Progressive Evangelicals and the Pursuit of Social Justice

Brantley W. Gasaway

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781469617725
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469617732
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: North American History

In this compelling history of progressive evangelicalism, Brantley Gasaway examines a dynamic though often overlooked movement within American Christianity today. Gasaway focuses on left-leaning groups, such as Sojourners and Evangelicals for Social Action, that emerged in the early 1970s, prior to the rise of the more visible Religious Right. He identifies the distinctive “public theology” — a set of biblical interpretations regarding the responsibility of Christians to promote social justice — that has animated progressive evangelicals' activism and bound together their unusual combination of political positions.

The book analyzes how prominent leaders, including Jim Wallis, Ron Sider, and Tony Campolo, responded to key political and social issues over the past four decades. Progressive evangelicals combated racial inequalities, endorsed feminism, promoted economic justice, and denounced American nationalism and militarism. At the same time, most leaders opposed abortion and refused to affirm homosexual behavior, even as they defended gay civil rights. Gasaway demonstrates that, while progressive evangelicals have been caught in the crossfire of partisan conflicts and public debates over the role of religion in politics, they have offered a significant alternative to both the Religious Right and the political left.

1. The Rise of the Contemporary Progressive Evangelical Movement

Over the Thanksgiving weekend of 1973, a small group of evangelical leaders gathered at the hotel of Chicago’s Wabash Avenue YMCA for an unconventional workshop. Their goal—drafting a statement that declared Christians’ responsibilities for social action and reform—distinguished participants as a self-conscious minority within the broader evangelical movement. They rejected the prevailing view that Christians should primarily address people’s eternal spiritual welfare and social problems through evangelism. Instead, these evangelicals believed that faithfulness to the Bible requires equal concern for people’s temporal needs and the pursuit of justice through social and political activism. At the end of the workshop, participants issued a document—the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern—that they hoped would change the course of evangelicals’ public engagement.

As an evangelical manifesto, the Chicago Declaration was remarkable for its time. The statement called American evangelicals to confession and repentance for failing to confront “social and political injustice.” Endorsers acknowledged dissonance between God’s love and justice and evangelicals’ own apathy toward “those suffering social abuses”—the poor, the oppressed, and racial minorities. In addition to identifying American society as unjust, the declaration criticized evangelicals’ complicity in both economic exploitation and militaristic nationalism that compounded global suffering and violence. Endorsers also confessed evangelicals’ wrongful support of male domination and female passivity, calling instead for “mutual submission.” Thus the overwhelming thrust of the Chicago Declaration centered upon a summons to public engagement on behalf of progressive political and social reforms. Both the tenor and vocabulary pointedly countered the narrow religious preoccupation, apolitical inclinations, and conservative orientation characteristic of most evangelicals. Embodying the core convictions of contemporary progressive evangelicalism, the Chicago Declaration captured the vision of a new movement of evangelicals committed to social justice and progressive politics.¹

Publication of the 1973 Chicago Declaration culminated the pioneering efforts of early progressive evangelical leaders. Beginning in earnest in the mid-1960s, a vanguard of activists, evangelists, academics, and theologians began to criticize evangelicals’ lack of social concern and public engagement. Through magazines, books, conferences, and even political activism, they urged evangelical audiences to fulfill the biblical mandate to promote social justice. In particular, two journals—The Other Side and the Post-American—became nuclei in the emerging progressive evangelical movement by establishing popular forums for its ideals and attracting sympathetic advocates. The editors and contributors to these journals propelled the rise of contemporary evangelical progressivism by attempting to reform evangelicals’ social and political perspectives. Over the previous half century, and in contrast to more liberal Protestants inspired by the Social Gospel movement, evangelicals had channeled almost all of their energies into evangelistic and religious campaigns. While most were not indifferent to social problems, they believed that authentic social change would come only through the spiritual redemption and moral transformation of individuals. Politics seemed to affect only temporal matters and potentially distracted from the more urgent task of saving souls, and thus evangelicals largely eschewed political activism beyond general support for conservative politicians and anticommunism. Yet pioneering progressive evangelicals regarded this religious preoccupation, individualistic social ethic, and apolitical conservatism as unbiblical. They insisted that the Bible calls Christians to forms of public engagement that directly address social problems and advance social justice—tasks, leaders argued, that requires progressive political participation. As The Other Side and the Post-American popularized these arguments and attracted influential supporters, a network of progressive evangelical leaders emerged in the early 1970s. Their collaborative efforts led to the 1973 Thanksgiving workshop, and the resultant Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern established the progressive evangelical movement as a recognizable faction within American evangelicalism. While the thunderous rise of the Religious Right at the end of the decade attracted more attention and support, a small coalition of evangelical progressives coordinated the first campaigns to push evangelicals back into the political sphere.

MAGAZINES FOR A MOVEMENT

Two magazines—The Other Side and the Post-American—played central roles in the rise and trajectory of contemporary progressive evangelicalism. Leaders of social, political, and religious movements regularly create journals in order to disseminate their beliefs and to forge a common sense of purpose and identity among participants. During the twentieth century, notable examples of such religious periodicals included the Christian Century, the flagship magazine of mainline Protestantism; Christianity and Crisis, founded by Reinhold Niebuhr as a journal of religious and political opinion for Protestant liberals; Commonweal, the voice of progressive Catholic public intellectuals; and, more recently, First Things, a neoconservative journal uniting like-minded Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Within modern evangelicalism itself, the most prominent magazine, Christianity Today, began as a strategic effort of “new evangelical” leaders to strengthen their movement and to distinguish it from fundamentalist evangelicalism in the mid-twentieth century. While most of these magazines never reached vast numbers of readers, they nevertheless exercised influence in two important respects: these journals positioned themselves as the public voices of their respective movements, and they attracted clergy and lay leaders to their religious and political positions. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, The Other Side (founded as Freedom Now) and the Post-American began to assume this role for progressive evangelicalism. These magazines popularized calls for social justice, brought together a network of advocates for progressive political participation, and offered supporters a sense of shared identity. Thus close inspection of the emergence and evolution of The Other Side and the Post-American offers insight into the rise of contemporary evangelical progressivism. Other journals such as Right On, published by the leftist Christian World Liberation Front, and the scholarly Reformed Journal also promoted progressive forms of evangelical public engagement. Yet The Other Side and the Post-American attracted the most attention and retained reputations as vital organs for evangelical progressivism. Through their regular publication and growing popularity, the two journals served as midwives for the progressive evangelical movement.²

Freedom Now for The Other Side

By the mid-1960s, Fred Alexander, a pastor in the conservative General Association of Regular Baptists, believed that the times were certainly changing. As a younger fundamentalist evangelical in the early twentieth century, Alexander had regarded attacks by liberal Protestants on traditional interpretations of the Bible as evangelicals’ greatest threat. “The problem of the church thirty years ago was theological—proper Biblical doctrine,” he wrote. But now Alexander concluded that theologically conservative Christians faced a more pressing “practical” problem: “the proper application of Biblical doctrine to human relations, especially racial relations.” Alexander became convinced that whites must demonstrate love for others not only through evangelistic programs but also through practical actions that alleviated racial inequalities. He lamented most evangelicals’ lukewarm or even antagonistic reactions to the civil rights movement as a failure before both God and their black neighbors. In response, Fred, his wife, Anne, and their son, John, began in 1965 to publish Freedom Now, a twelve-page newsletter designed to convince fundamentalist evangelicals to support blacks’ civil rights and equal opportunities as part of their Christian discipleship. Although many liberal Christian leaders had already mobilized for such reform, the majority of evangelicals still believed that social or political activism—including the civil rights movement—distracted and thus undermined the church’s foremost task of evangelism. Yet the Alexanders refused to accept that Christians could justifiably address spiritual privation while neglecting physical and economic problems. “To practice the whole gospel of Jesus Christ means, we believe, to have integration, to remove all forms of discrimination, to improve educational facilities, and to fight poverty,” Fred Alexander wrote in Freedom Now’s initial issue. Over the next several years, the Alexanders’ modest newsletter evolved into a provocative magazine. While fundamentalist evangelicals rejected the Alexanders’ message, the journal found support among a small but growing group of more socially engaged evangelicals. In the process, Freedom Now and its successor The Other Side became a leading forum for evangelical opposition to all forms of injustice, enhancing both the appeal and momentum of the nascent progressive evangelical movement.³

Personal exposure to the plight of African Americans transformed the Alexanders’ interpretation of Christian social ethics. In the early 1960s Fred Alexander began teaching at a black Bible college and moved into an integrated neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio. His growing awareness of racial inequalities and the inspiration of civil rights leaders led him to reevaluate the standard evangelical belief that religious conversions and moral reforms of individuals would solve socioeconomic problems. “I must confess that most of my life I have isolated Christian responsibility from everything but soul winning and direct Christian activity,” he reflected. “I have honestly believed that all we need to do is lead people to Christ and build them up in the faith, and everything else would automatically fall into place.” Yet the elder Alexander discovered that a sole focus on evangelism and religious training did little to lessen blacks’ inequality; in fact, it allowed evangelicals to “claim an interest in a man’s soul” but “neglect his physical welfare.” John Alexander reached a similar conclusion. As a student at the evangelical Trinity College in the early 1960s, he became disillusioned with his peers’ preoccupation with “winning souls” to the neglect of meeting people’s urgent physical needs. After graduating and working with his father for several years, John moved to Chicago to begin graduate work in philosophy at Northwestern University and to teach at one of evangelicalism’s premier institutions, Wheaton College. Together the Alexanders hoped to challenge white evangelicals’ apparent apathy and naïveté regarding social problems through publishing a periodical.⁴

The journal’s title, Freedom Now, alluded to Martin Luther King Jr.’s criticism of gradualist approaches to integration and civil rights adopted by many evangelicals, including the celebrated evangelist Billy Graham. But the Alexanders also intended the title to underscore that blacks needed more than eventual religious salvation—they needed immediate deliverance from social and economic problems. To be sure, Fred Alexander explained in the initial issue, “salvation through Jesus Christ” remained the only means to true, eternal freedom. But “the simple message of salvation” would not end segregation and racial injustices. Expeditious rather than eventual freedom from such social problems required the application of “the whole gospel” to “every phase of an individual’s life, not just the ‘religious’ phase.” From the magazine’s outset, the Alexanders promoted their interpretation of the Christian gospel as both the answer to individual sin and a summons to active social concern.⁵

Because evangelicals associated a commitment to social reform with the heresies of the Social Gospel, early contributors to Freedom Now took great pains to distinguish themselves from liberal Protestants who described the purpose of evangelism and salvation in terms of social justice rather than spiritual redemption. The Alexanders insisted that they were neither promoting social action at the expense of evangelism nor conflating the two. “Surely the gospel of Jesus Christ is partly social,” Fred Alexander argued, for “being born again means being born again in the whole man, political, social, economical, personal, etc.” The editors used the liberal National Council of Churches (NCC) as a foil by quoting one of its officials: “Salvation has more to do with the whole society than with the individual soul,” stated the NCC’s head of evangelism, and “it is for this reason that contemporary evangelism is moving away from winning souls one by one to the evangelism of the structure of society.” The Alexanders unequivocally condemned the NCC’s position. Yet they also insisted that such expressions of the Social Gospel did not nullify a proper biblical regard for social action. “Because some men confuse social concern with evangelism does not make social concern evil any more than it makes evangelism evil,” they argued. “Because they have let the pendulum swing too far in one direction does not mean that we should let it swing too far in the other direction.” Yet the editors knew they faced an uphill battle. John Alexander complained that lingering backlash against the Social Gospel and the consequent concentration on spiritual issues made it “very common to hear evangelicals say that social, political, and economic problems have nothing to do with Christianity.” According to Freedom Now, anxiety about the Social Gospel had become a red herring that prevented evangelicals from rightly expressing love of others through practical social concern.⁶

Although the magazine pressed readers to confront social problems, the legacy of fundamentalist evangelicals’ individualistic social ethic initially restricted Freedom Now’s own recommended responses. Until early 1968 the magazine largely proposed conservative strategies for social change that depended upon personal transformations rather than on political reforms or public policies. If readers had biblically accurate racial views and deepened familiarity with blacks’ experiences, the Alexanders assumed, then they would take individual initiatives to improve African Americans’ welfare. Thus the editors printed several exegetical articles that debunked interpretations of the Bible used to support blacks’ subordination and segregation.⁷ As practical suggestions, Freedom Now urged actions such as building friendships with blacks, reading books such as Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin, joining the NAACP, and even subscribing to Ebony magazine. John Alexander also pushed readers to accept considerable blame for African Americans’ socioeconomic inequalities. “The reason Negroes have so many problems is precisely because whites have treated them so wretchedly,” he wrote. “First we broke their legs, and now we criticize them for limping.” Therefore, Alexander expected evangelicals to repent and to take personal responsibility for helping blacks. A few articles did express support for civil rights legislation and protest demonstrations, but early issues of Freedom Now focused primarily on reforming Christians’ personal beliefs and behaviors that hindered a balanced concern for blacks’ spiritual and physical needs. While this broad commitment to social concern and relieving the plight of African Americans marked a departure from most evangelicals’ reluctance to support the civil rights movement, these proposals revealed that the Alexanders still viewed personal reforms as sufficient for social change.⁸

Coverage of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April 1968 marked a turning point in Freedom Now’s prescriptions for social action. Following King’s death, the editors began offering unequivocal support for civil rights activism and efforts to change social structures. “The time for polite discussion is past,” John Alexander wrote. He called upon not only individual readers but also their denominations and political parties “to become involved in a massive action program.” The editors admitted that they now viewed most of Freedom Now’s previous proposals as far too narrow and inadequate—they “had been fiddling while Rome burned,” John Alexander regretted. The memorial issue on King marked the beginning of a more aggressive tone and signaled two critical developments in the progressive orientation of Freedom Now.⁹

First, the framework and language of justice began to supersede that of love as the foundation for social concern. In the magazine’s earliest years, articles primarily invoked Jesus’s command to love one’s neighbors as the basis for supporting blacks’ civil rights.¹⁰ After King’s assassination, Freedom Now increasingly appealed to the ideal of social justice. Bill Pannell, a black evangelist with Youth for Christ and contributing editor to the magazine, remembered that as a younger fundamentalist evangelical he “had been schooled to decry any suggestion of the social implication of the Gospel.” But King’s activist example persuaded him that the Bible taught not only loving reconciliation between individuals but also expectations for a just society. “I began to see that the issue was not love, but justice, and that one is false to the Gospel if he dares preach one concept to the exclusion of the other,” wrote Pannell...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Progressive Evangelicals and the Pursuit of Social Justice
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Rise of the Contemporary Progressive Evangelical Movement
• 2. A Public Theology of Community
• 3. Racism
• 4. Trials and Triumphs of Biblical Feminism
• 5. The Agony of Abortion
• 6. A Civil Right but Religious Wrong?
• 7. The Crusade against Poverty
• 8. Make Peace, Not War
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index