The playwright Peter Shaffer once made the observation that tragedy is not a conflict between right and wrong, but a conflict between two different kinds of right.
The world is a noisy place and opinions about what’s right and who’s wrong are growing louder.
In these early days of 2026, listening thoughtfully and integrating intentionally has suddenly become a lot more difficult. The people I normally turn to for clarification or relief – op ed journalists like Jonathan Freedland or American comedians like Jimmy Kimmel – are themselves struggling to understand what’s going on. How can they explain the world to us in a way that makes any sense?
I was born in 1959, too young to comprehend the cause and effects of WWII or to have a clear understanding of the Civil Rights Movement. I did know, however, that there were certain people my parents respected and admired, men (and they were mainly men) who spoke unflinchingly and with integrity about God, man and meaning. They were the public philosophers and theologians of the 20th century: men like C.S. Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr.
In the 1930s, Niebuhr, then a pastor in a New England village, wrote a prayer.
“Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other.”
The Serenity Prayer was included in the prayer book given to American soldiers on the front lines during WWII and later adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous.
Reinhold Niebuhr was born in Missouri in 1892, the son of a German pastor. He received his degree from Yale Divinity School and was subsequently sent to Bethel Church in Detroit, where he became an outspoken critic of Henry Ford in the days before labour was protected by unions. His congregation (which swelled from 18 families to 600 during the 13 years he was there), consisted of those in management positions at the Ford plant as well as assembly line workers. “An industrial overlord” said Niebuhr, “will not share power with his workers until he is forced to do so by tremendous pressure”. As individuals, he knew his affluent congregation to be good, concerned and altruistic people and yet as a group they appeared selfish and self-interested.
Niebuhr saw religion as a real world issue, not confined to those who attended church or worked in academia. He sought institutional change over the salvation of the individual. He spoke out against President Nixon for his misuse of religion to bless his politics and he expressed regret at President Kennedy’s promiscuity and the thinness of his moral fibre. “By their fruits shall ye know them” he said “and the relevant fruits are charity, proportion and justice.”
Niebuhr often expressed weariness at what he described as the stale debate of atheism versus faith.
“It’s as difficult to get charity out of piety as to get reasonableness out of rationalism. Nothing worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime, therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in our immediate context of history, therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone, therefore we are saved by love.”
In 1952, my father was teaching at a boys’ boarding school in Massachusetts where Christopher, Reinhold’s son, was his advisee. At the end of the year, Reinhold Niebuhr gave Peter a copy of his book The Irony of American History. In writing to thank him, he took the opportunity to ask Niebuhr for advice on how to manage his own religious conflict. This is the reply he received:
“Dear Mr. O’Connell,
I deeply appreciate your letter if for no other reason than it gives me an opportunity to thank you for your great kindness and help to Christopher. I meant my copy of the book to be a token of my gratitude but it is a poor token indeed.
I find as a matter of fact that parents are so deeply indebted to teachers who take an interest in their children that there is no adequate way of expressing gratitude. What you and the School have done for Christopher is of inestimable value to him, and we can never be too grateful.
Perhaps I will have time in June to talk with you about the issues which you raise in your letter, because they have concerned me all of my life, but I have reached rather different conclusions than you have reached.
I believe, for instance, that in a world where, as Pascal said, justice must be enforced by power, the voluntary abnegation of power by a few Christians is not as valuable as the wielding of power “with fear and trembling” in the way that every business man and every Government official must wield it.
Whether on the question of powerlessness or poverty it seems to me that the Christian has to choose between the Monastic-perfectionist principle of goodness and an essentially Protestant one. According to the one he seeks to free himself from the evils of the world but he does not seriously affect the struggle in the world for a tolerable justice and brotherhood.
According to the other, he never escapes guilt because he is involved in all the various forms of guilt in the social life of man, but he regards this as a concomitant of “an ethic of responsibility” in contrast to “an ethic of perfection”.
I know this is a very sketchy way of stating a very ultimate problem with which I have been wrestling, as it were, all my life.
Sincerely yours,
R Niebuhr”
Reinhold Niebuhr was a nuanced, thoughtful and passionate thinker, willing to risk popularity for the sake of integrity. People paid attention to him because he didn’t speak out of self-interest but from a larger, human perspective. This made him trustworthy. Despite being on an FBI watch list, the US State Department invited Niebuhr to help shape government policy during the Cold War.
In this time, in our time, we are in profound need of Niebuhrs, Tillichs, Lewises and Kings.
Reinhold Niebuhr June 21st, 1892 – June 1st, 1971
Reference:
Mike Wallace interview with Reinhold Niebuhr, April 27th, 1958
The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr, pub. 1952
An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story by Martin Doblmeier, 2017