How the former FBI director's interest in Reinhold Niebuhr shaped his approach to political power.

christianity today

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"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill

Many Christian theologians in Niebuhr's day embraced love as the solution to the world's problems.
As Comey explains in the thesis, Niebuhr rejected that view.
Since human selfishness gets in the way of perfectly emulating Jesus' sacrificial love, they must instead inject love into the world through justice.

In an essay called "The King's Chapel and the King's Court" published in 1969, Niebuhr rebuked Hoover himself, comparing his spying on Martin Luther King, Jr. to the actions of the biblical Amaziah, a priest who abused the prophet Amos in an effort to suppress his critique.

It is ironic that Comey admires a figure who felt he had to denounce a previous FBI director. What is even more ironic, however, is that the essay anticipates the predicament Comey himself faced when, on January 27 - in the midst of the FBI's investigation of Michael Flynn for his contacts with the Russians - he was invited to dinner with Trump and asked to declare his loyalty. At the time he wrote his thesis, Comey could have had no idea that he would one day be summoned to the court of the king and then, like Amos, driven out for not saying what the king wanted to hear.

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"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill

Very interesting insight.

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"One of the reasons why propaganda tries to get you to hate government is because it's the one existing institution in which people can participate to some extent and constrain tyrannical unaccountable power." Noam Chomsky.