Gary Dorrien is the author of the magisterial three-volume survey of American liberal theology, The Making of American Liberal Theology, Volume 2, Vol 3. He describes his understanding of the Occupy movement, and also has a Q&A, in the journal America. In the Q&A, he highlights the work of Occupy Faith.
Occupy the Future: Highlights on the flip:
After describing the basic state and background of the Occupy movement, Dorrien highlights the basic difference between the social vision of Occupy and the Tea Party as representative of broad historical trends:
For over two centuries, our nation has debated two fundamentally different answers to the question of what kind of country the United States should be. The first envisions a society that provides unrestricted liberty to acquire wealth. The second envisions a “realized democracy,” in which rights over society’s major institutions are established.
In the first view, the right to property is lifted above the right to self-government, and the just society minimizes the equalizing role of government. In the second view, self-government is considered superior to property; and the just society places democratic checks on social, political and economic power. Both of these visions are ideal types, deeply rooted in U.S. history, that reflect inherent tensions between classic liberalism and democracy. Both have limited and conditioned each other in the American experience. But in every generation one of them gains predominance over the other, shaping the terms of the debate and telling the decisive story of its time. Today an extreme version of the first of these two views is being asserted aggressively. According to this perspective, a great people is stymied by a voracious, intrusive federal government; Americans are overtaxed; and government is an incompetent, even malicious social force.
Claims of this sort have deep cultural roots; the Tea Party did not invent them. But this ideology finds no endorsement whatsoever in the modern Catholic and ecumenical Protestant traditions of social ethics. That ethical system begins with the acceptance of mutual obligation and a firm belief in the common good.
This notion of "mutual obligation" is one that secular liberal discourse does not focus on, and one that I think religious voices would do well to reassert. Obligation has a different kind of moral force than empathy, one that maintains a kind of constancy beyond our ability to maintain empathy in the midst of the changing circumstances and moods we all go through.
The rest of the article outlines more practical challenges - tax rates, fair trade vs. free trade - in light of the basic commitment to the common good. He starts off with three points about taxation:
1. Americans are not overtaxed.
2. The shift to lower tax rates are the reason America fell strongly into debt.
3. Tax rates are not the most important factor in economic growth.
He moves on to consider the practical goals that would address wealth inequality:
1. Create public banks.
2. Support real bank reform.
3. Support alternative production models
In the Q&A, he addresses the question of religion in relation to Occupy:
What role can religious communities play in the Occupy movement?
The Social Gospel movement took off, in the 1880s and 1890s, because trade union leaders accused the churches of not caring about the poor and excluded. The founders of the Social Gospel realized that it was pointless to defend Christianity if the churches continued to take a supposedly neutral position on the rights of poor and working class people to organize, fight for their rights and expand American democracy.
That's pretty much where we are again today, except that in our case, we have a 120-year history of modern social ethical teaching in the Catholic and ecumenical Protestant churches to draw upon. If people suffer because of politics and economics, then the Christian community has to deal with politics and economics. This proposition, a century ago, was no less slippery, controversial and fraught with peril as it is today. But it is as true today as it was then.