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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

Reinhold Niebuhr

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The theology of limitation

I’m rereading a chapter of James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree in advance of a welcoming churches retreat in Washington, D.C. this week.

Chapter 2 discusses White American Christianity’s inability to see Jesus in the Black people that White Christians lynched between the 1880s and the end of World War II.

Cone focuses mostly on Reinhold Niebuhr, who, like Cone, taught theology at New York City’s Union Theological Seminary and was a preeminent scholar of Christian ethics and moral responsibility.

Despite his other contributions to the Church, Niebuhr failed to recognize the abyss that was American racism and genocidal violence. He made excuses for the slow pace of change and wrote that Black people in the United States needed to “exercise patience and be sustained by a robust faith that history would gradually fulfill the logic of justice” (in Cone, p. 39).

The first time I read that line, I nearly threw the book across the room. On my second read, it made more sense, though I still find it repulsive.

The logic key is Niebuhr’s definition of justice: it’s a definition that’s severely limited.

Niebuhr taught that love is the absolute, transcendent standard that stands in judgment over what human beings can achieve in history. Because of human finitude and humanity’s natural tendency to deny it (sin), we can never fully reach that ethical standard. The best that humans can strive for is justice, which is love approximated, a balance of power among competing groups… Since Niebuhr saw justice as a balance of power between groups, whether classes, races, or nations, he saw it always in a state of flux, never achieving perfection in history.” —James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree; emphasis added

There are two things to note here.

First is Niebuhr’s idea that justice is about negotiation and compromise. He presents it as a finite and indeterminate thing that is as imperfect and in-progress as we are. As a matter of compromise, it’s also a matter of how scarce and limited goods are shared. “Democracy,” Niebuhr believes, is the political tool best used to dole those goods out.

Second is Niebuhr’s distinction between infinite love and finite justice. Whereas Cornel West describes justice as manifested love, not love’s real-world step-child, Niebuhr represents justice as the consolation prize for the love that God expresses and that humans can only “reach for” but never arrive at.

The first computer programming maxim I ever learned was “GIGO: Garbage in; Garbage out.”

It applies to theology too.

Niebuhr’s inability to recognize the full humanity of Black people and the extent of the evil they faced flowed from his limited understanding of love, justice, and the righting of the world.

It’s worth asking: what garbage theological premises do I operate with? How might my ethical outputs change if my theology could be more than a justification of scarcity? What else do I need to take into account?

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(CN) Moderate and neutral

Content note: descriptions of anti-Black lynching and White terrorism. This post is related to yesterday’s comments on torture.

I’m at that point in The Cross and the Lynching Tree where James Cone asks how Reinhold Niebuhr, one of 20th Century America’s leading Christian theologians, managed to live through the heyday of anti-Black lynching but never mentioned it as an ethical concern.

How could he have taught the church during the era of W. E. B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph, yet failed to cite any Black philosophers, activists, or writers? How could he have read the newspapers during the years that White mobs kidnapped and killed Mack Parker and Emmett Till, but failed to engage the conditions or communities that produced their murders? How could he have insisted that Black people be “patient” with White crawls toward a just society yet promoted a gospel that inspired economic justice throughout the South?

Cone explains this Laodicean dissonance as a failure of empathy.

It was easy for Niebuhr to walk around in his own shoes, as a white man, and view the world from that vantage point, but it takes a whole lot of empathic effort to step into those of black people and see the world through the eyes of African Americans…

Niebuhr knew that denying membership to persons merely on the basis of race was also a denial of the Church’s Christian identity. Yet he also knew that white churches were not prepared to include blacks, a minority they truly despised, and he was not prepared to deny the Christian identity of white churches on that basis.” —James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree

So Niebuhr understood that Christianity called followers of Jesus to social equity, and he acknowledged that churches were failing to embody that standard. But he wasn’t willing to challenge the churches for failing their own faith’s standards, and he also literally encouraged a congregation to abandon its attempt to integrate.

The camera looks up at a tower of the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C. The tower is scaffolded for repairs. In the background a deep blue sky is filled with white, fluffy clouds. The tower is in shadow. Photo by Keisha E. McKenzie.
The National Cathedral, like the nation’s faith, needs work. Photo credit: Keisha E. McKenzie

This morning I read a fantastic extended article on the only person known to have survived a race-based lynching in the United States, James Herbert Cameron.

Cameron, born in 1914 and therefore just a year older than my still-living grandfather, was one of three teenagers arrested by local Indiana police and then set upon by a mob of White vigilantes. Cameron’s friends were beaten, tortured, and hung in the middle of town, but someone interrupted his hanging—his memoir and others’ accounts conflict on who—and he was able to escape from town.

Cameron died in 2006, after years he’d filled with family, manufacturing jobs and store management, writing and book sales, and founding, funding, and curating America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee. At that museum, he walked visitors through exhibits on slavery, segregation, lynching, and his own experience.

Read his story.

Even with stories like Cameron’s, “White theologians, then and since,” Cone writes, “have typically ignored the problem of race or written and spoken about it without urgency, not regarding it as critical for theology or ethics.”

This moderate neutrality is uncomfortable to recognize. It should be uncomfortable to recognize. And it’s part of the “profound moral failure” that people of faith today must be willing to resolve.

I see no way to be moderate or neutral when it comes to human flourishing. I believe moral leadership requires more from us, even and especially those of us in faith subcultures that “aren’t prepared” to move forward.

The bad news:

The will-to-survive is so strong that it transmutes easily in to the will-to-power… Groups use both religion and reason to advance their own interests and find it nearly impossible to ‘feel the pain of others as vividly as they do [their own].'”

The good news: “Nearly impossible” is not impossible! I still believe that empathy, reason, and faith can support us in subverting dangerous and violent expressions of our drive to survive.

And I take encouragement from James Herbert Cameron’s lifelong resilience despite a community that nearly beat him to death while both the police and the church looked on.