Moral church, amoral society

For at least a century now, Christians in the United States have been trying to be “realistic” about their relations to the world in which they find themselves. In the Social Gospel era, that meant moving out of the sanctuary to meet the challenges of an urbanizing, industrial society, seeking to transform social relations through the power of Christian love implemented with the aid of the new sciences of economics and sociology.

After a couple of discouraging decades marked by race riots, labor unrest, and World War I, the Social Gospel effort at realism came to be seen as overly idealistic. A new movement arose that called itself Christian Realism. It recalculated Christian expectations of social reform by emphasizing the limits imposed by self-interest and power. Love may be the guiding norm in personal relationships, Reinhold Niebuhr explained in Moral Man and Immoral Society, but the work of social justice depends on some form of coercion. That version of realism provided important moral support for making the hard choices and understanding the historical ironies that marked America’s global role during the following decades of hot and cold wars—but it proved barely adequate for addressing the conflicts that racial injustice, international commitments, and economic inequality provoked in domestic politics during the last half of the 20th century.

My generation came of age in the 1960s with the slogan “The world sets the agenda.” Our Christian ideals were tempered by the sense that we ourselves are deeply implicated in the evils we denounce. Before we can set the captives free, we must confront our own illusions and guilt. Nevertheless, toward the century’s end, with the fall of the communist bloc and the apparent triumph of ideas of human rights and liberal democracy, we could believe that that transformation was well under way in ourselves and in the world.