Dorrien won the
American Library Association's Choice Award in 2009 for his book
Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition, which
The Christian Century described as "magnificent, sprawling and monumental." He won the
Association of American Publishers' PROSE Award in 2012 for his book
Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology, described as "a brilliant and much needed account of the influence of
Immanuel Kant and the tradition of
post-Kantian idealism on modern theology." He won the
Grawemeyer Award in 2017 for his book
The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel, described by theologian William Stacey Johnson as, "a magisterial treatment of a neglected stream of American religious history presented by one of this generation's premiere interpreters of modern religious thought performing at the top of his game." He won the Choice Award in 2018 for his book
Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel, which
Choice described as "intellectual history at its finest...A triumph of careful scholarship, rigorous argument, clear prose, unblinking judgments and groundbreaking conclusions…indispensable." He won the American Library Association's Choice Award for the third time in 2023 for his book
American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory, described in
Current Affairs as “a masterpiece.
American Democratic Socialism will be the definitive history for some time.” He won the Gandhi King Mandela Peace Prize in 2024 at
Morehouse College in
Atlanta, Georgia; the prize citation commended his “distinguished teaching and magisterial, rigorous, monumental, and definitive scholarship that counter and disrupt White racist theology and ethical inquiry by centering the truths of Black life, Black Christian witness, and political imagination.” ==Books==