Faith and Economic Democracy

Back in July of this year Bill Moyers sat down with three leading theologians on his PBS show to discuss the role of faith and social justice. One of his guests was Gary Dorrien, who is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He’s the author of 13 books and numerous articles. As I mentioned in a prior post Professor Dorrien is also a strong advocate of economic democracy.

In the Bill Moyers production Dorrien stated,

“That's why I'm for economic democracy, because I think that economic democracy is essentially an attempt to sort of hold down, serve as a kind of a break on human greed and will to power, which are virtually universal, so I'm not talking about anything that requires some kind of idealistic idea about human nature, or what we're capable of, or the like. My main argument for it is the same that Niebuhr, that Reinhold Niebuhr had about democracy. You know, the human capacity for goodness makes democracy possible, but it's precisely the human capacity for evil that makes democracy utterly necessary. There are two sort of fundamental stories or ideas about a just society, what it could be, that have been operative in US American history virtually from the beginning, and that are always there. And that one is the idea of providing unrestricted liberty to acquire wealth.

And there's a politics that goes with that. You want to hold down government. You want to hold - even democracy is not really necessarily a good word, in that conception. And then in the other idea, it's that you want to attain as much through a democracy as you can, over society's major institutions.

You can interpret virtually every decade of U.S. American history by the way these two different sort of conceptions of what a just society would be, end up conflicting with each other, sometimes modifying each other, sometimes changing each other.”

I highly recommend to this episode. You can download the episode’s transcript as well as view the show at the PBS web site.