Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) May 24, 2011: Gary Dorrien's work in Christian social ethics deserves to be better known than it is, because his work can give us a better sense of American exceptionalism than we receive in other formulations of American exceptionalism, whether those other formulations are by President Barack Obama or by aspiring Republican presidential candidates.
My own sense of American exceptionalism is that American liberal culture (i.e., political liberalism in our experiment with American democracy, and economic liberalism in our capitalist economic system) is indeed imperfect, but nevertheless is the most adequate model of culture for all other peoples of the world today to aspire to emulate, inasmuch as they can. I hasten to say that I am not an advocate of unbound capitalism. I do not favor deregulation. I believe that capitalism should be bound by government regulations. I do not view our American government as a necessarily evil, as the title of Garry Wills' book A NECESSARY EVIL: A HISTORY OF AMERICAN DISTRUST OF GOVERNMENT (1999) suggests. Government is a necessary good. We need government to work for and protect the common good. But our elected officials are fallible, as we ourselves are.
Ah, but what is the common good in any given set of circumstances? This is the central question in Christian social ethics. Even though I do not share Gary Dorrien's Christian faith (I am a theistic humanist, as distinct from a secular humanist), I admire his essays in this collection about progressive Christian social ethics. In ECONOMY, DIFFERENCE, EMPIRE: SOCIAL ETHICS FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE (2010), Gary Dorrien has reprinted a selection of his previously published writings. In some cases, he has adapted parts of two previously published works to create a new composite essay for this collection. This collection could be titled A GARY DORRIEN READER.
Gary Dorrien is the author of more than a dozen books, including his monumental three-volume study titled THE MAKING OF AMERICAN LIBERAL THEOLOGY (2001, 2003, 2006) and SOCIAL ETHICS IN THE MAKING: INTERPRETING AN AMERICAN TRADITION (2008).
Gary Dorrien is now the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan. Not surprisingly, Niebuhr's thought is prominent in this collection. Because President Obama claims to have been influenced by Niebuhr's thought, Gary Dorrien's new collection can help us better understand where President Obama is coming from, as they say. But Gary Dorrien's chapter about Obama is disappointing, to say the least. For a fuller discussion of Obama, the interested readers should see James T. Kloppenberg's book READING OBAMA: DREAMS, HOPE, AND THE AMERICAN POLITICAL TRADITION (2011).
The title and subtitle of Gary Dorrien's collection call attention to the four groupings of essays in the collection: (1) the tradition of progressive Christian social ethics within which Gary Dorrien works, (2) economic democracy and social justice, (3) neoconservatives and U.S. empire, and (4) race and gender social justice.
Gary Dorrien's new collection is a timely antidote to the recent revival of Ayn Rand's stupid ideas glorifying being self-centered and selfish, which has been spurred on recently by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who claims to be a Roman Catholic, and others, some of whom claim to be Christians. Gary Dorrien's new collection can serve as a timely antidote to the Ayn Rand revival by reminding us about social justice and the need to be other-regarding, not just self-regarding (as Ayn Rand stresses).
Gary Dorrien tells us where he himself is coming from: "I side with the right order tradition in justice theory, which is more relational and solidaristic than the justice-as-rights views, but I share the social gospel conviction that the way beyond liberalism is through it, taking as foundational the rights of individuals to freedom of speech, association, preference, and the like, and the liberal emphasis on equality of opportunity" (p. xii).
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