The black social gospel tradition emerged alongside the understandably far more widely known white American Protestant social gospel tradition associated with the white American Baptist minister and theologian Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918), the author of Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) and A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917).
For Rauschenbusch, the so-called social gospel stands over against what he referred to as the individualistic gospel. He emphasizes that the Jesus in the canonical texts of the New Testament refers to the Kingdom of God - which by Rauschenbusch's time was interpreted as the individualistic gospel. According to the Wikipedia entry on Rauschenbusch, he held in his 1917 book that "The Kingdom of God is not subject to the pitfalls of the Church; it can test and correct the Church; it is a prophetic, future-focused ideology and a revolutionary, social and political force that understands all creation to be sacred; and it can help save the problematic, sinful social order."
For a discussion of what Rauschenbusch referred to as the individualistic gospel in the context of the Roman Catholic Church, see the American Jesuit moral theologian James F. Keenan's book A History of Catholic Theological Ethics (Paulist Press, 2022).
In the Roman Catholic Church, the body of Catholic social teaching emerged in 1891 with Pope Leo XII's encyclical letter Rerum Novarum (Latin for "Of Revolutionary Change"), which is about the rights and duties of capital and labor.
For discussion of the still growing body of Catholic social teaching, see the lay English Catholic theologian Anna Rowland's book Towards a Politics of Communion: Catholic Social Teaching in Dark Times (T&T Clark, 2021).
The most widely known contribution to Catholic social teaching is Pope Francis' 2015 eco-encyclical (which is available in English and other languages at the Vatican's website).
Now, Dorrien's 2017 book Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel unfolds in the following chapters:
Chapter One: "Achieving the black Social Gospel" (pp. 1-23);
Chapter Two: "Prophetic Suffering and Black Internationalism" (pp. 24-95);
Chapter Three: "Moral Politics and the Soul of the World" (pp. 96-171);
Chapter Four: "Protest Politics and Power Politics" (pp. 172-254);
Chapter Five: "Redeeming the Soul of America" (pp. 255-354);
Chapter Six: "Nightmare Fury and Public Sacrifice" (pp. 355-441);
Chapter Seven: "Theologies of Liberation" (pp. 442-504).
In the context of the Roman Catholic Church, liberation theology emerged most prominently in South America - where the future Pope Francis was exposed to certain varieties of liberation theology. For further discussion of the Argentinian variant of South American liberation theology favored by Pope Francis, see the lay Venezuelan Catholic theologian Rafael Luciani's 2017 book Pope Francis and the Theology of the People, translated by Phillip Berryman (Orbis Books).
In any event, in Dorrien's 2017 book, he highlights "six major social gospel intellectuals" (p. 22; listed here in alphabetical order): Martin Luther King, Jr.; Mordecai Johnson (1890-1970); Benjamin E. Mays (1894-1984); Pauli Murray (1910-1985); Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (1908-1972); and Howard Thurman (1899-1981).
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