sion can always be condemned as wrong," adding that the United States owed its national existence to revolutionary warfare. He objected only to the "idea that violence can suddenly establish righteousness," which he thought "just as utopian as the idea that moral suasion can suddenly establish it." ^*

By ignoring Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr invited the suspicion that his position was developed in opposition to a caricature of the social gospel. This made it possible for his adversaries to shrug off most of his criticism. He forced the liberal party in American Protestantism to admit that "we can no longer speak of a 'Christian' social order," as John C. Bennett put it in 1935, and that politics represented a "compromise" between the "ideal and the possible." In the absence of a more fully developed Niebuhrian critique of the politics of compromise, however, liberals could

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As Donald Meyer notes in his study of the social gospel in the twenties and thirties, "Rauschenbusch's conception of political strategy was not an appropriate windmill for Niebuhr's tilting." This helps to explain why, for the most part, Niebuhr left Rauschenbusch alone and singled out weaker opponents like Shailer Mathews and Francis Peabody. His own position would have been clearer, however, if he had forced himself to develop it in opposition to the most rigorous version of the social gospel. Rauschenbusch not only denied the efficacy of political strategies based solely on moral suasion; he tried to revive elements of theological orthodoxy that liberals, he thought, had prematurely surrendered. He "took pleasure," he wrote somewhat provocatively in A Theology for the Social Gospel, in defending such seemingly unprogressive doctrines as original sin. He may not have succeeded in restoring the doctrine of original sin in all its "reality and nipping force," as he intended, but his attempt to combine political radicalism with theological conservatism nevertheless anticipated Niebuhr's, and Niebuhr should have confronted it. But even on the occasion of the 1934 Rauschenbusch lectures in Rochester—the lectures later published as An Interpretation of Christian Ethics—Niebuhr continued to avoid such a reckoning. His introductory explanation that these "lectures did not offer as large an opportunity as might be desirable to come to grips with the dominant note in Rauschenbusch's theology" was disingenuous. What better opportunity could he have asked for? Perhaps it was his predecessor's ghost, hovering over the precincts of the Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, that wrung from Niebuhr the uncharacteristic concession that the preachers of the social gospel were "usually realistic enough to know that justice in the social order can only be achieved by political means, including the coercion of groups which refuse to accept a common social standard." But if that was the case, why did he spend so much time attacking the social gospel?

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