While the Black Lives Matter movement officially started after George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the death of Trayvon Martin, the fight for true racial equality began long before then with the Civil Rights Era. Among the allies of the African American freedom activists were the Kennedy family, a large number of Jewish-Americans and notably, progressive evangelicals.
The latest lecture in Clemson’s Race and the University series, aptly named “How Black Lives Matter to Evangelicals: Progressive Evangelicals and the Problem of Race – 1965-2015,” examined this relationship between the groups.
The discussion was led by Dr. Brantley Gasaway, an associate professor of religious studies at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Gasaway also wrote the book “Progressive Evangelicals and the Pursuit of Social Justice,” which details how the religious group’s history began and developed over the past five decades.
The dialogue began with a summary of the progressive evangelical movement, which split away from its modern conservative counterpart because of differences in opinion concerning the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. Gasaway suggested in his argument that the liberal religious sect was empathetic towards the Black Lives Matter movement because it interprets sin as both a personal and social concept.
The lecture brought up the group’s leaders, such as Jim Wallis and Jim Rice — both Christian writers and activists who were involved in the racial equality movement. Their work was found in the literature magazines “The Other Side” and “Sojourners,” two publications founded to end an American society “cancerous with racism,” as a member of the publication described it. Other topics of discussion included the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern, which highlighted the progressives’ idea of God as “[requiring] love,” meaning that Christians must demonstrate love to “those suffering social abuses” and their views on how the administrations of presidents Reagan, Clinton and Obama have handled race issues in America.
Gasaway then offered his thoughts on the small but growing number of contemporary evangelicals joining the Black Lives Matter movement. Among them is Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, who has been very adamant about what he feels is a large problem of police brutality against African Americans. The lecture ended with a forum, through which Gasaway answered questions about the racial and denominational makeup of the progressive evangelical community and minorities’ reactions to the sect’s support.
As the university continues to have these discussions, Doug Herlong, a junior religious studies major, had an expression of satisfaction, saying, “I think that this lecture is one of a lot of events that are cool and interesting as far as getting the conversation going in our culture in relation to racial diversity and possible tensions that may have arisen. It helps to answer questions such as ‘What about race or racial tensions?’ or ‘How can we objectively deal with this?’ It helps to give me perspective on what to do should these events were to come about again.”
Dr. Elizabeth Jemison, an assistant professor in Clemson’s Deptartment of Philosophy and Religion, explained her optimism about the event. She said, “I think that part of the reason as to why this event is important is the way that it shows us that there’s a long history of white evangelicals that are not seen as advocates for social justice or progressive causes … it’s not just something that started with the Black Live Matter movement, but hopefully the lecture has given the audience a sense of this minority of white evangelicals voicing that racism is a systemic problem and that evangelical theology should have a response to it.”
In his lecture, Gasaway hoped to emphasize the fact that “evangelicals themselves, as well as others can be advocates for racial justice, but it requires them to address structural racism and not just personal racism.”
Students, faculty and the Clemson community can attend the next lecture in the Race and the University series, “Speaking Truth to Power: Lessons and Legacies from the Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells,” on Friday, Oct. 9 at 3:30 p.m. in Room 330 of Tillman Hall. It will be directed by Dr. Dean Jacqueline Royster of Georgia Tech and Dr. Mary Barr of Clemson.