In an episode of Speaking of Faith titled “Obama’s Theologian,” David Brooks and E. J. Dionne talked with Krista Tippett about Reinhold Neibuhr, the twentieth-century theologian who has become a favorite of journalists and politicians in recent years. The discussion ultimately focused less on Obama than on Niebuhr’s intellectual legacy and the contemporary American religious scene:

Ms. Tippett: This is another place where the analogy is very difficult with Niebuhr’s time and our time. I mean, for him part of what he was speaking to was a clash between a secular worldview and a religious worldview, and it was Communism versus the West. And you really can’t translate that into our dynamics. Yet, in our time in the 21st century, we have a secularized culture to an extent that Niebuhr couldn’t have imagined. And we have a plural, a religiously plural, society. And there was a lot of attention paid to the fact that at the inauguration, Barack Obama spoke of this as a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers. That’s actually not new language for him; he’s spoken that way before. But it is interesting for me to wonder how Niebuhr’s worldview might speak to the challenge of pluralism in our time and how Christian realism now can take account of religious and cultural pluralism. So, yeah, what do you think about that?

Mr. Brooks: I guess my main thought, and I don’t know what Niebuhr would think of this, is that there’s cause for worry about the extent of pluralism. Henry Steele Commager had a line “In the 19th century, religion prospered while theology slowly went bankrupt.” And what he meant by that is that we are not a doctrinal people. We’re not a particularly theological people.

And in 2004, I actually counted up the number of presidential candidates who had switched denominations at some point in their lives, and it was most of them. Howard Dean switched because of a fight about a bike path. I think Wes Clark switched a number of times. A whole series of them had switched, and a lot of them for reasons one might not necessarily think were deeply philosophical.

In fact, when Barack Obama was looking for a church—

[…]

Mr. Dionne: I share David’s general view there but I—and I think Niebuhr would have been very skeptical of a kind of therapeutic faith. I’m not sure that is exactly the same as belief in pluralism or religious tolerance. In other words, I think there is sort of a hard, if you will, a theologically hard argument that can be respectful and also mindful of the importance of toleration of differences about religion and still be quite serious.

Read a transcript of the conversation here. Download a podcast of the conversation here.