In 1957, American theologian H. Richard Niebuhr gave a series of lectures at the University of Nebraska. The revised and edited lectures were published in 1960 under the oppressively weighty title Radical Monotheism and Western Civilization. The actual book and the line of argument are not as obtuse as the title makes them out to be: Niebuhr is essentially just working through a definition of faith, as opposed to other proximal terms like religion or theology. All these terms cluster together, and sometimes they’re used interchangeably – so Niebuhr spends his time straightening out their relationships.

Faith, Niebuhr suggests, is not specifically spiritual or religious. It is “the attitude and action of confidence in, and fidelity to, certain realities as the sources of value and the objects of loyalty.” That is, having faith in something means having both loyalty and trust in and towards that thing. If you have faith in the power of friendship, you’re going to try and be a good friend – you’ll be loyal to the idea of friendship – and you’ll trust your friends will do the same. It’s in the same general conceptual space as the social contract: we’ll trust each other, and we’ll have loyalty to this ideal, and we’ll trust that our loyalty will be rewarded.

We might also expect to have different sorts of faith in different contexts. When I go to work in the morning, I have faith in the public transport – that it’ll turn up, that it won’t stop halfway, that the driver won’t take us off the edge of a cliff. I have a level of faith in my company, in my colleagues, in our suppliers and clients. I have a level of faith in the abstract concept of business and in the economic structures underpinning our society. I might not like them, but I operate with the expectation that they function according to certain rules, and that they’ll continue to function in some sort of reliable or consistent fashion. Every day, we modulate and refine our faith in all of these different contexts. We offer and retract loyalty and trust, tempering our expectations and learning what we can and can’t rely on – where we can and can’t have faith.

In addition to these relatively superficial faiths, we also have this – I almost want to call it an existential faith, a faith in the things that make up the foundation of our being. Niebuhr points to the example of nationalism. When someone grounds their being in their national identity, the nation becomes “the reality whence his own life derives its worth.” It becomes the base and rationale for value in all other areas: “His life has meaning because it is part of that context, like a word in a sentence … faith in the nation is primarily reliance upon it as an enduring value-center.” All other, more minor forms of faith are built around this central, existential faith. They derive their value from that center. To the nationalist, public transport is good because it expresses some value of the nation – our communality, our cooperative spirit. Suppliers and clients embody the nation’s industrious spirit, its efficiency and drive.

If we stretch our language a little, and talk about these different value-centers or objects of faith as ‘gods’, we can see a question about how our different faiths relate to each other. Are we monotheistic, having one ‘god’ (one value-center); polytheists, with multiple ‘gods’; or henotheists, loyal to one ‘god’ among others? The question becomes especially pointed when applied to religion. Christianity, for example, is traditionally thought of as monotheistic. There aren’t a stable of gods running around – there’s one. But, Niebuhr says, under our definition of faith, there are potentially forms of Christianity that are polytheistic – that are committed to several ‘gods’ or value-centers. Even when people believe in the divine, they often petition on behalf of their particular sect or group, revealing the group as a secondary value-center beyond the divine itself. “The god to whom prayers are addressed is not infrequently identified with the group-deity whose special concern is for Christians or Jews and whose cause is identified with their cause more than theirs is with his.” Christians often speak of ‘our God’, as if God is a special possession belonging to the group – as if the value of the divine lies in its ability to protect and empower the group, which operates as the true value-center. Niebuhr writes that the Christian “tends to worship a supernatural being who is the collective representation of his own community or who is the principle of its being; to make his center of value that which bestows value on the members of the special society and to define his loyalty as commitment to that society as if it were the ultimate cause.” He essentially identifies here a form of idolatry, where the church, as value-center, supplants or appropriates the divine. “The community that pointed to the faithfulness of the One now points to itself as His representative, but God and church have become so identified that often the word ‘God’ seems to mean the collective representation of the church.”

The radical monotheism of Niebuhr’s title is then the struggle against henotheism or polytheism in the church. It is hostility to multiple centers of value, hostility to a church that treats its own existence as more important than the divine. Niebuhr’s concept of radical monotheism treats the divine as the sole center of value. It names the self-interest of the various churches, the usurpation and idolatry, and challenges it. That’s the struggle we’re given to overcome, Niebuhr suggests. We won’t necessarily fix the problem: “radical faith in the God who is the principle of being itself is given to men as a hope and a goal more than as achievement.” But we have a better language with which to continue the task.