A Darkly Radiant Vision

A Darkly Radiant Vision: The Black Social Gospel in the Shadow of MLK completes Gary Dorrien’s trilogy on the Black social gospel tradition. The trilogy represents a monumental accomplishment and all those who study the many figures outlined in these texts owe a debt to his scholarship. The overarching argument in his three volumes is “that the Black social gospel is a tradition of unsurpassed importance in U.S. American life and remains ongoing” (1). Dorrien completes his argument in this volume, in which he chronicles the lives of well-known lieutenants of Martin Luther King Jr.—in particular Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young—and tells a nuanced history of the rise of academic Black liberation theology and subsequent movements, such as womanism and Black feminism. He also includes figures that operate within the Black church today, such as Traci Blackmon and William Barber II, though he notes that the Black social gospel’s “traditional base in the Black church has considerably diminished” (17).

Dorrien’s depth of research and personal relationships with many of the figures on which he writes make his history compelling even for those already familiar with Young, Jackson, and the history of academic Black theology. In addition to making the case for the importance of the Black social gospel post-King, Dorrien also makes several philosophical arguments in this text. The two most important are that W.E.B. Du Bois’ idea of double consciousness continues to describe “the terribly real dilemmas in Black U.S. American life” (16) and that there is a need to develop “a capacious Christian metaphysic that mines Black experience and overflows the boundaries of received traditions” (17).

After the book’s introductory chapter, Dorrien devotes a chapter to Young and then another to Jackson. Though these two men’s personalities and roles within King’s organization were quite different—Young was generally soft spoken and often served as a conciliator, whereas Jackson was brash and bold—their lives post-King possessed important similarities. Both spent a considerable amount of their time and effort engaged in formal politics, and both often relied on a particular version of capitalism to attempt to achieve liberatory ends. Young served as a congressman, ambassador to the United Nations, and the mayor of Atlanta, Georgia. During and after his political career, Young was a proponent of corporate capitalism, wherein he attempted to work with and through corporations to benefit those in poverty. Jackson formed his famous Rainbow/Push Coalition, through which he worked to raise money for various charitable causes and positioned himself for multiple influential, though ultimately unsuccessful, presidential campaigns. Dorrien notes that both men took paths that King himself largely eschewed and critiqued—namely entering into the formal political sphere and attempting to empower Black people through capitalism. However, Dorrien could have been more explicit regarding the fact that King—who critiqued both Jackson and Young for their commitment to capitalism during his lifetime—would likely have been particularly repulsed by Young’s corporate capitalism, his defense of cutthroat corporations like Wal-Mart, and his notion that international corporations are a means to form people into global citizens (103).

Dorrien dedicates the bulk of the remainder of A Darkly Radiant Vision to the rise of academic Black theology and the movements that grew out of it. This section benefits from his personal relationships with many of the important figures in these movements—in particular James Cone, who was Dorrien’s long-time colleague and close friend. While much of this section of the book consists of intellectual history, Dorrien also builds on material from his previous two volumes to argue that Black theology, broadly understood, did not originate in 1969 with Cone’s publication of Black Theology and Black Power (Seabury Press). By drawing on figures like Du Bois and King, Dorrien demonstrates the continuity of the Black social gospel tradition from the early days of the United States into the present. Dorrien’s meticulous work documenting the rise of, and internal debates within, the different waves of womanism and its interaction with Black feminism are also particularly valuable, as these traditions have received less academic attention than male-centric Black liberation theology.

In the concluding section of this book, Dorrien returns to his argument that the Du Boisian idea of “double consciousness” remains an important concept for understanding the difficulties and paradoxes faced by Black folk, and calls again for a new Christian metaphysic that draws upon the power of Black experience. Whether Dorrien’s former argument is successful, I leave to others, particularly those in the Black community. His latter argument is compelling, and is bolstered by the quantity of scholarship that engages the topics of Blackness, metaphysics, and Christian spirituality—for example, Leonard C. McKinnis II’s work on divine Blackness and Ashon Crawley’s on Blackpentecostal breath.

Upon finishing Dorrien’s work, one is struck both by the impact of the Black social gospel tradition upon American society and the world, as well as by the fact that King is, in many ways, an outlier in this tradition. If Dorrien is right that the Black social gospel tradition answers the question of where King came from, then it is interesting that nearly all of his descendants within this tradition took paths that King himself refused. As noted previously, Young and Jackson both largely pursued careers in politics and philanthropy, and Cone and those who followed him largely stayed within the confines of academia, a path that King also rejected. Dorrien rightly notes that “succeeding [King] was impossible” (485). However, other than figures like Traci Blackmon and William Barber II, few have attempted to engage in the militant, yet nonviolent, activism championed by King. Perhaps, then, to comprehend the entirety of King’s legacy, we must look beyond the Black social gospel to those who rejected King’s Christianity or absolute commitment to nonviolence yet retained his militancy in their pursuit of a better world.

David C. Justice is a postdoctoral fellow, Baylor Interdisciplinary Core, at Baylor University.

David C. Justice

Date Of Review:

March 19, 2024