Religion / Literature
Reinhold Niebuhr
1892–1971 · theologian, pastor
One of America's leading 20th-century theologians, who formed his ideas as pastor of Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit from 1915 to 1928.
- Born
Wright City, Missouri- Died
Stockbridge, Massachusetts
aged 78- Birth name
- Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
- Detroit years
- 1915–1928
- Field
- Religion, Literature
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Reinhold Niebuhr was 23 when his German Evangelical denomination sent him, in 1915, to Bethel Evangelical Church, a small German-speaking congregation in Detroit. The city was booming, drawing Southern Black and white migrants and European immigrants to its auto plants, and Niebuhr's 13 years there shaped his whole career. He built Bethel into a large English-speaking church, watched the human cost of the assembly line and became a sharp critic of Henry Ford's labor practices, arguing that the celebrated five-dollar day hid layoffs, speed-ups and insecurity. He spoke out against the Ku Klux Klan, which by 1923 had more than 20,000 Detroit members, and after the Ossian Sweet case he chaired the mayor's interracial committee. His diary of these years, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (1929), remains a portrait of a pastor in an industrial city. In 1928 he left to teach at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he became famous for Christian realism and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.
Highlights
- Pastor of Bethel Evangelical Church, Detroit, 1915–1928
- Critic of Henry Ford's labor practices in the 1920s
- Wrote Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (1929) about his Detroit years
- Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964