THE CRISIS

At the end of 1933, the future looked grim for the social and political order that had dominated the world at the end of the nineteenth century. Europe had destroyed a generation of its youth in a disastrous war and disrupted the world economy, and the effects were still being felt more than a decade later. The only signs of recovery seemed to be in Russia, Germany, and Japan, places that had abandoned democracy and capitalism for a communist or nationalist vision that would be spread by revolution or by conquest.

In light of those political and historical realities, Reinhold Niebuhr abandoned the sentimental hope of the Social Gospel that Christian ideals would change social realities for the better. Realism required a harder look at the pervasive self-interest of the rich and the need for power of the poor. Like early Christian apocalyptic or Marxist revolutionary theory, Christian realism also seemed to require a recognition that civilization had arrived at the end of an age. The foundations of social life had been so disrupted that conventional wisdom and established expectations could no longer guide responsible action.

This theme distressed many of Niebuhr's Christian readers, who still wanted to see the Gospel as a strategy for social transformation, but Niebuhr repeated the point even more forcefully a little more than a year later in Reflections on the End of an Era.