Volume 33, Number 2 · February 13, 1986
American Jeremiah
By David Brion Davis
Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography
by Richard Wightman Fox
Pantheon, 340 pp., $19.95
Reinhold Niebuhr, who died only fifteen years ago, is little known among the rising generation of young intellectuals. Despite the renewed interest in religion at American colleges and universities, it is difficult today to imagine a charismatic Protestant preacher electrifying students and faculty on all the major campuses, influencing statesmen and reformers, and commanding respect, even among agnostics and non-Christians, as one of the leading intellects and social critics of the century. At a time when American culture is ominously divided between fundamentalists and secular humanists, it is difficult to recapture Niebuhr's remarkable presence from the 1930s to the 1960s, decades that were supposedly dominated by science and secularization. How can one explain Niebuhr's close ties with such figures as Felix Frankfurter, W.H. Auden, Lewis Mumford, Lionel Trilling, Perry Miller, Hubert Humphrey, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.? Did Niebuhr, who could admire the antics of an evangelist like Billy Sunday and yet disavow supernaturalism and any belief in personal immortality, leave us clues for narrowing the cultural rift in our country as we hurtle on to the twenty-first century?
Review, 3392 words
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