Immodest Faith for a Modest Republic

Abstract

IF THE RECOVERY OF A MODEST REPUBLIC NEEDS HELP FROM GOD, THE SEARCH for a faith geared toward national meekness appears to have ended somewhere between 1932 and 1952. Those are the dates (respectively) of Reinhold Niebuhr’s highly acclaimed and oft-quoted Moral Man and Immoral Society and The Irony of American History. One of the most compelling recent appeals to Niebuhr came from the Boston University political scientist Andrew Bacevich, who wrote at World Affairs Journal that few American intellectuals saw better than Niebuhr the “hazards” deeply embedded in America’s most cherished myths about the United States. Bacevich explained that Niebuhr taught four important truths—”The persistent sin of American Exceptionalism, the indecipherability of history, the false allure of simple solutions, and … the imperative of appreciating the limits of power”—all with incredible prescience for the “predicaments in which the United States finds itself enmeshed today.”¹ Most recently, John Patrick Diggins in his posthumously published Why Niebuhr Now? boiled down the value of Niebuhr to one simple question: “How much evil might America do in attempting to do good?”²