ABSTRACT
Reinhold Niebuhr was one of the leading spokesmen in the United States for Protestant orthodoxy. An intense concern with the significance of human history and social change has had motivated him to study and interpret the relation of religion and philosophy to social and political problems. Fascism, as a general movement, is the characteristic defense of an imperiled social system. Most of the Western nations were developing fascist tendencies because the poverty and the disillusionment of the post-War period had given the radical political parties sufficient strength to challenge the established order. The philosophic temper of the Germans may hardly seem to be the cause of the kind of public hysteria which Hitler, with the aid of Dr. Goebbels, his genius for technicized propaganda, had been able to create in support of his program. The anti-Semitism of the fascist movement was intimately related to the extravagant nationalism which it was developing.
