The Accra Confession: A Niebuhrian Consideration – R. Ward Holder

Reinhold Niebuhr has suffered much in the past decade.  While during his lifetime he was lionized and his likeness even adorned the front cover of Time magazine, he fell out of favor in theological, ethical and political circles during the 1970s.  In the first decade of the new century, however, Niebuhr’s thought was suddenly en vogue again.  Liam Julian would write of a “Niebuhr resurgence,” where a Niebuhr quote became de rigeur for demonstrating currency and profundity. Niebuhr was significant, even in the negative light cast by Stanley Hauerwas’ opprobrium, the famously pacifist Hauerwas taking on Niebuhr’s Christian realism as insufficiently Christian and a bad model for America to follow as it considered various military options.  Niebuhr was quoted by John McCain, by Hilary Clinton, and a famous David Brooks column in the New York Times made sure that Barack Obama’s enthusiasm for the Christian realist philosopher would be noted.[1]

But that rise in notoriety came with a cost.  Niebuhr’s influence was cited by neo-conservatives, by libertarians, and by progressives.  At times it was difficult to know what Niebuhr might have thought about a topic in his own day or to project what he might say to a current issue, because there were so many claimants to his mantle.  Further, with the waning of the popularity of Barack Obama throughout his second term, there have been fewer considerations of Obama’s faith, and a consequent loss of interest in Niebuhr.  The candle that burned so bright only a decade ago seems to be guttering – Niebuhr seems to have been called back onto the intellectual stage, only to find out that it was merely a polite curtain call.

But for those who have read Niebuhr rather than Niebuhrians, both the sudden interest and the fadeaway fail to see the true value in Niebuhr.  Whether Hauerwas approved or not, Niebuhr presented a serious discussion of Christianity and the modern superpower.  More considerations of that are necessary, not fewer.  America and the politics of empire are not going to disappear because our theological frameworks disapprove.  Further, possibilities exist beyond the imaginable applications of Niebuhr’s thought in the realm of military might.  Niebuhr’s first weighty tome, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics, a book that Cornel West called both “timely,” and “timeless,” took far more cognizance of the economic realm than many realize.  Further, many seem to forget that Niebuhr cut his pastoral-practical teeth in Henry Ford’s Detroit.  He knew as well as anyone what the concentration of wealth and power in a single man’s hands meant not only for the workers but also for the wider society.

Niebuhr would have supported the Accra Confession.  In his “Henry Ford and Industrial Autocracy,” he noted that America had the most efficient and autocratic industry in the world.  While others might have seen this efficiency as a consequence of that autocracy, Niebuhr charged that it was a function of the “…virtually unqualified despotism of industrial management.”  Niebuhr exposed the nature of Ford’s relationship to his workers.  While many industrialists were complaining that Ford was too generous in “giving” his workers a five-day work week, Niebuhr understood that Ford had done this by speeding up the manufacturing processes, thus producing the same amount in fewer days.  What labor had received was a pay cut while they worked faster.  Further, there were no unemployment benefits.  Because of this, Niebuhr saw the pressure visited upon Detroit’s municipal funding sources whenever an economic downturn occurred.

Through his ongoing analysis of Ford and his relationship to labor, Niebuhr grew to understand several points both about capitalism and about societies.  First, the normal turn to philanthropy could not be trusted to effect real social change.  In Niebuhr’s eyes, the powerful man, even though a human impulse might arise within him, always remained a beast of prey.[2]  In all cases, humans could not be trusted to give to their neighbors what they took for themselves.  That led to his dictum that, “All social co-operation on a larger scale that the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion.”[3]  Therefore, though Niebuhr would support capitalism, he could not give his espousal to the laissez-faire models so popular among the industrialists of his day.  While Andrew Carnegie could write “The Gospel of Wealth” and explain that the highest results of human existence were individualism, the accumulation of wealth, freedom of competition, and private property, Niebuhr had already seen the problems with those.[4] Niebuhr had already noted the insatiable desire of humanity for the treasures of this world, and seen through the utopian views that industrialists of his day and multinationalists of our own spin that given enough time and enough freedom to earn, the new global economy will solve hunger, poverty, and want.  Niebuhr began his classic with this sobering truth.  “However much human ingenuity may increase the treasures which nature provides for the satisfaction of human needs, they can never be sufficient to satisfy all human wants; for man, unlike other creatures, is gifted and cursed with an imagination which extends his appetites beyond the requirements of subsistence.”  No economy will ever create enough for all, because humans have an unappeasable capacity to turn wants into needs.  The evidence is all around us if we wish to see it.  Consider Timothy Noah’s The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It, or Chrystia Freeland’s Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. There is no question about the facts of the matter.  The income and wealth gaps grow daily.  Political conservatism masquerades as a political philosophy while acting as an ideology designed to protect the privilege of the few.[5]  And when the Pope speaks out against the faith in trickle-down economics, coming to the same conclusion that Niebuhr did earlier that trusting the goodness of human actors is to fail to understand human nature, he is savaged in the analyses of both Catholic and Protestant defenders of the status quo.

While Niebuhr decried the unfettered character of the economies of his own day, he still held on to a belief in the necessity of capitalism as a support for the democracies that he saw as the best possible governmental structures to ameliorate the worst tendencies in humanity.  His solution was the coercion of the state to amend the follies of the market system.  What Niebuhr could not foresee were the enormous powers that were loosed by globalization.  The move to transnationalism, with its ability to escape the laws of any given nation, provided the factual proof to Niebuhr’s caution that economic power was likely to become irresponsible to the powers of the state.  And it may be worse than that – Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes Everything, claims that capitalism is at the heart of global climate change, and that to fight that change successfully would require a re-evaluation of capitalism itself.

The Accra Confession reads the signs of the times and finds that humanity is standing on the brink of disaster, a situation that has been brought about by our worship of unfettered capitalism and globalization.  Theorists of a variety of previous times, including both Adam Smith and Reinhold Niebuhr, believed that the balancing of interest groups would ameliorate the toxic effects of greed.  But with the advent of transnational corporations and the context of a globalized marketplace, we are witnessing the triumph of Niebuhr’s doctrines of anthropology and sin over his understanding of the marketplace.  In seeking to serve God, we must then attack these root causes of the present crisis, even if that requires an enormous re-framing of our economic systems.  To do any less is both to deny God’s sovereignty over all creation, and to fail in our service to Jesus our Lord.

R. Ward Holder is a historical and political theologian, and professor of theology at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire.  He is an ordained teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and serves as moderator of the Presbytery of Boston.  He writes on John Calvin, biblical interpretation, and the manner in which religious convictions shape modern politics and political theory.  His most recent work was co-edited with Peter B. Josephson, The American Election 2012: Contexts and Consequences (Palgrave – 2014). He holds a bachelor’s degree from Cornell College, a master’s in divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary and a doctorate in theology from Boston College.

[1]Not least by myself and my colleague.  See R. Ward Holder and Peter B. Josephson, The Irony of Barack Obama: Barack Obama, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Problem of Christian Statecraft (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012).

[2]Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 13.

[3]Moral Man, 3.

[4]Note how closely this list approximates the points of “neoliberal economic globalization,” in paragraph 9 of the Accra Confession.

[5]Obery Hendricks, “A Camel through the Eye of a Needle: Class, Political Conservatism, and Anti- Christian Economics,” in The Universe Bends Toward Justice: Radical Reflections on the Bbile, the Church, and the Body Politic (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2011), 89-194.