A Darkly Radiant Vision

Abstract

This book is an interpretation of Black social Christianity since the early 1970s. It stands on its own and concludes a trilogy, completing the author’s argument that the Black social gospel is a tradition of unsurpassed importance in American life and remains ongoing. The first book of the trilogy, The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (2015), argued that four schools of Black social Christianity arose during the Progressive era and created the specific social gospel tradition that led to MLK and the civil rights movement. The second book, Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel (2018), argued that the Black social gospel provided the social justice theology and politics espoused by King and his followers in the civil rights movement. A Darkly Radiant Vision is more like the first book than the second for being narrow and broad, interpreting the ongoing King tradition within the context of contemporary Black social Christianity. From the beginning the Black social gospel was a broader phenomenon than the line that led to King. This book argues that today the liberationist social gospel of King is the touchstone of a broad Black social Christianity consisting of varieties of liberation and womanist theology, Black religious thought, progressive religion, broad-based interfaith organizing, and global solidarity politics.