A call for a Christian realism worthy of the name
âRealismâ is a tricky word. Few want to be called unrealistic, not least when it comes to human lives, borders, warfare, and the worldâs fate. The same goes for âChristian,â making it an often unhelpful adjective. Many today claim âChristian realismâ who directly oppose each other. There are Christian realists defending Israel, others Hamas, and others neutrality.
The meaning of Christian realism is better found in people than in definitions. The most important person in this matter is Reinhold Niebuhr. The pacifist pastor turned activist thinker ranks among the most influential American theologians. Martin Luther King, Jr., Jimmy Carter, James Comey, John McCain, and Barack Obama all counted him as their guide.
Many others have told Niebuhrâs story, and I wonât belabor it. He found liberal Protestantism, with its Pelagian anthropology that boiled all political problems down to the negotiation of good wills, an utter failure at dealing with the crises of his timesâthe crises being totalitarians of the left and rightâJoseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. So he turned to Augustine for a deeper insight into our fallen wills. Out of those depths came an energy that could get a progressive to fight wars and defend political liberalism against its enemies, whether on the battlefield or on magazine pages.
One might understand why some of the more martial names listed above would look up to Niebuhr. Indeed, Niebuhr seems a patron saint of the believing boys in Brooks Brothers blue, who have consciences and ideals but also the sense to get their hands dirty keeping the worldâs conscience clean. Niebuhrâs profile is fated, for most, to resemble Jack Ryan with an MDiv.
For many, then, Christian realism is just a justification for belligerence. Lenin was right, they say. You canât make an omelet without cracking a few eggs. But we have a much better recipe than Lenin did: universal freedom, democracy, open marketsâand Godâs grace to forgive us for the cracking.
In fact, that is what came to be American ârealistâ foreign policy throughout the later twentieth and early twenty-first century, all of it headed by Christian presidents. Realism proved to do little more than baptize and inspire American imperial power, wielded disastrously over the Middle East, all thanks, ironically, to some quite unrealistic expectations. As it turns out, most on the left and right now agree that political liberalism cannot come to a country with drone strikes as its herald. The twenty-first century has seemed to prove Niebuhrâs Christian realism totally wrong.
Yet few recall that Niebuhr opposed the Vietnam War and other imperial stretches in strategy, even as he never stopped fighting communism. Much like George Kennan: another great American realist who came to attack American interventionist policy against the Soviets some years after proposing an ideal form of it himself. (Good realists have the virtue of picking whatâs really there when it conflicts with their ideals of whatâs real.) Todayâs stereotype of realism, Christian or otherwise, neglects the restrained choices of its most august thinkers.
I believe that neglect owes to a mistaken understanding of what makes for Christian realism. It isnât just the notion that people are often very bad (even when they try to be good) and that sometimes one must get dirty to accomplish what must be done. Much more crucial is Christian realismâs contention about God and reality itself. In its most compelling form, Christian realism insists that reality simply cannot be manipulated, even and especially when we think we know all we need to change it. For reality is governed by a Good, Sovereign, and Mysterious God. And so in every decision, event, and relation between beings there are never exclusively two partners, nor only a sequence of cause and effect, but also a third Partner Who can be neither controlled nor predicted, and Who is much greater than any other partner involved, and Who shall always have His say. So there shall always be a totally unpredictable element in every eventâand this element holds much moral weight. Call it Providence or FateâAugustine thought both meant the same thing.
All action, therefore, must follow this Providence in two ways: in responsibility to the moral order this God holds His creatures to, and in humility that one cannot ever fully account for any action or event that happens within this order. The former inspires action and justice, the latter grace and restraint.
Now we might better understand why Niebuhr could support one war and not another, and why the pose of Christian realism as a G-man with a Bible and a gun hardly captures this way of thinking.
A remnant of a truer Christian realism remains. The two most faithful Christian realists working today are Andrew Bacevich and Walter Russell Mead. They differ in many ways. Bacevich is a retired colonel, Mead a writer and policy analyst. Bacevich tends dovish, Mead hawkish. They disagree over what to do about Palestine. But both have proven prescient in recent years as fierce critics of American imperial policy and liberal internationalism, whether left or right. They are not outright pacifists, but they stress deterrence through diplomacy, prudence, and above all an allergy to hubris. Both are practicing Christians, and both claim Niebuhr and Christianity as antidotes to the expertâs constant infection of arrogance.
The point here is not to transmogrify their points of view into something uniform, but only to prove that Christian realism need not lead to policies of shooting first and asking questions later, nor of blessing technocratic gestures as authoritative. Quite the opposite. A Christian realism worthy of Niebuhrâs legacy stresses restraint. And especially now, when various technocratic forces and organizations still claim to own the mantle of ârealistâ in the face of so many rebellions against their control, Bacevich and Mead have, each in his own way, shown how unrealistic these prevailing strategies are and why they have failed.
Which brings me to Wendell Berry. His writing on farming and environmental policy is often chided for being unrealistic, even by those who like him. I suspect Berry gets annoyed by that. For, as is clear from his earliest essays to his latest, he cares utmost to write and think realistically, attuned to what is real over what is not. And he thinks the same way about Jesus, whom he calls a teacher of an âeminently realistic and tough-mindedâ tradition.
What might Christian realism have to do with Berryâs ecological policy? Both invoke a prophetic warning against hubris. As Berry puts it, âhubris . . . is the great ecological sin, just as it is the great sin of politics. People are not gods. They must not act like gods or assume godly authority. If they do, terrible retributions are in store.â This hubris is finally theological, for only gods think themselves limitless. Of course, only God is limitless, while these other gods, striving to cast off all limits, can only give the illusion of doing so by abstraction: âThe Devilâs work is abstractionânot the love of material things, but the love of their quantities . . . It is not the lover of material things but the abstractionist who defends long-term damage for short-term gain, or who calculates the âacceptabilityâ of industrial damage to ecological or human health, or who counts dead bodies on the battlefield.â Berry is a Christian realist because he, like Niebuhr, Bacevich, and Mead, attacks such hubrisâwhether it be found in governmental policy or in its everyday occurrences as it pillages our land, creatures, and people.
Berry counsels a positive vision as well. To depart from hubris we need a âchange of mind,â the key to which is the ârealization that the first and final order of creation is not such an order as men can impose on it, but an order in the creation itself by which its various parts and processes sustain each other, and which is only to some extent understandable.â To the doctrine of Providence, Berry adds the âorder of creation,â which, because it is given by God, cannot be manipulated, or even comprehended. Since it is an order, it demands a just, proper response. And since it is an order of divine creation, it calls, finally, for a sense of grace, even in its demand for justice.
Environmental ârealismâ today might claim we must make do with the order we haveâfactory farms, geoengineering and renewable technologies, even lab-grown meatsâbecause our population is large and farming the old-fashioned way wonât do. It seems tough-minded, wary of nostalgia. Yet there is nothing realistic about it. Not only does it ignore the many statistics we have about crop overproduction, it does not even treat animals as animals, the soil as soil, water as water. It only turns each into abstractions of various measurements, numbers, and calories, all to reduce to standing reserve. Berry once called it the ârule of efficiency, which takes thought only of the volume of the yearâs produce, and takes no thought of the life of the land.â Only a deluded abstractionist can agree that in this age of green energy we can mine unrenewable minerals to put solar panels on irreplaceable places to fix the problem of unrenewable fuelsânever stopping to consider using less energy. As Berry has been arguing for a long time, we are not thinking as tough minds but as optimistic calculators, much like the Devil himself.
This is foolishness, andâas Berry often points outâit coincides with the ârealisticâ interventionist foreign policy of the past sixty years, which, as most now see, was never realistic, neither in its means nor ends. It should be clear that the same realism of restraint that criticizes prevailing imperial foreign policy applies just as well to our political economy. For both follow the basic principle of humility that is essential to Christian realism.
It is an insult to Niebuhr, Berry, and every other genuine realist that ârealismâ has gotten mistaken for technocratic delusion. And only a real realism can fix that confusion. There must be a revision of Christian realism in domestic and environmental policy like the one that has finally come in foreign policy. To call for more farmers, better farming, restrained energy use, and ways of living more attuned to human limits before what we cannot and should not control: None of that is unrealistic. It is eminently realistic among its unrealistic contraries, much like the call for a more restrained prudence in our countryâs dealings with others.
And yet, among the many revisions and realignments in recent years, especially among the divers crowd of the âNew Rightâ and the âNew Center,â no such rethinking has occurred, at least nothing compared to new thinking about American strategy abroad. Instead, calls for re-shoring American industries have simply ignored environmental realities.
Take two brief examples. The newly rebranded, nationalist, and apparently post-libertarian Heritage Foundationâs âProject 2025â calls for the next Republican-governed Department of the Interior to open every available wilderness refuge to oil drilling. These lobbyists, who say they are striving to recover the vision of Theodore Roosevelt and an American national heritage, seem to think very little about the American land, the truest heritage we have, and one which Roosevelt saw for himself.
And in the âNew Center,â I have not read a single Compact article take climate change, environmental pollution, or renewable agriculture seriously. As grateful as I am for all the hard work that writers like Sohrab Amari and Matthew Schmitz are doing to work out new political alignments, I mourn that care for our land, and with it a clear-eyed criticism of modern industrialism, have fallen victim to this negotiation. Of course, an industrial policy that works for American workers might conflict with a policy that protects endangered land, water, and wildlife. But it might not. Perhaps an agrarian âindustrialâ policy might even propose that American workers be considered not just workers but proprietors, as Berryâand Thomas Jeffersonâurge. Yet ignoring these matters ensures that nothing will be done, that contradictions will remain unaddressed.
I suspect the inconsistency between foreign and domestic policy in these realignments comes from mere prejudice. Things like sustainable agriculture, widespread small productive business and land ownership, and wildland preservation are only the stuff of bright-eyed liberal New Englanders or nostalgic reactionary Southerners. But the reverse has been shown when it comes to foreign policy. People as different as Pat Buchanan, Susan Sontag, and Stanley Hauerwas were proven much more realistic than Bill Kristol and Dick Cheney about the Iraq War. I can only hope that soon many will come to realize that the same might be true of Wendell Berry and Christopher Smaje over Michael Lind and Greg Monbiot about agriculture and land ownership. Then we might have a âChristian realismâ in domestic policy as well as foreign, and one worthy of the name.
Casey Spinks writes from Waco, Texas, where he is a PhD candidate in theology and teaches in religion and philosophy.‘