‘The Gospel Is a Social Gospel’

Her speaking calendar exploded. The UCC was thrilled to be associated with Blackmon, and President Obama appointed her to the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-based Neighborhood Partnerships for the White House. Blackmon said the UCC is made for fights—fighting for justice, love, compassion, and equality. Her high position in the quintessential liberal denomination and her support of its liberal views on sexuality earned her a tag she hated—“progressive Christian.” Sometimes she ripped it off just after being introduced: “One of my pet peeves is when people describe me or others that I work with as being left, or being progressive, or being liberal. I don’t preach a progressive Gospel. I preach the Gospel. The Gospel is progressive. The Gospel is a social Gospel. The gospel is a liberating Gospel. And if, when you preach it, it does not do those things, it is not the Gospel.”

Donald Trump won the White House, and Blackmon shuddered at church audiences that just wanted to talk about Trump, Trump, Trump. Yes, some things must be said about Trump, she said. But the most important thing is that his presidency did not come from nowhere. Trump is a product of four hundred years of racism and a half-century of cunningly racist politics geared to destroy the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

On August 11 and 12, 2017, neo-Nazis and white nationalists staged a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, beginning with a march through the campus of the University of Virginia. Local and visiting clergy held a counter-protest worship service at St. Paul’s Memorial Church, across the street from the university rotunda. Blackmon preached a barnburner of a sermon to an overflowing, high-spirited crowd. Three hundred white supremacists, marching two by two, approached the church with torches, chanting, “Jews will not replace us! Blood and soil! You will not replace us! White lives matter!” There were flyers calling for a race war and flyers declaring that the white nationalists had come to take back their country. No one knew if the mob would invade the sanctuary, where the crowd sheltered in place, fearing the worst, until the mob finally returned to Nameless Field. Blackmon, on MSNBC, replied to the chants: “Are you kidding me? And this president wants to talk about revising history? Read some history. Black people built this country.” From Charlottesville, she traveled to a small evangelical college in Nebraska, not realizing that she was traumatized. Blackmon discovered this only when she found herself demanding to be moved to a hotel containing at least one or two Black people. She couldn’t stay in her room or go to sleep surrounded only by white people.

Often she spoke and marched alongside William J. Barber II. Every week on the road, someone chastised Blackmon, instructing her that the church should not be involved in politics. Sometimes, they opined that her approach to her job crossed the line. She replied that the line was real to her; she didn’t want the church to take positions on how people should vote. But the teaching of Jesus is quite specifically political, she argued. An apolitical Jesus is a fantasy or some kind of cover-up. When faced with a choice between Jesus and any American convention, she took Jesus every time. On the road, when teamed up with Barber, she has to say it differently if Barber gets the question first, because Barber has the same answer.

Blackmon contrasts the light of Epiphany that shines in the darkness and compels all persons forward in love with the fear-mongering hatred that erupted on Epiphany 2020—January 6. She watched in “horror and disbelief,” she recalls, as insurrectionist vigilantes stormed the gates of the Capitol, scaled walls, built gallows, and inflicted injuries and deaths, trying to thwart the peaceful transition of power, all of it spurred on by Trump’s “inflammatory lies” and the many public figures who endorse them. The vigilantes are gaining, she warns. Nineteen states have passed thirty-four laws restricting voting rights. On the other hand, twenty-five states have enacted fifty-four laws that expand voting access. January 6, 2020, was atrocious, to be sure, but on January 6, 2022, tens of thousands of peaceful demonstrators gathered across the nation in more than 350 vigils.

Blackmon urges rally crowds and sanctuary gatherings to reject the current flood of legislation to ban books and teaching on America’s racial history: “It is the not seeing things through the lens of race that makes privilege invisible to whites.” “If we remain silent at a time such as this,” she says, “deliverance will arise from some other place but we, my friends, will be lost. Jesus stands at the door of everyone, and knocks, and hopes to gain entrance but also requires that we change, that we repent, that we do better.” Everything, she says, that has tried to kill her has failed, because love never dies: “Redemption is possible when we live out love. Let us learn from the tragedies of our past and move toward the light within each of us fueled by the everlasting power of love.”