The Politics of The Courage to Be

Abstract

Paul Tillich is arguably the most important exponent of the theology of culture. As a religious socialist Tillich felt compelled to leave National Socialist Germany in 1933 and to emigrate to the United States where he established himself as a major figure in American theology. Among his most influential works is the book The Courage to Be, which presents an existentialist Ground of Being theology as a basis upon which to address the concerns of people living in a period increasingly characterised by anxiety. The purpose of this article is to examine The Courage to Be against the background of the growth of conservative cultural and political trends in the United States. Originally presented as four lectures in the Autumn of 1950 at Yale University, The Courage to Be was expanded into a six chapter book and published in 1952. The article comparatively examines certain observations Tillich makes about Marxism and Soviet and American national life in the pre-revised lectures of1950 and the published texts of 1952 against the background of the ascendancy of McCarthyism in the United States. We propose that in revising the original lectures Tillich becomes more critical of Marxism and the Soviet Union and, in certain respects, less critical of the United States; it is our view that such revisions represent concessions to the anti-left wing mood of the period. In undertaking such a contextualised comparative textual analysis, we seek to show that the scholar of religion and culture does not work in isolation but in creative tension with his or her context and that context is a fundamentally important factor in contributing to the shaping of ideas and texts.