On Remembering and Forgetting

The unexpected revival of a once obscure philosopher, thanks to a former president.

I’m not entirely sure why Reinhold Niebuhr was one of Barack Obama’s “favorite philosophers.” But at least the former president was reading, and better yet he was reading philosophy.

Today, Niebuhr is a towering figure at the intersection of religion and philosophy. But he hadn’t been. It took Obama, then a rising star and senator, to revive Niebuhr. There was something refreshing about a politician using his newfound fame to name-check obscure philosophers.

The passage of time is a weird thing. The Niebuhr revival was itself an accident in a long series of accidents, the very accidents that led Obama to the presidency in the first place. I confess to a fascination with tracking and observing how certain ideas, and intellectuals, are perceived (or ignored) in different contexts—and how quickly that can change. In late 2005, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who himself seems (somewhat) forgotten, wrote a New York Times essay titled “Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr.” It includes this sentence:

In the midst of this religious commotion, the name of the most influential American theologian of the 20th century rarely appears—Reinhold Niebuhr.

Yet, just two years later, Niebuhr was no longer forgotten. He had become, at least for a moment, the most influential philosopher in the world, having earned the proverbial ear of the president, the most powerful man in the world.

But there was something else that was odd about Schlesinger’s discussion of Niebuhr’s obscurity that had little to do with Niebuhr himself. The opening paragraph goes like this:

The recent outburst of popular religiosity in the United States is a most dramatic and unforeseen development in American life. As Europe grows more secular, America grows more devout.

Whatever this was, it wasn’t so much an outburst as much as a last gasp. (Or was it?). Where it had hovered at around 70 percent from the 1930s, church attendance dropped below 50 percent for the first time in 2021, a precipitous decline in what had long been one of two holdouts (along with Ireland) in an otherwise secularizing West. These trends have only deepened, the pandemic having failed to produce the religious awakening that some had hoped for.

This was—and apparently still is—an America without God, or so it seems just 18 years after Schlesinger wrote his essay, alarmed by an America that appeared to be bursting with religious fervor. Stark reversals such as this seem unexceptional in retrospect, after they have happened. They become mere facts, and we acclimate ourselves to them surprisingly quickly. But before they happen, they might as well seem impossible. This should either fill you with dread, or fill you with hope. Or both.

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