November 12, 2008

DENVER – In opening sessions of a General Assembly observing the first 100 years of the ecumenical movement in the U.S., a nationally known theologian told delegates that the movement has "an historic opportunity to change."

Dr. Gary Dorrien, Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University in New York, traced the history of the social gospel movement and said the recent election of President-Elect Barack Obama opens the door to new possibilities.

Delegates of the member communions of the National Council of Churches and Church World Service are meeting at the Renaissance Hotel November 11-13.

Dorrien suggested the ongoing worldwide economic crisis creates a new scenario for churches whose original response to modern economic globalization was the social gospel.

"This year we have witnessed a presidential candidacy that carries the burden of America's entire history of racial prejudice and exclusion," he said. "Regardless of which candidate you supported in the election, it is undeniable that Barack Obama's election represents an historic breakthrough in the American experience, symbolizing the hope of an American society that affirms and celebrates its multiracial diversity. That hope reverberated in the enormous cheering crowds of mostly white people that convinced him to run for the presidency sooner than he had expected."

But Obama himself has not claimed that racism in America has ended, Dorrien said. "He talks about racial justice as little as possible; he plays down the racial prejudice that his campaign encountered; and he required his campaign workers to follow his example. Yet he does not regard himself as a symbol of ‘post-racial politics,' for on the few occasions that Obama has explicitly addressed the issue, he has stated that it's premature to imagine such a thing in American society."

Most whites are impatient with black grievances and the Obama campaign played them down, Dorrien said. "But bear in mind that these very guidelines reflect the persistence of the problem. Obama's favorite image of how we should think about racial justice is a split screen. One side of the screen holds in view the just, multi-racial society that must be created; the other side shows the existing America that is far from a just society."

Obama's election gives the U.S. "an historic opportunity to change the second half of this screen. Last week the world changed, and we woke up in a better country," Dorrien said.

Even so, he suggested the festering economic crisis will impede President Obama's agenda for progress, and the churches will have to reexamine their attitudes toward capitalism that they began to develop in the 19th century and through the Great Depression of the 1930s.

"A month ago I went around the country saying that because our banks don't know what their assets are worth, and it's impossible to sort out the toxic debt, we might as well half-socialize the banks to unfreeze credit lines. Then Gordon Brown did it in England, France and Germany followed suit, Paul Krugman said we should do it too, he won the Nobel Prize, suddenly Henry Paulsen agreed, and on October 13 the Bush administration invested $250 billion in senior preferred bank stock in nine major banks, take it or take it, there was no choice. We're bailing like it's 1933 ... The next several years will be devoted to cleaning up the financial mess and coping with a bad recession." Dorrien also suggested that the bygone social gospel movement rose to heights that will challenge modern church leaders.

"For all its faults and limitations," he said, "the social gospel movement produced a greater progressive religious legacy than any generation before or after it. Christian realism inspired no hymns and built no lasting institutions. It was not even a movement, but rather, a reaction to the social gospel centered on one person, Reinhold Niebuhr. The social gospel, by contrast, was a 60-year movement and enduring perspective that paved the way for modern ecumenism, social Christianity, the Civil Rights movement, and the deep involvement of the ecumenical movement in the Civil Rights movement. It had a tradition in the black churches led by Reverdy Ransom, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Benjamin E. Mays, Mordecai Johnson, and Martin Luther King Jr. It had anti-imperialist, socialist, feminist and theologically conservative advocates in addition to its liberal reformers. It created the ecumenical and social justice ministries that remain the heart of American Christianity. And it expounded a vision of economic democracy that is as relevant and necessary today as it was a century ago."

Read the full text of Dorrien's address at http://www.ncccusa.org/ga2008/dorrien.html.

National Council of Churches USA