Niebuhr, Reinhold

(1892-1971)

   This influential theologian was born Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr in Wright City, Wisconsin. Raised in a religious family, Niebuhr graduated from the German Evangelical Synod’s Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis in 1913 and gained an M.A. from Yale Divinity School in 1915. From 1915 to 1928, he was pastor at the Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit, where his powerful sermons helped swell the congregation from 65 to 600 members. During World War I, he supported the dropping of “German” from the Synod’s title and abandoning the use of the German language. After the war, he became a pacifist and, as a result of his knowledge of Detroit’s car factories, increasingly socialist. From 1928 until his retirement in 1960, Niebuhr was professor at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. In 1929, he became editor of the socialist World Tomorrow, and he stood as a socialist candidate for election to the New York state senate in 1930 and to Congress in 1932. He was unsuccessful on both occasions.

   Niebuhr authored a number of influential books, including Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (1935), Beyond Tragedy (1937), The Nature and Destiny of Man (two volumes, 1941, 1943), The Children of Darkness (1944), and The Irony of American History (1952). He was chair of the Union for Democratic Action, a left-wing but anticommunist group, and he also campaigned in support of aid to Great Britain prior to 1941. After the war, he was a founding member of Americans for Democratic Action and a critic of Joseph McCarthy. In 1949, he was an official U.S. delegate to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization General Conference in Paris. He continued to lecture widely, and in 1964 he was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson. Nonetheless Niebuhr was a critic of U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam. His message of Christian realism and opposition to injustice was an inspiration for civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and made him a major influence in postwar America.