This is the first live Q&A for Theology for Troublemakers — the class Gary Dorrien, Aaron Stoffer, and I have been building for exactly this moment — and if the questions that came in after the first lecture are any indication, we've got a room full of people who came ready to learn. Gary is the Reinhold Niebuhr Chair at Union Seminary and has written more books and supervised more PhDs on the history of Christian social ethics in America than anyone alive. When Aaron said we could get Gary to join I was thrilled!
This session covered the ground the first lecture opened up: what the social gospel actually was and why it took forty years to get its name (Walter Rauschenbusch held out until 1917, and even then conceded reluctantly), what social crises made the movement urgent, and why the Black social gospel is — as Gary puts it without hesitation — the better side of it. We went deep on the moral formation of Ida B. Wells and Reverdy Ransom: Wells going to four or five church services on a Sunday, working through her own rage at the Eliza Woods lynching before she could write about it, and eventually being burned out of Memphis for telling the truth about what lynching was actually about. Ransom, Harriet's son, clawing his way toward education in an Ohio that barely saw him, discovering socialist thought through George Herron's underlined pages, hiding his theological liberalism from bishops for years. We talked about the organizing question — why Frederick Douglass was wrong about race-specific organizations, why the Afro-American League and Council kept collapsing, why Booker T. Washington was the most famous living American in 1900 and used every bit of that power to undermine protest organizations, and what finally made the NAACP stick. And we ended with Ransom's late-life declaration that Africans and their descendants are the last spiritual reserves of humanity — part resignation, part prophecy, entirely worth sitting with.
Next week: Reinhold Niebuhr. Gary's lecture is already on the resource page.
If you haven't joined yet, come find us at www.HomebrewedClasses.com — it's donation-based, including zero. You'll get access to Gary's full lecture series tracing the history of Christian social ethics in America, Aaron's bonus interviews with leading scholars and activists, curated readings, discussion guides for small groups, and the online community. This is the class for right now.
JOIN THE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins
This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now.
Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
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