Introduction

In the spring of 1930 a brilliant new professor of ethics at Union Theological Seminary (New York City) was facing a deadline for submitting his regular contribution to The Christian Century, the foremost liberal Protestant journal of that time. A sense of impending crisis was in the air. Earlier that year, he had written in another paper about the dramatic decline in the Wall Street stock market that had begun in October 1929. In his estimate the crash disclosed “the unethical character of our entire civilization.”

But did the churches have anything important to say about the ethical “character of our entire civilization?” What ethical theory would provide guidance for the days ahead? One possible suggestion was “stewardship.” This theme had captured considerable attention in the preceding two decades. Could one hope for help from this currently popular notion?

And so Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), later to become internationally famous as one of America's greatest religious thinkers of the twentieth century, penned a Century article entitled “Is Stewardship Ethical?” The title was vintage Niebuhr. He had an extraordinary gift for asking the “unthinkable” question as a way of challenging received wisdom. Here, for instance, he is attacking an assumption that most of his contemporaries took for granted. Of course stewardship was ethical, they seemed to be saying. Along with other ethical disciplines, it placed “an inner check upon the expansive desires and lusts of every single person” and thereby made them “fit to participate in social enterprise without taking undue advantage of others.”

Niebuhr was not so sure. His skepticism about such claims led him to question Protestant idealism of any brand. The fashionable teachings about stewardship, he suggested, were often a seedbed for moral self-deceptions and illusions. The churches are sometimes the most easily deceived in this respect. For example, over the generations Protestant teachings about giving had proclaimed the almost automatic virtue inherent in any act of voluntary giving. This understandable preoccupation with uncoerced giving had led the churches to be much too ready to celebrate the philanthropic generosity of rich Americans.

Niebuhr's point was well taken. “The church with varying degrees of sophistication and naiveté accepts these philanthropies as fulfilling all righteousness. If they actually reach the proportions of the traditional tithe, they are acclaimed with paeans of praise even though they may represent less than what the Government exacts in income tax, and they may be given partly to escape the tax.” The apparently voluntary nature of a gift does not necessarily make it a truly ethical act.

Perhaps a personal anecdote out of my own experience will help illustrate the consistency of Niebuhr's position on this matter. In 1947 I happened to be visiting Union Theological Seminary to test whether I wanted to enroll there the following year. The admissions office arranged for me to sit in on Professor Niebuhr's class on Christian ethics. Even today, some fifty-seven years later, I can still vividly remember one exchange between the renowned teacher and a student. Their conversation pivoted around a debate over the ethical power of voluntary action versus a coerced response. In an effort to defend the ethical superiority of voluntary action, the student asked if Professor Niebuhr agreed with her about a proposal to make the act of paying the Federal Income Tax entirely a voluntary manner. The citizens would then pay whatever they believed they owed the Federal government. Her teacher quickly replied “No! Most of us would pay twice as much as we think we should pay, and that would only be half of what justice would require us to pay.” Or, to paraphrase a famous Nieburian dictum, our capacity to exaggerate our own generosity in voluntary giving is as evident as is our incapacity to discern fully the demands of justice. 

Second, this “tamed cynic,” as he described himself in the title of a book published shortly before the Century article appeared, doubted that the conventional forms of stewardship teachings could ever speak to the moral complexities of life in an industrial society. According to Niebuhr, this approach required a depth and range of ethical “imagination” seldom found among human beings. While he did not totally dismiss the ideal implicit in the popular literature about stewardship, he found it largely irrelevant in the midst of the ethical crises facing America at the outset of the 1930s. At the very least, the times called for something more searching than stewardship sermons about “going on to perfection.”

It is hard to know whether these neo-orthodox strictures made even a slight dent in the enthusiasm of the advocates for stewardship during the 1930s. I suspect not. Yet decades later, Niebuhr's piece seems compelling. For one thing, contemporary Protestant teachings about giving rarely explore the mixed motives involved in giving. A latter-day Reinhold Niebuhr could find countless examples of sentimentalism in the brochures about congregational building funds or the claims of imputed virtue bestowed on “tithers.”

This piece may also have a second life as a commentary upon the sentimental idealism so visible in American society as a whole. Once again one hears claims for the self-evident superiority of voluntary action – i.e. the activities of the voluntary or “independent” sector – over against all forms of governmental initiative. And once again the ideal of stewardship as an ethical ideal seems persuasive to a fair number of Americans, within and without the churches. In this emerging cultural setting, Niebuhr's provocative question – “Is Stewardship Ethical?" - is worth pondering once again.

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Source: The Christian Century, 47 (April 30, 1930), pp. 555-557.

Is Stewardship Ethical?

Most ethical theory in the Christian church is based upon the assumption that it is possible to make society ethical by socializing the individual, by placing an inner check upon the expansive desires and lusts of each single person and thus making him a person fit to participate in social enterprise without taking undue advantage of others.

It is not surprising that the church should hold to this assumption; for it is essentially the attitude of Jesus. He believed in a Kingdom of God, in an ideal society; but he expected to create such a society by regenerating individuals until they would have a completely social attitude toward their fellow men, until they would be thoroughly dominated by the passion of moral good will. He did not participate in any political or economic program designed to strip the powerful of their strength or the privileged of their advantages. He sought rather to convince the strong and the privileged to divest themselves of their perquisites in the interest of his Kingdom of love.

Suasion Not Enough

It would not be difficult to prove that this ideal is still and will remain the absolute ideal of social life. It is the final ideal because the individual is never completely ethical if he must be restrained by external restraint from pursuing ends detrimental to society; and society is not fully socialized if it must use force rather than suasion to bring the individual into conformity with its own ends. The recognition of this ideal must not, however, tempt us to regard the socialization of the individual through educational and religious suasion as adequate means for eliminating the injustices and inequalities of modern society. The assumption that these means are sufficient gives the whole moral life and theory of the Christian church a note of unreality, not to say hypocrisy.

The fact is, Christianity or any other religion, or for that matter any rational or educational force, has never developed a sufficient number of individuals with so perfect a passion of love as to change the main facts of history. Pious kings have held to their power until robust nobles divested them of it. Good aristocrats took their hereditary advantages for granted until the emerging middle classes matched the strength of the aristocracy with their own newly won commercial power. Even in the family relationship, where love has been a more potent force than in less intimate social organization, the autocracy of the male was not challenged until the women gained a measure of economic independence. The industrial worker must develop power through organization before he can hope to dislodge the commercial classes from their favored position in the economic order.

There are always a few individuals in the privileged classes who, because of religious insight or rational analysis, have divested themselves of their privileges in the interest of an equitable society. Their achievements are not futile; for moral splendor in individuals always has exemplary power and persuades others to do likewise, perhaps with a lesser degree of consistency. But the total effect of the lives of such individuals mitigates without abolishing the eternal conflict in society, which the pressure of those who have not against those who have makes inevitable.

The Christian church has been singularly oblivious to this plain lesson of history. It has tried to escape the logic of the facts by its doctrine of stewardship. The idea of stewardship is plausible enough. According to it, men hold their advantages and their power as trusts from God. This trust is not used for selfish advantages. It is used only as God would have us use it. If we accept the Christian interpretation of God’s will as a loving will, which seeks the welfare of all men with equal zeal, this would mean that men would use privilege only as they could justify it in terms of the greater service they could render their fellow men through it, and would use power only as it is transmuted into the kind of influence that the leader achieves in his group by the service that he renders to it. In other words, a strict interpretation of the idea of stewardship would automatically eliminate the kind of power and privilege that the church tries to moralize.

Sanctifying Privilege

What the church actually does is not to insist on such a strict interpretation of stewardship, but to sanctify power and privilege as it exists in the modern world by certain concessions to the ethical principle. The critics of the church have a right to be very scornful of this whole procedure. It could probably be proved psychologically that an unethical attitude that can get itself obscured behind a facade of moral sentiment is more dangerous than a frankly immoral one, because it confuses not only the observer but the doer.

Here, for instance, is a pious businessman who is honest in all his dealings but whose imagination does not carry him beyond the contemporary standards of honesty. Besides being honest he is fairly generous. Those two virtues give him the satisfaction of being a Christian. He regards his power in his factory much as kings of old regarded their prerogatives. Any attempt on the part of the workers to gain a share in the determining of policy, particularly the policy that affects their own livelihood, hours, and wages, is regarded by him as an impious attempt to destroy the divine order of things. He knows what is good for his workers. There is no unemployment insurance in his concern. The owner lacks the imagination to realize just what insecurity of employment means in the lives of workers or what the social consequences of unemployment are. If he has a slight comprehension of these consequences, he will make some contribution to the charities of the city and feel virtuous.

There is, of course, a wide variance between individual employers in this regard, from the owner of Procter and Gamble, who guarantees his workers forty-eight weeks of work during the year, to the employer who, while 20,000 of his workers were idle during this winter, contributed $15,000 for the relief fund and spent $300,000 to purchase rare tapestries.

No Unique Business Ethics

There is not one church in a thousand where the moral problems of our industrial civilization are discussed with sufficient realism from the pulpit to prompt the owner to think of his stewardship in terms of these legitimate rights of the workers. The best proof of this is that there are hardly any Christian employers who have any unique business ethics. There are some, it is true, but they could be counted on the fingers of two hands. In most of our cities the pious employers of labor are just as uncompromising in fighting the labor movement and in resisting efforts to make industry responsible for old-age pensions and unemployment insurance as any other type of employer.

Meanwhile your man of power and privilege is generous. The degree of generosity varies in different cases. Sometimes his philanthropies represent a mere bagatelle in proportion to his income. It is only in rare instances that philanthropic giving changes standards of living by a hair’s breadth. The church with varying degrees of sophistication and naiveté accepts these philanthropies as fulfilling all righteousness. If they actually reach the proportions of the traditional tithe, they are acclaimed with paeans of praise even though they may represent less than what the Government exacts in income tax, and they may be given partly to escape the tax. If contemporary standards of honesty are followed, part of the income thus tithed may have been made in stock speculation, in which socially created wealth is privately appropriated without a qualm of conscience; or, as is not infrequently the case, the income for the year has been derived from stock dividends, in which the productivity of the industry is used to compound the original holdings and becomes forever after a charge upon the industry.

Philanthropy Is Not Stewardship

Any theory of stewardship that operates purely upon the level of philanthropy is not only inadequate to deal with the moral problem involved in the increasing concentration of wealth and power in an industrial civilization, but it is actually inimical to a sane understanding of the problem. How inadequate it is may be recognized from the fact that in the year 1929 the total philanthropies of America amounted to two and a half billion dollars, a sum that does not equal the accretion of values in stocks on the New York exchange in a single day on more than one day in the past year. It is, of course, not impossible to interpret the doctrine of stewardship realistically. But to do so would require an honest discussion of every moral and social problem involved in modern industry, the displacement of workers by the machine, the inequality of income, the ethics of varying standards of living, the democratic rights of workers, and all the rest. If this is not done, it is idle to think of the church as a moral guide in our civilization.

But even if it is done, it will remain a fact that not a large enough number of employers will be won over to an ethical way of life to obviate the necessity of restricting power and privilege through increasing social control. Without using economic force in the form of the strike, or the strike threat, and political force through the creation of a political party that protects the interests of the less privileged members of an industrial community, there is no possibility of equalizing privilege and destroying arbitrary power.

Reducing Conflict To Tension

This fact is no reason why we should trust social coercion alone and regard moral suasion as futile. It is not futile. The more farsighted, imaginative, and ethical the holding classes are, the more is social conflict reduced to social tension and the more can violence be replaced by the use of more ethical types of power. However, any institution of the ethical ideal will make just as large a contribution to the attainment of an ethical goal for society by educating men in the indubitable facts of history and persuading them of the necessity of social control as by challenging them to ethical self-control. The one type of education need not exclude the other.

The realistic teacher of morals will be able to prove by examples drawn from much more ideal fellowships than that of the industrial community that even a fairly ethical individual is inclined to live his life at the expense of other men, if others do not offer resistance to his exactions. The human imagination, except in rare cases, is simply not equal to the task of completely envisaging the interests of those whose lives depend on us. There are few Americans who know that a 300 per cent tariff on French laces has, in late months, thrown 25,000 French lacemakers out of work. There are still fewer who can see that fact in terms of its human and social consequences. Such a tariff will be continued, unfortunately, until France teaches us a lesson in mutuality by raising a tariff on our automobiles.

That is not an ideal way of settling social problems. By increasing social imagination we can prevent such conflicts of interest from issuing in violence and we may perhaps be able to reduce the conflict until it is no more than tension between various interest groups in the international community. But there is no prospect of changing the facts, except in very small communities of the ideal; and an institution of the ethical ideal, such as the church, will, on the whole, make its largest contribution to the development of an ethical society by teaching its members the necessity of an increased measure of social control.

The student of history is forced to draw his conclusions in terms that come perilously near to the assumptions of economic determinism. He will, if he is wise, escape the moral enervation of complete determinism as being inconsistent with the facts. But, meanwhile, most ethical teaching is still functioning upon the basis of assumptions that are much farther from the truth than this dreaded determinism. If one had to choose between two errors, it would be truer to believe that all social action is economically determined than to believe, as the church seems to do, that ethical action develops in some kind of social vacuum. The only chance the modern man has of achieving a measure of ethical freedom and dignity is to realize with what difficulty he extricates his actions from the pressure of economic self-interest and how necessary and ultimately ethical are the restraints of an ethical society upon his will-to-power and his lust for gain.

Source: The Christian Century, 47  (April 30, 1930), pp. 555-557.