The Black Social Gospel as Rainbow Politics

Abstract

The role of the Black social gospel in undergirding racial justice organizing, politics, and church preaching vastly transcended the debates that consumed academic theologians. Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson went on to highly prominent political careers that symbolize, between them, the march of the civil rights movement into electoral politics. The political struggles that consumed Young and Jackson drove the Black social gospel in ways that impacted millions of people. Both combined an anti-racist postcolonial approach to world politics with a vigorous Black capitalism, imagining a new world order shaped by Black internationalists and enlightened corporations. Both contended that Black internationalists and Black capitalists held better values than the White versions--or at least they should. Jackson wanted to be two things that conflicted, a King-like moral prophet and a leading politician. He oscillated for many years, never quite willing or able to stop wavering. He shared with King the powerful Black folk spirituality of the NBCUSA, which Jackson inflected, like MLK, with social gospel theology and politics. Jackson was a lodestar to many Black liberationists and progressives finding their way in the shadow years. He radicalized King’s approach by collaborating with Black nationalists, aligning PUSH with Black Power, developing a Black national agenda, and flirting with third party politics. He showed there was a third way between civil rights liberalism and the nationalist and left-wing sects that derided Jackson as a dead-end opportunist. This third way was always subject to Jackson’s wavering and whims. Jackson gyrated until his Rainbow Coalition campaigns of 1984 and 1988 harnessed him to the concrete, historic, high profile, and draining demands of running for president.