Imagining Moral Presidential Speech: Barack Obama\'s Niebuhrian Nobel

IMAGINING MORAL PRESIDENTIAL SPEECH: BARACK OBAMA’S NIEBUHRIAN NOBEL JOSEPH RHODES AND MARK HLAVACIK

This essay continues the ongoing discussion Robert Terrill began and Joshua Reeves and Matthew May joined regarding the moral, philosophical, and rhetorical choices made in Barack Obama’s 2009 Nobel lecture. We argue that Obama’s address is best understood as an articulation of Reinhold Niebuhr’s rhetoric of Christian Realism—Obama wrote the lecture himself and prepared for it by studying the influential theologian’s works. Importantly, Obama is not the fırst rhetor to use the moral and political thought of Niebuhr to situate his or her public address; the list includes Martin Luther King Jr., Saul Alinsky, Jimmy Carter, John McCain, and Hillary Clinton. Yet Niebuhr’s vocabulary remains largely unstudied by public address scholars and rhetorical theorists. We argue that criticizing the moral and political judgments made in Obama’s address by the Niebuhrian standards the president sets for it provides an alternative method by which to evaluate the speech’s successes and failures. In so doing, we also provide the fıeld of public address with its fırst account of the rhetorical possibilities and limitations of Reinhold Niebuhr’s work, specifıcally his vision of a “spiritualized-technician”—a rhetor who speaks the language of realism, idealism, and irony, to expand an audience’s moral imagination.

JOSEPH RHODES is Assistant Professor in Residence of Communication Studies in the Honors College at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. MARK HLAVACIK is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Texas in Denton. © 2015 Michigan State University. All rights reserved. Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 18, No. 3, 2015, pp. 471–504. ISSN 1094-8392.

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rom his fırst day in offıce, President Barack Obama contended with the charge of prematurity. Over and over, Obama was characterized as long on rhetorical eloquence and short on executive experience.1 This criticism reached an international zenith with the Nobel Prize Committee’s announcement that they had awarded the new president the 2009 Peace Prize less than nine months into his presidency. The award and the lecture Obama delivered in acceptance of it received a great deal of attention in the news media and in rhetorical studies.2 Consequently, President Obama’s Nobel lecture on December 10, 2009 has become an important site for the examination and assessment of contemporary presidential address. Generically, Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance was the third of its kind by a sitting U.S. president.3 Substantially, though, Obama’s lecture was an original meditation on the history of violent conflict and the diffıculties posed by the use of force in a global age. As such, it has been subject to competing evaluations in the pages of this journal. Striving to make sense of a Peace Prize Lecture that was at least as much about war as it was about peace, Robert Terrill emphasized Obama’s ambivalence. Noting that war and peace “blur into one another” throughout Obama’s lecture, Terrill worried that the president’s “vision will have diffıculty attracting adherents when the very instability that it seems crafted to address also renders more attractive the rigid fundamentalisms that it is intended to critique.”4 Although Terrill stopped short of condemning the speech, he concluded his assessment by wondering aloud about the wisdom of rearticulating just war theory as a rhetorical, rather than a philosophical, construct.5 Setting themselves in opposition to Terrill, Joshua Reeves and Mathew May denounced Obama’s Nobel lecture. According to Reeves and May, Obama’s lecture was a “celebration of American military power” grounded in “a dangerous, a priori American exceptionalism.” Recognizing that their concern “extends beyond issues of textual interpretation,” Reeves and May decried the lecture, in part, by detailing the Obama administration’s policy decisions over the years following the president’s speech. Reeves and May then concluded that “it is of serious disciplinary consequence that Obama has largely escaped the criticism that was aimed at his predecessor.”6 Although we do not share Reeves and May’s moral assessment of Obama’s speech, we do share their concern about the role of ethics in the evaluation of presidential public address.

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The divergent appraisals of Obama’s Nobel lecture presented by Terrill and Reeves and May are grounded in two similarly divergent critical practices: one realist and the other idealist. Obama’s Nobel lecture, be it ambivalent or abhorrent, provides a litmus of critical practice for the study of presidential rhetoric. Reevaluating Obama’s Nobel lecture yet again, we situate our critique of the ethical dimension of his speech in the moral framework the president himself chose for it. And that framework is Niebuhrian. Reinhold Niebuhr was the public face of American protestant theology in the mid-twentieth century. A theologian, public intellectual, pastor, and professor, Niebuhr is perhaps best known for authoring “The Serenity Prayer.”7 He rose to prominence during the interwar years as a socialist thinker and labor advocate in Detroit, Michigan. During and after World War II, Niebuhr engaged in a critique of Christian pacifısm, becoming the voice for what, retrospectively, was labeled “Christian political realism.”8 During the Cold War years, his status peaked as a public intellectual and political prophet who denounced American exceptionalism, highlighting the ironies of an American foreign policy that accelerated the spread of communism while denouncing communism.9 Niebuhr’s political commentary and theological framework provided his audience with a vocabulary for making tough judgments in the face of hard political and moral realities. At the same time, he countered the cynicism that results from political realism, by providing his readers with a faith and hope that humanity might somehow increase its “moral imagination” and create a more just society. In Oslo, Obama used the theological vocabulary of Niebuhr, the United States’s most influential Christian thinker, to perform a public moral inquiry into the ethics of war and peace. Writing for the Atlantic, James Fallows noted that the speech contained a “consciousness that was once called Niebuhrian and at this rate will someday be ‘Obamian.’”10 Echoing Fallows’s assessment, a cadre of commentators on contemporary religious issues noted the Niebuhrian bent of Obama’s remarks as well.11 Historian William Lee Miller went so far as to declare it, “as thoroughly Niebuhrian an utterance as we are likely ever to hear a sitting president utter.”12 Of course, it is easy to connect the ideas in presidential addresses to their representative philosophers or thinkers. But it is much harder to demon-

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strate direct influence. And although the parallels between Obama’s acceptance speech and Niebuhr’s theological writings are manifold, their abundance is not necessarily confırmation of their signifıcance.13 However, as it turns out, the popular diagnosis of Obama’s speeches as “Niebuhrian” has grounding in the president’s speechwriting process—Obama wrote the speech himself using a 300-page binder containing Niebuhr’s essays, writings, and speeches gathered by his speechwriters at his request.14 Before the Nobel Prize Committee in Oslo, President Obama rearticulated Niebuhr’s ethical vision for American foreign policy, presenting his global audience with an opportunity to expand their own “moral imaginations” in the face of new sociopolitical challenges. Through a close analysis of Obama’s Nobel Prize lecture, we argue that Niebuhr’s essays, writings, and speeches provided the president with a rhetorical model for moral speech. Obama’s address, combining the complex dimensions of global action with the reflective capacity of rhetoric, made manifest a moment of moral imagination in international public life. Obama seized the opportunity the Nobel Prize afforded him by helping the global community envision an American foreign policy that might satisfy the contradictory expectations of national self-interests and moral idealism by embodying Niebuhr’s model rhetor, the “spiritualized-technician.” Speaking through Niebuhr’s rhetoric of Christian Realism, Obama attempted to expand his audience’s moral imagination, paving the way for an enlightened American foreign policy, and perhaps too, for a global rhetoric of civil religion.

REINHOLD NIEBUHR’S RHETORIC OF CHRISTIAN REALISM As the son of a small-town pastor and the older brother of another influential theologian (H. Richard Niebuhr), Reinhold Niebuhr developed a keen awareness of the political and social responsibilities of Christianity. And these visions were characterized, as were most of the visions of the early twentieth century, by an overwhelming optimism in technique and social science. One such promising theological program was called the Social Gospel, and at Yale Divinity School, Niebuhr, along with his professors, fully embraced it. Pitting moral suasion against political and economic power, the Social Gospelers argued that the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount could be applied not just to interpersonal relationships but to politics as

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well. Walter Rauschenbusch, the Social Gospel’s chief exponent, gave voice to the aspirations of the movement in the language of technique and promise, which was typical for the period: “We have the possibility of so directing religious energy by scientifıc knowledge that a comprehensive and continuous reconstruction of social life in the name of God is within the bounds of human possibility.”15 At Yale, Niebuhr agreed with these sentiments, but when he left the ivory towers of New Haven and began his practice as a minister in an industrial city, his outlook quickly changed. Niebuhr was 23 when he accepted the pastorate of Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit, Michigan. It was 1915. There, immersed in the cultural malignancies of industrialism in a “Henry Ford town,” he became deeply concerned about the problems of social justice. He found that, despite the best of his intentions, the Social Gospel he espoused at Yale was an inadequate solution to the problems of his blue-collar parishioners. “I was up against an industrial city,” he would later recall, “and I saw that human nature was quite different than I had learned at Yale Divinity School.”16 Niebuhr discovered, much to his surprise, that Henry Ford, despite his professed Christianity, was immune to rhetorical appeals based on the Sermon on the Mount’s ethics. Ford could not be loved into giving the Detroit autoworker a fair wage and the Detroit autoworker could expect no earthly results from turning the other cheek. Niebuhr learned that so-called Christian ethics were irrelevant to the realm of politics, a realm dominated by self-interests, egotism, greed, and the lust for power. Working as a pastor in Detroit taught Niebuhr “that the simple idealism” of the prevailing liberal theology “was as irrelevant to the crises of personal life as it was to the complex issues of an industrial city.”17 Adapting to these new experiences in Detroit then, Niebuhr abandoned what he concluded was the false idealism of the Social Gospel. Instead, he began to articulate a more realistic vision for Christian politics grounded in mythopoeic truths of orthodox Christianity. For Niebuhr, as it was for Augustine, the problem was how to be an involved Christian in a fallen world without getting one’s hands dirty. If getting involved inevitably leads to sin, then how should a Christian go about improving society? How does one balance the inevitable demands of power and force in the realm of politics with the moral and ethical demands of Christian faith?

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The best solution Niebuhr could come up with was the idea of expanding society’s moral imagination. Niebuhr coined the term “moral imagination” in his fırst major work, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932). Moral imagination described the role of the imaginative capacity in the pursuit of social justice: “The highest moral insights and achievements of the individual conscience are both relevant and necessary to the life of society. The most perfect justice cannot be established if the moral imagination of the individual does not seek to comprehend the needs and interests of his fellows.”18 Although Niebuhr imbued moral imagination with the capacity to guide people through reason to maximally ethical action, he did not posit the source of human caring for the other in moral imagination alone. Instead, Niebuhr’s moral imagination is a practice cultivated out of a concern for the other, giving that concern “vividness.” For Niebuhr, reason and intelligence, in and of themselves, are inadequate for answering the political and existential questions that face humanity. “Men will never be wholly reasonable, and the proportion of reason to impulse becomes increasingly negative when we proceed from the life of individuals to that of social groups, among whom a common mind and purpose is always more or less inchoate and transitory, and who depend therefore upon a common impulse to bind them together.”19 This means, for Niebuhr, that each person’s creative capacities for moral imagination must, like his or her reasoning faculties, be groomed and organized to solve the most vexing human problem—that of our aggregate existence. Moreover, the impulse to care for the other must come from somewhere else, some guiding principle that sets reason and imagination into motion. Niebuhr insisted that without a mythopoeic tradition to furnish a common origin, as well as common ends in view, the delicate balance between reason and imagination is ultimately unsustainable. Thus, what was needed was a rhetor that could bring out the best that his or her audience had to offer by appealing to both the heights of their ingenuity and technical prowess, while stirring their souls with the depths of religion’s timeless insights. As a pastor rooted in the prophetic Christian tradition, expanding moral imaginations was an exigency that, for Niebuhr, required a rhetorical response. To resolve the anxieties of Christian political action and expand the moral imaginations of large groups of people, Niebuhr envisioned an ideal rhetor he called the “spiritualized-technician.” Through a deft rhetorical leadership, Niebuhr’s spiritualized-technician would put the humpty-

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dumpty of twentieth-century sociomoral relationships back together while solving the technical problems of modern governance. The rhetor Niebuhr imagined would be a social movement leader, an orator, or a public intellectual capable of understanding the technical elements of a complex social situation, while also transcending those actualities from a religious perspective. For Niebuhr, “a robust ethical idealism, an extraordinary spiritual insight and a high degree of intelligence” are all equally necessary to make the complex relationships of modernity ethical.20 The spiritualizedtechnician arranges the intricacies of a technical society into the language of aspiring ideals, thereby expanding the moral vision and technical profıciency of an entire people. In the spiritualized-technician, Niebuhr imagined a rhetor with a strong moral imagination who would inspire others to engage their imaginations as well. Niebuhr never fully fleshed out his idea of a spiritualized-technician, but the rest of his career was spent both practicing and conceptualizing his vision for a rhetoric of Christian Realism. Niebuhr developed no system. But his later writings, the very ones Obama drew from when composing his Nobel Lecture, identify three rhetorical moves the Christian realist must make. A rhetoric of Christian Realism will articulate a realist view of human nature by reflecting upon sacred history and acknowledging the inevitability of sin. However, this realist perspective leads naturally to cynicism and despair. Thus, the spiritualized-technician also tames the cynicism of realism by offering audiences an ideal vision of transcendent possibilities. Moving beyond the tragic realm of politics without escaping into the transcendent ideals of religion, the rhetoric of Christian Realism holds realism and idealism in constant tension. The result is a paradox. And instead of resolving the paradox between Christian ideals and toughminded realism, Niebuhr asks us to take an ironic attitude toward history, facilitating humble, yet resolute, political action. ORIGINAL SIN AND THE POWER OF SACRED HISTORY

The rhetoric of Christian realism was Niebuhr’s response to the false hopes of industrial age optimists—thinkers like John Dewey and Walter Lippmann, who thought the answer to all of the twentieth century’s problems could be solved with just a little more science or just a few more experts. As

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Niebuhr articulates it, realism is the disposition to take into account all of the factors in a given political and social situation that resist established norms, particularly the factors of self-interest and power.21 Niebuhr cites Machiavelli: realism means “to follow the truth of the matter rather than the imagination of it; for many have pictures of republics and principalities which have never been seen.”22 Realism is the refusal to turn away from the way things are simply because they tarnish our hopes for the way things ought to be. From Niebuhr’s realist perspective, idealists have illusions about social realities and ignore many of the actual facts of human nature and the limits of politics and governance. Realists insist that the values and principles of idealism are not only unobtainable but often serve as a moral facade for hiding self-interests, both individual and collective. Niebuhr’s realism was always rooted in a vocabulary of sin, drawn from Christianity’s myth of Adam and Eve’s fall. Sin is the Christian concept that explains the origins of evil in the world and the dialectical nature of human freedom and fınitude. For Niebuhr, understanding humans as sinful is a corrective to views of human nature that are either too optimistic or too pessimistic. Any analysis of a human situation must begin with the frank recognition—the “realism”—that the source of evil in the world is not “some residual natural impulse which mind has not yet completely mastered” but is a direct result of self-love, pride, hubris, egotism—the tendency of the self to make itself its own end.23 “Sin,” then, is the term Niebuhr uses to describe those situations in which men and women, acting naturally as demigods, pretend to be the one true God. Sin occurs when humans pretend to know more than they do, be more powerful than they really are, and be more virtuous than their enemies. Worse than sin, for Niebuhr, was collective sin. The essential truth in Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society was that even if an individual were capable of self-sacrifıce for a greater good, collectives are, by their very nature, simply incapable of moral action. When the pride of individuals is organized around a common theme, their judgment is given pride and majesty, making the transcendence required to reflect upon moral actions even harder to realize. The state, for Niebuhr, is the most consistent voice for the collective impulses spurred on by the egotism of racial, national, and socioeconomic groups because it “presents the imagination of individuals” with unifying rhetorical symbols of its collective identity.24 Thus, collective sin typically expresses itself not in the longing for survival but in lust-for-

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power, pride (prestige and honor), contempt toward others, and hypocrisy.25 “Collective pride,” Niebuhr argues, is “man’s last, and in some respects most pathetic, effort to deny” his creature-ness; “the very essence of human sin is in it.” He continues: “It can hardly be surprising that this form of human sin is also most fruitful of human guilt, that is of objective social and historical evil. In its whole range from pride of family to pride of nation, collective egotism and group pride are a more pregnant source of injustice and conflict than purely individual pride.”26 Expanding moral imaginations, then, in one sense, requires starting from a clean ideological slate, collectively. It requires scrubbing the residue of idealism from a nation’s worldview by taking a hard, long look at humanity’s capacity for evil. But Niebuhr always countered this approach by taming his cynicism in turn. He maintained, in spite of the lessons learned in Ford’s Detroit, that “moral ideas and faith commitments are also real and exert their own pressures on the course of events.”27 Thus, he articulated a moral vision of realism that was grounded in the Christian virtues of the Sermon on the Mount: love and mercy. CHRISTIANITY AND THE POWER OF IDEAS

Expanding the moral imaginations of one’s audience requires that one offer them an ideal that transcends the particulars of their own self-interests. Typically, justice is the standard used by developed nations and modern collectives to measure political judgments. Niebuhr insisted that justice is an excellent tool for self-criticism, for holding our own groups, not those of our enemies, accountable. Niebuhr argued that without this self-criticism “all justice becomes corrupted into a refıned form of self-seeking.”28 On the other hand, if the claims of another individual or collective are not considered as well, there can be no justice at all. For the justice ideal to be realistic, it may not be either completely self-critical on the one hand or completely self-serving on the other. The problem with justice then, when taken in isolation, is that it never achieves this balance. One cannot actually achieve justice, according to Niebuhr, if justice is one’s highest ideal. Niebuhr argues that justice “cannot exist without love and remain justice. For without the ‘grace’ of love, justice always degenerates into something less than justice.”29 Justice, then, demonstrates a paradox of ethics: the most ethical

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result of political action can never be its desired result; instead, it must be its by-product. If justice is the goal one seeks, one is left with rigid selfinterested claims that are in a continuous battle with one another. If one aims at love, however, one will likely end up somewhere around justice. Expanding our moral imaginations requires that no matter how high the political stakes are—our collective health, safety, welfare, and economy— we must always hold justice up to the yardstick of perfect love. Unlike justice, which is always “our justice,” Niebuhr insisted that love “is drawn from, and relevant to, every moral experience. It is immanent in life as God is immanent in the world. It transcends the possibilities of human life in its fınal pinnacle as God transcends the world.”30 Love is the law of life—the aspiring ideal that hovers above all human action. It works, for Niebuhr, precisely because it is impossible to reach. It is, as Niebuhr often called it, “an impossible possibility.” It is impossible because “Man, as the creature of both necessity and freedom, must, like Moses, always perish outside the promised land. He can see what he cannot reach.”31 Yet, it is something to aspire to, nevertheless, because in our fıner moments we do get very close to achieving it, and even when we don’t, the approximation is more ethical than its counterpart. Lastly, love, like justice, also contains a paradox—one that is important for understanding Obama’s address. Like justice, if one aims at love, for the sake of love, one will never achieve it, for if one aims only at the love of others, one will inevitably come up against those who do not qualify, as others. To love everyone Niebuhr insisted that we must love God fırst. Loving God fırst sets human judgment in motion toward an imaginative end: by loving God fırst, we are able to love all human beings; by loving all human beings, perfectly and selflessly, we are able to achieve a more ethical and uninterested justice, thereby achieving a tolerable harmony between the selfısh claims of competing wills. This is what Niebuhr means when he writes that justice “that is only justice is less than justice.”32 For Niebuhr, one must aim at a transcendent ideal to achieve a better actuality. Niebuhr’s term for this transcendent justice is “imaginative justice.” He writes, “Only imaginative justice, that is, love that begins by espousing the rights of the other rather than self, can achieve a modicum of fairness.”33 Thus, Niebuhr envisions a rhetorical strategy that balances realism with the Christian ideals of love to reach an imaginative

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justice that is more than subjective, a justice that transcends the limits of self-interest and egotism. PARADOX AND THE POWER OF IRONY

In addition to balancing a realist account of the world with a call to the ideal of love, Niebuhr’s spiritualized-technician also cultivates a Christian attitude toward history. This attitude toward history was an ethical imperative for Niebuhr. A philosophy of history that brings all of the various perspectives of economists, political strategists, insightful artists, and moralists into a harmonious unity, Niebuhr argued, “must be endowed with the highest imagination.”34 It must “combine the exact data of the scientist with the vision of the artist and must add religious depth to philosophical generalizations.”35 The spiritualized-technician’s philosophy of history accomplishes this task by embracing the ironic perspective of biblical, prophetic religion. An ironic perspective, in some ways, results from the realist invocation of sin followed by the idealist invocation of love, but both contain their own ironies. Sin is built on the principle that what makes us more than animals— our capacity to create things anew and transcend our fınite perspectives—is the very thing that turns us into mere animals—our self-seeking behavior and the egotistical preservation of our own interests. Similarly, the relationship between love and justice is ironic, for as Niebuhr notes, though we must aspire toward perfect love, any attempt to follow it “in a world that is, particularly in its group relationships, hardly human and certainly not divine,” leads inevitably where it led Jesus—“to the cross.”36 The ironic refutation of the love ideal is that, here on earth, perfect success results in absolute failure. Thus, the Christian myth is inundated with ironic tropes, and it is these tropes that lead to the humility required to orient one’s political judgments toward sacred history in as ethical manner as possible. Irony is a corrective to the idealistic views of progress found in German romanticism and the American social sciences; it also corrects the tragic, cynical approaches to history found in Greek classicism and the absurdity of contemporary existentialism. Niebuhr prefers irony to both tragedy and pity because it accounts for all the empirical facts of human nature without leading to over-optimism or cynical despair. It leads, ultimately, toward a

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resolute commitment to engage in the affairs of this world, yet irony also leads to humility, repentance, and contrition—the attitudes necessary for one to hold up all of the partial achievements of human justice and love to their highest conceptualizations—imaginative justice and agape love. The realism of collective sin, the idealism of love, and the irony of history are the three rhetorical appeals Niebuhr’s spiritualized-technician uses to perform political judgment on the world’s stage in such a way that it calls others to engage their moral imaginations. For Niebuhr, an expanded moral imagination is the best that rhetoric can offer the tragic realm of politics, in which approximate solutions are developed to solve unsolvable problems. Moral imagination requires a realistic vision of what is possible, rooted in the understanding of sin; it demands of us that we artistically orient our audiences toward love of God and love of neighbor, “that which we can see but cannot reach”; it insists that we are ever vigilant for the ironic refutations of history, that we embrace the paradoxes of impossible possibility and the conflicting ideals of love and justice. But it also insists that we never let these paradoxes and ambiguities lead us to the Charybdis of political paralysis or the Scylla of American exceptionalism. Conducted to Niebuhr’s standards, the rhetoric of Christian Realism performs moral judgment in a way that fosters goodwill in spite of rhetorical and political constraints. In other words, a successful rhetoric of Christian Realism grants the spiritualized-technician the benefıt of the doubt. And we contend that it was this harmonious balance between realism and idealism, between justice and love, between humility and resolute action that Obama hoped to attain in Oslo’s City Hall.

BARACK OBAMA’S NIEBUHRIAN NOBEL On October 9, 2009 the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced Barack H. Obama as its selection for that year’s Peace Prize.37 Typically cause for celebration, President Obama’s selection not nine months into his fırst term instead proved cause for consternation. Although the committee’s press release “attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons,” it met with accusations that it had decided to reward the fırst African American president of the United States for a future he had yet to achieve.38 Editorials around the world urged Obama to consider declining the award. Some, like the Sydney Morning Herald, called

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Obama’s selection over the likes of Sima Samar and Piedad Cordoba a “travesty.” Others, like Der Spiegel, observed that rejecting the prize might be in Obama’s “own best interests,” going so far as to describe it as a political “burden.”39 The Washington Post led with the dissonant headline: “President Obama Wins the Nobel Prize for Peace—But That’s Not His Fault.”40 Noting that “only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future,” the committee’s announcement lent some credence to the criticism.41 Commending Obama’s vision for the future with a prize often given in recognition of the admirable sufferings of freedom fıghters like Nelson Mandela (1993), Elie Wiesel (1987), Mother Teresa (1979), and Martin Luther King Jr. (1964) struck many commentators as premature at best.42 Elevating the Obama campaign’s “hope” message from a persuasive appeal to historical fact, the Nobel Committee appeared rhetorically naïve. Amid the outcry, Obama spoke to the press in the White House Rose Garden, agreeing with his critics that he did not “deserve to be in the company” of “the transformative fıgures” who had been “honored by this prize” before him. Nonetheless, as “an affırmation of American leadership” and “on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations,” Obama resolved to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.43 Between early October and early December, concerns about Obama’s selection turned from his lack of accomplishments to his foreign policy in the Middle East.44 On December 1, the president delivered a policy address to the United States Military Academy at West Point. His speech, entitled “The Way Forward in Afghanistan,” concluded a review of the war effort Obama had ordered following a delayed parliamentary election in mid-September. “This review is now complete,” Obama told the assembled cadets, and “I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan.” The president envisioned an end to the conflict through a surge strategy, insisting that the surge would provide “the resources that we need to seize the initiative, while building the Afghan capacity that can allow for a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan.”45 Ordering an escalation just nine days before he was to accept an award for peacemaking, Obama framed his decision as indispensable in the pursuit of peace, a necessary means to a just end.

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Thus, taking the lectern in Oslo City Hall as U.S. servicemen and servicewomen began receiving orders, Obama had his rhetorical work cut out for him. In response, the president addressed the controversy and Nobel Prize Committee head-on.46 “I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated,” he said. “I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars,” he explained, “and so I come here . . . fılled with diffıcult questions about the relationship between war and peace.”47 By declaring himself full of questions about the tension between two trans-historical political phenomena, Obama set forth a Niebuhrian task for his speech: to wrestle publicly with the irresolvable and to discover proximate solutions to inherently unsolvable problems.48 Others have noted that Obama began his lecture with a meditation on the aspirations and limitations of just war theory.49 Indeed, Obama’s thoughts on the nature of war are the content of about the fırst third of the speech, but the rhetorical form of this section is sacred history. In a sermon, sacred history is when a pastor or prophet reflects on a canonical story from the past, usually a well-known passage or set of passages from the Bible. For Niebuhr, the prophet-technician, speaking as a successful Christian realist, uses this reflective portion of the sermon to rediscover the sinful nature of humanity. Thus, instead of resolving tensions between war and peace into a new doctrine of just war, Obama’s meditation on the history of war asserts over and over the inevitability of human conflict. “War,” observed Obama, “appeared with the fırst man.” In Obama’s Nobel lecture, war stands in for sin. And, like sin, pride, and collective egotism, war is both original and trans-historical. War always looms as a possibility requiring constant efforts at prevention. “Over time,” explained Obama, “codes of law sought to control violence within groups” as “philosophers and clerics and statesmen seek to regulate the destructive power of war.” As Obama applied Niebuhr’s Christian realism to the problem of U.S. foreign policy he did not advocate or prohibit war. Instead, Obama urged his audience to confront the inexorability of war. “Of course,” Obama impelled, “we know that for most of history, this concept of ‘just war’ was rarely observed. The capacity of human beings to think up new ways to kill one another proved inexhaustible, as did our capacity to exempt from mercy those who look different or pray to a different God.” As a prophet-technician, Obama dwelled on humanity’s violent recidivism through a realist description of past events,

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but, in addition, the president urged his audience to confront and accept this version of historical events as well. For Niebuhr, engaging with sacred history always reveals the diffıcult truth that humans, despite their best efforts, cannot avoid sinning. Obama crystalized his version of this idea when he fınally said: “We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations—acting individually or in concert—will fınd the use of force not only necessary but morally justifıed.” However, the Christian realist engagement with sacred history also reveals the paradox that humans often sin precisely as they try to make their world less sinful. Obama confronted this paradox in his discussion of nonviolence. After quoting Martin Luther King Jr., Obama reflected on nonviolence as a means for making a more peaceful world: “I know there’s nothing weak—nothing passive—nothing naïve—in the creed and the lives of Gandhi and King. But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone.” By declaring Gandhi and King only partial models for his own leadership, Obama acknowledged a constraint on his actions as president. More importantly, though, Obama’s discussion of nonviolence also revealed how even a doctrine whose sole tenet is the refusal to engage in sinful behavior can be responsible for violence by prescribing inaction. “Make no mistake,” said Obama employing a frank tone, “Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.” Obama’s sacred history lesson thus teaches that the violent nature of international affairs is not avoidable, even for those who refuse to commit acts of violence themselves. In addition to unnamed ancient conflicts and the movements of King and Gandhi, Obama also rehearsed America’s military and political accomplishments during the twentieth century. Although the president spoke in defense of his country’s modern history, his overarching argument was that international affairs inevitably involve violence. Thus, Obama framed his narrative of U.S. history with an acknowledgment that American hegemony has not been perfect: “Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of

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our citizens and the strength of our arms.” Tracing his realist interpretation of history into the twentieth century, Obama challenged his international audience to recognize the role of the United States in preventing global conflict. However, in asking his audience to be humbled by the impossibility of perfectly moral or peaceful action on the global stage, Obama simultaneously encouraged them to view the United States and its president sympathetically. Throughout the speech, Obama continued to reflect on the paradoxical nature of war and peace. Right after describing the U.S. efforts to “underwrite” global security, the president appeared to prevaricate: “So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another—that no matter how justifıed, war promises human tragedy.” Speaking dialectically, Obama performed the ambivalence that is Niebuhr’s hallmark.50 More than just tortured sentences with opposing clauses, Obama’s Niebuhrian ambivalence also formed the structure of the speech. After using sacred history to reveal the inherently sinful nature of humanity as evidenced by the trans-historicity of violent conflict, Obama continued in the idiom of Christian Realism to envision transcendent possibilities. Although Niebuhr prescribed an unflinchingly realistic perspective of the world for his spiritualized-technician, he insisted that his ideal rhetor would balance the jarring truth of sacred history with a commitment to uplifting possibilities promised by transcendent ideas. Transcendence in Obama’s Nobel Prize lecture comes from his discussion of the conduct of the international community. Near the middle of his speech, the president declared: “I have spoken at some length to the question that must weigh on our minds and our hearts as we choose to wage war. But let me now turn to our effort to avoid such tragic choices, and speak of three ways that we can build a just and lasting peace.” Obama then proceeded to describe a vision of justice—one of Niebuhr’s core ideals—achieved on a global scale by a community of nations in the pursuit of what the president called a “lasting peace.” Obama discussed three ideals of justice on which a “lasting peace” would need to be based. First, Obama declared that “in dealing with those nations that break rules and laws,” the international community “must develop alternatives to violence that are tough enough to actually change behavior.” Although earlier in his speech Obama insisted that the “instruments of war” had a role in

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“preserving peace,” here Obama insisted that the strict enforcement of rules through sanctions could serve a preservation function. Obama insisted that the real force of such sanctions comes from “pressure” that “exists only when the world stands together as one.” Instead of through armed conflict, Obama envisioned peace achieved through the univocal judgment of the international community declaring what is and is not just. Thus, Obama’s vision of a “lasting peace” incorporated the sense that peace must be grounded in standards of justice that inspire international unity in their enforcement. Second, Obama insisted that peace could not be lasting or just if the global community of nations did not harbor a belief in the viability of broad individual rights for all people. The president distinguished the lack of violent conflict from lasting peace, reasoning that “only a just peace based on the inherent rights and dignity of every individual can truly be lasting.” Interweaving the narrative of the mid-twentieth-century great wars from his earlier lesson on the sacred history of international relations, Obama upheld the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as evidence of the realization that “if human rights are not protected, peace is a hollow promise.” The president went on to quip: “Only when Europe became free did it fınally fınd peace.” Obama then described the means by which he envisioned the growth of freedom and greater individual rights. The president insisted that “the promotion of human rights” would have to “be coupled with painstaking diplomacy.” According to Obama, human rights expand when oppressive regimes are given the opportunity and encouragement to open them up: “No repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door.” Thus, Obama’s ideal justice required unity from the global community of nations but also a collective belief in the potential for reforming oppressive nations. Obama’s third ideal of justice insisted on economic security. The president argued, “a just peace includes not only civil and political rights—it must encompass economic security and opportunity.” According to Obama, “true peace” requires “freedom from want.” Although Obama expressed the inherent importance of food, water, medicine, and shelter as basic economic needs, his argument for the importance of economic security rested on its role in creating both real and perceived social justice. Obama argued that the basic economic needs of individuals must be met not just for their own sake but also so that people can “aspire to a decent

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education or a job that supports a family.” A dearth of economic opportunity equated to an “absence of hope” that “can rot a society from within.” So, Obama’s ideal of justice demanded international unity in condemning injustice, a commitment to acting on the potential for a more just world, and facilitating the felt perception that individuals’ efforts to improve their own conditions are both possible and reliably rewarded. For Thomas Heneghan, the president’s discussion of peace and justice echoed Niebuhr’s observation that “the sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.”51 But more than just a reflection of Niebuhr’s social philosophy, the overall effect of Obama’s pairing of the sacred history of international relations with the ideals of international justice was a deeply ironic speech performance. By interweaving the realism of armed conflict with the vision of a just world, Obama displayed the ironic understanding of world events as realist and world leadership as idealist, the ironic outlook Niebuhr prescribed for the spiritualized-technician. Near the end of his speech, this paradoxical view led Obama to the same place it led Niebuhr– the idea of moral imagination: Agreements among nations. Strong institutions. Support for human rights. Investments in development. All these are vital ingredients in bringing about the evolution that President Kennedy spoke about. And yet, I do not believe that we will have the will, the determination, the staying power, to complete this work without something more—and that’s the continued expansion of our moral imagination.

Having spent the majority of his speech talking about the diffıcult reality of violent conflict and the shape of just and lasting peace, the president’s demand that his audience strive to expand their moral imaginations seemed appropriate as he had just demonstrated the expansiveness of his own. Obama’s invocation of Niebuhr’s “moral imagination” became a rallying cry as his speech sped to a close. He attached it to the theologically grounded Golden Rule. He analogized it to the law of love. He quoted a version of it from King’s Nobel Prize lecture. As Obama ended his lecture, he engaged his moral imagination again to create hypothetical examples of people struggling despite their awareness of the diffıcult odds they face: an outgunned soldier fıghting for peace, a protester marching for freedom with the

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knowledge that her efforts will get her beaten, and a mother saving the little money she has to send her child to school. In each case, Obama’s imagined protagonists understood the irony of taking idealistic action despite realistic constraints. This striving for progress with the knowledge of one’s limitations is the essence of action based on moral imagination, and so Obama declared: “Let us live by their example. We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice. We can admit the intractability of depravation, and still strive for dignity. Clear-eyed, we can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace.” For Obama, as for Niebuhr, moral imagination sustained the desire for a more ideal world while confronting the diffıculties of the real one, and he used that irony as the grounds for moral action. “We can do that,” Obama concluded, “for that is the story of human progress; that’s the hope of all the world; and at this moment of challenge, that must be our work here on Earth.” As Obama fınished making presidential enthymemes of Niebuhrian syllogisms, he never stopped dwelling in the tension between the hard realities of international relations and the ideals of international justice. However, by inviting his audience to use their moral imaginations to join him in these diffıcult tensions, Obama achieved a Niebuhrian call to action.52 But Obama’s conclusion departs from Niebuhr’s Christian Realism in its progressive and optimistic insistence that “We can do that” and its invocation of the “story of human progress.” These are the essential markers of what Robert Bellah calls the rhetoric of American civil religion, not of Niebuhrian Christian realism—Niebuhr would never have said “we can do that,” only that we can hope to. Civil religious rhetoric invokes “the obligation, both collective and individual, to carry out God’s will on earth.”53 But as Bellah noted, as early as 1967, American civil religion was bound to confront its own rhetorical limits in a pluralistic society. Caught in a theoretical and theological conundrum over the meaning of “God,” American civil religion faced then, and does now, a deep crisis. Obama, using the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, may have resolved it rhetorically, for unlike Bellah’s presidential examples, Obama does not explicitly use the word “God,” and apart from the aforementioned momentary lapse, there is no simple dogma of a life to come or rewards for good behavior—key markers of civil religious discourse as well. Obama’s Nobel acceptance, then, articulated a hope that the expansion of our moral imaginations, on the global stage, begins with the expansion of civil religious

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discourse as well. Niebuhr’s rhetoric of Christian realism is precisely the model needed for this rhetorical project because it was born out of a rhetorical situation analogous to the one Obama confronted when he stepped to the stage in Oslo.

FROM AMERICAN CIVIL RELIGION TO GLOBAL CIVIC PHILOSOPHY Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize lecture is as fıne a Niebuhrian statement as has ever been uttered by a sitting U.S. president.54 Insisting on a realist foreign policy posture guided by moral imagination, Obama’s Nobel lecture did not fızzle into a potentially dangerous ambiguity, nor did it forward a selfserving defınition of just war. Instead, Obama invited his audience to hold onto their nonviolent ideal of a just world, while appreciating the real constraints of executive leadership when violence is unavoidable.55 There is no distinction between just war and unjust war in Obama’s Nobel lecture, but there is the insistence that those who yearn for a peaceful world reconcile their idealism with the inevitability of war. War, for Obama, is a paradox in the same way that sin is for Niebuhr: it is simultaneously indefensible and inevitable. Thus, the problem of war demands both spiritual vision and political technique. By refusing to resolve the paradox of state violence as an essential feature of peace, Obama described a philosophy of international politics guided by what Niebuhr called “moral realism.” Although Obama acknowledges that war might be “justifıed” as policy under the doctrine of moral realism, he also maintains that war is an unjust act that always “promises human tragedy.” As Obama articulates it, war is an irredeemable failure, but an inevitable irredeemable failure akin to Niebuhr’s conception of sin. And, although Obama does not describe conditions that make war morally just, he does ponder how the technological developments of the twenty-fırst century blur the boundaries between war and peace. Like Pastor Niebuhr struggling to lead his congregation in response to the dehumanization of modernity in the early and mid-twentieth century, President Obama struggled to articulate a defensible philosophy of state action in a world where the “old architecture is buckling under the weight of new threats,” such as the “dizzying pace of globalization” and the “cultural leveling of modernity.” Whereas Niebuhr sought to advise protestant America on the moral perplexities of love, justice, and political conflict in an attempt to make “com-

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plex group relations ethical,” Obama sought to advise the world on the diffıculties of peace, security, and war in an attempt to make statecraft ethical. Of course, Niebuhr’s theology is more than a collection of truisms that happen to be well suited for public address. Niebuhr developed Christian Realism as a response to the dramatic geopolitical changes he witnessed during the early and middle twentieth century.56 Civilization’s greatest problem, for Niebuhr then and for Obama now, is that of human beings’ “aggregate existence.”57 The purpose of Niebuhr’s rhetorical method remained the same from the beginning to the end of his career: “the task of making complex group relations ethical.”58 Thus, Christian Realism provides audiences with a religious “frame of reference,” an ethical tool for interpreting the actuals and the ideals of a given situation. This frame resides in Niebuhr’s moral realism and its appearance in Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech warrants our close attention, both for his accomplishments and its shortcomings. By taking Obama’s invitation to expand our moral imagination seriously as the real-world application of a Niebuhrian theological concept, we can begin to understand how Obama’s use of Niebuhr operates as a rhetorical strategy for public address. Moreover, close attention to Obama’s representation of the rhetoric of Christian Realism calls attention to an element missing in the address: the explicit mythopoeic insights of the Christian tradition.59 Niebuhr’s moral realism rests on theological insights, not political or philosophical ones.60 These insights compose the very core of Niebuhr’s thought. They make it theology. They make it Christian. They make it Niebuhrian. And, they make it work.

ORIGINAL SIN AND NATIONAL REPENTANCE Unlike Obama, Niebuhr insisted on embedding his criticisms of political action in the language of sin. The distinction between American political realism—“the school of thought that places national self-interest above idealistic schemes for social reform”—and Christian Realism—a view of human nature as “rooted in human sinfulness”—is crucial. Paul Elie argues: “Viewing humans as ‘sinful’ leads to certain key conclusions for Niebuhr, most notably that in trying to reform the political you will only get so far, because ‘the human person without divine aid is a profoundly limited

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creature.’”61 We are called to act, but in recognition of our sinful nature, we are called to act humbly, aware of our limitations. “Political realism is a pretty thin reduction of that,” says Elie.62 Political realism starts from the idea that Obama is America’s president and therefore he must act, as the nation must, in our own self-interest. It takes Niebuhr’s view of sinfulness and makes it a “baseline for foreign policy: since we can’t eliminate selfinterest from our actions, we might as well be frank about it and make self-interest primary.” The depth of Niebuhr’s realism gets lost in this analysis, a depth that contains the proper ends of rhetorical judgment against collective pride and sinful hubris. In other words, without the concept of original sin, Niebuhr’s realism can quickly denigrate into a resigned form of American exceptionalism—and though American exceptionalism out of resignation is better than American exceptionalism out of pride, humility—an indispensible element of moral action for Niebuhr— remains absent. Without a sense that the human events are guided by a higher power with an unknowable purpose, it is impossible to achieve the graceful embrace of moral action in international affairs with the knowledge that it may never work out. Believing in the purposefulness of history is essential for Niebuhr’s Christian Realism. God’s hand in history, though mysterious, remains meaningful for Niebuhr’s spiritualized-technician. This divine purpose and sacred view of history is absent from Obama’s speech. Without couching the ironic view of history in the mythic narrative of sacred time, Obama’s speech fails to lead to repentance and contrition, which prophetic religion demands of self-interested groups. Repentance that leads to forgiveness is the fınal form of love, according to Niebuhr, and such forgiveness depends upon an awareness of sin that is grounded in Christian mythopoeia. If not, if the recognition that America has made a shipwreck of its collective life, for example, is not affırmed in religious faith, then the awareness of it leads to death (symbolic cynicism).63 “Without faith,” the recognition of national sins “generates the sorrow of the world, which is despair,” Niebuhr argues. “Without faith this confusion is the mark of meaninglessness.”64 In other words, to experience judgment upon a nation’s sins as a source of grace and to grasp the ironic vision that, in the future, we might do better, but in trying to do better we may also do worse, we must recognize the divine author and source of both history and

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judgment. “In the day of judgment and catastrophe the Christian Gospel has a message of hope for those who truly repent,” Niebuhr insisted.65 This insight begs the question: is it possible for a nation to experience the divine judgment of God collectively, and to repent, on the national stage, for its sins? Prophetic history tells us that it was possible for Israel and Judah, in the ancient world. Is it no less possible for the United States, now? It is tempting at this point in an analysis of Obama’s address—considering both its heights and its failings—to resort to the crutch of rhetorical norms and political constraints; to say, for instance, that Obama simply “could not go there.” But this is a hasty judgment—one that ignores what Martin J. Medhurst calls “the most important speech on American slavery since Abraham Lincoln”—George W. Bush’s 2003 address at Goree Island.66 In that address, Bush, the fırst sitting U.S. president to visit the continent of Africa, adopted a theological perspective, speaking to the God of history and calling America’s slave trade “sin,” directly and unapologetically. Bush didn’t use a Niebuhrian vocabulary in his address, but it is worth noting in retrospect just how progressive, morally and ethically, such a radical rhetorical moment Bush’s Goree Island address was. We are of course sympathetic to the traditional neoclassical argument regarding Obama’s rhetorical constraints. But we also believe that political consequences are never guaranteed things—that great rhetorical risks may remold rhetorical norms and bring great political rewards, and that Niebuhr’s spiritualized-technician would have seized this rhetorical moment to make bold, prophetic claims about national sin and collective repentance.

IRONIC HISTORY AND NATIONAL HUMILITY Unlike Obama’s embrace of ambiguity and paradox, Niebuhr framed his ironic attitude toward history in Christian mythology. As David Gibson notes of Obama’s Nobel acceptance, to those who view Obama through the dueling political categories of liberal/conservative, dove/hawk, president/ candidate, the address read “not as irony but as a series of contradictions that collapsed in on themselves.”67 This is because Niebuhr’s theological framework is necessary for one to grasp the ironies of Obama’s moral vision. Thus, Gibson goes on to note that Obama’s speech makes perfect sense to anyone who recognizes that we are sinful creatures in a fallen world and furthermore, that this recognition “requires hard thinking and tough mor-

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alizing, about oneself and about the world.” But what about those who aren’t familiar with the speech’s Niebuhrian, Christian, underpinnings? What about Muslims, Hindus, atheists, and Buddhists listening to Obama’s Nobel lecture? Would they have picked up on the irony of Obama’s Niebuhrian perspective? Can Niebuhr’s ironic view of American history be accepted without also articulating and accepting its theological basis? Is it feasible “to affırm the pastor’s conclusions and not necessarily his premises?”68 Martin Marty does not think so. He notes that Niebuhr “insisted that without the ‘governing principle’ of which he spoke, an ironic interpretation would be only ‘subjective,’ ‘imaginative,’ ‘capricious,’ ‘superimposed,’ reflective of ‘special interest’ and ‘arbitrary’; it would ‘do violence to the facts’ and represent but ‘fortuitous’ correlations of a ‘biased mind.’”69 And Liam Julian, editor of Policy Review, agrees: It is certainly possible for the secular historian, glancing back through time, to agree with Niebuhr’s rejection of idealism. But our historian has no defınitive rejoinder to the idealist who argues that mankind is just now, at this moment, poised to cross the boundary between [banal] self-interest and enlightened cooperation. . . . unless he is willing to acknowledge man’s inherent limitations he possesses no dispositive proof to the idealist’s vision.70

Julian’s conclusion is that those who accept Niebuhr’s thoughts but reject his theological framework are only fınding its endpoints plausible and sensible. In doing so, they are “devaluing the syllogism by countenancing the conclusions but skipping the premises or substituting their own.”71 Of course, Niebuhr was anything but a naïve idealist. He knew the limits of statecraft and rhetoric. He knew that national repentance was unlikely, even for a religious nation. “We cannot expect even the wisest of nations to escape every [moral] peril . . . for nations have always been constitutionally self-righteous.”72 But, Niebuhr continues, “it will make a difference whether the culture in which the policies of nations are formed is only as deep and as high as the nation’s highest ideals; or whether there is a dimension in the culture from the standpoint of which the element of vanity in all human ambitions and achievements is discerned.”73 But again, this height, Niebuhr insists, can only be reached by religious faith. “The God before whom ‘the nations are as a drop in the bucket and are counted as small dust in the

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balances’ is known by faith and not by reason.”74 And this faith “inevitably involves an experience of repentance for the false meanings which the pride of nations and cultures introduces into the pattern.”75 Obama fails in his Nobel acceptance to call America’s selfısh actions “sin,” and thus, he also fails, unlike his predecessor, to “repent” for the nation’s sins against other nations. The president did not challenge his audience to confront their own sinfulness. The call for a moral imagination is simply not enough for Niebuhr. It is an imaginative religious faith that Niebuhr insists is the salve for national hubris. All three of these rhetorical dimensions were combined, for Niebuhr, in the symbolism of Christ and the Cross. The life of Jesus fostered a morally creative worldview, which requires, Niebuhr argued, “a potent but yet suffering divine ideal which is defeated by the world but gains its victory in the defeat.”76 In other words, a corrective to the problems of modernity must be a tragic worldview that goes beyond tragedy because its tragedy transcends the meaning of what it means to fail in the world of politics. Obama’s address, as Niebuhrian as it is, really gives us no reason to keep trying, for it can provide no hope that in losing our collective identity as a nation, we may win on a higher plane of existence. This was, for Niebuhr, the lesson of the cross. And without it, there was simply no reason for a tragic perspective to continue its efforts at improving the world.

CONCLUSION Nathan Crick argues that what makes Obama’s rhetoric “religious” is “not his explicit reference to God or his usage of terminology associated with established religion; it is how he constructs dramatic narratives that amplify the religious quality of the common realizations and achievements of ordinary citizens as they struggle together to carve a home out of an often hostile environment.”77 Our analysis agrees with Crick’s. Obama’s rhetoric in Oslo was not religious, per se, but an invocation of religious experience—an experience whose primary characteristic has, in John Dewey’s words, “the force of bringing about a better, deeper and enduring adjustment in life.”78 Likewise, religious faith is not, for Obama, “obedience to a higher law or authority outside of everyday political action.” Rather, it is “simply the common ambition of people to work together against resistance for a better life.”79 But is this enough? Niebuhr didn’t seem to think so. “There must

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always be a religious element in the hope of a just society,” he insisted, for without the “ultrarational hopes and passions of religion no society will ever have the courage to conquer despair and attempt the impossible.”80 For Niebuhr, the Christian myth, properly understood, provides the rhetorical resources needed for an expansion of moral imaginations. In other words, civic philosophy must contain, for Niebuhr, civil religion. However, Niebuhr argued that the prophetic and ironic elements in a religious myth do not inevitably lead to ethical activity and that many forms of Christianity play “the part of the court chaplain to the pride of nations.”81 The church can become, just as the state can, the vehicle of collective egotism, because “every truth can be made the servant of sinful arrogance, including the prophetic truth that all men fall short of the truth.”82 This means, in our fınal analysis, that Obama’s failures to achieve Niebuhr’s religious heights may at the same time propel him to new Niebuhrian rhetorical heights. The spiritualized-technician who provides the moral energy needed to move a collective toward social justice is an ideal that can be approximated but never perfectly actualized. Like love and justice, Niebuhr’s spiritualized-technician is an ironic, perfect imperfection. It is thus fıtting that Obama’s address is Christian, yet not quite Christian enough—religious, yet not quite religious enough—spiritual, yet technical. In the end then, according to both Niebuhr and Obama, the morality of our foreign affairs will depend upon us entering crises with a humble attitude and a contrite heart. It will depend upon our capacity for rational decision making. It will depend upon the amount of information we have on the particular problem at hand. It will depend upon a realistic survey of the power relations involved. It will depend upon our best estimate of what the future holds. It will depend upon our best understanding of what is best for us as well as what is best for others. And it will depend, most of all, upon the humble recognition that all of our answers to these questions are biased justifıcations of our own self-interests. This recognition of the inherent frailty of human endeavors is the ethical grounds Obama selected for his speech, and those are the grounds by which it should be judged. Addressing a global crisis of faith in the interwar years, Niebuhr prescribed Janus-faced caution: “What is needed [then as it is today] is a philosophy and a religion which will do justice both to the purpose and to the frustration which purpose meets in the inertia of the concrete world, both to the ideal which fashions the real and to the real which defeats the

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ideal, both to the essential harmony and to the inevitable conflict in the cosmos and in the soul.”83 Whether Barack Obama’s foreign policy then, in its totality, can be fairly called moral, his Nobel Prize lecture passed Niebuhr’s test. Obama boldly faced the hard truths of collective action, pointed toward the highest ideals of Christianity, and spoke with the humility that is only possible from a paradoxical attitude toward history. Thus, his was a rhetoric of caution too—a spiritualized call for hesitation, mindfulness, and deep reflection—on the topic of state violence and the prospects of peace, a topic that is and has always been about technique—speeding up, fırm declarations, and bold action. Here, in return, we have aspired to exercise similar caution as critics. Continuing the discussion of the moral, philosophical, and rhetorical choices made in Barack Obama’s 2009 Nobel lecture, we argue that Obama’s address is best understood as an articulation of Reinhold Niebuhr’s rhetoric of Christian Realism. Obama is not the fırst rhetor to use the moral and political thought of Niebuhr to situate his or her public address, but he is unique for having made a conscious study of Niebuhr’s thought and a direct application of his vocabulary in major rhetorical addresses. We argue that criticizing the moral and political judgments made in Obama’s address by the Niebuhrian standards the president sets for it provides an alternative method by which to evaluate the speech’s successes and failures. In so doing, we also provide the fıeld of public address with an account of the rhetorical possibilities and limitations of Reinhold Niebuhr’s vision of a “spiritualized-technician,” a rhetor who speaks the language of realism, idealism, and irony, to expand an audience’s moral imagination. NOTES 1. These claims were echoed in public opinion polls. See “Obama Inspiring but Inexperienced, Clinton Prepared to Lead but ‘Hard to Like,’” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, February 13, 2008, http://www.people-press.org/2008/02/13/ obama-inspiring-but-inexperienced-clinton-prepared-to-lead-but-hard-to-like/ (accessed October 15, 2014). 2. Robert L. Ivie, “Obama at West Point: A Study in Ambiguity of Purpose,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14 (2011): 727–59; Robert E. Terrill, “An Uneasy Peace: Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize Lecture,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14 (2011): 761–79; and Joshua

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RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS Reeves and Mathew S. May, “The Peace Rhetoric of a War President: Barack Obama and the Just War Legacy,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 16 (2013): 623–50.

3. The other two are Theodore Roosevelt (1906) and Woodrow Wilson (1919). Jimmy Carter (2002) also received the prize but as a former president. 4. Terrill, “An Uneasy Peace,” 776. 5. Terrill, “An Uneasy Peace,” 775. 6. All quotations in this paragraph were taken from Reeves and May, “Peace Rhetoric of a War President,” 638–41. 7. See Daniel F. Rice, Reinhold Niebuhr and His Circle of Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Joseph Rhodes, “Book Review: John Patrick Diggins, Why Niebuhr Now?,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99 (2013): 531–34; Daniel Malotky, Reinhold Niebuhr’s Paradox: Paralysis, Violence, and Pragmatism (Plymouth, England: Lexington Books, 2012); Gabriel Fackre, The Promise of Reinhold Niebuhr, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Group, 2011); John Patrick Diggins, Why Niebuhr Now? (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Charles Lemert, Why Niebuhr Matters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011); Richard Crouter, Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics, Religion, and Christian Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Daniel F.Rice, ed., Reinhold Niebuhr Revisited: Engagements with an American Original (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Group, 2009); Mark L. Kleinman, A World of Hope, a World of Fear: Henry A. Wallace, Reinhold Niebuhr, and American Liberalism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000); Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Larry Rasmussen, ed., Reinhold Niebuhr: Theologian of Public Life (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1991); Paul Merkley, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Political Account (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975); and Ronald Stone, Reinhold Niebuhr: Prophet to Politicians (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1972). 8. For a comparison of “moral realism” with Niebuhr’s distinctive “Christian Realism,” see Robin W. Lovin’s introduction to Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), xi–xxiv; for a comparison of Niebuhr’s Christian realism with Augustine’s, see Reinhold Niebuhr, “Augustine’s Political Realism,” in Christian Realism and Political Problems (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953) 119–46; for a discussion of Niebuhr’s Christian Realism as a rhetorical construct, see James Arnt Aune, “Reinhold Niebuhr and the Rhetoric of Christian Realism,” in Post-Realism: The Rhetorical Turn in International Relations, ed. Francis A. Beer and Robert Hariman (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1996), 75–93.

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9. Niebuhr had a lasting impact on the rhetoric of the Cold War, but the nature of that influence continues to be contested. Niebuhr’s formative influence on Hans J. Morgenthau in the United States and on E. H. Carr in Britain was “early, direct, and unquestioned.” Both cite Niebuhr more than any other thinker. And as a cofounder and voice of the Americans for Democratic Action, Niebuhr was supported by Elmer Davis, Hubert Humphrey, and Edward R. Murrow. Niebuhr’s direct influence on George F. Kennan, the director of Secretary of State George Marshall’s policy planning staff, has been widely noted. But, as Thompson and others note, all of these relationships were complicated, and Niebuhr was critical of many of these same Cold War actors. See Kenneth W. Thompson, “Niebuhr and the Foreign Policy Realists,” in Reinhold Niebuhr Revisited: Engagements with an American Original, ed. Daniel F. Rice (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Group, 2009), 139–60. For more on Niebuhr’s relationship to the rhetoric of war see also, in the same collected volume of essays, Larry F. Rasmussen, “Empire or Global Community?”; Ronald H. Stone, “Reinhold Niebuhr and Perspectives on Middle East Foreign Policy”; and Colm McKeogh, “Niebuhr’s Critique of Pacifısm.” 10. James Fallows, “Obama’s Nobel Speech,” Atlantic, December 10, 2009, http://www. theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2009/12/obamas-nobel-speech/31598/ (accessed October 15, 2014). For a complete record of the president’s association with Niebuhr’s theological and political thought, see R. Ward Holder and Peter B. Josephson, The Irony of Barack Obama: Barack Obama, Reinhold Niebuhr and the Problem of Christian Statecraft (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 2–3. 11. Tom Heneghan, “Thoughts on Obama’s Nobel Theology Prize Speech,” FaithWorld, December 10, 2009, http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2009/12/10/ thoughts-on-obamas-nobel-theology-prize-speech/ (accessed October 15, 2014); Joseph Loconte, “Obama Contra Niebuhr,” The American, American Enterprise Institute, January 14, 2010, http://www.american.com/archive/2010/january/ obama-contra-niebuhr (accessed October 15, 2014); and Hendrik Hertzberg, “Presidents and Peace Prizes,” New Yorker, December 11, 2009, http:// www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2009/12/presidents-and-peaceprizes.html (accessed October 15, 2014). 12. See Quoted in Hertzberg “Presidents and Peace Prizes.” 13. See Joseph Loconte, “Obama Contra Niebuhr”; and Liam Julian, “Niebuhr and Obama,” Policy Review, April and May 2009, Hoover Institute, http://www.hoover.org/ research/niebuhr-and-obama (accessed October 15, 2014). 14. See Gary Dorrien, The Obama Question: A Progressive Perspective (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefıeld, 2012), 144.

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15. Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (New York: Macmillan Company, 1913), 209. 16. Charles C. Brown, Niebuhr and His Age: Reinhold Niebuhr’s Prophetic Role in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia, PA: Trinity Press International, 1992), 20. 17. Charles W. Kegley, ed., Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1984), 6. 18. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960), 257–58. 19. Niebuhr, Moral Man, 35. 20. Reinhold Niebuhr, Does Civilization Need Religion? (New York: Macmillan Company, 1927), 139. 21. Niebuhr, Christian Realism, 119. 22. Niebuhr, Christian Realism, 119. 23. Niebuhr, Christian Realism, 122. 24. Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 188. 25. Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 211. 26. Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 213. 27. Lovin, “Introduction,” Nature and Destiny of Man, xii. 28. Reinhold Niebuhr, Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. D. B. Roberston (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1957), 28. 29. Niebuhr, Love and Justice, 28. 30. Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1963), 37. 31. Niebuhr, Interpretation of Christian Ethics, 79–80. 32. Niebuhr, Love and Justice, 32. 33. Niebuhr, Love and Justice, 32. 34. Reinhold Niebuhr, Reflections on the End of an Era (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934), 122. 35. Niebuhr, Reflections, 122. 36. Niebuhr, Love and Justice, 33. 37. The Norwegian Nobel Committee is a group of fıve, typically former politicians, appointed by the Norwegian Parliament to give the Peace Prize. 38. Nobel Prize Committee, “The Nobel Peace Prize for 2009,” Press Release (April 2, 2014), www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2009/press.html (accessed October 15, 2014). 39. Der Speigel, October 9, 2009; and Sydney Morning Herald, October 12, 2009.

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40. “President Obama Wins the Nobel Prize for Peace—But That’s Not His Fault,” Washington Post, October 10, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2009/10/09/AR2009100903860.html (accessed October 15, 2014). 41. Nobel Prize Committee, “The Nobel Peace Prize 2009.” 42. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on Winning the Nobel Peace Prize,” White House Offıce of the Press Secretary, October 9, 2009, http://www.whitehouse.gov/ the_press_offıce/Remarks-by-the-President-on-Winning-the-Nobel-Peace-Prize/ (accessed October 15, 2014). 43. Obama, “Remarks by the President on Winning the Nobel Peace Prize.” Susanna Dilliplane argues that, as a candidate, Obama’s rhetoric on the question of race positioned his candidacy as the realization of a larger historical development for the United States. The controversy surrounding Obama’s selection for the Nobel Prize suggests that this narrative did not transfer well to the international stage. Susanna Dilliplane, “Race, Rhetoric, and Running for President: Unpacking the Signifıcance of Barack Obama’s ‘A More Perfect Union’ Speech,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 15 (2012): 146–47. 44. Gwladys Fouche and Ewen MacAskill, “Anger as Obama Cancels Royal Lunch on His Trip to Pick Up Nobel Prize,” Guardian, December 10, 2009, 24. 45. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on the Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” White House Offıce of the Press Secretary, December 1, 2009, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-offıce/remarks-president-addressnation-way-forward-afghanistan-and-pakistan (accessed October 15, 2014). 46. Robert Rowland addresses Obama’s directness in his piece on the president’s attempt to invite reasoned debate over the issue of healthcare. Here, Obama used a similar rhetorical move to open his speech just a few months before his address on healthcare. Robert C. Rowland, “Barack Obama and the Revitalization of Public Reason,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14 (2011): 693–725. 47. This and all subsequent quotes used by Barack Obama in this essay are from “Remarks by the President at the Acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize,” White House Offıce of the Press Secretary, December 10, 2009, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-offıce/ remarks-president-acceptance-nobel-peace-prize (accessed October 15, 2014). 48. See Krista Tippett’s radio broadcast “On Being” (National Public Radio) January 2004, www.onbeing.org/program/moral-man-and-immoral-society-rediscovering-reinholdniebuhr/feature/voices-niebuhr/2314 (accessed October 15, 2014). 49. Reeves and May, “Peace Rhetoric of War President,” 626. 50. Robert Danisch describes Obama’s campaign speech as “rhetorical pragmatism,” identifying fıve characteristics, several of which reappear in Obama’s Nobel lecture.

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RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS Robert Danisch, “The Roots and Form of Obama’s Rhetorical Pragmatism,” Rhetoric Review 31 (2012): 164–66.

51. Heneghan, “Thoughts on Obama’s Nobel Theology,” 52. It is the tension heard in the evolution of Stanley Hauerwas’s (TIME’s proclaimed “America’s Best Theologian”) position on violence and war. Hauerwas learned from Niebuhr that “if you desire justice you had better be ready to kill someone along the way.” Hauerwas, now America’s preeminent voice for Christian pacifısm, learned from Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder that “if there is anything to this Christian ‘stuff,’ it must surely involve the conviction that the Son [of God] would rather die on the cross than have the world to be redeemed by violence.” See Paul Elie, “A Man for All Reasons,” The Atlantic, November 1, 2007, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/ 2007/11/a-man-for-all-reasons/306337/. 53. Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Dædalus 96 (1967): 4. 54. Holder and Josephson, The Irony of Barack Obama, 99. 55. Holder and Josephson, The Irony of Barack Obama, 99 56. In 1927 alone, the following events took place: the fırst transatlantic radio signal was transmitted (prompting the fırst regulatory political machine, the U.S. Federal Radio Commission—later the FCC—to be established); Fritz Lang’s Metropolis premiered in Germany; the Bell Telephone Co. transmitted an image of Hoover in the fırst-ever successful long-distance demonstration of television; Lindberg made the fırst solo nonstop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris; Sacco and Vanzetti were executed; CBS formed and went on air with 47 radio stations; The Jazz Singer was released (the fırst feature-length motion picture with synchronized dialogue sequences called “talkies”); Pan Am made its fırst flight (from Key West to Havana, Cuba, no less); Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Communist Party (leaving Stalin with undisputed control of the Soviet Union, where, in December, he condemned all deviators from the party line); Ford released the Model A (after 19 years of Model T production); the British Empire executed Indian revolutionaries; and striking coal miners in Colorado were fıred upon with machine guns by the local police department (6 killed, 60 injured). Kleinman, A World of Hope, a World of Fear. 57. Niebuhr, Does Civilization Need Religion?, 17. 58. Niebuhr, Does Civilization Need Religion?, 139. 59. Robert Terrill astutely observes Obama’s Niebuhrian ability to maintain the necessities of a just war and a just peace in a sort of dialectical tension and also notes that the “moral imagination” is the tool Obama offers to navigate the murky waters of this tension. More importantly, it is in his analysis of Obama’s “moral imagination” that Terrill couches his brief, though helpful, analysis of the Niebuhrian influence in this

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rhetorical strategy. We wish to develop this strand of thought more clearly, by going directly to the source of Obama’s phrasing. See Terrill, “An Uneasy Peace,” 771. 60. Lovin, “Introduction,” Nature and Destiny, xvi. 61. Paul Elie, interview with Justine Isola, “Everybody Loves Reinhold,” Atlantic, November 2007, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/everybody-lovesreinhold/306367/ (accessed October 15, 2014). 62. Elie, interview with Justine Isola. 63. Niebuhr, Christian Realism, 112. 64. Niebuhr, Christian Realism, 112. 65. Niebuhr, Christian Realism, 112. 66. Martin J. Medhurst, “George W. Bush at Goree Island: American Slavery and the Rhetoric of Redemption,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96 (2010): 257–77. 67. David Gibson, “Of Niebuhr and Nobels: Divining Obama’s Theology,” Politics Daily.com, 2010, http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/12/12/of-niebuhr-and-nobelsdivining-obamas-theology/ (accessed April 2, 2014). 68. Julian, “Niebuhr and Obama.” 69. Martin Marty quoted in Julian, “Niebuhr and Obama.”; see also Martin E. Marty, “Reinhold Niebuhr and the Irony of American History: A Retrospective,” History Teacher 26 (1993): 161–74. 70. Julian, Niebuhr and Obama.” (Empasis added) 71. Marty, “Reinhold Niebuhr and the Irony of American History.” 72. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), 149. 73. Niebuhr, Irony of American History, 149–150. 74. Niebuhr, Irony of American History, 150. 75. Niebuhr, Irony of American History, 150. 76. Niebuhr, Does Civilization Need Religion?, 209. 77. Nathan Crick, “Barack Obama and the Rhetoric of Religious Experience,” Journal of Communication and Religion 35, no. 1 (2012): 1–15. 78. Quoted in Crick, “Barack Obama and the Rhetoric of Religious Experience,” 5–6. 79. Crick, “Barack Obama and the Rhetoric of Religious Experience,” 11. 80. Niebuhr, Moral Man, 81. 81. Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 1:216. 82. Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 1:217. 83. Niebuhr, Does Civilization Need Religion?, 209.

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