Contents
Contents
Social Ethics in the Making
Books by Gary Dorrien
Logic and Consciousness
The Democratic Socialist Vision
Reconstructing the Common Good
The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology
Soul in Society: The Making and Renewal of Social Christianity
The Word as True Myth: Interpreting Modern Theology
The Remaking of Evangelical Theology
The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology
The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805–1900
The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900–1950
Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana
The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity, 1950–2005
This paperback edition first published 2011
© 2011 Gary Dorrien
Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (hardback, 2008)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dorrien, Gary J.
Social ethics in the making : interpreting an American tradition / Gary Dorrien.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-8687-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4443-3730-3 1. Christian sociology–United States. 2. Social gospel–United States. 3. Social ethics–United States. 4. Christian ethics–United States. I. Title.
BT738.D655 2008
261.80973—dc22
2008009057
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
For James Cone Eminent theologian and treasured friend
Acknowledgments
For the rights of access to and permission to quote from the unpublished letters and papers of Francis Greenwood Peabody, grateful acknowledgment is made to the Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, with special thanks to Curator Frances O’Donnell; for the unpublished letters and papers of Graham Taylor, grateful acknowledgment is made to the Midwest Manuscript Collection, The Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois; Washington Gladden, grateful acknowledgment is made to the Archives/Library Edition of the Ohio Historical Society in Columbus, Ohio, with special thanks to Mr. Gary Arnold, Chief Bibliographer at the Ohio Historical Society; for the unpublished letters and papers of Walter Rauschenbusch, grateful acknowledgment is made to the Rauschenbusch Family Papers, American Baptist-Samuel Colgate Historical Library of the American Baptist Historical Society, Colgate-Rochester/Crozer Divinity School, Rochester, New York, with special thanks to Assistant Director Nancy Blostein; for the unpublished letters and papers of Harry F. Ward and Beverly W. Harrison, grateful acknowledgment is made to the Burke Library of Columbia University/Union Theological Seminary in New York, New York, with special thanks to Archivist Ruth Tonkiss Cameron, Archives of Women in Theological Scholarship; for the unpublished letters and papers of Reverdy C. Ransom, grateful acknowledgment is made to the Reverdy C. Ransom Papers, Payne Theological Seminary, Wilberforce, Ohio; for the unpublished letters and papers of Reinhold Niebuhr, grateful acknowledgment is made to the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, with special thanks to Archivist Fred Bauman, and the Columbia University Oral History Research Collection, Columbia University, New York, New York, with special thanks to Associate Director Jessica Wiederhorn; for the unpublished letters and papers of Walter G. Muelder, grateful acknowledgment is made to the Department of Library Research Collections, Boston University School of Theology, Boston, Massachusetts, with special thanks to Dawn Piscitello, Research Collections Librarian; for the unpublished letters and papers of John Courtney Murray, grateful acknowledgment is made to the Archives of the Woodstock College Library, Georgetown University, Washington, DC.
For the photo of Francis Greenwood Peabody, grateful acknowledgment is made to Manuscripts and Archives, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, with special thanks to Curator Frances O’Donnell; for the photo of Graham Taylor, grateful acknowledgment is made to the Morrison-Shearer Foundation, Northbrook, Illinois (Photographs by Helen Balfour Morrison used with permission by the Morrison-Shearer Foundation, Northbrook, Illinois), with special thanks to Program Manager Julia Mayer; for the photo of Washington Gladden, grateful acknowledgment is made to the Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio, with special thanks to Teresa Carstensen, Photoduplication/Library Acquisitions Coordinator; for the photo of Walter Rauschenbusch, grateful acknowledgment is made to the American Baptist Archives Center, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania “Courtesy of the American Baptist Historical Society, American Baptist-Samuel Colgate Historical Library,” with special thanks to Executive Director Deborah Van Broekhoven; for the photo of Harry F. Ward, grateful acknowledgment is made to his granddaughter, with special thanks to Ruth Tonkiss Cameron, Archivist, Union Theological Seminary Records, The Burke Library Archives, and Director of Publications and Media Relations Joann Anand, Union Theological Seminary, New York, New York, with credit to photographer Luke Nelson; for the cover photo of Reverdy C. Ransom, grateful acknowledgment is made to The Wilberforce University Archives, Wilberforce, Ohio, with special thanks to Associate Librarian Jacqueline Brown, and to Anthony B. Pinn, editor of Making the Gospel Plain: The Writings of Bishop Reverdy C. Ransom (Trinity Press International, 1999); for the inside photo of Reverdy C. Ransom, grateful acknowledgment is made to the African Methodist Episcopal Church Sunday School Union, Nashville, Tennessee, with special thanks to Andre’ Wright, Administrative Assistant; for the photo of Jane Addams, grateful acknowledgment is made to Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, with special thanks to Technical Services Specialist Mary Beth Sigado and Curator Wendy Chmielewski; for the photo of John A. Ryan, grateful acknowledgment is made to “Monsignor John A. Ryan, ca. 1935, photograph from The American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives, The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.,” with special thanks to Audiovisual Archivist Robin C. Pike and Administrative Assistant Jane Stoeffler; for the cover photo of Reinhold Niebuhr and the photos of Beverly W. Harrison and Larry Rasmussen, grateful acknowledgment is made to Union Communications Office, Union Theological Seminary, New York, New York, with special thanks to Joann Anand, Director of Publications and Media Relations; for the inside photo of Reinhold Niebuhr, grateful acknowledgment is made to Union Theological Seminary Records, The Burke Library Archives, with special thanks to Archivist Ruth Tonkiss Cameron, Associate Director of Development for Online Communications James J. Kempster and Director of Publications and Media Relations Joann Anand, Union Theological Seminary, New York, New York, with credit to Pan American World Airways Atlantic Division, LaGuardia Field; for the photo of H. Richard Niebuhr, grateful acknowledgment is made to Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, with special thanks to Public Services Manager Cynthia Ostroff, Library Services Assistant Stephen Ross and Technical Service Assistant Dika Goloweiko-Nussberg; for the photo of John C. Bennett, grateful acknowledgment is made to Union Theological Seminary Records, The Burke Library Archives, with special thanks to Archivist Ruth Tonkiss Cameron and Director of Publications and Media Relations Joann Anand, Union Theological Seminary, New York, New York, with credit to the photographic firm Blackstone-Shelburne, New York, New York; for the photo of Paul Ramsey, grateful acknowledgment is made to Princeton University Archives, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey, with special thanks to Ben Primer, Associate University Librarian for Rare Books and Special Collections, to Jennifer M. Cole, Public Policy Papers Project Archivist, and Christine W. Kitto, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton, New Jersey; for the photos of Walter G. Muelder and Martin Luther King Jr., grateful acknowledgment is made to Boston University Photo Services, with special thanks to Director Frederick Sway; for the photo of James Luther Adams, grateful acknowledgment is made to Harvard News Office, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, with special thanks to Harvard Divinity School Office of Communications Staff Assistants Elizabeth Busky and Chris Bower; for the photo of John Courtney Murray, grateful acknowledgment is made to Catholic News Service, Washington, D.C., with credit to CNS Photographer Paul Haring; for the photo of Dorothy Day, grateful acknowledgment is made to “Photo by Fritz Kaeser, (c) University of Notre Dame,” with special thanks to Steve Moriarty, The Fritz and Milly Kaeser Curator of Photography, The Snite Museum of Art, and Archivist William Kevin Cawley, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, and Phillip M. Runkel, Archivist, Raynor Memorial Libraries, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin with credit to “Milwaukee Journal photo, courtesy of the Marquette University Archives”; for the photo of James H. Cone, grateful acknowledgment is made to James H. Cone, with special thanks to Union Theological Seminary, New York, New York, and to Special Assistant to James H. Cone, Victoria Furio, with credit to photographer Charlotte Raymond; for the photo of Mary Daly, grateful acknowledgment is made to EnlightenNext, Inc. (Reprinted with permission from What is Enlightenment? magazine, Fall/Winter 1999, copyright 1999 EnlightenNext, Inc., all rights reserved, ), with special thanks to Administrative Assistant Judy Fox; for the photo of Carl F. H. Henry, grateful acknowledgment is made to Christianity Today, International (photo credits, Christianity Today, International), with special thanks to Editorial Administrative Assistant Ashley Gieschen and Design Director Gary Gnidovic and with special thanks to Carol Henry Bates, William Bates, Senior Vice President for Institutional Advancement Paul J. Maurer, and University Librarian Rob Krapohl, Trinity International University, Deerfield, Illinois; for the photo of John Howard Yoder, grateful acknowledgment is made to the Mennonite Publishing House, Paul Schrock Photograph Collection, Mennonite Church USA Archives, Goshen, Indiana, with special thanks to Dennis Stoesz, Archivist, Goshen Office; for the photo of Stanley Hauerwas, grateful acknowledgment is made to Stanley Hauerwas, with credit to Duke University Photography, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, and with special thanks to Duke Divinity School Research Associate Carole Baker and Associate Dean for Communications Jonathan Goldstein; for the photo of Michael Novak, grateful acknowledgment is made to Michael Novak, with special thanks to his Research Assistant, Ashley Morrow, American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C.; for the photo of Jim Wallis, grateful acknowledgment is made to Jim Wallis, with special thanks to Jason Gedeik, Press Secretary, Sojourners Magazine, Washington, D.C.; for the photo of Charles Curran, grateful acknowledgment is made to Charles Curran, with special thanks to Southern Methodist University/Perkins School of Theology, Dallas, Texas; for the photo of James M. Gustafson, grateful acknowledgment is made to the Office of Public Affairs, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (Photographs of Yale affiliated individuals maintained by the Office of Public Affairs, Yale University, 1879–1989 [RU 686], Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University Library), with special thanks to Chief Research Archivist Judith Ann Schiff, Associate University Librarian Ann Okerson and Public Services Archivist William Massa; for the photo of Gibson Winter, grateful acknowledgment is made to Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey, with special thanks to Kenneth Woodrow Henke, Research Archivist; for the photo of Cornell West, grateful acknowledgment is made to Cornel West, with credit to photographer Brain Velenchencko, and with special thanks to Mary Ann Rodriguez, Assistant, Department of Religion, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey; for the photo of Katie G. Cannon, grateful acknowledgment is made to Katie G. Cannon, with special thanks to Union Theological Seminary & Presbyterian School of Christian Education, Richmond, Virginia; for the photo of Victor Anderson, grateful acknowledgment is made to Victor Anderson, with special thanks to Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee; for the photo of Max Stackhouse, grateful acknowledgment is made to Max Stackhouse, with special thanks to Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey; for the photo of Dennis P. McCann, grateful acknowledgment is made to Dennis P. McCann; for the photo of Lisa Sowle Cahill, grateful acknowledgment is made to Lisa Sowle Cahill, with special thanks to Boston College, Boston, Massachusetts; for the photo of Marvin M. Ellison, grateful acknowledgment is made to Marvin M. Ellison, with special thanks to Bangor Theological Seminary, Portland, Maine; for the photo of John B. Cobb, Jr., grateful acknowledgment is made to the Center for Process Studies, Claremont School of Theology, Claremont, California, with special thanks to Communications Director J. R. Hustwit and Program Director John Quiring; for the photo of Daniel C. Maguire, grateful acknowledgment is made to Daniel C. Maguire, with special thanks to Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; for the photo of Sharon Welch, grateful acknowledgment is made to Sharon Welch, with thanks to Meadville Lombard Theological School, Chicago, Illinois; for the photo of Emilie M. Townes, grateful acknowledgment is made to Emilie M. Townes, with special thanks to Yale Divinity School, New Haven, Connecticut; for the photo of Ada María Isasi-Díaz, grateful acknowledgment is made to Ada María Isasi-Díaz, with special thanks to Drew University Theological School, Madison, New Jersey; for the photo of María Pilar Aquino, grateful acknowledgment is made to María Pilar Aquino, with special thanks to the Office of Public Relations, the University of San Diego, San Diego, California; for the photo of David Hollenbach, grateful acknowledgment is made to David Hollenbach; for the back cover photo of Gary Dorrien, grateful acknowledgment is made to Union Theological Seminary, New York, New York, with special thanks to Director of Publications and Media Relations Joann Anand, with credit to photographer Lynn Saville.
The photo of William Jewett Tucker, which is taken from My Generation (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1919) by William Jewett Tucker, is in the Public Domain. The photo of Josiah Strong, which is taken from The New Home Missions (NY: Missionary Education Movement of the US and Canada, 1914) by Harlan Paul Douglas, is in the Public Domain; special thanks is given to Ralph E. Luker, author of The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885–1912 (The University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
This book is a byproduct of my work at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University as a teacher to graduate students and, especially, a mentor to doctoral students. Shortly after I moved to New York in 2005 and began working with doctoral students in social ethics, it occurred to me that we lacked a history of the field they were entering. Every field should have an account of its origins, development, key figures, methodological options, and theoretical varieties, I thought. Meeting with one of my doctoral advisees, Christine Pae, I mused that perhaps my next project would be a history of social ethics; Christine replied, “Could you hurry up and write it? I’ll be doing my comprehensive exams next year.”
That suggested an impossibly ambitious timeline, but I soon plunged into the research for this book, and taught a course titled “Social Ethics as a Discipline” that mapped out the book’s narrative structure. I am deeply grateful to all of the master’s and doctoral degree students in that course for enriching my perspective on this subject. Above all, I am grateful to my current group of doctoral students – Lisa Anderson, Malinda Berry, Chloe Breyer, Ian Doescher, Babydoll Kennedy, Jeremy Kirk, Eboni Marshall, David Orr, Christine Pae, Gabriel Salguero, Charlene Sinclair, Joe Strife, Rima Veseley-Flad, and Demian Wheeler. The privilege of working with these gifted, fascinating, and promising scholars has been the most rewarding experience of my academic career.
Three faculty colleagues at Union Theological Seminary befriended me immediately upon my arrival in New York and helped me feel that I had found a new home. This book is dedicated to one of them, James Cone. The second was Christopher Morse, an accomplished theologian and extraordinary teacher whose greatest distinction is his genial gift for friendship. The third friend, Joe Hough, is retiring from the presidency of Union Seminary as this book goes to press. Union Theological Seminary in its long and noted history has never had a better president than Joe Hough, nor a more remarkable human being. All of us in the Union community wish him fond farewell and will miss him desperately.
I am grateful to numerous expert readers who reviewed the manuscript either in whole or in part, including John B. Cobb, Jr., James Cone, Charles Curran, Christopher Evans, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Stanley Hauerwas, Charles Henderson, Jennifer Jesse, Daniel Maguire, Larry Rasmussen, Emilie M. Townes, and Sarah Winter. Many thanks to my editors at Blackwell for their friendly and skillful work, especially copy-editor Felicity Marsh, project manager Louise Spencely, and publisher Rebecca Harkin. Thanks to Diana Witt for another stellar index. As usual I end with a word of thanks to my incomparable friend Becca Kutz-Marks, now of Austin, Texas, whose gift of friendship is a constant grace in my life, and who marshaled the gallery of photographs in this book with her usual care and exuberance.
Introduction
In the early 1880s, proponents of what came to be called “the social gospel” founded what came to be called “social ethics.” This book is a history of the tradition of social ethics of the USA, a tradition that began with the distinctly modern idea that Christianity has a social-ethical mission to transform the structures of society in the direction of social justice.
The simultaneous rise of the social gospel and social ethics was not coincidental, nor the fact that sociology, “social justice,” social Darwinism, corporate capitalism, modern socialism, and the trade unions arose at the same time. For social ethics was essentially a departmental subset of the social gospel. The social gospel was novel for its idea of social salvation. Social salvation was based on the sociological idea of social structure. The term “social justice” gained currency in the literature of rising Socialist and union movements. And the social gospelers had to figure out how to affirm Darwinism as science while rejecting an ascending social Darwinism. By the 1890s the favored shorthand for all of this was “the social problem,” to which social ethics brought the resources of a socially awakened Christianity.
This book describes the founding and development of social ethics as a discourse in the realms of the academy, church, and general public. It explains and analyzes the three major traditions of social ethics, offshoots of these traditions, evangelical and neoconservative alternatives, and various confessional and cultural standpoints from which religious thinkers have construed the social meaning of Christianity, all in a narrative fashion.
Nearly from the beginning, “social ethics” named a specific academic field and a way of thinking about Christian ethics that transcended the academy. This book pays attention to both meanings, featuring prominent academic voices and important exponents of social Christianity who had little or no relation to the social ethics guild. In the latter category, pastors and movement activists are prominent; on the other hand, after the book enters the postmodern era, the academics prevail almost without exception. In contemporary social ethics, even self-described “public intellectuals” and “public theologians” are academics.
Social Ethics in the Making emphasizes the role of the liberal-Progressive social gospel in giving birth to social ethics and establishing its disciplinary character. It describes the founders of social ethics whom history forgot, the liberal Protestant social gospelers whom history remembered, and the founders of African-American and Roman Catholic traditions of social Christianity. It devotes more attention to Reinhold Niebuhr than to any other figure, analyzing his influential blend of realist politics and neo-Augustinian theology, while making room for H. Richard Niebuhr’s ethic of the responsible self. It treats liberation theology as a third major tradition alongside the social gospel and Christian realism, interpreting liberationism fundamentally as an eruption of repressed and excluded voices. It examines various offshoots and hybrid blends of these traditions and gives extensive attention to evangelical and neoconservative alternatives. It emphasizes contemporary discussions of race, gender, sexuality, ecology, and cultural difference, and analyzes fundamental debates over the coherence and relevance of the social-ethical tradition.
Some of the latter debates have carried on for over a century. Is social Christianity a naturalistic and/or sociopolitical replacement for traditional Christian supernaturalism? Has social ethics addressed the appropriate topics? Was it fatally flawed from the beginning through its connection to social gospel Progressivism? How political or realistic can social ethics be without losing its basis in Christianity? Does social ethics need a specific social scientific method to be a field, or is it better off being the place in a theological curriculum where one directly takes up current social problems?
The founders of social ethics, notably Francis Greenwood Peabody, had no doubt that this new field needed a scientific method. Social ethics was established to expound the ethical dimension of a rising, ostensibly unified field of social science. Beginning as a successor to required courses in moral philosophy, it approached ethics inductively as the study of social movements addressing social problems. Social ethicists used social scientific methods to observe, generalize, and correlate their way to an account of the whole, including its ethical character. By attaching themselves to social science, the social-ethical founders won a place for their enterprise in theological education, and aspired to one in social science.
But the social sciences took the path of specialization and secularization, leaving social ethics to theology. Afterwards, the view that social ethics had to have a blood relationship to science became a minority one, while the field’s greatest figures paid little attention to disciplinary concerns. What mattered to the great advocates of social Christianity was to change the world, not the university. The three towering figures in American Christian social ethics are Walter Rauschenbusch, the prophet of the social gospel; Reinhold Niebuhr, the theorist of Christian realism; and Martin Luther King, Jr, the leader of modern America’s greatest liberation movement. But Rauschenbusch and King did not teach social ethics, and Niebuhr took little interest in disciplinary or methodological issues.
Niebuhr did not worry about the disciplinary standing of his field, nor did he share Peabody’s fixation with social scientific validation. He ended up in social ethics because that was the place where liberal seminaries took up current social problems. That was what he cared about: the struggle for justice and a decent world order. To the extent that Niebuhr had a method, it was a dispositional one of determining the meaning of justice in the interaction of Christian love and concrete situation. For Niebuhr, justice was a contextual application of the law of love to the sociopolitical sphere, mediated by the principles of freedom, equality, and order.
A great deal of social ethics has been Niebuhrian in the sense of being essentially political, activist, and pragmatic. That did not start with Niebuhr, because in this respect he simply assumed the activist orientation of the social gospel movement that preceded him. Rauschenbusch had no field or doctorate; he taught in the German Department at Colgate Rochester Seminary and ended up, by accident, in church history. Niebuhr had no field or doctorate either, except for the social-ethical space that he inherited from the social gospel. Thus the major social ethicists have not been the ones that worried about the social scientific or methodological standing of their field.
But social ethics has not lacked method-minded caretakers of the discipline that Peabody, William Jewett Tucker, and Graham Taylor founded. In the second generation of the social gospel, Harry F. Ward and John A. Ryan were notable practitioners of a distinct method. Ward used a stripped down variant of Peabody’s method, while Ryan fashioned a Roman Catholic version of the social gospel that blended policy arguments with Thomist philosophy. In the next generation field consciousness heightened, notably in the work of John C. Bennett, Walter G. Muelder, and James Luther Adams. Bennett developed the theory of “middle axioms” that Niebuhr partly adopted; Muelder developed a “synoptic” method that fit his personalist theory of the social mind as the total content of objective spirit; Adams developed an influential curriculum model at the University of Chicago Divinity School. At Chicago, a school with a tradition of naturalistic empiricism, students were trained to search for moral norms within the variegated life of society, integrating social scientific research with ethical reasoning. In recent social ethics, Gibson Winter and James Gustafson have been the leading advocates of binding ethics to social science. This book examines these figures and perspectives, in addition to social ethics as liberationist, womanist, mujerista, and feminist praxis, and to social ethics as communitarian narrative, biblical application, confessional discipline, ecumenical consensus, and postmodern carnival.
It would be enough to write a strictly disciplinary history of American social ethics. It would be enough, and more interesting, to write a book on social-ethical thinkers who made a public impact. A third possibility would focus on the social ethics of the Christian denominations and ecumenical movement. This book combines the first and second projects while telling an ample slice of the third story through its interpretation of ecumenical theologians such as Ward, Bennett, Muelder, both Niebuhrs, John Courtney Murray, John Howard Yoder, Max Stackhouse, and Larry Rasmussen. By giving equal weight to the disciplinary and public stories, I show that social ethics at its best has been a public discourse of the academy and church.
In addition to the field’s usual cast of luminaries, this book tells the unknown story of the founders of social ethics, restores Harry Ward to his rightful place in social Christian history, and gives featured attention to streams of the social gospel that were not white-male-Protestant. Reverdy Ransom was a major black social gospeler of his time and a forerunner of the civil rights movement. A theological liberal, he was also a Socialist, a black nationalist, and in his later career, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He was a liberationist and Afrocentrist before these terms had currency. His rhetorical eloquence, for which he was renowned in his time, was stunning. Afterwards he was almost completely forgotten; the present work makes an argument for remembrance. Jane Addams, by contrast, was famous in her time and became more so afterwards, but she is rarely counted as a Christian social ethicist, a convention I argue against.
The Catholic figures discussed in the first half of this book had different kinds of careers from their Protestant counterparts. Catholic officials and intellectuals took a cautious attitude toward America’s predominantly Protestant society, and they had to cope with the papal condemnations of modernism. Catholic institutions were also slow to recognize social ethics as a discipline. While all of that changed after Vatican II another significant difference remained: for most liberal Protestants, denominational identity was not very important, but for Catholics, the church and its tradition were centrally important. All three of the pre-Vatican II Catholics featured in this book – John A. Ryan, John Courtney Murray, and Dorothy Day – were theologically conservative, but each of them took edgy social-ethical positions that risked ecclesiastical censure. Ryan vigorously supported the New Deal, Murray defended religious freedom, and Day was a pacifist movement leader. Murray’s stance led to ecclesiastical censure; at Vatican II he was vindicated.
After Vatican II, Catholic social-ethical thought was very much like liberal Protestant ethics in its diversity of perspectives and engagement with liberation theology. Mary Daly began her career as a Catholic theologian before opting for radical feminism. Michael Novak took a brief turn as a Catholic New Leftist before opting for Catholic neoconservatism. Charles Curran’s influential arguments against Catholic teaching on sexual ethics led to his censure by the Vatican. David Hollenbach formulated a prominent Catholic position on human rights, defending economic rights in opposition to Novak. Dennis P. McCann was closer to Novak, criticizing typical social-ethical progressivism on political economics. Lisa Sowle Cahill espoused a liberal feminist perspective on sexual ethics. Daniel C. Maguire proposed an ethical “common creed” with a strongly liberationist bent. Ada María Isasi-Díaz and María Pilar Aquino advocated mujerista and Latina feminist perspectives, respectively, that reflected the influence of Latin American liberation theology. All of these perspectives were forged in dialogue with or as types of liberation theology, though negatively in Novak’s case.
The influence of liberation theology as a third major tradition of social ethics shows through in most of the book’s second half. Chapter 6 discusses liberationist founders Martin Luther King, Jr, James H. Cone, Mary Daly, and Beverly W. Harrison, describing Cone’s founding of black liberation theology, Daly’s origination of radical feminist theology, and Harrison’s leading role in establishing feminist social ethics and queer theory.
Chapter 7 deals with evangelical and neoconservative perspectives, featuring Carl F. H. Henry, John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, Michael Novak, and Jim Wallis. Henry, the major theologian of conservative evangelicalism, achieved godfather status in the Christian Right movement. Yoder championed the pacifism and Anabaptist evangelicalism of the radical Reformation. Hauerwas found a sizable audience as an evangelical Methodist proponent of a Yoder-style communal ethic. Novak’s “theology of the corporation” wedded corporate capitalist apologetics to conservative Catholic ethics. Wallis achieved public prominence as the spokesperson for a neglected alternative, progressive evangelicalism. Yoder, Hauerwas and Wallis had little in common with the Christian Right and even less with neoconservatives, but all the thinkers featured in Chapter 7 had fundamental objections to the social-ethical tradition. For them, social ethics had begun badly by baptizing liberal modernism; afterward it made faulty course corrections; repeatedly, it was about the wrong things.
Chapters 8 and 9 describe the legacies of liberation theology and the concerns of late twentieth and early twenty-first century social ethicists to make sense of postmodernity, cultural difference, sexuality, and ecology. Except for James Gustafson, all the thinkers featured in Chapter 8 either adopted or interrogated key aspects of liberationist criticism, as did every ethicist featured in Chapter 9.
Chapter 8 mixes disciplinary, ecclesiological, and public concerns, analyzing Charles Curran’s moderate liberalism, Gibson Winter’s argument for social ethics as social scientific praxis, James Gustafson’s theocentric ethics, Cornel West’s publicly prominent social criticism, Katie G. Cannon’s exposition of womanist ethics, and Victor Anderson’s postmodern cultural criticism. With a focus on work contemporary with the writing of the book, Chapter 9 describes the state of the field in the early 2000s with reference to economy, sexuality, ecology, and difference, featuring Max Stackhouse and Dennis McCann on political economy; Stackhouse, Lisa Sowle Cahill, and Marvin M. Ellison on sexual ethics; John B. Cobb, Jr. and Larry Rasmussen on ecological ethics; Daniel Maguire’s proposal for a common Christian ethical creed; Sharon Welch’s feminist ethic of risk and solidarity; Emilie M. Townes’s elaboration of womanist ethics; the Latina feminist perspectives of Ada María Isasi-Díaz and María Pilar Aquino; and David Hollenbach’s defense of human rights. My concluding chapter makes an argument for the relevance of the social gospel vision of economic democracy, the limits and value of progressive realism, and the importance of liberationist and ecological criticism.
Even a large book devoted solely to contemporary social ethics would face very difficult problems of selection and emphasis. This book, dealing with the current scene only in its later chapters, can address only a fraction of the field’s current debates. The book as a whole gives highest priority to racial justice, economic justice, war, and representing the field’s diversity of perspectives, traditions, and theorists. The priority given to the ethics of war and violence drops back somewhat in the last two chapters to make room for ecological ethics and debates about gay and lesbian sexuality. Arguments about militarism and war are as important today as ever before; a substantial portion of my own work is devoted to this subject. But most of the arguments in this area are not new; ours is the generation to feature the ethics of difference.
This book makes a pitch, however, for the enduring relevance of the most “discredited” social gospel idea of all, economic democracy. Ernst Troeltsch, in his classic history of Christian social thought The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (1912), observed that up to the late nineteenth century, Christianity had developed only two major social philosophies: medieval Catholicism and Calvinist Protestantism. The modern social gospel – specifically, Christian socialism – was significant for having developed the third one, he argued. Its goal was to make Christianity relevant to a nationalistic, capitalist, technological, and increasingly secular order, an ambitious project that Aquinas and Calvin could not have imagined. Troeltsch cautioned that the social problem was “vast and complicated,” and that modern defenders of the traditional models offered little help in alleviating “all this distress which weighs on our hearts and minds like a perpetual menace.” To move forward, Christianity had to build on the achievements of the Christian Socialists, who regained for the church the “Utopian and revolutionary character” of Christianity in modern form.
A century later that is still what Christianity needs to do.
Note
Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, 2 vols., trans. Olive Wyon (1st edn.: 1912; Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992), 2: quotes, 1011, 728.