SUMMARY OF MORAL MAN AND IMMORAL SOCIETY CHAPTER 3:

"THE RELIGIOUS RESOURCES OF THE INDIVIDUAL FOR SOCIAL LIVING"

In Chapter 2 Niebuhr asked how far human reason could go toward making a just harmonious society. In Chapter 3 he asks the same question about religious faith. In Niebuhr's day, many American Christians thought that if people were more religious, or practiced Christianity more perfectly, they could create a society that would be just and equitable without using violence or coercion. One of the most important effects of his book was to cast doubt upon that idea. In Chapter 3 he first explains how religion can help to improve society in some ways. Then he explains why religion can never produce a perfect society, and how religion can actually increase injustice and coercion in some ways. (The ideas in this summary are all paraphrases of Niebuhr's chapter, apart from a few remarks that are clearly my comments on his work. Numbers after quotes refer to page numbers in the book.)

As a Christian theologian, Niebuhr stresses two aspects of religion that are especially important in Christianity. First, religion gives people an image of absolutely perfect goodness, usually in the form of a perfectly good person (for example, God the Father or Jesus Christ). Compared to this perfectly good person, the individual must feel imperfect (in Christian terms, a sinner). Perfect religious goodness means perfect selflessness, so the individual feels guilty for having any amount of selfish desire. This guilty conscience motivates religious people to set aside their own desires and give to others, at least to some extent.

Religion also moves people toward selflessness through its other major feature: its emphasis upon love of others. The ideal of religious love is a perfectly good will, which means wanting everything for others and nothing for oneself. Because love sees the infinite divine value of every individual, it sees every individual as equally valuable. So it protests against inhumane treatment of any person. Because religious love demands absolute goodness and perfection, it leads people to imagine an absolutely good and loving society. This can motivate people to work for a better society, even when it seems most hopeless. "Religion is always a citadel of hope, which is built on the edge of despair." (62) Marxism motivates its adherents with the same kind of religious enthusiasm for a perfect society, even though it is a secular philosophy.

However, says Niebuhr, "in their most unqualified forms, these hopes [for a perfect society) are vain." (63) Religion can improve life immensely for the individual, for families and small groups. But when it comes to the political complexities of modern societies, religion has limits that turn its hope for a perfectly harmonious nonviolent society into a vain illusion. In fact, the sense of imperfection and guilty conscience that religion creates can actually undermine efforts to improve society, for at least two reasons.

First, religion often makes people feel attached to an infinitely powerful perfect being (a God) who is still a person, much like ourselves except greater in every way. Religious people believe that this absolutely powerful person gives them special care and support. So religion can encourage people to assert themselves in extremely powerful ways. This can be especially especially dangerous when whole nations believe they have God on their side.

Second, religious people may be so focussed on their ideal of perfect goodness that they see everything in the world as evil. Since everyone has some degree of selfishness in all their actions, every action falls short of God's standard of perfection. From this point of view, for example, building shelters for the homeless is no better than building overpriced mansions for the rich. As a result of this view, people may not protest against evils in the world. The classic source for this idea in Christian theology is Augustine of Hippo, who wrote in the early 5th century. One reason Niebuhr's book is so important is that it persuaded a lot of U.S. Christians to take Augustine's ideas seriously again.

Augustine divided all of human life into two realms, the heavenly "city of God" and the earthly "city of man," which are totally opposed to each other. He wrote: "Two loves have created these two cities. Self-love in contempt of God created the earthly [city of man]; love of God in contempt of one's self created the heavenly [city of God]. The first seeks the glory of man, and the latter desires God only, as the greatest glory." Since everything that we call human society is part of the "city of man," it is all inherently evil. It is "regarded as too involved in the sins of the earth to be capable of salvation in any moral sense. Usually the individual is saved by the grace of God while society is consigned to the devil; that is, the social problem is declared to be insoluble on any ethical basis. Thus Augustine concludes that the city of this world is 'compact [made up of] injustice,' that its ruler is the devil, that it was built by Cain [the first murderer, in the Bible] and that its peace is secured by strife. That is a very realistic interpretation of the realities of social life." (70) The last sentence in this quotation shows Niebuhr's sympathy with Augustine.

But Niebuhr immediately adds that there is a problem with this view: it can lead people to despair of doing anything good in this world. "The injustices of society are placed in such sharp contrast with the absolute moral ideal, conceived by the individual conscience, that the religiously sensitised soul is tempted to despair of society." (70) This can easily create defeatism; people feel defeated in their efforts to do good before they even try. So the religious sense of imperfection, which leads to a fine selfless morality on the individual level, can actually undermine efforts for social morality.

The other quality of religion, its ideal of love and good will, also has serious limits in our efforts to create a more moral society. We can easily love members of our families and other intimate small groups, people we have direct ties to. The Quakers are a good example of people who, at first, extended perfect love to the others in their small groups, where each person had a direct feeling for every other. Paradoxically, we can also love total strangers, because they exist purely in our imagination, so we never have to deal with their reality. But when we are dealing with the real people in our society who are not intimate with us, we have to use our cold reasoning rather than our feelings and imagination. Then love, which is a warm feeling, has distinct limits.

In fact love can also lead us to give up in our efforts to improve society. Love is concerned with pure motives, not results. So it can end supporting actions that lead to bad results, because the motives are good. And the pure motives it demands may be unrealistic: "The demand of religious moralists that nations subject themselves to 'the law of Christ' is an unrealistic demand, and the hope that they will do so is a sentimental one. Even a nation composed of individuals who possessed the highest degree of religious goodwill would be less than loving in its relation to other nations." (75; this is explained in Chapter IV.) The same goes for other groups, especially economic classes.

Religious idealists thus find themselves easily discouraged in their efforts to reform society on the principle of universal love. They may then fall into defeatism; they may say that since perfect love can't be realized in society, no social efforts are worth anything. This can lead people who love individuals very much to accept unjust social institutions as inevitable. This is what happened in classical Christianity, as represented by Augustine: "Slavery, injustice, inequality of wealth, war, these all were accepted as ordained by the 'natural law' which God had devised for man's sinful state." (76) "Natural law" supposedly prevailed in the "city of man," and even the most saintly person could do nothing about it.

This kind of defeatism is not good, because it accepts injustice. But "there is a certain realism in this defeatism, and it has its own virtues." (78) We can understand those virtues when we look at another result of religious love. People with a high ideal of love, trying to make the world live by their ideal, may easily convince themselves that their efforts are having more effect than they really are. They then become too sentimental or tender-hearted, believing that everyone is really pure and good. This sentimental trend was most evident in 19th and early 20th century liberal Protestantism, especially in the U.S. This is the trend that Niebuhr was most concerned to combat, since it was the most common trend in his day. To point up what he saw as its dangers, he stressed the virtues he saw in the Augustinian approach.

Sentimentalists are dangerous, Niebuhr says, because they are unrealistic. Since they think they are improving society more than they really are, they may be content with rather feeble efforts at reform and never get at the real injustices in society. In fact, they may never even see the real injustices, since their view is so unrealistic. Even if they do see the problems, they won't do anything effective to solve them because they will misunderstand their causes. They mistakenly think that society is made up of loving people. So they don't see that social problems arise from unavoidable conflicts. This same mistaken idea leads to perhaps the greatest danger, in Niebuhr's view: sentimentalists think they can change society without using any coercion. Naturally, he argues, their efforts at change are ineffective, since all change requires some degree of coercion.

Still another danger is that the wealthy and powerful will attach themselves to the sentimental reformers and support their efforts. In this way they will use religion to legitimate their own power and oppression. The poor and powerless will correctly see this as hypocrisy and reject the religious reformers' efforts completely (see the quote at the beginning of p. 80). In Niebuhr's opinion, these dangers of sentimentalism were so great that it was necessary to bring Augustine's view, which he found more realistic, back into a central place in Christian social thought. He wanted a movement for social change that would be hopeful, avoiding Augustine's defeatism, yet be based on Augustine's supposedly "realistic" idea of human society.