And Niebuhr's gift was to not get stuck on that...

Should have known it.  When I got the idea of doing some posts encouraging people to read the expanse of relevance that is the thinking of Reinhold Niebuhr, I should have checked because Krista Tippett already did it.  First from back when her program was called "Speaking of Faith" and today when it is "On Being".  She even has play lists with study guides etc.  While nothing replaces the actual reading of the books, the articles, the sermons (when those can be found) as a motivator she and her staff have done the work.

Here is one of the early programs she did on the topic which is quite excellent.

Moral Man and Immoral Society :
Rediscovering Reinhold Niebuhr

And here is the always useful transcript.

For my hearing and reading, it begins with a warning, noting both the use which such people as David Brooks makes of the name to support military adventures that it is doubtful he would have supported, remembering his opposition to the American war in Vietnam.  There is also something of a warning in the status of the "serenity prayer" as it was adapted first for Alcoholics Anonymous, even some of his subtlety being read out of it.   A member of my family made that very point not knowing the original, "the courage to change the things that should be changed" to "the courage to change the things I can".   Here's the original as given in the program.

 "God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other."

Especially good is hearing Niebuhr giving some of his sermons, you can hear the intelligence and the passion in his voice as well as what he's saying.   I've read some conservatives who dismiss his status as a Christian but I don't think there is any doubting his belief in the central defining things that would be any Christianity that means anything.

One of the things I have found most thought provoking was his saying that human organizations, human governments are not going to be morally uncompromised, are not going to frequently do wrong.   There is discussion of Augustine's justifiable war theory, something which I've never been able to think was compatible with the gospel of Jesus.  The earliest Christians were notable for being pacifists.   We're stuck with living in the world we live in and the exigencies that are forced on us - I have no illusions about the end of war at any time in the near future, of a society which will not be forced into having police who use force and deadly force.  I think the dangers of regularizing the military an police within a religious sentiment risks doing what the imperial Romans did and ignore the fact that what they are doing is fraught with moral compromise.  It does religion a world of evil to do that, it does no favor for the society and, I think, does no real good for the men and women who do that for society to wrap up what they do in such a tidy package of civic goody-ness because, as we see all the time, their choices and decisions will not live up to that TV show picture of what they do.

The same is true for organized religion.  The neo-atheism we suffer under is a reaction against the pseudo-Christian hypocrisy of the 1980s and 90s, the many hypocrisies of religious figures and the use of religion as a so much stage dressing masking some of the most evil institutions and individuals among us.

MR. ELIE: I can't remember which ancient Christian sage said that good and evil are joined at the spine, something like that, though. What Niebuhr meant is that we can't separate out our virtues and our vices. The very idealism that has animated so many good things in the history of this country also lead us to be arrogant, lead us to be insensitive to the cultures of other peoples, lead us to overestimate the ability to get things to go our way, and so on. Our virtues and our vices are inextricably joined. It's a religious insight that's being applied in a political situation.

MS. TIPPETT: I think one reason Niebuhr is intriguing to us now also is that he was such a bridge person, a crossover person between religious thinkers and actors, and secular thinkers and actors.

MR. ELIE: I think that's true. And I was thinking about this over the past few days in connection with Niebuhr's insights about purity. His realism was grounded in his feeling that human nature is necessarily impure. And when you try to purify society, those people better watch out because that's when things get dangerous, whether it's reforming Christians who are trying to purify things, or reforming secularists who are trying to purify things. The Niebuhrian position would be religion never was altogether pure and never will be. Let's start from a different premises.

MS. TIPPETT: Have you thought about how Niebuhr might react to the religiosity of our time, the way in which — I'm saying that and I'm realizing that was probably after he died that religion really retreated from the public sphere, and yet it's back out on the surface in many forms. And it's alarming to many intellectuals who, I think, are the same kinds of people we're talking about who would have found Niebuhr a very intriguing and helpful figure 50 years ago.

MR. ELIE: There was a lot of religious strife in Niebuhr's time as well. And it's easy to forget that, to assume that his time was one in which established religion had a comfortable place in the public life. And religious figures could act without fear of reprisal, et cetera and so forth. The religion was deep, historically committed.

MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.

MR. ELIE: The religiosity of the South was such that H.L. Mencken could sneer at it in the Bible Belt. Roman Catholics at the time were so distrustful of the public school system that they refused to send their children to it.

MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.

MR. ELIE: Certainly, American Jews didn't suffer like the Jews of Europe, but this was not an altogether hospitable place for them. So my point is that in retrospect, it looks as though that was a solidly religious age, but these things are being contested in every age. And Niebuhr's gift was to not get stuck on that…

It is one thing to take comfort in, while looking at all of that unappealing and awful history that while it was happening, the man who was calling it out, who was facing up to it was the most prominent figure in Protestant religion in the United States.   I don't think that's something you'll ever find with atheism or fundamentalism.   The religious failing of fundamentalism is that it is entirely harder on those outside of it than it is on its own basic institutions and its own proclaimed ideas.

Even this one program in the list has so much material that it would take a long series of posts to go over them, the multiple points of view included certainly better than one person's thinking on it.  I'd recommend reading the book mentioned and whatever else you can find, I have to say that listening to more of his sermons is something I'm going to try to do.  There is something great in getting a writers' voice in your mind even when reading things they never recorded.  I find it helps to understand what they said.

Here, from the program, is a section of a sermon which is seasonally appropriate.

Have you studied the history of our Puritan fathers in New England? I don't want to engage in the ordinary, rather cheap strictures against our Puritan fathers because there were some very great virtues and graces in their life. But I've become convinced as I read American history that this represents the real defect in our Puritan inheritance — the doctrine of special providence. These Puritan forefathers of ours were so sure that every rain and that every drought was connected with the virtue and vice of their enterprise, that God always had his hand upon them to reward them for their goodness and to punish them for their evil.

This is unfortunate. And it's particularly unfortunate when a religious community develops in the vast possibilities of America, where inevitably the proofs of God's favor will be greater than the proof of God's wrath. This may be the reason why we are so self-righteous. This may be the reason why we still haven't come to terms in an ultimate religious sense with the problem of the special favors that we enjoy as a nation against the other nations of the world.