E-mail a friendGustav Niebuhr
airdate August 15, 2008
Gustav Niebuhr is a leading writer on news about American religion. Over his 20-year career, he's written feature and analytical articles for The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His work has also been published in anthologies and on the Internet. Now associate professor of religion at Syracuse University and an On Faith panelist, Niebuhr is author of Beyond Tolerance, which takes the reader on a hopeful journey through America's religious heartland.
Author discusses the genius of his father and great-uncle and how Reinhold's writings impacted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2:15)
Full Interview. (12:16)
Gustav Niebuhr
Tavis: Gustav Niebuhr is the former religion reporter for "The New York Times" who now serves as a professor of religion and media at Syracuse. His new book is called "Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America." Professor Niebuhr, nice to have you on the program.
Gustav Niebuhr: Pleasure to be here, Tavis.
Tavis: After all these years, how many times a week do you still get asked about that last name and all the legacy that you carry?
Niebuhr: Well, it's fairly often. I look up to those ancestors with awe and I'm always happy to acknowledge it.
Tavis: Whether it's Reinhold Niebuhr or Richard Niebuhr, as you get older, does your appreciation for them shift, change, deepen? How do you rate that? How do you characterize that as you get older?
Niebuhr: Well, as I get older, I think I read their books with new insights that perhaps come to one with age. One of the pleasures, though, has been meeting their students who are, you know, up a ways now and the students of their students. I feel like I've learned from both groups because I hear about them, that is, my ancestors, and also hear about the interpretation of their work and what their work has done in peoples' lives. It's been very meaningful to me.
Tavis: Certainly where Reinhold Niebuhr is concerned, one of your uncles.
Niebuhr: Great-uncle.
Tavis: Great-uncle, yeah. Certainly where he's concerned, it must be something, though, to be a part of a legacy where his thinking, his writing, influences, impacts, changes the life of the person who I regard as the greatest American we've ever produced, Dr. King.
Niebuhr: Yes.
Tavis: I mean, there is no King as we know him without his reading of Niebuhr.
Niebuhr: Well, King did absorb quite a bit of Reinhold's writings and I take great pleasure in that. I mean, I view that as being something very important in my life. When we come to talking about the different people in our world and in our country, it was Martin Luther King who I think left us one of the most important quotations in his essay, "The World House." He talks about how it's as if we all are a family that has inherited this house, a world house, and we have to find a way to live together. The only way to live together is in peace and he talks about Jew and Gentile, Muslim and Buddhist, Black and White and it's a wonderful quotation.
Tavis: Which leads us to "Beyond Tolerance" which I'll get to just in thirty seconds. Before I do that, let me ask how does one - in light of all that or with that as the back story of their life - how does one go about crafting his own life and making his own contribution?
Niebuhr: If you're talking about my own exact experience -
Tavis: - yeah.
Niebuhr: I was very fortunate in that I reported on religion as a news subject for more than fifteen years for various newspapers ending with "The New York Times." What it meant was I traveled the country and I wound up in any number of houses of worship and met a vast range of people. Again and again, if I had preconceptions or stereotypes, they generally tended to be shattered by the individuals.
The great pleasure of that was meeting people as individuals and hearing how religion worked in their lives and what it did for them. You just couldn't generalize anymore because people became individuals and faiths, or lack of faith, came to be represented by these people. I couldn't just think of, you know, like a broad mass of people anymore.
Tavis: This title, "Beyond Tolerance," suggests to me at first glance that tolerance ought not be the goal, that there is a greater goal than simply tolerance.
Niebuhr: Yeah. I firmly believe that. Tolerance in its dictionary definition generally means forbearance. It means not getting in someone's way. Tolerance to me is a neutral position. You know, it's a great thing if you're moving from violence, you know, from inter-group violence, okay? We're gonna tolerate each other.
But one thing I say in the book, it's not really an American tradition. Even George Washington back in 1790 when he wrote a very famous letter to one of the smallest minorities in this country, American Jews back in 1790, he said, "You know, it's no more that we talk about tolerance. We talk about religious liberty. All people are equal before the government."
So toleration has always sounded like something grudging to me. You know, I'll tolerate you. You know, I'll let you be. I'll permit you your errors. I think engagement, conversation, cooperation are much better words.
Tavis: Let me challenge you in that, respectfully, and in love, obviously. When you say it's not the American tradition, I could argue to you - I won't, but I could - that it is in fact the American way, that what America has done to the American Negro, to Black folk in America, is not to engage them. It has been historically to tolerate them to the extent that Black folk have made the contributions they've made, they've done it in spite of, not because of.
They've done it because they want to help to create a nation that is as good as its promise, but not because they've been engaged, but because they have been tolerated going back to the documents, the two original documents of this country. It really has been the American way. I want to just dig deeper to what you mean by not being the American way because I can argue that it has been, in fact.
Niebuhr: You know, it's an excellent point and I should say it's the American ideal.
Tavis: Okay.
Niebuhr: And at our best, the American way. I should say I'm hopeful too. I'm hopeful about, well, the last ten or twelve years despite all the social stresses we've been through, despite the 9/11 attacks, I am hopeful that a new sensibility is emerging among Americans that leads people beyond tolerance.
I do see a movement in this country which I try to chronicle in the book of people working at the grassroots and trying to have conversations with each other. It's conversations across faith lines. It's necessarily conversations across racial lines too and ethnic lines and it's a hopeful thing. It's the counter-trend to exclusivity and it's the counter-trend in some ways too to the very problem that you are talking about there.
Tavis: Given that we live in a world now where, for a variety of reasons, Muslims get blamed for this, that and the other, how does this book situate itself given that reality certainly where the American public is concerned?
Niebuhr: Yeah. What I try to show in the book is that there's no shortage of Muslims in the United States who are willing to enter in to serious conversations with Christians and Jews and others. The Muslim population is fairly widely spread in the U.S. What is the number now? Five million? Six million?
If we look at the demographic statistics, by and large, they're middle-class people, they're married, they have children, they have pretty high educational attainment. A lot of them are professionals, doctors and accountants and such. It's those people who will engage in conversation.
It's a question, though, of somehow breaking through the stereotype which I think is often perpetuated by certain media of all Muslims as one great antagonistic mass that's after us, that doesn't like American values. That's not true. That's just not true.
Tavis: Let me ask you, given that there is at least on paper this notion of a separation between church and state and to your point now about the media, is there a role that government, the state, can play or ought to play? Is there a role that media can play or ought to play to help move us beyond tolerance?
Niebuhr: You know, I think the role of government is always a difficult thing because legally we do have a separation of church and state. But I'd say one area is that schools could be a little bit more daring in teaching about religion. Not teaching religion, but teaching about religion, you know, at the high school level, and people have talked about this.
There are some schools. You know, I teach at the university level and I meet some students who have come through comparative religion courses in high school and I say great. It's a great starting point.
As far as media go, I think that, you know, media could stand to be a bit more educational. Not advocacy, but more educational, providing the basics because I just don't know how you live in the twenty-first century without knowing about religious diversity or about religious pluralism, about what the different religions teach because, if you don't, you're prey to all kinds of stereotypes and to fear. You know, there's enough fear floating around in this society without it being added to by the media.
Tavis: How do you respond to the notion held deeply by many I've talked to, many I know, many you teach, I suspect, the notion that many people hold dearly that the most intolerant folk in this country have at times been the folk who most often invoke the name of God?
Whether you call it the religious right or whatever you want to call it, a lot of folk believe that the most intolerant - speaking of moving beyond tolerance - that the most intolerant folk have been the folk who most call down His name.
Niebuhr: Well, I think there is something to be said for that, but sometimes it's a matter of tone. It's how people talk about God or a Higher Power. If they talk about it like, you know, "I know God's will, I absolutely know God's will and it's got to be applied in an X, Y, Z way," well, then, all right. Then we're dealing with, you know, probably some kind of intolerance.
I want to say, though, I have met people who I think would be classified as fundamentalists, as biblical literalists, because they believe their scripture to be completely and totally accurate and yet they're very gentle people. They're not invoking God's name in that way. I want to say that as a caveat because sometimes I think that we throw around terminology too loosely and that gets us into trouble in that way.
Tavis: Let me close with this. I could argue - again, I won't, but I could - I could argue that because we live in a country, in a world, but certainly in a country that, for a variety of reasons, we don't have time to get into, is becoming more nativist, I wonder if where our faith is concerned we are becoming more nativist and, if we are, what makes you hopeful that we can move beyond that, beyond tolerance, in fact?
Niebuhr: There are two reasons.
Tavis: Sure.
Niebuhr: One of them is I think immigration into the United States had a tremendous impact over the past forty years. The new immigrants who've come here from South Asia, from Africa, from Latin American, from the Caribbean, a lot of them have moved into the middle-class. They've established themselves; they've created their own institutions. We who have longer roots in this country have to interact with them because they are in our workplaces and also in our neighborhoods.
Another is that religion is simply more prominent than it ever has been. People are talking about it more. I think religion is to the twenty-first century what ideology was to the twentieth. It really is. It demands being talked about. We've got to treat it as a public subject.
Tavis: He is part of a grand tradition of love and service in this country, that of Reinhold Niebuhr and Richard Niebuhr. He, of course, is Gustav Niebuhr. The new book by him is called "Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America." What an honor to have you on the program, sir.
Niebuhr: Thank you so much. Great pleasure.
Tavis: A pleasure to have you.
Back to August 15, 2008