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

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.”

Giboney is often critical of Left and Right simultaneously, rarely condemning a fault in one without immediately condemning a fault in the other. “We’re camouflaged in a political culture full of contempt and lies,” Giboney writes in the book. “Christians participated in, if not led, the attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. Some Christians unconditionally defend social movements that explicitly undermine the family and sanctity of life.”

Though not directly criticizing Sojourners, Giboney’s claim that progressives misalign the Civil Rights Movement with progressive values at the expense of biblical fidelity, is one I wanted to understand better. Giboney and I spoke twice in late 2025, edited into one fluid conversation for length and clarity. Rather than approach our interview as a debate, I pressed to better understand his view of the Civil Rights Movement, Christian obligations in politics, his critiques of progressive Christians, and how he tries to support LGBTQ+ civil liberties while upholding conservative views on sex and gender. 

Mitchell Atencio, Sojourners: What’s the goal of this book?

Justin Giboney: The goal, number one, is for people to more clearly recognize and understand the ethic and theology behind the Civil Rights Movement.

Unfortunately, that movement gets co-opted by the Right to create this colorblind narrative; it gets co-opted by the Left on issues that I don’t think that generation would have necessarily agreed with. They get filtered into the movement in ways that I don’t think are honest. I wanted to clear the record but also help people understand more clearly what the Civil Rights Movement was about, what they’re getting at, and why that could be very useful today, that these are timeless principles.

What lessons have you learned from studying Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth about relating to people who are partially but not fully aligned with your vision?

What’s going on with King and what I call the Civil Rights generation, is they’re getting pressured. They’re getting pressured from the older generation saying, “You’re doing too much.” They’re getting pressured from the Left and some of the younger generations saying, “You’re not doing enough.” I do think, if you look at King’s writings and what he said, they were aware of that. They acknowledged those differences. But they didn’t allow the older generation to slow them down so they didn’t press forward harder. They also didn’t allow the more militant groups telling them to do more to stop them from being civil. They maintained their ethic while, at the same time, trying to have constructive conversations with people outside or inside the movement that had disagreements with them.

Let me summarize the ethic and principle you see from the Civil Rights Movement. Tell me if I am getting this wrong: We should be simultaneously tenacious about justice and rights for oneself and one’s enemies, while being committed to human dignity, the possibility of redemption for enemies, and fidelity to the Bible and God’s words.

That’s right. And within that is a willingness to critique yourself and be honest about what you get wrong.

On that note, is there somewhere you’ve changed within the last 10 years?

There are times when I was probably too harsh to what I saw to be the other side. I was far more partisan, coming from Democratic and progressive spaces, than I should have been. That’s not to say there’s nothing wrong with the other side; there’s a lot we could talk about. But one of the features of the culture war that is really harmful is the “good v. evil” perspective.

When we really start to believe that our side is good, we’re not going to critique it. When something happens we just justify it because the other side is so much worse. And we can never be honest about something the other side gets right. Do you mean to tell me there’s nothing you see that you could do better and no critique that they have that there may be some merit to?

Something I hear from Christians who are strongly partisan is that they can acknowledge those things, but that there’s an existential threat—to democracy or to the unborn. Are there times where faithful Christian witness could include being partisan?

My message isn’t that you can’t be in a party or that one party isn’t clearly better than the other one on multiple issues. It’s not, “Oh, they’re really all the same, and once you get one thing wrong it’s really just as bad as one getting 20 things wrong.”

The message is: If your party gets seven out of 10 things right, there’s good reason for you to side with that party on those issues. But you can’t be silent on those other three issues.

When I talk to Christians, in both parties, I don’t hear them saying they ignore the things their party gets wrong. Are you encountering that?

I’m encountering people who see their party doing something that’s wrong and don’t say something about it. Now, there’s some nuance there. Because if I’m coming from a Democratic Socialist position, that may be different. When it came to Gaza there were a lot of people who said, “No.”

What I’ve seen over the years, and even what I saw in myself before I changed, was when the Democratic Party goes further and further to the Left on abortion, we go with it. When it goes further and further Left on transgender issues, we go with it. When the Republican Party goes further and further Right on immigration issues, we go with it. I’m not saying nobody ever says anything; I’m saying there’s a lot of things we overlook because everything’s about the scoreboard.

You wrote in the book: “We don’t need to conflate love and affirmation to protect our neighbors with tenacity and grace.” What legal rights do you support for your LGBTQ+ people?

Well, you may know I was part of the Fairness for All legislation. We pushed back against the Equality Act, which would have had a negative impact on a lot of Christian institutions that want to maintain a Christian sexual ethic.

[Neither piece of legislation has passed into law.]

At the same time, this is an example of how you can be nuanced when two parties present you only two positions. We also said, “Why does it matter what someone’s sexual attraction is when trying to get housing or loans or working on a job? Shouldn’t they have those protections?”

There are a lot of civil liberties that I personally—this is not just talk—have fought for on behalf of people in that community because I think it matters. Nobody should be getting bullied, nobody should be treated differently, even if I disagree with them on what the definition of marriage is.

I do remember you supporting the Fairness for All Act. I don’t believe it protected a federal right to same-sex marriage. Is that something you support?

We did support the Respect for Marriage Act in a political trade-off. Do I think that same-sex marriage is marriage by a biblical definition? No.

[The Respect for Marriage Act did not protect the federal right to a same-sex marriage. Rather, it ensures that the federal government and states banning same-sex marriage recognize same-sex marriages performed where it is legal, if Obergefell were overturned.]

Not by biblical definition, but would you support the legality of it?

It is the law. I’m not fighting against the law.

If you could snap your fingers and there would or would not be federal protections for same-sex marriages, which would you do?

I’m not a supporter of same-sex marriage. No, in general.

For someone who wants to defend LGBTQ+ marriage and trans kids in sports, what common ground can you build with them?

I don’t know if I can give you a better example than the legislation we’ve supported … If someone comes to me and says transgender girls should be in girls’ sports, I’m not going to agree, but I might try to say, “What compromise can we make?” I don’t have the answer to what that would be, but I’d be willing to sit down and listen. But there’s a standard that needs to be set when it comes to physiological differences.

Let me ask you more about that. Let’s look at high school sports: You don’t support letting children participate in high school sports based on gender identity, correct?

I don’t.

Why not?

I don’t think it’s safe for girls.

In the book you cite an NBC News article about a study of transgender people in the U.S. Air Force that found that after a year of hormone therapy, trans women still had higher performance indicators than cisgender women. But the author of that study said he supports trans youth in youth athletics, saying, “[Transgender girls] should be allowed to compete with all the other people who are born women.”

He makes a different conclusion based on his own data than I would. His data would lead me to say there’s differences. You know, we gotta go to the data. Which, for most Americans and most Christians is a matter of common sense.

[The study did not contain data relating to transgender youth. The authors reviewed medical records and fitness tests for 29 transgender men and 46 transgender women in the first 30 months after starting hormone replacement therapy.]

This is what I get into in the book too: This is a fact of life that may be inconvenient but, you look at societies throughout history, where we land on this, men and women are different. We can get into the science of it, but that just doesn’t change. His data supports where I am coming to, even if he goes in a different direction.

His data is specifically about people who have already been through puberty—adults who started hormone blockers after puberty. He said that someone who transitions before or during puberty “doesn’t really have any advantage” in sports.

So then we’d have to go back to—and there’s disputes there too—should someone that young be even going through that process. And I don’t think that’s advisable.

There’s a number of people on the Left, I’m sure you know, Mitchell, who would disagree with you on that too. Many feminists, some lesbian writers, would disagree that that’s something kids should be going through. This particular issue is interesting because it’s not just a Left and a Right issue. There are a lot of folks on the Left who would say what I’m saying. I don’t think where I’m coming from has anything to do with me disliking somebody or whatever. That’s against the design. Although it may make somebody feel better in the immediate, it’s disordered and eventually, I believe, it ends up hurting somebody.

You end up contrasting the Left’s sexual politics [with the Right] a lot in the book. Here’s a quote from you: “For instance, I’ve yet to hear a good reason for taking children to watch drag queens or having children pose in pictures with high-powered rifles in their hands.” Why make the contrast between those two things?

You don’t think it was clear in the book?

OK, then I’ll ask, do you think drag queens are as dangerous to children as high-powered rifles?

It’s dangerous. I don’t see any value to it.

It’s as dangerous?

Everything’s not exactly equal. It’s not about everything being exactly equal. The point I was making in that part is that this is about empty defiance. We do things because it seems like an offense to the other side. I don’t see the value in either of those, not that they were equal.

Earlier in the book, you wrote that there were Christians who “participated in, if not led, the attack on the United States Capitol on January 6” and Christians who “undermine the family and sanctity of life.” You talk a lot about honoring and defending dignity in the book and I wonder how those comparisons honor transgender people. What does it look like to honor their dignity?

To value them as human beings. If someone is an adult and they want to live that way, you have a right to live that way. Nobody should mistreat you when it comes to housing and basic civil liberties as you go about your life.

Does that apply to how a family may want to support their child in transition?

If a family wants to transition their kid as far as changing their name and all that, I don’t have—when it comes to parental rights, I’m very slow to tell parents exactly what to do.

I was wondering particularly about puberty blockers and whether families should be allowed to do that.

The AND Campaign hasn’t come to a conclusion on that. I think there are studies that are saying that’s actually harmful. I’m not gonna make a conclusive statement on that, but it seems harmful to me.

Coming back to the book— you talk a fair bit about economic exploitation and racism, but I wondered your thoughts on militarism—the third of King’s “giant triplets of evil.” Militarism, compared to culture war issues you dealt with in the book, is an area with lots of bipartisan support.

Not everybody in the Civil Rights Movement was a pacifist, but they certainly saw violence as not the answer. They saw domination of other nations not as the primary means of coexisting. It’s very clear in the gospels that that’s not something Christians should be leaning on. We can talk about Just War Theory and all that stuff, but the “might is right,” using the sword as the main means of dealing with others is oftentimes just not Christian.

I’m not a pacifist, though I can sympathize. It was, what, $900 billion in a military bill? And we complain and nitpick over funding for food and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program and health care?

Where our money goes, what we take the time to legislate for, what does that say about our priorities and how should it impact the way we vote and the way we advocate in the public square?

You had an extended section in the book where you write how the Civil Rights generation wasn’t aiming for the middle or to be moderate on political issues. Is that an error you think some Christian moderates make?

Absolutely. I don’t think there’s any inherent virtue in the middle. The middle can be a way of conflict avoidance and not taking a position. The point isn’t to find some mushy middle; the point is to take the right position. It just so happens that when you have two very extreme sides that seem to be getting further and further apart, you might find yourself in the middle.

At the end of that section, you wrote, as you’re saying here, that it’s “no mystery” why Christians end up in the middle. I’d agree that it’s not surprising, but do you think it’s wrong for Christians, at this moment, to find themselves conflicted about which party to support at the ballot box?

Not necessarily. This goes to: Do you have to choose a side? If you have a problem choosing a side, I’m not so worried about that. Once you choose that side, if you go along with whatever they say, that doesn’t make sense to me.

So, should you take positions on what Trump does? Absolutely. But I also would say he’s not the whole of American politics. I can see somebody who lives in a red state, focused on local issues, saying, “I do struggle with whether I should be a Republican or Democrat because there’s a lot of different issues that I’m dealing with.”

I don’t have a problem with a Christian who says, “Yeah, that’s really bad, but I see some stuff on the other side too. Let me take the right positions.”

I’ve always appreciated how much the AND Campaign emphasizes that politics goes beyond the ballot box and beyond parties. But I do worry—amid the rise of authoritarianism—that emphasizing to such a degree that there are flaws with both parties might leave Christians feeling like it’s OK to support the politics of the Trump administration.

I see serious problems with Trump and the Trump administration. But when I look over to the Left, I don’t see a good, perfect place where I could be comfortable either. When I look at a lot of different issues, especially when you’re talking about parental rights and all that. If it were very clear that this was good versus evil and the Left was really getting all this stuff right—before Trump came, when you look at academia and a lot of other places, I see some cultural tyranny coming from the Left. People have memory-holed that. I’m not going to memory-hole that because I’ve experienced it myself.

I tend to think the Left is dangerous too. I’m not one of those people who can say, “Because the Left is better on most issues, well hey, I just gotta jump over there to stop fascism.” Some of the problems on the Left are absolutely dangerous to a culture and communities.

At the beginning of the interview you said the Civil Rights Movement is being “co-opted by the Right to create this colorblind narrative; it gets co-opted by the Left on issues that I don’t think that generation would have necessarily agreed with. They get filtered into the movement in ways that I don’t think are honest.” My read of your book is that this specifically means politics of sex, gender, and abortion.

The Civil Rights Movement had a lot of figures who were LGBTQ+—James Baldwin, Bayard Rustin, or Pauli Murray. And a lot of people from the Civil Rights generation supported LGBTQ+ rights and liberation—Coretta Scott King and John Lewis, for example. I know you disagree with the Left on this issue, but why say it’s dishonest?

Let’s back up a little bit. Are there similarities? Absolutely. When you’re talking about these basic civil rights and people being pushed to the margins in ways that are unconstitutional and violate human rights, there is some connection. It’s not totally disconnected from conservatives talking about religious liberty, in as much as they talk about it for everybody.

Where the difference comes and where it becomes dishonest is a lot of what I see in that movement as well comes from the sexual revolution. 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.

Just like when the Right co-opts it, you’re co-opting it to impact culture. To make culture more conservative or more permissive or progressive. That’s not what the Civil Rights Movement was doing. Both kind of veer off to serve their own narratives and purposes and use the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn’t meant to be part of the culture war; it wasn’t meant to make society more progressive, in that way, or more conservative.

The idea isn’t that there’s not some level of connection. It’s that both veer off. Especially when it comes to the individual expression, which is more rooted in a sexual revolution than it is anything related to anything Civil Rights.

When I look at the Civil Rights movement, I don’t see anyone who can be accurately described as supporting a “colorblind narrative.” But when I look at how the Civil Rights generation related to sexuality, it’s hard for me to separate whether James Baldwin and Pauli Murray were part of Civil Rights or the “sexual revolution” in your view. It feels like a more honest appropriation because there were people in the Civil Rights movement who were fighting for gay rights.

You can take a couple people and say they were—I think James Baldwin added a lot to American culture and American art; I would question whether him being part of the Civil Rights means that the LGBTQ+ movement is just an extension of the Civil Rights Movement. There were a lot of people that were engaged in it. In any movement, you focus on what you agree on.

A lot of what my book talks about is not the academics nor the artists, but the core and primary part of the Black ecclesial tradition. All of the people that you named don’t really fall into that tradition, even though that tradition was able to say, “Hey, come along, we can fight for these things together.”

“I’m not one of those people who can say, ‘Because the Left is better on most issues, well hey, I just gotta jump over there to stop fascism.’ Some of the problems on the Left are absolutely dangerous to a culture and communities.”—Justin Giboney