Does civilization need religion?

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About this book

"Does civilization need religion? : A study in the social resources and…." by Reinhold Niebuhr is a treatise on religion and society written in the early 20th century. It examines whether and how religion can sustain personality, supply moral energy, and guide social life in a mechanized, secular age shaped by science and industrialism. The work argues that religion’s metaphysical plausibility and its social efficacy are both under pressure, yet it may still offer indispensable resources for ethical reconstruction. The opening of the treatise diagnoses religion’s waning influence in modern urban-industrial life, noting that science challenges a personalized universe while impersonal economic systems corrode respect for persons. It contrasts frantic orthodoxy and accommodating liberalism, arguing that the urgent crisis is not intellectual alone but moral: religion’s failure to make civilization ethical alienates especially the working classes.