Ecumenical Democracy
Recovering the Spirit of the American Promise
A meditation on reason, community, and the fragile meaning of the American Dream
By Clay Hipp
I sincerely hope that this title gives one pause.
Ecumenical.
I do not use this word lightly.
It is a word commonly used in conjunction with religion, however it should not be taken in any way to suggest that the two should be merged.
Rather, I use the word here to suggest that the survival of our “American Dream” must become much more inclusive—each voice heard, each voice pondered—in order to re-establish the idea of a more perfect union.
Having spent nearly forty years teaching law and public policy at the college level, I will not sit by and watch it die.
This is a completely non-political look at what it might take for us, together, to preserve our collective “freedoms” and move forward into the light.
Please consider this small personal essay, offered in honor of the 250th anniversary of our beginning—the American Dream.
This could be a dangerous site….
Taken the wrong way, it might seem an attack on “capitalism” itself.
I urge you not to take it as such.
It arises from long experience teaching law and public policy in several business schools.
The current state of the Union is precarious, to say the least.
Much has happened to the American Dream.
In the last fifty or so years, the nation has made a significant transition—from commonality to individuality, from the “New Deal” of the Roosevelt years to the anti-regulation (new morning in America) movement that gained momentum during the Reagan years.
Serious questions are now being asked about whether the “market economy” has been, on balance, a good thing—or an unfortunate evolution.
I have written and spoken about these issues through the years and will, on occasion, offer thoughts that might help us understand where we are—and where we might go.
The site is apolitical.
As I indicated in the introduction to this section, this subject is fraught with controversy.
I am most interested in what it all means for our country.
Here, I offer a draft of a piece I have been working on. It will give you a picture of my current thinking.
Ode to the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration — The American Dream
I believe firmly in the power of reason.
It is one of the greatest gifts of human evolution.
Our ability to analyze available evidence—to reach conclusions, to solve problems—seems to set us apart from other members of the animal kingdom (though perhaps there is more yet to learn on this issue).
But this power of reason is not all that we are.
In fact, if it were, we would be much less than we are.
Too great a preference for “rationality” has the power to make us less than we could—should— be (more on this later.)
In 1776, we had a problem.
The vast land between the seas lacked the option for its people to decide how best to live.
We were told our limitations by a sovereign state that gave us little, if any, choice of self-determination.
When dissatisfaction with rule by monarchy became unbearable, a large contingency of the “subjects” made demands for change.
When those demands were not met, in fact were dismissed, physical confrontations followed—and were met with force.
The leaders of the colonists gathered and chose a remedy.
The Declaration of Independence was that remedy.
Please read carefully the opening salvo of the rationale for this action:
“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another… a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal… that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights… Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from teh consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate, that governments long established, should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
Is this the foundation of the “American Dream”?
Taken as a whole—is this a “rationalist” argument for separation, or is it something much. much more?
This begs the question: What is the American Dream?
I find this question carries increasing significance in the twenty-first century.
How did we arrive at this place and this time?
Is our current upheaval the result of pursuit of the dream—or a sign that we have lost our collective way?
To put it bluntly:
“Is our capitalist, market-based system consistent with the Declaration—or a bastardly aberration of its content?”
I would argue the latter.
Allow me to start with this observation.
The Declaration began by stating that all men are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights—among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Nineteen years later, in the Fifth Amendment to the new Constitution the phrase morphed into the unwarranted taking of life, liberty, and property by Congress.
At the signing of the Declaration, the pursuit of happiness was an “inalienable right”.
Suddenly, individuals had the right to “possess” property, rather than a sacred right to pursue happiness.
What happened and why does it matter?
If one researches the phrase “pursuit of happiness,” it is more difficult to determine the inclusion of the clause than one might imagine.
Its sources lie in both historical and philosophical traditions.
The relationship between the two phrases—happiness and property—is, at best, ambiguous. But parsing it is essential to the questions being asked here.
Brent Strawn, editor of The Bible and the Pursuit of Happiness: What the Old and New Testaments Teach Us About the Good Life (Oxford University Press, 2012), notes:
“It may be that the American Dream, if parsed as lots of money and the like, isn’t a sufficient definition of the good life or true happiness. It may, in fact, be detrimental.”
Further:
“In the Declaration, “the pursuit of happiness” is listed with “life” and “liberty”—qualities of existence, states of being.”
If this is of interest, I leave it to you to do the research and make up your own mind.
For me, it is sufficiently troubling to warrant serious reflection on the state of our nation—and the meaning of democracy itself.
The second paragraph of the Declaration makes a compelling case for throwing off monarchy. (See also Common Sense by Thomas Paine, among others.)
Patriot or not, it is difficult to disagree with the logic.
It seems to “make sense.”
But if we look at it another way—as a foundation for the American Dream—we must look just as carefully at the opening.
Prefaces matter, they set the stage.
Should we not take great heed of those words as we consider the rest?
Are they not the context for everything that follows?
If that has pertinence, what might we conclude about a second major reason to wonder whether the moving force was “merely” rational?
Back to The Declaration:
“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them…
The separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation”
This statement seems to directly oppose the idea that the declaration is simply a rational political conclusion. In fact, it recognizes and affirms their partnership in the declaration.
This is where the current dilemma requires an inquiring mind to consider the evidence about whether this country, in relying upon a rationally based economic idea, may have wandered far from the “revolutionary” ideas that made the American Dream possible.
Who indeed are we and who, based on this founding document, should we begin the process of becoming?
Have property rights subsumed our unalienable right to pursue happiness?
Or have we simply redefined happiness itself—as wealth, ownership, and individual gain?
Perhaps this “little mind” is ill-equipped to answer such questions alone. Still, I offer these thoughts for consideration.
I ask you, what is the essential idea that has brought us to this moment?
In the last fifty years, we have traveled far from the collective mind of the country that was defined in the late 1960s.
We had won a great war.
The economy was booming.
We were building towns and cities, owning homes and automobiles, pursuing jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities, and machines were replacing some hard tasks and creating time for play beyond work.
It was easy to believe we were “on top of the world.”
Yet the cracks had already begun to form.
One side saw prosperity as the fulfillment of opportunity for all. The other saw it as a threat—to the environment, to equity, to the future itself.
Manufacturing, while booming, was devouring natural resources at an alarming rate and destroying the landscapes from which they were extracted.
Chemicals were being used to increase farming production and to eradicate infestations of “pests” that ate crops and spread disease.
Threats from abroad were beginning to worry policy makers about threats to democracy.
Economic reports showed that our burgeoning economy was not benefitting a significant portion of the disadvantaged citizenry.
Suddenly, domestic tranquility began to strain.
Racial inequality had not been ended by efforts at desegregation and threats from abroad were resulting in “saber rattling” in Washington.
The economic, corporate community was already voicing concerns about the threat that federal regulation of the marketplace and the freedom to compete.
The Environmental movement inspired by Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” was a counterforce and growing in support.
The “hippy movement” among the flower children of San Francisco, though viewed originally as a cultural anomaly, became an irritant—especially after it joined the anti-Vietnam War movement.
Then the new president who promised to end the war signed two significant bills: the Endangered Species Act and another creating Environmental Protection Act giving two governmental agencies significant powers to interfere in private activities.
Several prescient academic economists had seen this coming and began writing papers urging that the Roosevelt New Deal needed to be cut back, that too much power to regulate business activities and severely hinder the ability of the free market to operate “efficiently”.
The pushback had begun.
It does not take an education in economics to understand the next move. The leader of the ”free market” economic movement was Milton Friedman from the University of Chicago.
In a 1970 New York Times Magazine essay, he is famous for having said:
“…there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud”
Milton argued that free markets are essential for preserving both individual and economic freedom. He and his colleagues had been writing and publishing papers along these lines since the late nineteen fifties and this was their true and clear clarion call to the public economy.
Captains of industry hailed it, and business school faculties adopted it gladly and preached it to future managers.
It also struck a chord politically. Future Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and then the younger Bush campaigned on these principles, and an ever more affluent population also took them to heart.
Federal judges appointed by these administrations were also steeped in the idea that government regulations were hindering freedom of action and expression.
Some of them reached the Supreme Court and, when they formed a majority, gave us the famous Citizens United case. In the majority opinion, written by Justice Kennedy, the Court held that limiting independent political spending based on corporate identity is a form of censorship and violates the First Amendment’s protection of the free flow of ideas (asserting that the latter does not pose a substantial risk of corruption [!] that would justify a ban on speech).
(One might counter that ideas supported by inordinate amounts of money are hard to counter for us with less access to media of all kinds).
As we now know beyond little doubt, it opened the gates to millions of dollars from corporations or their captains, influencing individual elections in many jurisdictions. It seems that some opinions and ideas are not truly “free.”
One person standing on a street corner is perhaps a bit overmatched. It has been reported that at least one election featured handing out checks to voters in plain sight.
All right, time for us to ask questions.
Is this our destination?
Is this the “market” that we truly want—a market society in which all decisions are transactional, not just those in the commercial world?
Should politics, in which we choose our current and future leaders, be based on “the highest bidder”?
Or should we prefer a system in which the common good is equally important, so that each has the freedom to pursue the individual’s “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness”?
How free do you feel in this version of the American Dream?
A philosopher once said:
“The best definition of a good free market society is one in which you can only get rich by making other people better off” —Ezra Klein, podcast with Jonathan Haidt, April 1, 2025.
This writer says, without hesitation, that the Declaration and Constitution clearly support a system that stands for a much higher respect for universal rights—giving us boundaries for rational thinking that might otherwise favor unfettered individuality—even though it was clearly “right” to throw off authoritarian power, no matter how it arises.
(But I have a strong feeling that I “might as well try and catch the wind.”)
Ok, I have said enough for now.
All I know is that whatever this nation is—
it is not finished.
And I find myself wishing for us
the very things David Mallett gives voice to in his marvelous song Celebration.
I leave you with it…..