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60 A Quiet Revolution and the Culture Wars Peter Slade the story of the civil rights movement dramatizes the moral failure and cultural captivity of the white evangelical church in the United States of America. Evangelicals’ active resistance to integration in the 1960s stemmed from their rejection of the social gospel movement and separation from modernist and progressive Protestants earlier that century. The civil rights movement was only one act in a theological drama that continues to play out in the sanctuaries, seminaries, and city streets of twenty-firstcentury America. John Perkins is a key character in this unfolding drama. As an African American prophet to contemporary white evangelicals, Perkins confronts them with their complicity in rejecting the prophets while at the same time inviting them to expand their theology to include what he calls the holistic gospel. More than forty years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s death,Perkins’s unique life story enables a new generation of evangelicals to relocate themselves as participants in the continuing civil rights movement without rejecting their evangelical heritage.In the latest act of this theological drama, we find a theology of the social gospel alive and well in the most surprising of places—as a grassroots movement within the mainstream of American evangelicalism. THE SOCIAL GOSPEL The story of John and Vera Mae Perkins’s return to Mississippi in 1960 and the foundation of Voice of Calvary Ministries in Mendenhall is a familiar one. It is told by John Perkins and retold as the founding narrative of the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA).1 Also well known is Perkins’s strategy for Christian community development condensed into his three Rs of relocation, reconciliation, and redistribution.2 Perhaps less well known is the theological distance Perkins traveled from his fundamentalist/evangelical roots to preaching his holistic gospel of the a quiet revolution and the culture wars 61 kingdom of God that “see[s] people not just as souls, but as whole people.”3 His original reason for returning to Mississippi was to bring biblical literacy to the black churches in his home state,whose preachers and congregations, in his opinion, had plenty of zeal and emotion but lacked “enlightenment.”4 Driven by this vision, Perkins first established a Bible institute and engaged in evangelism at every opportunity. Three years after returning to Mississippi , motivated by a desire to help their neighbors as well as their own children,Vera Mae started running a day care center from their home.“[It] was,” Perkins remembers,“the first real social action we got into.”5 The day care flourished, and from 1966 to 1968 it became part of the federally funded Head Start program.6 By the mid-1970s Voice of Calvary, now located in both Jackson and Mendenhall, was operating thrift stores, health clinics, a housing cooperative, as well as classes in Bible and theology. The notion that the gospel of Jesus Christ is good news not just to an individual’s soul but also to his or her whole person and community is not a new idea to American Christianity; it found its most pronounced expression in the social gospel movement of the early 1900s. The fact that Perkins had to rediscover this dimension of the gospel for himself is an embarrassing testimony to the self-imposed theological segregation of American evangelicals in the middle of the twentieth century, a tendency that continues to this day. In the 1960s evangelicals desired to remain holy and separate from the corrupting influence of liberal Christianity with its social gospel, ecumenical, and universalist tendencies. The influential writings of the great prophets of the social gospel movement —Washington Gladden, Walter Rauschenbusch, Richard Ely, Shailer Mathews, et al.—were shaped by a number of factors that came together in the churches and seminaries of America’s Gilded Age. By the time Rauschenbusch published his landmark work Christianity and the Social Crisis in 1907, this form of socially progressive Protestantism was a complex ideological laminate with its own distinctive properties. This laminate was formed in part by, and in part in response to, the rapid expansion and industrialization of America’s cities. These cities filled to overflowing with migrants and immigrants, and the churches struggled to find ways to respond to the vice and poverty of this new urban landscape. In a huge burst of energy following the Civil War, encouraged by the success of the abolitionist cause, Protestant churches created a plethora of societies, organizations , and leagues...

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