Justin Giboney Wants Us to Stop Co-opting the Civil Rights Movement

“What I see happening is people taking issues that are really primarily about individual expression and then characterizing them as about civil rights in the same way as the Civil Rights Movement,” Giboney said. Graphic by Ryan McQuade/Sojourners. Image of Justin Giboney courtesy IVP. Background images by Library of Congress and Sophie Popplewell via Unsplash.

As founder and president of the AND Campaign, Justin Giboney has championed an approach to politics that seeks to overcome, in his words, Left-Right culture wars.

He has galvanized Christians, especially evangelicals, around a platform that aims to maintain a commitment to traditionally conservative Christian morality while championing traditionally progressive views on race and economics. His organization’s name and its ampersand logo represent an unwillingness to cede either value in service of a political party.

An attorney and political strategist, Giboney explains in his new book, Don’t Let Nobody Turn You Around: How the Black Church’s Public Witness Leads Us Out of the Culture War, the ways his upbringing and study of the Civil Rights Movement informs his work. In particular, Giboney criticizes Christians on the Right for allowing conservative politics to shape their views on race, immigration, and economics; he criticizes the Left for allowing progressive politics to shape their views of sex and abortion. At one point, the AND Campaign’s tagline was “Social Justice (&) Biblical Values.” In recent years, it has shifted to “Social Justice (&) Moral Order.”

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