The Darkly Radiant Vision of the Black Social Gospel

In the 1880s and 1890s, a stream of Black Methodist and Baptist ministers pressed a desperate question: What would a new abolition be? Abolitionism and the Civil War had come and gone, Reconstruction had come and been forsaken, and a mania of racist terrorism descended on Black Americans. The U.S. imposed a racial caste system lacking any parallel in the post-slavery Americas. Lynching backstopped the Black Codes, the 14^th and 15^th Amendments were eviscerated in most of the South, and a post-Confederate grievance mythology about a Lost Cause grew into a civil religion. 

The idea that churches must be involved in political struggles for justice to be faithful to the gospel is disputed in every generation. Those who affirm it are always a minority.

The penalties for disputing any aspect of Jim Crow were swift and lethal. Baptist cleric William Simmons, AME Zion cleric Alexander Walters, and AME cleric Reverdy C. Ransom enlisted churches to join political struggles against all of it. Mostly they failed. The Afro-American League folded, the Afro-American Council had a few good years before Booker T. Washington hijacked it, and the Niagara Movement of W. E. B. Du Bois sputtered and collapsed. 

A New Abolitionism

The founders of the Black social gospel kept pressing for an activist social justice religion—a new abolitionism fired by gospel faith. They taught that God cares about the poor, the excluded, the denigrated, and the kingdom of God. They preached about equality, democracy, righteousness, and Jesus loving all the children. Not to enter the social and political struggle for justice was to betray Jesus. 

The Black social gospel tradition they forged became the moral epicenter of American religious thought and politics in the 20^th century, and it still is. Its vision applies to theological education reform, political strategy, and social healing. It continues to sift the creative parts of Western civilization from its racist, colonial, and nationalist underpinnings. For Martin Luther King Jr. and Howard Thurman, especially, the language of religious idealism, which identifies spirit and reason with the will, was distinctly suited to theologize struggles for human flourishing. But the Black social gospel has not been treated, until recently, as a religious, activist, and intellectual tradition, let alone a great one. 

The social gospel movement of the historic white Protestant churches is renowned and heavily chronicled. It arose in tandem with the Progressive era and was already a national movement by the mid-1880s. The Black social gospel arose during the same period. It advocated protest activism within reluctant religious communities and helped to create an alternative public sphere of excluded voices. The founders of the civil rights organization that did not fold—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—believed that the best name for their organization was the New Abolition, except if they called it that, they would never attain a single chapter in the South. 

A Personal Quest

For 20 years it frustrated me that almost no literature existed on the Black social gospel as a tradition of thought and activism. The Black social gospel was like the other social gospel in fashioning numerous ideologies and theologies, but here the defining issue was obvious, a matter of survival: upholding the dignity of Black persons in the face of racist tyranny. It was clear to me that the tradition of Black social Christianity outstripped its white social gospel counterpart in its political and moral consequences. It played a key role in creating the civil rights movement—America’s greatest liberation movement—and a large role in carrying it out. The case for the Black social gospel was always there in the writings of the founders, the mediating generation of ministerial leaders Benjamin E. Mays and Mordecai Johnson, and the stalwarts of the King era. I sprinkled into numerous books and articles my argument that the Black social gospel was a great tradition that someone better than me should interpret in a multivolume history. 

Six scholarly fallacies thwarted the Black social gospel from being recognized as a tradition at all, let alone one of our most important traditions. Those misjudgments said: (1) It consisted in the early 20^th century of only a handful of ministers; (2) Black churches were too self-centered, conservative, and preoccupied with survival to advocate a social justice agenda; (3) The social gospel was a white Progressive movement that avoided the racial justice issue; (4) ministers Reverdy Ransom and Adam Clayton Powell Sr. were marginal figures who had little impact; (5) Religious intellectuals were irrelevant by the end of the 19^th century, so it doesn’t matter if Black churches produced public intellectuals; (6) Reinhold Niebuhr shredded the social gospel, so there’s no usable history there.

“People are Dying!”

My friend and Union Seminary colleague James Cone knew my work better than anyone. We had lunches that stretched into dinner time, and he implored me to take on the Black social gospel history: “For God’s sake, Gary, it’s your obsession. Just start writing it.” First, though, I published a doorstopper book titled Social Ethics in the Making (2009), and soon Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit (2012). Jim grew impatient: “People are dying! How can you write so much about Hegel?” I finally began the big project: the first volume became The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (Yale, 2015), which tracks the specific line that led to King and three closely related currents in which women and Black nationalists played important roles. 

This book refuted the regnant conventions. In fact: (1) There were many Black social gospel advocates and leaders; (2) They inveighed assiduously against the provincialism problem; (3) They applied the justice activism of the social gospel to the racist evils of American society, sometimes forging alliances with white social gospelers in the ecumenical movement; (4) Ransom and Powell were sensational figures who reached as far as they could; (5) The tired assumption about religious intellectuals was a prejudice of secular historians; (6) Niebuhr brilliantly skewered idealistic and pacifist strains of the social gospel, but his polemics misrepresented the social gospel and obscured his own debts to it. I argued that Black churches have always been widely diverse theologically, politically, culturally, and socially, united only by opposition to racism. Many of them are, and always have been, very conservative. But this fact only accentuates the importance of the Black social gospel. 

The idea that churches must be involved in political struggles for justice to be faithful to the gospel is disputed in every generation. Those who affirm it are always a minority. Walter Rauschenbusch, the icon of the Progressive Era social gospel, refused for most of his career to employ the term “social gospel.” He said there is no legitimate non-social gospel, so why should he concede otherwise by adding a redundant adjective? Rauschenbusch gave in only near the end of his life, in 1917, lamenting that a non-social gospel was the norm. Those who dissented from it, like him, had to wear a special name. The founders of the Black social gospel confronted this problem in a far more oppressive context. The Black church was born liberationist, yet it was mostly averse to social justice activism. Those who preached about building protest organizations were always a minority. 

Tracking a Complex History

My chief concern was to reestablish the category of Black social gospel amid its profuse complexity, contending that Martin Luther King Jr. did not come from nowhere. But I also expanded the category beyond the line leading from Ransom and Wright to Johnson and Mays to King and Pauli Murray. To focus only on the group surrounding Du Bois would have yielded a parade of males, the forerunners of the very male group that surrounded King in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The women in this story who broke the grip of male domination and presumption were creative, stubborn, independent, and tough, building new organizations and working with religious communities that denied women the right to lead. 

I did not render Du Bois as a church Christian against his will, but I pushed back against the many Du Bois scholars who are tone deaf to his deep, vibrant, yearning spirituality. Du Bois had a powerful religious wellspring and a practical version of the social gospel. He said Christianity rightly understood is about sympathy and unselfishness, giving your life for others in sacrificial struggle. Du Bois tweaked 1 Corinthians 13 on faith, hope, and love, contending that work, love, and sacrifice are saving, “and the greatest of these is sacrifice.” The early Du Bois conceived the divine in Hegelian fashion as the outward-reaching Spirit of freedom. Middle Du Bois conjured a Black baby Jesus in his essay, “The Second Coming,” a Black Jesus in his scathing essay, “Jesus Christ in Texas,” and a hymn in which the Buddha walked with Christ. The later Du Bois, though drifting to the pro-Communist Left, still wrote about saving “the tattered shreds of God.” 

Many readers of his time had no doubt that Du Bois had a spiritual sensibility. They caught that a religious, arguably Christian passion lay behind his furious attacks on unworthy ministers and church dogmatism. They discerned that he agreed with them about the Black church, even if he didn’t go to church: Nothing compared to the Black church as a source of inspiration, hope, solidarity, identity, belonging, entertainment, moral language, and transcendence. Any justice movement worth building had to share in the life of the Black church, speaking its language of struggle, hope, sacrifice, love, and redemption. 

I went through a health crisis when I wrote The New Abolition and its sequel, Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel (Yale, 2018). It was the highlight of my academic career when I made it to the page-proof stage of The New Abolition, knowing that this book would get out there regardless of what happened to me. Breaking White Supremacy poured out of me because I had spent my entire life preparing to write it. King was a lodestar figure to me when I grew up in a working-class, nominally Catholic family in mid-Michigan and the civil rights movement entered its climactic phase. Then he was cut down, and he became a Jesus figure who died for us. The story of the crucified Jesus and the King story folded together in my mind and feeling. That was the extent of my religious worldview when I squeaked into college, mostly to play sports. All these years later it is still my bedrock. 

The Womanist Presence

Cone, J. Deotis Roberts, and Gayraud Wilmore pioneered three Black liberation theologies that, in their different ways, privileged Black experience as a point of departure. Cone combined a Black Power movement concept of Blackness with a neo-orthodox version of Christian orthodoxy. Roberts combined a social gospel concept of Blackness with select aspects of liberal theology. Wilmore conceived Black theology as a subordinate enterprise within the non-Christian category of Black thought. Debates over these issues consumed Black theology before Black women entered the academy in the 1980s. Many of them judged that no existing liberation theology or form of Black religious thought worked for them. They found godsend deliverance in the writings of Alice Walker, who wrote about the distinct folk spirituality of Southern Black women. Walker wrote in 1982 that a womanist is a Black feminist or feminist of color who is always in charge, often considered to be willful, loves other women, is committed to survival and the wholeness of people, and loves herself. She named the ethic and sensibility by which many Black women entering the theological academy established their home within it. 

The founding womanists—Katie Cannon, Jacquelyn Grant, Delores Williams, and Kelly Brown Douglas—described a shared female sensibility, an ethic of communal support and reciprocity, a commitment to the folk wisdom of Black American women, an immanent sense of the divine, and for all but Grant, a rejection of all forms of atonement theology. Most womanists discounted Cone’s heroic male language of revolutionary liberation and his claim that Black people are united by the experience of suffering at the hands of white oppressors. They wrote about seeking wholeness in one’s life, being attuned to the God within.

The womanist founders were theologically creative without replicating the claim of Cone and Roberts that Black theology began with them. The tendency of liberationists to disparage their predecessors was steeped in trauma, the searing aftermath of the murder of King and other enormities in 1968. The grip of trauma had to loosen before it was possible in the mid-1980s for Cone, Roberts, Wilmore, and Cornel West to change how they talked about King. By then the Black Power movement had faded. Civil rights activism became institutionalized, King’s disciples ran for political office, and prosaic everydayness prevailed in the churches. Now theologians and historians remembered that the real MLK was a democratic socialist, a radical anti-militarist, and a de-colonizing internationalist steeped in the best parts of modern theology. 

Dehumanizing Times

I wrote The New Abolition during the excruciating year that Eric Garner was strangled to death with a banned chokehold by New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo, the year that Michael Brown was gunned down by police in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, and a Staten Island grand jury voted not to indict Pantaleo. Brown’s blood oozing for hours on the street cried out against the racism that criminalizes and dehumanizes Black bodies. In New York, we had massive demonstrations every night for weeks that chanted Garner’s dying words, “I can’t breathe.” 

Jim Cone could be dour about trends in theology and academic politics, which caused him to fear that he was losing his enthusiasm for teaching. It troubled him that theologians didn’t grapple strenuously with the doctrines, and thus didn’t expound or defend systematic theology. Jim was justly proud of the theologizing that lit up his books A Black Theology of Liberation (1970) and God of the Oppressed (1975). It thrilled him to add to these works The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011), which became his favorite among his books. But every year he read term papers that dismissed systematic theology as an antiquated enterprise, and papers that recycled too uncritically the claim that he wrongly reduced Blackness to a unifying, ontological category, a mere opposite of whiteness. Jim ontologized Blackness only in a cultural sense: To him, ontological Blackness was about fighting off oppression and having the courage-to-be, not about reifying race. But Jim keenly grasped why these distinctions cut no ice with his critics. His experience was different from theirs, and every Union student who took his courses heard him say: “Work out your own perspective based on your own experience.”  

On April 28, 2018, we lost Jim to cancer. I eulogized him on April 30 at Union’s memorial service. Eight days later, Raphael Warnock eulogized him at the funeral service at Riverside Church, declaring that to measure Cone’s significance in modern theology, we must distinguish between “BC and AC.” Theology was one thing Before Cone, and something very different After Cone.

Once I began the third volume, A Darkly Radiant Vision: The Black Social Gospel in the Shadow of MLK (Yale, 2023), during the Covid pandemic of 2020, I found that writing it was made both easier and harder by the fact that nearly every figure in it is a friend of mine. The book highlights the stories of Black theology, the womanist tradition, and forms of activist struggle featuring William Barber, Traci Blackmon, Lawrence E. Carter, Monica Coleman, Michael Eric Dyson, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Walter Fluker, Robert Franklin, Obery Hendricks Jr., Willie Jennings, Eugene Rivers, Eboni Marshall Turman, Raphael Warnock, and Cornel West.[1]Some are straight-line descendants of King while others are steeped in postmodern and womanist idioms that King never imagined. My account runs long on fluidity and multiplicity, arguing that traditions of liberationist struggle acquire new generations only by refashioning and renewing themselves, and that Black social Christianity owes its vitality to leaders grounded in religious communities and determined to be relevant to ongoing struggles for justice.

That could have been the concluding note, but at the end I circled back to the personalist social gospel of MLK and Howard Thurman, contending that no recent religious philosophy has surpassed it. King and Thurman were steeped in both theoretical streams of personal idealism—neo-Kantian subjective idealism and neo-Hegelian dialectics. Both conceived personality as the bearer of common spirit and the principle of individuality, community, and the divine. The soul is essentially active, a shining present of feelings and interactions, not a substance. God is the spirit of the world that lights our souls. MLK and Thurman believed that matter and spirit are aspects of one unitary process of personal will. Everything in life is a function or activity of divine willing. 

What the World Needs Now

Today we must reinvent theological education to be as large-scale, expansive, and interreligious as King and Thurman were, but also queer and eco-feminist and womanist, building intersectional movements bent on abolishing domination itself. The differences between King the movement leader and Thurman the mystic sage loom large in the story of the Black social gospel. King brilliantly exemplified his twofold theme that freedom has no reality apart from power and power is integral to hope and liberation. But Thurman’s influence is stronger today than ever. His interfaith mysticism speaks to “spiritual with religion” and “spiritual not religious” seekers, both activist and not. His emphasis on spirituality is for many a lifeline against alienation, consumerism, nihilism, dogmatism, and especially, everyday meaninglessness. His counsel that people should ask themselves what makes them come alive, not what the world needs—because what the world needs is fully alive people—inspires countless readers within and outside religious communities. So also does his plain rejection of all forms of authoritarian religion. His emphasis on the “religion of Jesus” renewed a venerable trope of liberal theology and improved upon it, placing Jesus among the world’s disinherited. Thurman looked for life, love, and truth wherever he went, seeking the larger ecumenism through Black faith and an expansive mystic and philosophical bent. 

In his last years he prophesied that Black Americans would soar past the despair of the 1970s. He insisted that no barrier to human community stands forever. He could imagine young Thurmans of the future who stared at the stars thinking lonely thoughts about where they came from and the meaning of their lives. Thurman said they will prophesy against isolation, provincialism, and separatism. Communities flourish only when their boundaries give way to “the coming of others from beyond them.” Someday, he said, the realization will spread like a contagion that no community can feed for long on itself. Then the colossal harm of centuries of racism will give way to a new heart and a new identity yielding a feeling of belonging in which our spirits are no longer afraid. All human beings belong to each other. 

I believe that no one in U.S. American history compares to King as a prophetic moral leader. But in some ways, Thurman reached higher, and his legacy grows evermore. 

Gary Dorrien teaches at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University. The New Abolition won the Grawemeyer Award. His American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory (Yale, 2021) won the Choice Award of the American Library Association. An Episcopal priest, he earned a Ph.D. from Union Graduate School. Two new books„ Anglican Identities: Logos Idealism, Imperial Whiteness, Commonweal Ecumenism and Over from Union Road: My Christian-Left-Intellectual Life, were published by Baylor University Press.This article is adapted from his address at Morehouse College upon receiving the Gandhi-King-Mandela Peace Prize in April. The prize honors work that advances nonviolent social change. Yale University Press published Dorrien’s three-volume history of the Black social gospel, the first comprehensive chronicle of Black social Christianity.