Was Ursula Niebuhr Reinhold's coauthor?
Two years before he died, Reinhold Niebuhr published one of his best-known articles. He didn't write it alone.
In early August 1969, an elderly Reinhold Niebuhr found himself in one last intellectual dogfight. In an article for Christianity and Crisis, "The King's Chapel and the King's Court," he blasted President Richard Nixon for holding Sunday morning worship services in the White House, services that were led by Billy Graham and other clergy loyal to the Nixon administration.
Niebuhr described Graham as "a domesticated and tailored leftover from the wild and woolly frontier evangelistic campaigns" and accused Nixon of circumventing the disestablishment clause of the Bill of Rights and, in its place, establishing "a conforming religion by semiofficially inviting representatives of all the disestablished religions." The presiding clergy were pandering to Nixon instead of challenging him, Niebuhr chided. "It is wonderful what a simple White House invitation will do to dull the critical faculties."
Instead of playing the role of the prophet Amos, who criticized the powers of his day, the principals in the East Room of the White House embraced the role of Amos's nemesis, Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, who flatters the king and warns Amos against prophesying in Bethel, "the king's chapel and the king's court." Niebuhr quoted one of his favorite texts from Amos, a verse that Martin Luther King Jr. had also loved—"But let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever flowing stream"—and wondered whether King, had he not been murdered the year before, would have been invited to the White House. Not likely, he decided. King was Amos to the White House's Amaziahs.
