Reinhold Niebuhr’s Anti-Pacifism

What can the work of America's leading 20th century theologian tell us about the decline of liberal pacifism and the stagnation of liberalism in general?

Hello folks, Derek here with the seventh entry in Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins’ special Foreign Exchanges series on the anti-war/non-violence movement as a political tradition. As I mentioned in the preface to his introductory piece, this series is being offered as a special for paid FX subscribers. I hope those who are interested in the piece will consider subscribing to FX to support Daniel’s work as well as everything else that goes on here. Please subscribe today:

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A hundred years ago, if someone desired to be a Liberal Protestant minister and attended one of the nation’s leading divinity schools—Union Theological Seminary (associated with Columbia University), Yale Divinity School, or Harvard Divinity School—they would have been surrounded by pacifists ministers and theologians who believed that war was the antinomy of the Christian faith. Today, such divinity schools exist on the margins of their respected universities, which are resoundingly secular. Back then, however, they played not only an integral role in the university but also had a towering influence in American society. Few today remember Harry Emerson Fosdick, the Union Theological Seminary trained pastor of Riverside Church in Morningside Heights. Fosdick was perhaps the most popular minister in America during the 1930s, and a well known public figure. He gave perhaps the most famous sermon of that decade, namely his 1933 anti-war homily “The Unknown Soldier.” If a minister today gave a sermon of this nature regarding the war in Ukraine, they would be accused of being a rightwing enabler. Back, then, however, antiwar liberal theology was at the heart of the American progressive movement.

It is perhaps not by chance that the decline of mainline liberal Protestantism in the United States, going back to the 1960s, has coincided with its turning away from the millenarian pacifist and anti-war theologies of the late 19th/early 20th centuries during the Cold War. In short, liberal Protestantism made peace with the American security state and lost its prophetic voice. Indeed, perhaps the movement’s last major political moment in the US came by way of supporting Martin Luther King’s non-violent protest against racial segregation and injustice.

What intellectual factors led to the decline of the antiwar wing of liberal Protestantism? The simple answer is that pacifism seemed morally irresponsible amid the rise of Bolshevism and fascism. Unlike today, millions of white liberals attended Church during World War II and the early Cold War. Liberal Protestant ministers and congregants, who before and after World War I touted pacifism and participated in the largest global antiwar movement in the history of the world, had to be reprogrammed to embrace a theology that accepted the United States’ new role as a world superpower. This would necessitate jettisoning a liberal theology of pacifism and antiwar resistance for a Cold War theology that defended the necessity of violence for containing small wars so as to prevent total wars. This transformation required that the New Testament—and specifically the pacifist message of the gospels, which was hard to avoid—be reread along spiritual lines; that is, as a heavenly ideal not relevant for this fallen world.

As mentioned, liberal Protestants made an exception for the Civil Rights movement, which allowed antiwar liberal protestants to remember, with nostalgia, the pacifist commitments of their youths. The moment, however, when King applied his non-violence critique to the Vietnam War, those same liberals rejected him. No thinker did more to transform the old antiwar liberal Protestantism into a Cold War liberal movement than the Union Theological Seminary theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who rebelled against the liberal anti-war Social Gospel theology in which he was originally trained.