In Saturday's New York Times, Peter Steinfels interviewed Gary Dorrien, the new Reinhold Niebuhr professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary.
I've had the good fortune to meet Gary on a number of occassions, and his three-volume Making of American Liberal Theology is an absolute necessity for understanding the currents of Christian thought in the 20th Century (volume 2 is especially important for understanding Niebuhr. He gave the keynote address at last year's Niebuhr Society meeting, and used the occasion to offer a blistering critique of the American neo-conservative ideology, which is un-Niebuhrian to its core. Here are some highlights from the Times article:
Q. How does your approach to Christian social ethics compare to Niebuhr’s?
A. There have been three major traditions of Christian social ethics over the past century — Social Gospel liberalism, Niebuhrian realism and liberation theology — and Union Seminary has been a major center of all three. Niebuhr absorbed the social justice ethic of the Social Gospel but turned against the idealism and rationalism it shared with the Progressive movement; he believed that the Social Gospel took too little account of conflict and human sinfulness. A generation later, liberation theologians turned against Niebuhrian realism, which they judged to be too much a defense of the American political and religious establishment.
My own work has been influenced by all three of these traditions: by the Social Gospel, by Niebuhr’s powerful blending of theology and political realism, and by the black liberationist, feminist, multicultural and gay rights perspectives that have flowed out of liberation theology and postmodern criticism.
From the beginning of social ethics as a distinct field in the 1880s, social ethicists have debated whether their field needs to be defined by a specific method. Should they burnish their social scientific credentials, or head straight for the burning social issues? Niebuhr is the field’s leading exemplar of directly addressing the social issues of the day without apology. I am on his side of that argument, though I also spend a lot of time explaining that there are other approaches to social ethics.
Q. What insights of Niebuhr’s are most pertinent for the nation’s public life today?
A. His sense that elements of self-interest and pride lurk even in the best of human actions. His recognition that a special synergy of selfishness operates in collectivities like nations. His critique of Americans’ belief in their country’s innocence and exceptionalism — the idea that we are a redeemer nation going abroad never to conquer, only to liberate.
Q. You’ve written two critical books on political neoconservatism. Don’t many neoconservatives claim to be Niebuhrians?
A. In various phases of his public career, Niebuhr was a liberal pacifist, a neo-Marxist revolutionary, a Social Democratic realist, a cold war liberal and, at the end, an opponent of the war in Vietnam. He zigged and zagged enough that all sorts of political types claim to be his heirs. Even the neoconservatives can point to a few things.
But over all, they’re kidding themselves. Niebuhr’s passion for social justice was a constant through all his changes. Politically he identified with the Democratic left. We can only wish that the neocons had absorbed even half of his realism.
The disaster in Iraq is so colossal that people are saying neoconservatism is dead. That’s been said before. Neoconservatives still control a formidable constellation of think tanks, journals and media connections. In John McCain they have a presidential candidate, and they would be welcomed in the administrations of several other Republican candidates. Most importantly, neoconservatism is based on a deep current in American opinion: that the sad lessons of history don’t apply to the U.S. and that we are a nation superior in goodness and power.
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