Undersold and Oversold: Reinhold Niebuhr and Economic Justice

The multilayered, multidirectional financial crisis known now as the Great Recession has bulked large in the national news for nearly four years. It is telling that it took an economic crisis of this scale, perversity, and duration to turn our attention to Reinhold Niebuhr’s views on economic justice. Indeed, it may well be the scale, perversity, and duration of the thing, more than the economic injustices it illuminates so harshly, that leads us to summon Niebuhr. If anything goes badly enough for long enough, Niebuhr will make an appearance. It is a testament to the profundity of his thought and the breadth of his vision that so many fresh and relevant insights can be found in his words today.

It is, of course, no mere coincidence that Niebuhr’s writings contain substantial material on the corruption, exploitation, and conscience-warping greed that characterized the industrial capitalism of his day and are so apparent in the financial capitalism of ours. The so-called Great Crash of 1929, the first of many landmark events in a crucial decade for Niebuhr, came during his first year at Union Theological Seminary.¹ The essays collected in this issue of Soundings demonstrate that the Great Depression both fueled Niebuhr’s desire for alternatives to industrial capitalism and shaped his understanding of how to address root causes and devastating effects. There are ample reasons, the authors show, to examine (in particular) the Niebuhr of the Great Depression for analyses, critiques, and even guidance relating to the Great Recession.

In the space that I have, I would like to highlight two ways in which the portrayals of Niebuhr in these essays might benefit from a consideration of additional contexts and comparisons. By paying little attention to the insights he gained and shared while serving as a pastor in Detroit—insights accessible in his Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic—the authors have undersold Niebuhr’s concern for economic justice. Niebuhr the pastor developed a deep admiration for the workers of Detroit, and offered stinging critiques of an exploitative American industry and complicit Protestant clergy. By considering Niebuhr’s thoughts on economic justice apart from the work of American Catholics John Ryan and Dorothy Day, these authors have also oversold him. Indeed, Niebuhr’s treatment of economic issues seems markedly less creative and robust in comparison than it does in isolation.

Niebuhr the Pastor

Reinhold Niebuhr served as the pastor of Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit from 1915 to 1928. In the excerpts from a personal journal kept during the period—which were collected and published in 1929 as Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic ([1929] 1980)—he confronted, analyzed, and critiqued intersections of Protestantism and capitalism. Niebuhr’s writings on the topic have an immediacy about them that is surely related to his congregation’s involvement with a world in which Protestantism and industrial capitalism came together frequently and forcefully. Niebuhr’s pastorate placed him in close contact with industry and labor; with wealth and poverty. His interactions with decent people working within an indecent system forced him to reflect on possible Christian responses to the exploitative excesses of industrialized capitalism, and to lament the consequences of capitalism’s permeation of American Protestantism.

The fusion of Protestantism and capitalism, Niebuhr concluded, led to confusion as to what the priorities of the church ought to be and to the Protestant churches’ loss of moral authority (indeed their lack of interest in claiming moral authority!) on the issue of economic justice. Having toured an unnamed automobile factory in 1925, he wrote scathingly, “Beside the brutal facts of modern industrial life how futile are our homiletical spoutings! The church is undoubtedly cultivating graces and preserving spiritual amenities in the more protected areas of society. But it isn’t changing the essential facts of modern industrial civilization by a hair’s breadth.” What’s worse, he concluded, “It isn’t even thinking about them” ([1929] 1980, 65). Niebuhr’s frustration with misplaced priorities is equally clear in a passage from 1926: “Protestantism’s present impotence in qualifying the...