On the icy streets of Minneapolis, democracy is fading in broad daylight. In January 2026, federal agents killed two American citizens—Renée Good, a thirty-seven-year-old mother, and Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at the VA hospital. Tens of thousands have taken to the streets in protest, braving subzero temperatures. Bruce Springsteen wrote and recorded “Streets of Minneapolis” in three days, releasing it on January 28 as a tribute to the fallen and a cry against what he called “a darkness descending.”
Oh our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
Here in our home they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
The images from Minnesota of federal agents flooding a major American city, citizens killed by their own government, and authorities blocking local investigators from the crime scenes feel like dispatches from a country we no longer recognize. Governor Tim Walz declared January 9 “Renee Good Day” and demanded the feds withdraw. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, reviewing the video of Good’s killing, told ICE to “get the f@*% out of Minneapolis.” A federal judge found the government violated ninety-six court orders in a single month. The Minneapolis Police Chief noted grimly that two of the city’s three homicides this year were committed by federal agents.
If you want to understand what is happening in America, you could do worse than turn to a theologian who has been dead for over fifty years. Reinhold Niebuhr, the mid-twentieth-century Protestant thinker who warned against the idolatry of national self-righteousness, has never been more relevant than now.
The Making of a Public Theologian
Reinhold Niebuhr was born in 1892 in Wright City, Missouri. After studying at Yale Divinity School, he began his pastoral work in Detroit in 1915, where he spent thirteen years witnessing the harsh realities of industrial capitalism. Beneath the shadow of Henry Ford’s factories, Niebuhr saw workers exploited and discarded. These experiences shaped his entire theological outlook and dispelled the optimistic Social Gospel theology in which he had been trained.
By 1928, when he joined Union Theological Seminary in New York, Niebuhr had begun developing “Christian Realism,” a political theology grounded in three biblical convictions: humanity’s sinfulness, humanity’s freedom as beings made in God’s image, and the binding claim of the command to love God and neighbor. Over the next three decades, he became America’s most influential public intellectual. His face appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1948. Martin Luther King Jr. cited his work in “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Presidents from Carter to Obama acknowledged his influence.
The Architecture of Christian Realism
At the core of Niebuhr’s ideas is a paradox: human beings can strive for justice but are also prone to injustice. In his 1944 key work The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, Niebuhr provided what might be the most insightful one-sentence defense of democracy ever written: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
His 1932 book *Moral Man and Immoral Society* made a key distinction: individuals can sometimes go beyond self-interest through love and reason, but groups almost never do. Collectives like nations, corporations, or movements tend to combine individual selfishness into a “collective egoism” that is far more resistant to moral constraints than any person’s conscience. This idea became his main theme: the danger of self-righteousness. “Ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people,” he warned, “but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply.”
Readers of this Substack will notice a link with Carl Jung’s ideas about the collective in both the individual and society.
The Irony of American Righteousness
Later, Niebuhr used his theological ideas to analyze American identity. He argued that the United States had developed an “innocent self-image” that made it blind to its own moral faults. America thought it was immune to the corruptions affecting other great powers.
The irony of American history, Niebuhr argued, is that the nation’s virtues turn into its vices. The work ethic that built prosperity becomes worship of money. The faith that held communities together turns into theocratic pretension. The confidence that led to victories in war gives rise to imperial hubris. “No laughter from heaven,” he wrote, “could possibly penetrate through the liturgy of moral self-appreciation.” When political rallies resemble worship services and when a partisan victory is declared to be divine approval, we have entered territory that Niebuhr mapped decades ago.
The Present Crisis
What would Niebuhr say about our era? He would see it as the very form of idolatry he dedicated his career to opposing. The merging of national pride with religious faith exemplifies what he called the “egotistic corruption” of faith. This is the idea that God has uniquely blessed America with a sacred destiny.
Bob Dylan captured the spirit of this idea in his song ‘With God on Our Side,’ where he laments how people justify every major war by claiming God is on their side.
“Religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values,” according to Niebuhr. Every political stance is temporary, partial, and susceptible to corruption. To declare any party, platform, or leader as God’s will is to commit the fundamental sin of idolatry.
Watch the videos from Minneapolis: federal agents acting with impunity, government officials lying about what the footage clearly shows, authorities invoking security to justify killing citizens who were recording their actions. This is what happens when power convinces itself of its own righteousness. Niebuhr predicted with eerie accuracy that if religious groups abandon humility and claim divine sanction for their political views, “the national community will be forced to save its unity through either secularism or authoritarianism.” Those are indeed the options now confronting us.
Proximate Solutions for Insoluble Problems
Niebuhr famously defined democracy as “a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.” This straightforward formulation offers both warning and hope. The warning: human problems are never permanently resolved. The hope: even without final solutions, we can develop workable arrangements that balance competing interests and limit concentrated power.
What would Niebuhr advise for our current times? First, humility truly involves recognizing that we are limited, flawed, and self-deceived. Second, engaging without self-righteousness means making difficult choices among imperfect options while acknowledging that choosing involves us in the complexities of power. Third, a revival of irony, not cynical detachment, but the ability to see tragedy in victory and grace in defeat. Finally, forgiveness: “the recognition that our actions and attitudes are inevitably seen in a different light by friends and foes than we see them.”
Niebuhr reminds us that the greatest threats to democracy often don’t come from its obvious enemies but from its corrupted allies. Those people who claim to uphold Christian values while abandoning Christian virtues, disguising their thirst for power with faith. In the face of such corruption, neither despair nor triumphalism helps. Only steady, patient, humble efforts of democratic citizenship guided by faith but aware of human sin can protect what Lincoln called “the last best hope of earth.”
“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,” Niebuhr wrote. “Therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.”
In Minneapolis, people continue to show up despite record-setting low temperatures, gathering at memorials that grow larger by the hour and holding smartphones to bear witness. They know that the struggle itself, carried out with humility and love, is what redeems the flawed and broken effort. The choice remains ours. It always has.
Recommended Reading – The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr
Recommend Film – An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story
More to Come
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Previously Published on substack and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
