Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich in an Age of Anxiety

by Andrew Finstuen

In the years following World War II, American Protestantism experienced tremendous growth, but conventional wisdom holds that midcentury Protestants practiced an optimistic, progressive, complacent, and materialist faith. In Original Sin and Everyday Protestants , historian Andrew Finstuen argues against this prevailing view, showing that theological issues in general--and the ancient Christian doctrine of original sin in particular--became newly important to both the culture at large and to a generation of American Protestants during a postwar "age of anxiety" as the Cold War took root.

Finstuen focuses on three giants of Protestant thought--Billy Graham, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Tillich--men who were among the era's best known public figures. He argues that each thinker's strong commitment to the doctrine of original sin was a powerful element of the broad public influence that they enjoyed. Drawing on extensive correspondence from everyday Protestants, the book captures the voices of the people in the pews, revealing that the ordinary, rank-and-file Protestants were indeed thinking about Christian doctrine and especially about "good" and "evil" in human nature. Finstuen concludes that the theological concerns of ordinary American Christians were generally more complicated and serious than is commonly assumed, correcting the view that postwar American culture was becoming more and more secular from the late 1940s through the 1950s.

Genres: American History, Christianity, Theology, Religion

255 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2009

Reviews

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The essential point of Christianity, Niebuhr observed, was that 'we are asked to forgive one another.' But in order to forgive, humans had to admit that 'we are ourselves sinners, and that we have been forgiven.' For Niebuhr, without an acknowledgment of the universality and inescapability of sin, Christianity--and by extenstion his deeply Christian criticism--had no center of gravity" (58).
"They revived Kierkegaard's analysis of the 'dizziness,' 'dread,' and 'angst' that humans experienced because of their double nature. Like their Danish predecessor, Niebuhr and Tillich asserted that humans were overwhelmed and shaken by the finit limits of human freedom--ultimately expressed in human mortality--and yet the seemingly infinite possibilities of human freedom. Finite freedom, then, was simply a technical way of describing the fundamentally enigmatic and ambiguous nature of human existence" (70-71).
"All of these categories illuminated a single truth for Niebuhr: humans were radically free and radically dependent beings" (73).

[John]

Very nice summary of the everyday correspondence that Niebuhr, Graham, and Tillich responded to from their "lay theologian" readers. It seems that the inclusion of Graham was a bit of a stretch (Finstuen could have picked any other sin-oriented intellectual and come off better in the comparison) but it was fascinating to get a peek into the letters provoked by reading Nature and Destiny of Man or The Courage to Be. I also learned some interesting bits about Niebuhr I will investigate later. Great read if you like me are fascinated with the middle decades of the twentieth century (1940-1970).