Shapes of Liberation and Wholeness

Abstract

The Black social gospel is the self-identifying touchstone of many Black churches and a reminder of America’s greatest story, the civil rights movement of the King era. In the generation of Ransom and Wells-Barnett it named all Black Americans who espoused a social justice theology on behalf of the new abolition, whether or not they employed the specific jargon of the social gospel. Today it should not be restricted to figures who keep alive the idioms of the early generations or the King era. The past half-century of Black social Christianity includes many figures who devoted their careers to “fulfilling Martin’s dream,” as they said, but does not consist only of those in this line. After King was assassinated, every figure and organization associated with the Black social gospel reeled from his loss and the traumas of the 1960s. Yet the Black social gospel thrived in seven spheres, undergirding the careers of civil rights leaders who became prominent public figures, lifting second-tier civil rights leaders to leadership positions, electing hundreds of Black mayors, constituting a kind of new orthodoxy in thousands of Black congregations, raising a new generation of female leaders, undergirding a new generation of denominational leaders, and creating a new Black intelligentsia in the academy, especially theological education.