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Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition

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It's difficult to be comprehensive on a topic as diverse and ill-defined as social ethics, but Dorrien's effort is at least profoundly inclusive. Reinhold Niebuhr is the crux of the book, receiving more attention than anyone else. Dorrien traces those who followed explicitly in Niebuhr's footsteps, but he also traces divergences, expansions and contentions of the tradition. The book is erudite and accessible. It tells an almost unified story of the tradition as a whole, while also providing a valuable introduction to many individual figures from the tradition. Perhaps most importantly, it makes the reader want to go back to the original sources Dorrien's discussing.

The hardcover edition of Gary Dorrien's big book SOCIAL ETHICS IN THE MAKING: INTERPRETING AN AMERICAN TRADITION (2008) was too expensive for me to buy a copy for my own personal use. However, I decided that I could afford to invest in the more reasonably priced paperback edition.

Thus far, I have only dipped into selected parts of this book. But I have been favorably impressed by the parts that I have read. In each part I've read, Dorrien provides enough biographical information about the author whose works he is discussing that I was able to form a sense of the person. Dorrien also skillfully contextualizes the issues each author discussed in terms of the broader discussions of issues in each author's time.

In the front of the book, several pages are devoted to reproducing photographs of the different authors whose work Dorrien discusses in the book. The index in the back of the book is superb.

In a review of Dorrien's book in the JOURNAL OF THEOLOGICAL STUDIES, volume 61, number 1 (April 2010): pages 467-470, David Cowan criticizes Dorrien's book only for its disappointingly short final chapter titled "Borders of Possibility: The Necessity of `Discredited' Social Gospel Ideas" (pages 674-691). As Cowan says, Dorrien's final chapter is shorter than any other chapter in the book.

As we consider Cowan's basically fair criticism of Dorrien's final chapter, we should remember that this big book follows the publication of the three big volumes in Dorrien's THE MAKING OF AMERICAN LIBERAL THEOLOGY (2001, 2003, 2006). Clearly Dorrien has done a massive amount of research to produce these four volumes. For this reason, it may be understandable that he has not yet sufficiently digested the material in SOCIAL ETHICS IN THE MAKING to write a more fully developed final chapter for it.

More recently, Dorrien has published a collection of previously published material titled ECONOMY, DIFFERENCE, EMPIRE: SOCIAL ETHICS FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE (Columbia University Press, 2010). As this collection shows, the sheer range of Dorrien's research interests is wide and diverse.

Over the last half century or so, we Americans have heard a lot from the noisy Christian right and its various concerns and crusades. For the most part, at least in terms of secular media coverage, there has been no counter-balancing of media reports regarding views from the Christian left. Evidently, the secular media are far more interested in reporting the antics of the Christian right.

But in SOCIAL ETHICS IN THE MAKING, Dorrien ably reminds us that there is a respectable American tradition of Christian social ethics, to which both Protestants and Catholic thinkers have contributed. However, as he suggests in the title of the final chapter, some people may see the Protestant social gospel ideas as having been supposedly discredited. In certain respects, the ideas are dated, as Dorrien himself frequently notes. But Dorrien wants to revivify the spirit of this American tradition of thought about social ethics and update the tradition to address our current needs to develop our sense of social ethics as we work for social justice and the common good.

As to Cowan's criticism of Dorrien's final chapter, it may be the case that, figuratively speaking, the final chapter, or at least the next chapter, is still in the process of emerging.