‘The Impossible Possibility of Love’: Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought on racial justice

One World, Two Kingdoms

Reinhold Niebuhr’s theology is best described as dualist. In the tradition of Paul, Augustine, and Luther, he understood the relationship between Christ and culture as paradoxical (Niebuhr, 2001). In sum, he subscribed to what William Bain describes as the ‘two kingdoms framework’: a world comprised of the City of God and the City of Man (2020). Rather than two distinct physical realms, dualists understand the two Cities to co-mingle. This dialectic finds expression in their claim that humans are homo duplex: saint and sinner, while the world is mundus duplex: redeemed and fallen (Niebuhr, 2001: lii). It informs Niebuhr’s understanding of human nature and history, what we may know and what we may hope for.

Niebuhr’s understanding of anthropology is shaped by his dualist theology. In his Gifford lectures, subsequently published as The Nature and Destiny of Man, he describes humans as ‘both strong and weak, both free and bound, both blind and far seeing. . .at the juncture of nature and spirit’ (1996a: 181), equal in sin but unequal in responsibility (1996a: 219). His conception of human nature is premised on his acceptance of both the doctrines of imago dei and ‘the doctrine of man as creature’ (1996a: 166). The former offers the promise of self-transcendence, denial of the latter is the source of evil. As Niebuhr elaborates,

The real evil in the human situation. . .lies in man’s unwillingness to recognize and acknowledge the weakness, finiteness and dependence of his position, in his inclination to grasp after a power and a security which transcend the possibilities of human existence, and in his effort to pretend a virtue and knowledge which are beyond the limits of mere creatures. (1996a: 137)

In other words, denial of this human finitude lies at our propensity to ‘sin’, which manifests itself in the pride of power, knowledge or virtue (1996a: 188). In its vertical or spiritual form, it constitutes idolatry or ‘man’s rebellion against God, his effort to usurp the place of God’ (1996a: 179). In its horizontal or social form, it manifests in injustice (1996a: 179).

Groups, Niebuhr claims, amplify our sinfulness rather than self-transcendence. The multiplication of ‘sinful pride and idolatrous pretension’ (1996a: 210) renders groups ‘more arrogant, hypocritical, self-centred and more ruthless in the pursuit of its ends than the individual’ (1996a: 208). Niebuhr offers two reasons for his cynicism about groups. First, he asserts that collectives offer the illusion of eternity that abate the anxiety of human finitude (1996a: 167), and impede the realisation of ‘higher and more inclusive loyalties’ (2013: 47). Second, he suggests only coercion could supply the social force for group cohesion (2013). Put differently, groups facilitate the forgetting of our finitude, the conflation of the City of God with the City of Man. However, the essence of these two Cities is distinct. In traversing them together, Niebuhr underscores the importance of remaining cognisant that each City is predicated on a different logic: ‘As individuals, men believe that they ought to love and serve each other and establish justice between each other. As racial, economic and national groups they take for themselves, whatever their power can command’ (2013: 9).

Langdon Gilkey suggests that for Niebuhr, ‘the nature of the human being. . .and the character and meaning of history’ are deeply intertwined (1974, 2001: 143). Indeed, the ‘two kingdoms framework’ leads Niebuhr to offer a ‘penultimately pessimistic’ but ‘ultimately optimistic’ view of history (Tippett, 2005). This penultimate pessimism is central to what Niebuhr comes to describe as his ‘Christian realism’. In part, he justifies this ‘pessimism’ by recourse to empirics: ‘For all the centuries of experience, men have not yet learned how to live together without compounding their vices and covering each other “with mud and blood”’ (2013: 1). In part, it is simply an articulation of his Augustinian conviction that ‘to the end of history the peace of the world. . . must be gained by strife’ (2013: 256). As Niebuhr puts it, his Christian realism shares much in common with Greek tragedy: ‘Neither give itself to the simple delusion that the titanic forces of human existence, whether they spring from below the level of consciousness or rise above the level of human limitations, can be brought under the control of some little scheme of prudent rationality’ (Niebuhr, 1941: Part III). Yet, Niebuhr’s understanding of history, like human nature, was paradoxical. Humans, in their freedom and capacity for self-transcendence, could act as co-creators of history (Niebuhr, 1996b). In this vision, then, ‘Christianity transcends tragedy’ (Niebuhr, 1941: Part III). However, for a dualist like Niebuhr, this resolution does not lie this side of death (Niebuhr, 2001:178).

Niebuhr’s commitment to dualism and his faith in its irresolution this side of death animates his realism. Rather than moral or political resignation, his belief that ‘man rather than life bears responsibility’ in history underscores the importance of human agency (Niebuhr, 1941: Part III). Its ethical consequence is to prescribe a cautious appraisal of epistemic claims and political programmes and promises. When it comes to epistemology, this requires accepting the impossibility of fully discerning or fulfilling the meaning of the historical process (Niebuhr, 1996b). It entails an acknowledgement that all knowledge claims are partial: ‘All human knowledge is tainted with an ‘ideological’ taint. It pretends to be more true than it is. It is finite knowledge, gained from a particular perspective; but it pretends to be final and ultimate knowledge’. (Niebuhr, 1996a: 194). Consequently, all universalisms contain the seed of evil: ‘The explicit character of this pride is fully revealed in all cases in which the universalistic note in human knowledge becomes the basis of an imperial desire for domination over life which does not conform to it’ (Niebuhr, 1996a: 198). This underpins Niebuhr’s sustained critique of all utopianisms, whether Catholic or Protestant, liberal or Marxist. Premised on a denial of human finitude; a disregard of history, and a lack of epistemic humility, all ‘Enlightenment’ faiths were for Niebuhr either dangerous or delusional:

(T)he sentiments of benevolence and social goodwill will never be so pure or powerful, and rational capacity to consider the rights and needs of others in fair competition with our own will never be so fully developed as to create the possibility for the anarchistic millennium which is the social utopia, either explicit or implicit, of all intellectual and religious moralists. (2013: 3)

It is tempting to read Niebuhr as a pessimist as Caron Gentry (2018) does, with his cynicism about group morality; his understanding of history and his disdain for universalisms and utopianisms. This is only half the story, however. Indeed, this pessimism co-exists uneasily alongside his ‘ultimately optimistic’ claims about human freedom, self-transcendence and our capacity to act as co-creators in history. In fact, what is most compelling about Niebuhr is this commitment to paradox, or his capacity to find in the tension between these competing Cities, an imperative for action. This finds expression in his claims about what love may render possible in politics.

Agape in History

Agape, or self-giving, sacrificial love, was for Niebuhr, of the City of God. Loving was the ultimate expression of self-transcendence, of acting in freedom as a co-creator in history. Agape is epitomised in the figure of a crucified Christ, and it follows that Niebuhr’s understanding of love’s promise in politics would centre on a meditation on the cross. As James Cone articulates, ‘for Niebuhr. . .the cross is not simply the ‘keystone’ of the Christian faith, it is the very key to history itself’ (2013: 35). The Cross, therefore, reveals which anthropological, historical and epistemological limitations love can transcend. In sum, an engagement with the Cross, offers insight into how to ethically traverse the Cities of God and Man. It helps highlight what love may render possible for humanity and history.

In his Gifford Lectures, Niebuhr suggests a meditation on the Cross offers three insights into love’s role in politics. First, Niebuhr posits that the sacrificial or agapic love of Jesus on his Cross underscores the limitations of mutual love or eros (1996b: 82). To the extent that mutual love emphasises reciprocity and conditionality, it is limited. What agape offers the world is a vision of universal love, which ‘makes it impossible to set any limits of race, sex, or social condition upon the brotherhood which may be achieved in history’ (1996b: 85). It also affirms secular and religious hopes and aspirations across the political spectrum that, ‘There are no limits to be set in history for the achievement of more universal brotherhood, for the development of more perfect and more inclusive mutual relations’ (1996b: 86). Second, the crucified Christ also ‘defines the limits of what is possible in historic development’ (1996b: 86). Agape appears in history, ‘only to be crucified’ (1996a: 147). Consequently, it acts as a corrective to the notion that

Sanctifying grace (as in sectarian interpretations) or by the cumulative force of universal education (as in secular liberalism) or by a catastrophic reorganization of society (as in Marxism), it is possible to lift historic life to the plane upon which all distinctions between mutual love and disinterested and sacrificing love vanish (1996b: 86).

Third, to the extent that the Cross highlights the stark contrast between the egoistic and the agapic, between the will-to-live and sacrificial love, it ‘contradicts the false pretensions of virtue’ (1996b: 89). In sum, love was the ‘impossible possibility’: liberating hope of what was possible, limiting pride or hubris in realising such possibilities.

Agape, Niebuhr asserts, is of the City of God and may have a role in interpersonal relations, but the distinction between individual and group morality leads him to deem love an entirely impossible, inappropriate ethic for the City of Man. As he elaborates, ‘Nations, classes, and races do not love one another. They may have a high sense of obligation to one another. They must express this sense of obligation in the desire to give each one his due’ (1967a: 25). Rather than reject love as entirely inappropriate for politics, Niebuhr calls for its approximation: justice. Cognisant of the distinct demands of the City of Man, Niebuhr contends that justice is more suitable for political ethics for three chief reasons. First, to the extent that it ‘admits the claims of the self, it is something less than love’ (1967a: 28). Second, it is inherently social because it ‘arbitrates not merely between the self and the other, but between the competing claims upon the self by various “others”’ (1967a: 28). Third, it necessarily belongs to ‘the realm of tragic choices’ (1967a: 29). Justice, for Niebuhr, was thus reconciled with the realities of human finitude and a fallen world.

The exaltation of justice did not negate the need for love. To the extent the Cities of God and Man co-mingle, Niebuhr envisages them in a dialectic relationship. As Vassilios Paipais (2021) elaborates in this special issue, the metaphor of a pendulum best conjures this movement between a perfectionist ethic and an imperfect world. In this motion, Niebuhr claims love remains relevant both as a motive and a form of judgement (Robertson, 1967), without which ‘justice always degenerates into something less than justice’ (Niebuhr, 1967a: 28). Hence, love which is ‘both the fulfillment and the negation of all achievements of justice in history’ must constantly inspire justice to reach greater heights (Niebuhr, 1996b: 246). What love does in Niebuhr’s thought is to make the aspiration for justice boundless. Nonetheless, to the extent that Niebuhr believed humans were characterised by a moral and epistemic finitude that was magnified in groups, the possibility of realising this love in politics was ultimately bounded. Love, however, illuminated the chasm between the two Cities, serving, also, as a lens through which the motives and means of achieving this justice never ceased to be the subject of scrutiny. The result, much like the rest of Niebuhr’s theology, is necessarily paradoxical: a yearning for utopia tempered by the pragmatism of what was politically possible. This commitment to both perpetual striving and plural accommodation, was to shape Niebuhr’s thought on racial justice.

Critique

Niebuhr’s early interest in the work of William James saw him place equal emphasis on theology and praxis (West, 1989). At various stages of his life he took an active role in combatting racism and chaired an interracial committee in Detroit that prepared a report on race relations; supported the NAACP Legal Defense Fund for legal action against segregation; criticised anti-Semitism, the internment of Japanese-Americans and Jim Crowism across all American churches (Halliwell, 2005). This action was animated by a theology which understood racism as an individual expression of ‘original sin’ and institutional expression of ‘group pride’. Niebuhr’s argument on the nature of race and racism was as follows. Although Niebuhr conceded any notion of ‘inferior’ and ‘superior’ races was a spurious cultural and historical construct, he was keen to assert the lived social reality of racism. In his words ‘(T)his scientific assurance that ‘there are no races’ or that ‘there are no inferior races’. . .is not sufficient because it does not measure the tragedy of racial bigotry deeply enough’ (1967a: 125). Niebuhr understood racism to be ‘something more than ignorance and something less than malice’ (1967a: 125). It was ‘one form of original sin’, a result of an attempt to overcome the anxiety that stems from the paradox of human finitude and freedom (1967a: 128). ‘The misery of man is derived from his idolatry, from his partly conscious and partly unconscious effort to make himself, his race, and his culture God’ (1967a: 129). This betrays something of Niebuhr’s understanding of racism as ‘natural’ and ‘universal’. Perhaps this is most clearly articulated when he associates it with an inevitable outcome of group loyalties.

All human groups are essentially predatory and tend to hold desperately to their privileges against the pressure of the underprivileged, who demand a fairer share of the blessings. All human groups are essentially proud and find that pride very convenient because it seems to justify their special privileges and explain the sad state of the underprivileged. It is this combination of selfishness and pride that makes the problems of group relations so difficult (1967a: 122).

Or again,

The sins that the white man has committed against the coloured man cry to heaven. But might it not be well for the ultimate peace of society if intelligent white men and coloured men studied and analysed these sins not so much as the peculiarities of a race, but as the universal characteristics of Homo sapiens, so called? (1967a: 121)

Subsuming racism as a sin of pride allowed Niebuhr to level the claim that no one was immune. Despite his proclamations about the equality of sin and inequality of guilt, he made pronouncements about racism which, which for some (Morris, 2016), obscured the structural quality of racism: ‘It may be true that Nordic people have an undue amount of race pride. But racial arrogance is certainly not a unique Nordic sin’ (Niebuhr, 1967a: 121). It is not clear whether this is a fair characterisation of Niebuhr’s thought. As James Cone notes, Niebuhr never denied the existence of white supremacy, ‘If. . .the White man were to expiate his sins committed against the darker races, few White men would have the right to live’ (As cited in Cone, 2004: 146). In any case, Niebuhr marshalled his universalist theology to challenge the self-righteousness of Northern liberals (Niebuhr, 1967a) and America’s pretensions to virtue understanding itself to be immune of the racial excesses of Nazi Germany (Niebuhr, 1967a).

Despite the theological language, Niebuhr’s conception of racism did not amount to an abstract affliction of the soul. Racism might have been the psychological outcome of the fear and insecurity of ‘proponents of “white supremacy” who feel their privileged position in a caste society imperilled’ (1967a: 143), but it had concrete, economic implications: ‘If a dominant group is able to hold a minority group in subjection, it is doubly repaid. It reaps economic rewards and also creates the social and cultural facts that seem to justify its pride’ (1967a: 123). An understanding of racial capitalism thus underpins his work,

But the fact is that those who hold great economic and political power are more guilty of pride against God and of injustice against the weak than those who lack power and prestige. . .White men sin against Negroes in Africa and America more than Negroes sin against White men (Cited in Cone, 2004: 145).

The structural dimension of racism rendered both reason and sentiment unable to adequately redress it. Although he saw the utility of education dispelling biological myths about race, he argued that the conception that racism was but a ‘vestigial remnant of a barbarism that increasing education would overcome’ was ultimately fallacious (1967a: 132). ‘The predisposition to think ill of a divergent group is a dark and terrible abyss of evil in the soul of man. If it is robbed of implausible rationalizations, it is quite capable of inventing more plausible ones’ (1967a: 126). Likewise, he criticised comfortable sentimentality about the soteriology of love.

Since liberal Protestantism, is on the whole, the religion of the privileged classes of Western civilization, it is not surprising that its espousal of the ideal of love, in a civilization reeking with social injustice, should be cynically judged and convicted of hypocrisy by those in whom bitter social experiences destroy the sentimentalities and illusions of the comfortable (1967a: 180).

Instead of Enlightenment and eschatological hope, Niebuhr emphasised Atonement. In addition to humility, he emphasised responsibility and justice. At the individual level, he called for the cultivation of a moral imagination that sought to ‘comprehend the needs and interests’ of others (2013: 257-8). At a group level, Niebuhr called for legitimate coercion.

Compassion

As Brent Steele (2021) notes in his article in this special issue, a key component of Reinhold Niebuhr’s response to cruelty was compassion. Niebuhr’s call for compassion was universal. Consequently, Niebuhr believed that compassion ought to be extended even to those who espouse views which perpetuated structural injustice, like racism. It saw him support a gradualist approach to the integration of schools following the Brown v Board of Education decision, the armed forces and indeed, his own church. Much like Niebuhr’s universalist proclamations about racism and ‘original sin’, Daniel A. Morris argues this betrays something of Niebuhr’s inability to understand ‘power asymmetries’ (2016). As he puts it, ‘For a man who was so attentive to the need to check power with power, Niebuhr very often failed to advocate black power to counterbalance white supremacy, which he knew was evil’ (2016). For James Cone, this call for ‘gradualism, patience, and prudence during a decade when Willie McGee (1951), Emmett Till (1955), M.C. “Mack” Parker (1959), and other blacks were lynched’ jars (2013: 39). And yet, it is entirely consonant with Niebuhr’s dualist theology. As I elaborate in the next section, Niebuhr’s dualism is but one of many theological articulations of the right relationship between Christianity and culture, the sacred and secular, the ideal and imperfect. Its privileging of pragmatism, then, was bound to frustrate proponents of more radical, liberationist theologies. Without discounting these compelling critiques of a theology that asks the disenfranchised to tarry disenfranchised yet a little longer, it is worth engaging with Niebuhr’s controversial call to compassion for two reasons. First, this commitment to compassion did not exist in isolation from Niebuhr’s scathing critique of the ubiquitous ‘sin’ of racism, on the one hand, and, his radical political call to coercion, on the other. Second, building on Steele’s (2021) work on cruelty, Niebuhr’s emphasis on compassion forms an important element of his articulation of what work love may ‘do’ in politics.

Rather than represent an aberration in Niebuhr’s thought, his call to compassion is consistent with it. If human finitude necessitates a commitment to epistemic humility, compassion – as emotion and practice – facilitates it. Recognising a fragility or vulnerability in common, compassion lays the foundation for the practice of penance rather than proclamations of purity. We encounter echoes of this when Niebuhr notes, ‘The preaching of the ideal possibilities of brotherhood that is not accompanied by a careful and pitiless analysis of the motives, of the inner fears, self-accusations, and self-justifications of those who deny brotherhood is not religious’ (1967a: 144) Or again,

Only religiously astute and profound pastors of the souls of men understand to what degree men make public accusations against their fellows in order to cover up the secret accusations the dispossessed make against them in God’s sight. Cain protests more loudly that he is not his brother’s keeper because he knows in the secret of heart that he is (1967a: 144).

Compassion enables a humility which sees and names everyone, including oneself, as implicated. In recognising fear and pride as the basis of racism, and never purporting to be exempt from it, compassion facilitates a practice of penance which remains perpetually attuned to the same sentiments Niebuhr sees at the heart of racism. For Niebuhr, no cause or ideological affiliation is associated with virtue (1967a). It underpins his disdain for self-righteousness, ‘elaborate confessions of group sins are merely devices for establishing the emancipation of the individuals for the sins of his group’ (1967a: 123). Rather than offering absolution, this emphasis on compassion seeks, then, to facilitate introspection and a recognition of the implication in the ubiquitous ‘sin’ of racism. It suggests that the work of unbecoming unjust is never done. It represents, as it were, a continuous commitment to a ‘contrite recognition of the remnant of pride that remains in the souls even of the emancipated’ (1967a: 129).

Beyond the piety of penance – or its secular equivalent of ‘reflexivity’ – Niebuhr’s emphasis on compassion would seem to accord with his view that change stems not from legislation but from the transformation of ‘the hearts and minds’ of a populace. It is premised on his pragmatic recognition that it takes a bottom-up shift in sentiments rather than a top-down imposition of law to effect long-term social change. His mobilisation of compassion to promote contrition suggests Niebuhr does in fact envisage a role for love’s work in politics. Acknowledging human fragility and finitude, it seeks to transform communities by inspiring individual change. More than any other ethical prescription, Niebuhr’s call to compassion is consonant with his self-understanding of his role as a pastor. His pastoral ethic (see Lang, 2013) profoundly shapes his understanding of compassion as an important tool in the redressing of racial injustice. His call to compassion would seem to suggest that any espousal of an integrated community may compel a critique of racism, and the use of force to challenge it, but controversially, it ought not preclude a commitment to care even for those who perpetrate it.

Coercion

Given Niebuhr’s reservations about love and liberalism, he drew on his resources of love and justice to articulate how the ‘disinherited’ might legitimately resort to coercion (2013). It is worth noting at the outset that coercive power was not concomitant with physical violence or force. As David Clinton (2021) articulates in this special issue ‘it included prestige, popularity, persuasiveness, moral standing, economic advantages – anything that gave one human being influence over the thought and actions of another’. This call for coercion was rooted in a recognition that power interests ultimately militated against social change: ‘It is hopeless for the Negro to expect complete emancipation from the menial social and economic position into which the white man has forced him, merely by trusting in the moral sense of the white race’ (2013: 252). Or again,

However large the number of individual white men who do and who will identify themselves completely with the Negro cause, the white race in America will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so. Upon that point one may speak with a dogmatism which all history justifies (2013: 253).

Premised in a Christian conviction that ‘the oppressed, whether they be the Indians in the British Empire, or the Negroes in our own country or the industrial workers in every nation, have a higher moral right to challenge their oppressors than these have to maintain their rule by force’ (2013: 234), Niebuhr understood equality as ‘a higher social goal than peace’ (2013: 235).

The legitimacy of coercion which stood for ‘the elimination of the inequalities of power and privilege which are frozen into every contemporary peaceful situation’, is really another form of Niebuhr’s critique of a status quo bereft of a balance of power (2013: 235). Indeed, in Niebuhr’s thought a balance of power and justice are often indistinguishable.

A balance of power is something different from, and inferior to, the harmony of love. It is a basic condition of justice, given the sinfulness of man. Such a balance of power does not exclude love. In fact, without love the frictions and tensions of balance of power would become intolerable. But without the balance of power even the most loving relations may degenerate into unjust relations, and love may become the screen which hides the injustice (Niebuhr, 1967b: 26–27).

In sum, ‘balance of power’ is the pragmatic politics of the saeculum. It accommodates, on the one hand, for finitude, and, on the other for difference, thus laying the foundation for a politics of pluralism and perpetual change. Although, it would appear that Niebuhr leaves open the possibility of violent coercion, this is not the path he prescribes. In 1932, in the context of inter-racial relations in the US, he rather presciently recommends the model of non-violent resistance adopted in colonial India. He argues

(b)oycotts against banks, which discriminate against Negroes in granting credit, against stores which refuse to employ Negroes while serving Negro trade, and against public service corporations which practice racial discrimination, would undoubtedly be crowned with some measure of success. Non-payment of taxes against states which spend on the education of Negro children only a fraction of the amount spent on white children, might be an equally efficacious weapon (2013: 254).

Niebuhr did not understand non-violent resistance as a form of pacifism. Rather, subscribing to a Tolstoyan logic which saw coercion as concomitant with politics, Niebuhr saw non-violent resistance not as the epitome of love, but an expression of justice. It was for him a form of coercion that had consequences often indistinguishable from violence. As Niebuhr argued, ‘(i)t is impossible to coerce a group without damaging both life and property and without imperilling the interest of the innocent with those of the guilty’ (2013: 172). Similarly, his advocacy of non-violent resistance in the context of the struggle for racial equality was not based on pretensions of virtue, but rather the pragmatic concern that ‘any effort at violent revolution on the part of the Negro will accentuate the animosities and prejudices of his oppressors. Since they outnumber him hopelessly, any appeal to arms must inevitably result in a terrible social catastrophe’ (2013: 253-4).

What is variously described as Niebuhr’s ‘pragmatism’ and ‘realism’ took a conservative turn in the 1950s. However, despite this seeming embrace of Cold-War liberalism, Niebuhr remained remarkably consistent on the question of coercion. In his 1963 dialogue with James Baldwin following the violence in Birmingham, he therefore maintained that although Black Americans had a legitimate right to coercive action, anything other than non-violent coercion would prove catastrophic for minority groups (Presbyterian Historical Society, 1963). Yet, despite this radical vision of coercion, his compelling critique of racism, and his universal call to compassion, it is worth asking what, if anything, Niebuhr’s theology of love to redress racial injustice might offer our present political moment.

Love’s limits

Caron Gentry (2018) argues that Niebuhr does not envision the powerful role love may play in politics. For her, Niebuhr limits the political possibilities of love by emphasising anxiety rather than vulnerability. This manifests itself in a preoccupation with power and coercion and security (2018: 35). Gentry’s critique ironically illuminates what Niebuhr offers normative thought on love. Niebuhr seems to suggest that while love is always implicated in the polis, speaking in love’s name is fraught with danger and difficulty. This is because love is multivalent and cannot be theorised in isolation from power.

While there is much that is compelling about Gentry’s critique of Niebuhr, I do not think it fully recognises that Niebuhr’s thought hinges on a distinction between loves. In my reading, Niebuhr understands mutual love as self-interested, acquisitive eros, which is fundamentally distinct from the disinterested, sacrificial love of agape. Niebuhr does not purport to claim that individuals – as opposed to groups – cannot love in agape. His dualist theology, with its understanding of the paradoxical nature of a finite and free humanity in a fallen but redeemed world, simply leads him to conclude that individuals cannot love in agape all of the time. For Niebuhr, ‘sin’ emerges from a pride or hubris that forgets the finitude of the self and the world. It allows for eros to masquerade as agape. Consequently, he calls for a cautious appraisal of political utopianisms animated by a faith in the soteriology of love. In illuminating the impossibilities of agape, he draws attention to hollow discourses which veil power and signal virtue. In highlighting, further, the distinction between loves, Niebuhr suggests many loves populate the polis: the love of self; of groups; of the other. These loves may be selfish or selfless: they may seek power-over or power-with relations, they may renounce power altogether. In drawing attention to the multivalence of love, Niebuhr cautions against a tendency to understand all love as normatively good in the polis.

Yet, even as Niebuhr elevates agape as the ideal or transcendent norm, much to Gentry’s disappointment, he does not endorse its unconditional embrace in the polis. A thoroughgoing Augustinian, Niebuhr believed different ethics were required to traverse the Cities of God and Man. As earlier noted, he believed agape appears in the City of Man, ‘only to be crucified’ (1996a: 147). An absolute ethic based on agape is problematic, then, because it enhances vulnerability to violence, and might inadvertently perpetrate it. Reminiscent of feminist theological critiques of agape (Andolsen, 1981), Niebuhr shines a light on how self-giving (agapic), self-emptying (kenotic) love is violent to the most vulnerable in the polis. For Niebuhr, a love of self – rather than the erasure of selves – is the basis of a plural political community. Thus, he claims, love your neighbour as yourself – does not mean destroy yourself so no friction arises with your neighbour (1967a: 137) or ‘There is an ecstatic form of agape, which defines the ultimate heroic possibilities of human existence (involving, of course, martyrdom) but not the common possibilities of tolerable harmony of life with life’ (1967a: 28). Elevating agape as an ideal, without reckoning with human finitude and a ‘fallen’ world, further risks perpetrating violence. For Niebuhr, summoning agape to legitimise a political programme is always susceptible to moral and epistemic arrogance. It imagines it possible to supplant the City of Man while continuing to dwell in it. It has at its heart a hubris that is antithetical to agape and inimical to pluralism. Consequently, it perpetrates violence: ‘But any illusion of a world of perfect love without imperfect harmonies of justice must ultimately turn the dream of love into a nightmare of tyranny and injustice’ (1967a: 29). Niebuhr’s agnosticism about agape in the polis alerts us to how any focus on our self-transcendence and a forgetting of ‘sin’ leaves us susceptible to legitimising a politics of suicide (or the denial or erasure of the self) and altercide (the denial or erasure of the other). These admonishments about agape, this plea for pluralism in the polis, in turn, draws attention to the fundamental antinomy and interrelationship of love and power in the co-mingled Cities. As David Clinton (2021) adumbrates, this forms the mainstay of Niebuhr’s realism.

Niebuhr’s understanding of love’s limits is the product of his dualist theology. As Niebuhr’s brother, the theologian H. Richard Niebuhr, posits there are very many theological conceptions about the right relationship between Christ and culture (2001) and by extension of ethics and politics, agency and structure. Consequently, there are a multitude of theologies of love. In Reinhold Niebuhr’s emphasis on the Cross rather than creation, incarnation or pneumatology; in his emphasis on love as a transcendent rather than immanent norm, Niebuhr was bound to disappoint those like Gentry who harbour more radical hopes for humanity and history. These theological differences, much like the philosophical differences between Hannah Arendt (1998) or Martha Nussbaum (2013), Annette Baier (1996) or Sara Ahmed (2014) about love’s place in politics, ironically underscore Niebuhr’s key contribution to normative theory on love. If very many different loves populate the polis, if these loves variously renounce and revel in power, there is a virtue in moral and epistemic humility when we aspire to speak in its name.

Love’s work

In the City of God, agape would reign and justice could be dispensed with. Niebuhr elaborates: ‘If complete selflessness were a simple possibility, political justice could be quickly transmuted into perfect love; and all the frictions, tensions, partial co-operations, and overt and covert conflicts could be eliminated’ (1967a: 27). Human finitude in a fallen world renders this impossible. Rather than reject agape as altogether dangerous and detrimental to the polis, Niebuhr’s solution is to mobilise a vision of love as a motivation to action and a form of judgement, which is transmuted in the saeculum in a balance of power, in the work of justice. In the context of Niebuhr’s response to racism, love does the work of critique, compassion and coercion. Niebuhr’s vision of love transmuted in the work of re-balancing power and redressing racism lies at the heart of realism as anti-racism. In this section, I draw on Niebuhr’s work on love and race to illustrate what it offers realist and anti-racist thought.

The ironies and antinomies of love and power lie at the heart of Christian realism. As Clinton (2021) notes, without reference to love, realism disintegrates to cynicism. As Paipais (2021) suggests, this dialectic is at the heart of a Pauline ethic which seeks to be in the world but not of it. However, Niebuhr’s offerings on love and power make a broader contribution to those who wish to theorise realism as antiracism ‘under an empty sky’. Indeed, the imbrication of love and power, the ideal and imperfect, is not the sole remit of Christian realism. Whatever the merits and limits of Niebuhr’s argument, he reveals that love cannot be properly theorised in isolation from power, and that power is rather nebulous and amorphous without an account of love. In drawing attention to the omnipresence of love and power and their enmeshment, Niebuhr suggests love ought not be extraneous to theorising of politics. This theme resonates yet remains largely undeveloped in broader realist literature. Indeed, to the extent that that Niebuhr suggests that although love and power are fundamentally distinct, love is ever at risk of co-opting power he evokes his famous interlocutor, Morgenthau’s (1962) Commentary essay. In more abstract terms, to the extent that love and power mirror the dialectic between the utopian and real, it underpins the work of E.H. Carr (2001). In further bringing these themes to bear on the challenge of racism, Niebuhr points to the rich and creative possibilities of realism’s role in reconceptualising balances of power in light of questions of unjust global order, cognisant perhaps of what W.E.B Du Bois (1925) once described as a global colour line. Whereas dualist theology is often thought to tend toward conservatism (Niebuhr, 2001) and realism the ameliorative proclivities of preserving the status quo (MacKay and LaRoche, 2018), there is a radical promise to Niebuhr’s realist vision of antiracism.

If Niebuhr’s offering to realist literature is a reckoning with love’s role in redressing racism, in anticipating and responding to the kinds of criticisms we encounter about love in anti-racist literature, he points to a shared space for the work of racial justice. Anti-racist political thought has drawn attention to love’s role in legitimising and exculpating racism. As Sara Ahmed (2014) reminds us, the language of love has been co-opted by neo-Nazis. Indeed, in their re-branding of ‘hate watch’ as ‘love watch’, ‘such organisations’ have claimed ‘they act out of love of their own kind (‘our White Racial Family’), rather than out of hatred for strangers or others’ (Ahmed, 2014: 122). Niebuhr’s aforementioned offerings about the multivalence of love; the impossibilities of agape, and the impoverishment of political theory that seeks to understand love in isolation of power, suggests that a love which is leant on to legitimise any political programme without an interrogation of the situatedness of the self or the pitfalls of politics, risks perpetrating vice in the name of virtue. Anti-racist literature also illuminates the risks of a turn to emotion to expiate guilt or evade responsibility. As Ida Danewid (2017) argues, an embrace of political emotions such as empathy or grief – and by extension, love – as a response to injustice enables a turn to universalism or an abstract humanism in order to evade historic responsibility. Yet, even as Niebuhr’s recourse to the language of original sin might universalise, it is accompanied by a conception of theological responsibility which understands judgement as intrinsically bound to historical and political context (Paipais, 2021). Further, his emphasis on the work of justice problematises the partiality and paternalism of sentiments. Perhaps this is best articulated in his distinction between philanthropy and justice. To be clear, Niebuhr sees both philanthropy and justice as the work of love (2013). However, whereas the former is epitomised in charitable giving, the latter is characterised by a humble recognition of the legitimacy of another’s claim upon us (1967a: 26). Niebuhr sees justice as a higher expression of love than philanthropy. In highlighting that race politics entails the claims of justice rather than charity, Niebuhr suggests that the ‘work’ anti-racism requires emanates from a fraternal rather than paternal love. Niebuhr’s emphasis on justice effectively articulates an ethic of loving in an imperfect world. He lauds a love that is neither sentimental nor soteriological but involves work in this world. This work involves agents to engage in compassion and critique, but also the ‘coercive’ work of resisting the social and economic structures that sustain racial injustice. In his pragmatic emphasis on political context and consequence, Niebuhr thus points to a place for the plural work of antiracism.