The Anti-Manichaeist

Tonight I attended with my high school biology teacher an incredible sermon by the Church Historian and int’l manipulations rhetorical analyst Gary Dorrien, Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary. 

The Sermon was part of a series on Liberal Christianity at Plymouth Congregational Church.  I have been admirer of Dorrien since I read his book, “The Remaking of Evangelical Theology“, a book that has the distinction of being the only book on evangelical theology ever written by a non-evangelical.  Dorrien is an Anglican Social Gospellist who has been strongly influenced by CS Lewis and traces the history of Liberal Christianity back to Count Nicholas Zinzendorf, who was strongly influenced by the early Pietism of Philip Jakob Spener and August Hermann Francke that I made the focus of the Pietist part of my Swedish Baptist Pietist paper.  He described how he turned away from his hobby of writing about the history of progressive/liberal Christianity to writing on the messy world of int’l politics because of the rise to power of a powerful contingent of neocons, thanks to uber-gunster Dick Cheney, and how after 9-11 they aggressively pushed for the US to regime change several states in the Middle East, starting with Iraq(after dispensing with Afghanistan). 

Dorrien describes how the US has become very imperialistic after the fall of communism as it has taken advantage of its military dominance and guarded against threats to our dominion. 

He describes that there are four basic perspectives on int’l manipulations that do not fit neatly into liberal and conservative categories and have a continuum within each worldview, as well as Christian Social Ethicists within each worldview. 

The first is International Liberalism that argues for world stability where nation states comply with int’l law that respects their sovereignty and promotes human rights and tends to foster a removal of trade barriers.  This is what was the creed of the US establisment churches and led to the formation of several important int’l institutions such as with the UN, World Bank.  The Clintons have a business-oriented form of this perspective. 

The next are the Realists, like Henry Kissinger, who reacted against the Internationalist Liberalists and believe that our int’l manipulations shd focus only on the advancement and defense of our nat’l interests, which tend to be rather economic in focus.  They see our int’l manipulations as perpetual struggles for power and argue only for a balance of power that includes a stable correlation of forces.  Among Christian social Ethicists, Reinhold Niebuhr was a strong realist who blasted both idealism and pacificism and yet still argued for a moral dimension. 

The third category is the Internationalist Pacifists.  This is the category that the Social Gospelists turned to after World War one.  They hold that war is always evil and not Christian and oppose military intervention on principle and do not see any good coming from invading our neighbors.  This is the perspective that Jim Wallis is moving away from some with his recent endorsement of Christian Peace-making. 

The fourth perspective stems from Cold War Conservativism and is Unipolarism/NeoConservativism/NeoImperialism.  This includes the proclamation of the superiority of the US system and the consolidation of US power all over the world.  They want to establish a Pax Americana that prevents the rise of any rival and sustains or extends our unrivalled dominance in int’l affairs. 

Dorrien describes how this group, after falling out of power in 1992, was able to consolidate power in the US through thinktanksand playing up the cultural wars issues as wedge issues. 

Thus, thanks to Bush’s uncritical trust in Dick Cheney, they came into unprecedented influence in the White House as a group and the result has been a serious deterioration of the US’s underlying reservoir of Goodwill with the world that has allowed us to grow without raising up serious rivals and spend our resources better as a result. 

Dorrien then calls for a Christianity that learns from the excluded and oppressed peoples of the world and that does not equate Christianity with ethical absolutism and has a strong presumption against war.  He calls on us to see the face of Christ in the disinherited peoples and to interrogate our past problems of race, sex, class and sexual orientation, as well as helping to forge new forms of collective security. 

Although, the top priority for him is the need to resist the politics of empire.  He sees this as outweighing all the other issues and including the need to encourage constructive reforms of the United Nations so it can be more decisive and help to prevent more tragedies like Gulf War II from happening.  Among the more interesting things he suggested is for the US to take the lead and renounce its veto power with the UN Security Council and call on the other permanent members(France, England, Russia and PRoChina) to do the same, as well as an increase in the number of countries on the Security Council(there are presently 15 countries with ten of the countries periodically rotating.). 

It was good stuff and impressive the way Dorrien testified that the only reason he follows and keeps track of all this political stuff is because he’s sees it as the way he follows Christ(in suffering).  I found it impressive an maybe looking into transferring to Union Theological Center if I could get funding…

dlw