The right wing basically dominates the discussion around religion.

And we believe that that's something that must be opposed.

Some of the reasons why I think this is the case that the history has been forgotten and that we lack these organizations and institutions.

I think we can look at the figure of Reinhold Niebuhr, I think, as a good example, a point of reference for understanding what has happened

and where we are. You may have heard the name Reinhold Niebuhr, your audience. Barack Obama referenced

him a lot. David Brooks tends to reference him a lot as like a wise spiritual figure for the kind

of politics that David Brooks is always touting. But Niebuhr himself was

always a socialist, actually, and he began as a very harsh critic of liberalism and particularly

the sentimentality of liberalism and how politically ineffective it was. And he started to attack

liberalism in the 1930s from a specifically

Marxist perspective. But over time, he started to think that Marxism itself tended to be

still too idealist. It didn't really have a realistic enough view of human nature. And so he

started to become critical of both liberalism and these certain forms of like revolutionary socialist practice.

What he was looking for and started to articulate was a combination of realism and politics that was based on a non-naive view of human nature that combined moral idealism at the same time.

So what he wanted was for this realism to be an antidote to American liberal sentimentality

and for the idealism to guard against barbarism, basically.

But I think what we've seen since the 50s and 60s forward with what Niebuhr articulated, and I should say,

Niebuhr was hugely influential for decades in this period publicly.

He was recognized.

He was very engaged in political discussions.

And so as he began to articulate this, it influenced many people. And I think what has happened is that his anti-liberal realism became a kind of conservatism. And it became the kind of conservatism that we see expressed in First Things magazine, for example. Newhouse, who was involved in founding First Things magazine, was very

convinced by this kind of anti-liberal, the religious anti-liberal expression. But on the other

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