Hi Friend,

As I was reflecting on Martin Luther King Day and the Beloved Community this past week, I found myself considering the history of the term 'beloved community' which has (most of) its origins in the Social Gospel and the Black Social Gospel.

There are so many ways in which this current U.S. political moment, with its particular religious currents, is a backlash against (amongst other things) the Social Gospel (both white and Black).... and so it feels fully appropriate to look at it again. Which, given that I don't talk about the Social Gospel very much, means I need to start with some basics....

Long-headline version: There Is Much In Social Gospel History that is Relevant For Today's Times... though translation is not always easy.

1. The "Beloved Community"

Quick reminder: the term "Beloved Community" was popularized by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who saw it as the ultimate goal that we are working towards. It is currently a term used as a title by (at least) hundreds of organizations across America and around the world, and has come, increasingly, to include the more-than-human world. As Coretta Scott King says: "The Beloved Community is a realistic vision of an achievable society—one in which problems and conflicts exist but are resolved peacefully and without bitterness."

It's common in the dominant culture to start the history of a term with the person who first started using it. Sometimes that's appropriate. It often misses the wider social context and the longer lineages - including the community of thinkers who influenced how ideas shifted and change, and the embodied realities that led to terms and ideas being taken up in the first place.

When you are (re)creating origin stories, it's very useful to inquire into the context and social/intellectual networks and lineages of a particular person who "invented" a particular term/concept.

Powerful concepts are like trees: they need soil to grow, and do not rise without roots.

In this case, the individual who coined/first published on the term the Beloved Community was American philosopher/ Christian theologian Josiah Royce in his 1913 book 'The Problem with Christianity' (in which he was working on how to be a Christian in the context of increased individualism). Royce, following the larger Social Gospel movement, pushed against the idea of an individualized Christianity, seeing salvation as only possible through and within community. He extended the (old) idea of the Kingdom of Heaven to the Beloved Community, where God's love transforms individuals who can then love one another, united by deep loyalty to a shared vision. This became the basis of his founding of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

The Social Gospel Movement

For the first few centuries (1600s-early 1800s) of much of (white) Christianity in what is now thought of as America, the kingdom of god/heaven and salvation was largely seen to be an individual concern (aka"Individual salvation").

In the late 19th century, after the Civil War, the rapid industrialization of society with its accompanying awful labor conditions and ecological destruction, coupled with the vastly widening wealth gap.

Some refer to this time as the Gilded Age, in part because of the Rococo style of gold everywhere (that Trump has recently instated throughout the White House). It was also known as the Robber-Baron Age and the Age of Excess.

Partly out of a response to this excessive elitism, all sorts of "social" ways of thinking began to emerge as a counter-narrative to the rise of extremely elite white men who were creating a lot more wealth for themselves at the cost of millions of people (and ecosystems). Socialism, sociology, the social gospel... all emerged at a similar time.

The Social Gospel emerged from a group of pastors working in NYC's Hell's Kitchen in the late 1800s, where they saw some of the horrors of industrialization on the workers and the homeless in their parishes. Walter Rauschenbusch is often credited for the movement, but he himself pointed to his small group of practical intellectuals who together re-worked the Christian tradition they had inherited to articulate the Social Gospel. They made the argument that the Kingdom of Heaven is not only a future thing: it can happen in the here and now, and humans can play a role in enabling it to arise. in an early publication, Samuel Batten wrote:

“Christianity is an earth religion, and has to do with the actual things and relations of everyday life, with such real things as homes and stores, factories, and counting rooms; with such real relationships as buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage, voting and working. Christianity is an effort to transmute and transfigure the dust of our humanity and the life of our world into the righteousness of the living God...The Kingdom of God is all-inclusive and comprehends every interest and relation and activity of man.”

Social structures, not just individual bodies, including structures creating poverty, were reinterpreted as causes of sin. If society is one of the causes of sin (ie, theft is caused by poverty which is caused by an unjust society; it is not just the moral fault of the person who steals) the loci of achieving salvation does not only rest with the individual. It's also about the society. Working to change systems - through policy, advocacy, corporate governing structures, etc. - becomes part of one's moral and religious responsibility.

Rauschenbusch found four major loci of structural evil: militarism, individualism, capitalism, and nationalism. To these he juxtaposed four institutional embodiments of good: pacifism, collectivism, socialism, and internationalism.

These sets of ideas gave churches a new role that was outside of simple charity: being a 'good Christian' was, for this branch, about addressing the root causes of society's shortcomings. White women (who themselves had not yet achieved suffrage) had greater agency in addressing issues in the public sphere, and fed everything from the temperance movement to the labor movement and the resulting 5-day work week.

The Social Gospel happened alongside the rise of Catholic Social Teachings (CST), a framework conceptualized in 1891 with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, (“Of New Things,” ) as a result of the wealth gap between the rich and the poor and the obstacles faced by the working classes. Similar to the Protestant leaders, CST asserted that the poor’s lack of wealth is not due to moral depravity, but rather the consequence of capitalism and social dislocation.

I wonder, given how much we now know that Native peoples in the Americas influenced so much European and white American understandings and practices of freedom, from democracy to socialism/communist thinking (America's Founding Fathers, early suffragettes, and Marx/Engels all were, strongly influenced by the equality and harmony within Indigenous American societies and governing systems), how much even the Christian social gospel movements were also influenced by Native thought and praxis....

((Multi-faith note: CST and the Social Gospel are sometimes compared to the (much older) Jewish notion of tikkun olam, or, 'repair of the world'. In Islam, zakat, or, 'obligatory charity' (often understood around 2.5% of accumulated wealth) serves as a direct, structural, and mandatory redistribution of wealth; it is not (unlike the social gospel) based on moral persuasion.))

The Black Social Gospel

White Social Gospel proponents did not center the needs and experiences of their Black Christian brothers and sisters. The logic of the social gospel movement - that salvation can have a social as well as an individual dimension - did, however, resonate with long-standing threads within the diversity of what theologians often refer to as the Black Church. The founders of the black social gospel movement and their successors fought hard within their own Churches for the right to advocate a progressive theology and social justice politics at one and the same time. It was not always an easy sell. As one of the scholars of the Black Social Gospel (and one of my teachers), Gary Dorrien chronicles, Booker T. Washington and many others had been advocating "an accommodating social ethic, trading Black dignity and rights for at least some economic opportunity." There was also a contingency that believed that white society was irredeemable and not worth it, and the only solution was a Black nation/return to Africa. Eventually, the social justice contingency led in part by W.E.B. Du Bois (who identified as a humanist, but the brilliant orator respected and worked with the Black Church) prevailed.

The next generation of leaders in the Black social gospel - Mordecai Johnson, Benjamin E. Mays, George Kelsey, J. Pius Barbour, Vernon Johns, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and Howard Thurman—espoused social gospel theology from the beginning of their careers. They understood theirs as a decolonial and global struggle, and the famous Pilgrimages of Friendship between Howard Thurman, Sue Bailey Thurman, and others to India significantly played a role in an extra-ordinary freedom movement that re-shaped the modern world. Thurman also read Royce, and developed his idea of the 'Beloved Community', placing it in the context of racial justice. That's the generation of thinkers and teachers who helped to train/shape Dr Martin Luther King Jr.

(btw, if you want to engage with some of Gandhi's thinking, our friend Ram in Chennai, India, is leading his Contemporary Gandhi online course soon. He welcomes people outside of India as well as within it to participate.)

Acceptance and Backlash

Since the relative success of what we now refer to as the Civil Rights Movement, much of the Social Gospel movement - both white and black - became accepted and, with various degrees, part of American culture. 'Social justice' and "progress" became increasingly understood as accompanying one another (certainly not always true in American history!)

I grew up with a sense that, regardless of one's faith background, addressing poverty and hunger were valid and relevant endeavors for anyone who was guided by spiritual inclinations. You don't need a theology degree to take a quick glance at the world's religions and see an overarching call for caring for one another, and it doesn't take long to figure out that charity alone is insufficient for addressing social and ecological challenges. Systemic change is necessary.

The Beloved Community - which I never attached to a particular faith group - is possible.

The current U.S. administration is interested in domination and consolidation of power through fear and control. It’s not about the beloved community.

Their focus on domination has its own long Christian-influenced roots within America: it is part of the Christian Doctrine of Discovery, based on a set of 15th-century Papal Bulls. That's a code of domination, and codes of domination rarely yield a focus on caring for those who are different from you (unless they can help you attain more power). Our ReMembering Course gets into this super-relevant history.

Their political interest in domination meshes well with what religious academics call 'High Control Religion', of which most versions of Christian nationalism is one of them. (Don't forget -High Control Religion is in no way limited to Christian expressions!)

Most Christian nationalist perspectives are not interested in the Social Gospel - Black or white. They do not see salvation as addressing 'social sins' such as hunger and poverty (even though Jesus clearly says: "as you treat the least amongst you so you treat Me".) Social reform is a definite goal, but their focus is on the family, including enforcing strict gender roles. This has been (re)gaining a lot of power in certain state-level legislations recently, as well as at the federal level.

The technologically-inclined, Christian-nationalist-oriented 'postliberal' federal policy orientation, with its embedded history in the domination code that has been festering within America's heritage, is going to continue to push forward notions of nationhood, social-ness (tho I don’t think it’s the same kind of individualism as in other times), and religiosity that enable excess through exploitation and thrive on fear. It denies the life-giving power of all sorts of Earthly orientations. That's what it does.

As such, in so many ways, this current political-religious moment is a reaction against the Social Gospel, both Black and white. Which was, way back then, powerful enough that it stopped some of the worse excesses of the Robber Barons….

What parts of the social gospel are now relevant?

Given the power of both the Black and white Social Gospel movements that created the moral framework around which secular notions of social justice and progress developed, I wonder which aspects of that movement might be revitalized... and reformed.

And what this might look like in a multi-religious, eco-spiritual context where contemporary understandings of 'sin', and 'salvation' have not just shifted, they are often absent from civic discourse?

Part of what I love about the notion of the Beloved Community is the way it can dance with temporal dimensions. It is both timeless and in-time; it is both something that we can work towards - a future for our children - and something that we can experience in the present moment, whenever we are in spaces where we have a collective experience of Spirit where are hearts are opened to another, especially across both differences and collective belonging.

Which is part of where mystical experiences comes in... which is part of what I'm working on for a talk I'm giving next week/on Imbolc on mystical experiences, social action, Quakerism, and the dark, divine feminine.

But that's enough for now, though!

As always, feel free to let me know what sparks for you here!