In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, Josephson and Holder ask, “What would Niebuhr do?” More specifically, how would Niebuhr respond to ongoing debates on economic justice and health care (chapter 3), international terrorism and US foreign policy (chapter 4), the rise of nationalism in the United States and abroad (chapter 5), and the future of liberalism (chapter 6)? This list of domestic and international challenges is formidable, but Josephson and Holder navigate it through the lens of Niebuhr's political theology with nuanced clarity and, rather importantly, balance. Ultimately, they propose the importance of returning to a politics that recognizes the impossibility of social idealism and the necessity of proximate solutions.

Josephson and Holder admit that such a politics may be a hard sell these days, especially given the penchant for political and ideological purity. However, anyone who is feeling fatigued by our current state of political affairs will find their analysis of Niebuhr's political theology and its application to the social questions of our day refreshing, if not revelatory. That is a remarkable feat given how Niebuhr's Christian realism has sometimes been taken as being overly pessimistic and underappreciative of socially transformative visions of Christian hope. But in a post-2016 world, Niebuhr's Christian realism, in its steadfast attentiveness to the heights and limitations of what human persons are capable of, offers a distinctive nonpartisan pathway for Christian engagement with political and social questions without resorting to forms of Christian sectarianism. For that reason alone, Josephson and Holder's book ought to be credited for showing why Niebuhr matters now more than ever.

Niebuhr does not necessarily provide specific policy prescriptions but warns of the perils of a politics that is less democratic (or not democratic at all). Niebuhr's Christian realism, therefore, ought to recommit us to the kind of liberal democratic institutions that, for instance, James Madison envisioned. This would mean taking seriously (again) the notion of “checks and balances” among all political, economic, and social entities and constituencies in light of human fallibility, contingency, and self-interests. From a Niebuhrian vantage point, no social problem can be fully and easily resolved; all proposed solutions, legislative or otherwise, will be inadequate to an extent.

Though Josephson's and Holder's case for Niebuhr's political theology is compelling, their efforts can at times be hard to appreciate given the excessive repetitions of the book (perhaps a reflection of the challenges of coauthorship). Apart from matters of style, there are more content-driven distractions, such as whether chapters 1 and 2, which review Niebuhr's biography and the major themes of his vast corpus of writings, are necessary. The next four chapters (where a Niebuhrian analysis of various social issues is mapped out extensively) seem to work just fine without the biographical and thematic overviews of the first two chapters. Then, there is the claim at the very outset of the book that Niebuhr merits our attention today because, in part, the public intellectualism and political practice of the US, with the election of President Trump, has moved markedly away from a “Niebuhrian presidency” (or from the Niebuhrian sensibilities of prior presidents such as Barack Obama and George W. Bush). But that premise is somewhat perplexing given the extent to which Josephson and Holder show how Niebuhr would have approached a number of challenges differently from recent past presidents, especially on health care and Syria.

In the end, these critical observations are more quibbles than deeply substantive, and, overall, Josephson and Holder demonstrate well the enduring relevance of Niebuhr's political theology as an analytic tool of prediction. Our politics may have never been “Niebuhrian” in any genuine sense. If we examine our politics from a Niebuhrian perspective, however, we should not at all be surprised to find ourselves mired in the kinds of political and ideological sorting, polarization, and fractured politics that define contemporary society. That is the lesson of his theological anthropology and why his Christian realism is worth a reconsideration.