Dear Reader,

Your question reminds me of something that happened to me in high school. I was in a small phys ed class, and the teacher, whom we called O.B. [O’Brian], was interested in how much we knew about sports rules. One question was: what do you get points for in football, a safety or a touchback? I knew the answer was safety, but one or two of the “tough guys” in the class said touchback, and I immediately agreed with them.

In 1932, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a book called Moral Man and Immoral Society, the title of which pretty much tells the story. An individual person can and will make ethical decisions on the basis of some chosen standard, whatever that standard might be. It could be a morality based on one’s religion, or societal law, or common respect and decency. The source of the decision-making is not the issue here. The point that Niebuhr makes in this book is that when a moral person becomes part of a group, group-think can overpower the individual’s sense of right and wrong, truth or falsehood. And that is exactly what happened to me in that choice between safety and touchback. 

The time of Niebuhr’s writing was just prior to Hitler’s takeover of Germany. How could it be? How was it possible that the good and moral people of Germany could follow the hate-filled rhetoric and leadership of the Nazis? Western governments thought it was not possible, but it was. The answer was quite simple: moral people, as social animals who want to belong to the group, get caught up in the fervor of group immorality and lose their own sense of right and wrong. The decade of the 1920s was a time in Western theology known as the Social Gospel, a time filled with the great expectation that social programs, coupled with increased education, would change the world for the better. Confidence filled the air, even as troublesome political and economic reality seethed beneath the surface. With the rise of Hitler and led by theologians such as Niebuhr, the Social Gospel gave way to what is called Christian Realism, Moral Man and Immoral Society being a foundation of that new understanding. 

Loss of moral fabric has happened and can happen, and the formula for creating it is simple. Start with economic hardship, identify a scapegoat who is then labeled as the source and cause of your hardship, set forth a leader who assumes messianic proportion as the one who can fix anything, and create a group that the individual can join. Result?  A collection of moral individuals becomes an immoral society. This is where we are here in America. Income inequality has created an underclass in our society that has no hope. We give more tax breaks to the rich and impose tariffs on the world, which will be paid for by the underclass to make up the additional deficit in the budget. Trump has deceivingly called immigrants the cause of this inequality, immigrants who are—what else?—brown and black, proclaimed himself Messiah with the help of the fundamentalist church, and offered male white pseudo Christian nationalism as the group to join. 

This we understand, but understanding the rise of Nazism does not excuse it, just as understanding the American parallel phenomenon we call MAGA does not excuse all its hateful tendencies. So, what can we do? The answer is manifold, but if anything, this understanding underscores the need for a rebirth in our society of respect, civility, and economic justice, a rebirth in which Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society, is replaced by its alternative, Moral Man and Moral society. This alternative is both our responsibility and our calling.

~ Carl Krieg, Ph.D.