Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/author/a_dorrieng/)
Gary Dorrien teaches at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University. His many books include Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit, which won the PROSE Award, The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel, which won the Grawemeyer Award, and Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel, which won the American Library Association Award. This article adapts material from his new book, American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory (Yale University Press).
The disintegration of the Old Left and the New Left in the late 1960s yielded two new organizations that sought to renew democratic socialist politics. The one founded by Michael Lerner went on to play an outsized role in the rise of a Gramscian Cultural Left.
In this historical overview of democratic socialism, Gary Dorrien claims that “[e]conomic democracy is the heart of democratic socialism and the test of its ambition for social justice.”
A tradition within modern social Christianity that should be renowned is the black social gospel. Long before Martin Luther King Jr. emerged, there was a black church tradition that fused the racial justice politics of abolitionist religion with the social gospel emphasis on economic democracy, comprehensive social justice, and modern criticism.
At its best, theology begins with the experience of the Holy and then presses to a prophetic demand for justice and the good.
It took James H. Cone four weeks to write his first book, Black Theology and Black Power, a work surging with revolutionary expectation. It took him six years to write his latest work, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, a book of haunting sorrow and beauty.
Four years ago we seemed to take a shortcut to some kind of national redemption. The same nation that enslaved African Americans until 1865 and imposed a vicious century-long regime of segregation and everyday abuse upon them elected an African American to its presidency. The same nation that elected twelve slave masters to its presidency elected a president whose wife was a descendant of American slaves. The same nation that never would have elected a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement to national office fulfilled some of the movement’s most idealistic hymnody.