Douthat and President Obama as a Niebuhrian

Ross Douthat from NYTimes:

PRESIDENT OBAMA, like many well-read inhabitants of public life, is a professed admirer of Reinhold Niebuhr, the famous mid-20th-century Protestant theologian. And more than most presidents, he has tried to incorporate one of Niebuhr’s insights into his public rhetoric: the idea that no society is innocent, and that Americans in particular need to put aside illusions about our own alleged perfection.

The latest instance came at last week’s National Prayer Breakfast, when the president, while condemning the religious violence perpetrated by the Islamic State, urged Westerners not to “get on our high horse,” because such violence is part of our own past as well: “During the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

These comments were not well received by the president’s critics…

From a Niebuhrian perspective, such complaints are to be expected. “All men,” the theologian wrote, like to “obscure the morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity.”….

[Douthat mentions problems: Presidents are not theologians or historians; self criticism is not helpful to foreign policy.]

A third problem is that Obama is not just a Niebuhrian; he’s also a partisan and a progressive…

[He mentions President Eisenhower.]

Obama was never going to have Ike’s authority, but he could still profit from his example. The deep problem with his Niebuhrian style isn’t that it’s too disenchanted or insufficiently pro-American. It’s that too often it offers “self”-criticism in which the president’s own party and worldview slip away untouched.

I am not convinced President Obama’s intellectual orientation is best understood from the lens of Niebuhr, America’s version of Neo-orthodoxy and decidedly against liberalism’s optimism. To quote Roger Olsen’s study of Niebuhr from an earlier post on this blog:

Furthermore, liberal theologians had thought that the kingdom of God, which Rauschenbusch had identified as society organized according to love, could be brought about by peaceful persuasion without conflict or coercion. Against this liberal idealism Niebuhr advocated Christian realism, the idea that sinful human beings cannot bring about God’s kingdom or even achieve anything perfect, but they can with God’s help approximate God’s kingdom in partial achievements of justice (356).

[His thesis, then, is this:] In An Interpretation of Christian Ethics Niebuhr set forth the thesis at the heart of Christian realism: “love may be the motive of social action [but] justice must be the instrument of love in a world in which self-interest is bound to defy the canons of love on every level.”… The grace of God makes love a possibility; the sinful condition makes it an impossibility (356).

Yes, but is this how we hear POTUS? I suggest instead that we see him through a Niebuhrian realism modified by two themes;

1. Liberation theology in the mode of African American liberation theology — from Martin Luther King Jr to James Cone and beyond. Cornel West may well complain that POTUS has not done enough for African Americans but I see in President Obama a routine articulation of a kind of liberation theology driving his vision for what the federal government is designed to accomplish. He’s a centralizer and sees that center as having the power to establish justice for those suffering from injustices both in our past and our present.

2. Economic justice in the mode of economic leavening through taxation (I use the term broadly for diverse efforts from welfare on) — and this is framed in the lens of systemic economic injustice, critiqued by the right as victimization theory and supported on the left as economic redistribution (and Niebuhr clearly has some socialism at work in this thinking).