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I’m slowly working through Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society and goodness his observations are timely for today. I don’t know where he’s going with the second half of the book, but I’m looking forward to finding out.

This bit on the relationship of patriotism and religion is particularly relevant right now:

Patriotism is a form of piety which exists partly through the limitation of the imagination, and that limitation may be expressed by savants as well as by saints…

But since the claims of religion are more absolute than those of any secular culture the danger of sharpening the self-will of nations through religion is correspondingly greater.

Even when the religious sense of the absolute expresses itself, not in the sublimation of the will, but in the subjection of the individual will to the divine will, and in the judgment upon the will from the divine perspective, it may still offer perils to the highest social and moral life, even though it will produce some choice fruits of morality. One interesting aspect of the religious yearning after the absolute is that, in the contrast between the divine and the human, all lesser contrasts between good and evil on the human and historic level are obscured. Sin finally becomes disobedience to God and nothing else. Only rebellion against God, and only the impertinence of self-will in the sight of God, are regarded as sinful.

— Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, chapter 3, emphasis mine

This turned the light bulb on for me as to how so many Christians in my evangelical background are willing to turn a blind eye to social ills as long as personal piety is maintained.