Jesse Jackson and White Evangelicals
The history of a choice.
I talked to an evangelical once who voted for Jesse Jackson in the Democratic primary in 1984. The way he saw it, Jackson was the obvious evangelical candidate. Jackson was a Baptist minister bringing his faith into politics. He spoke with moral urgency on moral issues, carrying forward the rhetoric of Martin Luther King Jr., and applying Christian mandates to care for the least of these and advocate for widows, orphans, and strangers.
The evangelical I talked to was white. He was one of the Jesus People, those hippies who surrendered to Christ and had their lives transformed. He assumed—naïvely, he later realized—that all the other Jesus People would feel like he felt. He thought all evangelicals, given the way they talked about engaging culture as Christians, should vote for Jackson. Or at least most of them.
But most of the people he went to church with actually supported the divorced-and-remarried actor who dabbled in the occult, Ronald Reagan. When he looked at the local election results, he saw he was one of only eight people in his district who cast a ballot for the Baptist.
Just eight. And one of them his wife, he knew. That’s when he realized, he told me, that evangelical politics were going to be white conservative politics, nothing more, nothing less, for the rest of his life.
Jackson, who died today at 84, was a complicated figure. He was, as his New York Times obit puts it, America’s most influential Black leader between the assassination of King and the election of Barack Obama. He remade progressive populism, turning it into something explicitly and intentionally multicultural, with an emphasis on solidarity and hope.
But his soaring moral rhetoric didn’t seem securely tethered to a moral personal life. His ego often got the better of him.
He exaggerated his connections to King, telling stories about his presence at King’s death that didn’t comport with the facts. It seemed to others in the movement he was trying to steal the title of heir. He ran afoul of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and was suspended for “administrative improprieties and repeated acts of violation of organizational policy.” He didn’t fix the relationship, but went out on his own in the 1970s.
In the 1990s, he had sex with a woman who worked for him. She was 20 years younger and they had a child together that he was later forced to acknowledge. At the same time Jackson was betraying his own marriage vows, he was acting as a spiritual advisor for President Bill Clinton, helping him through his sex scandal.
In his later years, Jackson couldn’t seem to accept Obama’s ascendance and couldn’t seem to find a final, redemptive act. Where other civil rights leaders made a place for themselves in city politics or became, like John Lewis, folk-saints of the left, Jackson floundered, apparently perpetually wounded.
Still, he wasn’t just his shortcomings. (The New York Times uses “still” like this four times in his obit.) His accomplishments were historic. He was a transformative figure. And an evangelical one, in a complicated way.
Jesse Jackson should be remembered, in part, as an option that American evangelicals considered and rejected. His story is partly the story of how “evangelical” really meant “white evangelical,” and then for a moment that didn’t have to be true, and then it really was, a choice was made, and the racial and political identity of the religious movement seemed permanent.
Christianity Today asked Jackson if he was an evangelical in 1977.
“I consider myself an evangelical, but white evangelicals don’t,” he said. “They shy away from me because of my social activism.”
The editor started grilling him on doctrinal details.
Did he believe Jesus was born of a virgin? Yes.
Did he believe in original sin? Yes.
Did he believe in Jesus’ bodily resurrection? Yes.
Did he believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God? “Oh yes, I do.”
Jackson went on to add, though, that he didn’t think Jesus was the only son of God, indicating he wasn’t entirely orthodox, and didn’t consider himself bound by orthodoxy. Measured that way, he wasn’t evangelical.
Those details matter to many Christians and mattered a lot to the movement magazine that was attempting, as I’ve written, to construct evangelicalism in the 20th century. So the probing questions makes sense, from that perspective.
But if you read through the archives of the magazine (where I worked as news editor from 2019 to 2025), you don’t find this level of questioning directed at other public figures. No one interrogated the orthodoxy of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. The magazine just politely termed him a “churchman” and gave him pages to say what he wanted to say.
And even when CT did ask a lot of questions about someone’s faith, the tone wasn’t always so inquisitional. When the first American went into space in 1962, CT published a 5,000-word investigation into the question of whether John Glenn had “actually experienced regeneration.” But the posture of the article was anticipatory, excited. Is he an evangelical? We sure hope so. The magazine wasn’t looking for a way to exclude Glenn from the fold, but to count him in.
It wasn’t like that with Jackson. Evangelical’s flagship magazine met him not with eagerness, but heightened suspicion.
Edward Gilbreath, the first Black editor on staff at CT, found that suspicion hadn’t lessened by the early 2000s. He recalled in his memoir Reconciliation Blues that he had to “scratch and claw through two levels of upper management” to get permission to profile Jackson.
Gilbreath thought it was obvious that Jackson was newsworthy and took it for granted that evangelical readers would be interested in a piece on the minister/activist. He was relevant to ongoing discussions of faith in politics and the way that Christians applied their morality to current issues. Jackson was perfect for a profile.
“Call me naïve,” Gilbreath writes, “but I underestimated the repulsion my bosses would have toward Jackson.”
Gilbreath wanted to do a balanced piece, which would include critiques of Jackson’s politics, both his methods and goals, and critiques of his personal failings. When higher-ups said they had concerns about the profile, Gilbreath made this point, and defended his work as balanced. Eventually, he said, he figured out that wasn’t the issue.
“Balance wasn’t enough,” he later recalled. “They wanted me to make certain the story was not too kind to Jackson and clearly distanced Christianity Today from any hint of sympathy for the man. … I slowly came to understand that the issue was much bigger than Jesse Jackson alone.”
He did publish the profile. And it’s a good piece. It gets at the complication of Jackson.
But the bigger issue, “much bigger than Jesse Jackson,” was still there. Evangelicals were making a choice about their racial identity and political identity and how locked in and permanent-feeling it would be. They weren’t making it overtly and outright, though. The decision for “evangelical” to mean almost always white and conservative was cloaked in a camouflage of heightened suspicion.
Gilbreath eventually found that exhausting. He left CT. Not because of Jackson. But not unrelated.
“I awoke to the reality of my otherness,” he writes. “I am a black Christian in a white Christian’s world. … I have been granted limited access to a place that will never fully be mine. I am a tourist with an expiring visa.”
Evangelicals had ample reasons not to rally to Jackson. I can think of good arguments to reject his politics, his priorities, his moral leadership. I’m sure you can too.
But it’s worth noting, as a matter of historical record, that this was a choice. We often get the sense that things like this, like the racial and political identity of “evangelicalism,” are inevitable. We think that how it happened is how it had to happen. The work of history can help us uncover the contingency. There were actual moments where people made actual choices. Things were different and could be different again.
It’s worth noting too how this choice was made. Not directly. Not out loud. But by gut feeling. By sympathy, and the lack thereof. The choice was made from inside a gravitational well of dispositions that come out not as statements but preferences, not clear articulations but intuitive trust and distrust.
Such choices are so subtle, you could think people are hiding them from themselves.
Consider, as a final example, the time Jackson went and spoke at the National Religious Broadcaster’s annual convention, a major evangelical affair, in 1986. Jackson was between his two presidential runs and a major political figure. Organizers hoped for 1,000 people—a reasonable enough estimate. That would have been one out of every four at the convention. They got just 125. Most of them Black.
The attendance fell so short that the broadcaster who organized Jackson’s speech had to take up a collection to cover the cost. It was embarrassing.
Some of the people who stayed away were explicitly rejecting Jackson’s leftwing politics, according to CT’s reporting from the event. But the official reason that almost no one went to hear Jackson talk was a scheduling conflict. His talked happened to be at the same time as a prayer breakfast for Israel. That breakfast, notably, was not officially part of the National Religious Broadcasters convention, and not on the schedule. The Jackson event was.
The honored guest at the prayer breakfast was Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick. She belonged to an Evangelical Presbyterian Church and was known, politically, for advocating that the US support authoritarian regimes around the world, as long as they went along with US foreign policy.
Jackson was also criticized at the time for failing to speak against authoritarians. In his talk to evangelicals, spoke of how he got Cuban dictator Fidel Castro to attend a Baptist service and how he told the Syrian authoritarian Hafez Assad about the biblical road to Damascus (and got him to release an American captive).
Still, the executive director of the National Religious Broadcasters insisted conference attendees weren’t making a choice between conflicting visions of American evangelical foreign policy, or conflicting politics, conflicting ideas of Christian morality applied to the world. It was just an unfortunate issue of scheduling.
And that is how this kind of history happens. That’s how Jackson was, for a moment, an option for American evangelicals. And then wasn’t any more.
As CT put it in the headline on the story about the dueling events in 1986: “Jesse Jackson Spoke, but Not Many Listened.”
Good, thoughtful piece.
Side note: Many years later, when I was at the magazine, I had to "scratch and claw" for permission to do a review of "The Hate U Give." And in the end, I didn't get it.
Fantastic article.