June 21

Reinhold Niebuhr, Mississippi Civil Rights workers, and Onesimos Nesib

Author

David Barnhart
June 21, 2025

Chickens exploring their coop for the first time. It does not look as pristine now. 2023, own photo.

Today is the birthday, in 1891, of Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the foremost public theologians of the twentieth century, who grappled not only with the rise of fascism, but with the role of Christianity in political life. We observed his death date on June 1.

Today is the anniversary of the 1964 murder of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner by the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan. The FBI case file and an eventual movie based on the events would be called “Mississippi Burning.” Forty-one years later, on this same date in 2005, the organizer of the mob lynching was found guilty of manslaughter.

Today is the feast day, in the Lutheran Church, of Onesimos Nesib, who died in 1931. As a child he was abducted from his home and sold into slavery. When freed he was taken in by Swedish Lutherans, and took the name “Onesimos,” the freed slave mentioned in Paul’s letter to Philemon. He became an indigenous Ethiopian missionary and translated the Bible into the Oromo language with the help of fellow freed slave and translator Aster Ganno. You can read more about their ministry here. 

Reflection: 

Niebuhr’s Christian realism is a good corrective to many utopian Christian ideas. He takes seriously the idea of sin, both individually and in systems. A lot of our ideas about improving the world take the form of, “if only everyone would…” do a particular thing, or think a particular way. Niebuhr points out that selfishness will always throw a wrench into whatever perfect society we want to design: 

The hope that the internal enemies will all be destroyed and that the new society will create only men who will be in perfect accord with the collective will of society, and will not seek personal advantage in the social process, is romantic in its interpretation of the possibilities of human nature and in its mystical glorification of the anticipated automatic mutuality in the communist society. ...In all these prophecies pure sentimentality obscures the fact that there can never be a perfect mutuality of interest between individuals who perform different functions in society... Man will always be imaginative enough to enlarge his needs beyond minimum requirements and selfish enough to feel the pressure of his needs more than the needs of others. Every society will have to maintain methods of arbitrating conflicting needs to the end of history; and in that process those who are shrewder will gain some advantage over the simple, even if they should lack special instruments of power.

Prayer: God, we may not be able to rid ourselves of sin and selfishness, but your grace has the power to transform us as individuals and as a society. Lead us toward a better way. Amen.