Still Somebody - Christianity Today

James meeks, senior pastor of the 10,000-member Salem Baptist Church of Chicago, is renowned locally for setting audacious evangelistic goals—and then meeting them. In seminary, he read books by John MacArthur and Charles Swindoll and decided he wanted to grow a church as large as theirs. He did. When he founded Salem in 1985, Meeks set the goal of having the largest Sunday-school program in Chicago. It started with 50 students; today there are 2,000. In early 1999, Salem launched an ambitious evangelism campaign to bring 25,000 people to Christ; by year’s end it had recorded 27,000 “confessions of faith”—and 3,000 of those people joined the church. Salem’s list of ministries reads like a city directory: a daycare center, a 500-student grade school, Chicago’s largest Christian bookstore, a soup kitchen, a counseling program for substance abusers.

Meeks’s sermons are unabashedly Christ-centered. He is a frequent speaker at Moody Bible Institute’s annual conferences. One of his close friends and prayer partners is Charles Lyons, a white Southern Baptist pastor. Meeks recently completed a campaign to deliver cassette tapes of the New Testament to each of the 38,170 prison inmates in Illinois. He is, by all indications, a passionate evangelical Christian.

But there’s just one thing. Meeks is the executive vice president of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and a longtime admirer of the controversial civil rights leader. Meeks was 14 when he discovered his hero. It was 1972, and Jackson was a brash young preacher from South Carolina who had been a member of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous team of activist clergymen. Jackson’s Chicago-based ministry, Operation PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity), was located near Meeks’s own South Side neighborhood. More than a decade before the rise of rap music, this preacher spoke to audiences in effortless rhymes. He intoned mantras like “It’s not the bark you wear but the fruit you bear” and exhorted crowds of black youths to “stay in school, stay off drugs,” and “Repeat after me: I am … somebody! I am … somebody!” When not rallying students in gymnasiums, he confronted corporate America, showing how boycotts and demonstrations could be used not only to desegregate buses and schools, but also to open up jobs and economic opportunities.

Meeks was smitten. “I was a fan of his to the point that every photograph of him that I found in Ebony, Jet, or the newspaper, I cut out and put on a board in my room—I had over 75 pictures,” he says. “Rev. Jackson’s influence helped me understand that ministers are leaders who could help people both in and outside the church.”

Many onlookers believe Meeks’s current affiliation with Jackson is a stain on an otherwise gleaming résumé. “I love Rev. Meeks’s ministry,” said one Chicago woman who watches the weekly TV broadcast of Salem Baptist’s service, “but, for the life of me, I cannot understand why he associates himself with that Jesse Jackson.” The truth is, Meeks is not the only theologically conservative Christian with whom Jackson associates. As it turns out, a surprising number of black evangelicals have been inspired and shaped by Jackson’s work. And many of them are card-carrying members of Rainbow/PUSH. They are Bible professors, parachurch leaders, and senior pastors; politically, they are both Democrat and Republican. There are no hard figures on the exact number of evangelicals directly influenced by Jackson, but the anecdotal evidence points to a wider trend.

“Jesse Jackson is the premier social activist of our time,” says Dwight Perry, professor of pastoral studies at Moody Bible Institute and the author of Breaking Down Barriers: A Black Evangelical Explains the Black Church (Baker). “He teaches us the importance of not dichotomizing the gospel, that the essence of the gospel is how I am relating to my neighbor, regardless of his race or social condition.”

Jerald January, who during the ’90s was U.S. director of Compassion International, believes evangelicals can learn from Jackson. “We understand the evangelistic part, but there is still a need for someone to cry out for justice. Jesse fills that void for a lot of us.”

Many things can and will be said about Jackson’s public and personal foibles, but the untold story on him is this: His vocational heirs will not be radical activists like Al Sharpton or other pseudo-religious figures but honest-to-goodness Christian churchmen who, like Meeks, have a call to ministry both “in and outside the church.”

‘God is Older than Genesis’

“I take Luke 4:18 seriously,” Jesse Jackson tells me as we sit in his Chicago office. “To preach the Good News to the poor, to bind up the wounds of the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom to the captives. If I preach the gospel of truth and reconciliation, I can touch hard hearts and make things happen. That’s my calling.”

Sitting behind a large desk cluttered with books, papers, and framed photographs of his family, Jackson is gracious and personable but utterly serious about this business of being Jesse Jackson. He rarely smiles and handles my questions with the no-nonsense determination of a weary grad student defending his dissertation.

When I met with Jackson last fall, I had to remind myself that I was there as a journalist, not a fan. In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that I like Jesse Jackson. I grew up liking him. In the 1970s and ’80s, he was one of the few living African American heroes, outside of sports and entertainment, whom a young black boy could look up to. Jackson could always be counted on to rattle the status quo. Sometimes he triumphed—his campaigns for president in 1984 and ’88 (though he lost the nominations, he brought a new constituency into the political mainstream) or his rescue of American hostages from Syria, Iraq, and Yugoslavia. Other times he stumbled—his insensitive “hymie” remark about New York Jews or his ill-advised defense of delinquent students in Decatur, Illinois. Still, Jackson’s good accomplishments seemed to outweigh the bad.

The rap against Jackson for many evangelicals is that he is a Christian minister who does not have a credible “spiritual witness.” He’s constantly craving the media spotlight and imposing the race issue on all his dealings, whether it’s legitimate or not. He seems stuck in a “black victimization” mindset that discourages some African Americans from taking personal responsibility for their conditions. What’s more, his political positions on issues like abortion and homosexual rights run counter to that of most people who interpret the Bible as God’s inspired Word.

Then there was the announcement a year ago that Jackson had fathered a daughter outside of his marriage. For many, it was a confirmation of what they had suspected all along—that Jackson was a spiritual phony, a scoundrel, a player. Here was the man who had for decades preached sexual purity and male responsibility besmirching everything he had stood for. Worse, his supporters seemed to turn a blind eye and shamelessly welcomed him back into public life after only a few days of seclusion.

When I told many of my white friends and colleagues that I was working on a story about Jesse Jackson, I could see the disgust spread on their faces. There was an almost visceral distaste for the man. And this was from people who have made racial reconciliation and social justice priorities in their churches and personal lives.

This dislike of Jackson is not just a white thing either. Of course, race is a factor for some whites who don’t like him. But there are also numerous blacks who are rubbed the wrong way by his rhetoric and tactics.

Eugene Rivers, the Boston activist and Pentecostal pastor, has become a prolific critic of Jackson and the “civil rights industry,” as he calls it. “We in the black community have to move beyond the gratuitous use of the race card to retard the debate and move forward towards a focus on measurable outcomes,” he told CNN last year.

“Rev. Jackson’s approach is to look for technical answers to spiritual questions,” says Star Parker, president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education in Los Angeles. “His approach misleads people to depend on him instead of the Lord.” A conservative and former welfare mother who turned her life around after becoming a Christian, Parker has debated Jackson and others on CNN and ABC’s Politically Incorrect.

Jackson, by now, is used to criticism. But he still seems irked by the notion that people would question the sincerity of his faith. To him, it’s not unlike the adversity that was faced by two of his heroes: Jesus and Martin Luther King. They, too, were misunderstood by the religious communities of their day. Jackson regularly—and some would say presumptuously—invokes their examples in relation to his own experience.

“Jesus was brought under a death warrant and killed by a conspiracy between the religious order and the government in the same night,” Jackson says. “Evangelicals had a negative view of Dr. King, too. That’s why the ‘Letter from the Birmingham Jail’ was addressed to the white clergy. It was the white church that sided with [police commissioner] Bull Connor over against Dr. King. The white church was negative about Dr. King and limited in their view of Jesus as a universalist; Jesus was not limited by race, by country, or by culture. He was preaching a global gospel. He saw these things as transcending the nation-state.”

As he says this, Jackson’s tone shifts into a higher gear. The preacher has found his groove: “The Good Samaritan who rescued the battered Jewish man was not of that man’s nation, not of his race, not of his religion. The priest saw the man lying there bleeding, went to the other side of the street. The Levite saw him, went to the other side of the street. But the Samaritan—a man from another culture—stopped and helped. You see, Jesus went beyond culture and religion and race. He said, ‘Look, is this guy your brother because he’s your pastor? Is he your brother because he’s your skin color? Who is your neighbor? It’s easy to love people who are in your comfort zone, but loving people outside of that zone … That’s getting beyond private salvation into defining brotherhood in much broader terms.”

Jackson’s use of phrases like “Jesus as a universalist” rightfully sets off alarms for many theologically conservative Christians. In a 1977 interview with CT, Jackson hinted at an extra-biblical universalism regarding salvation. “Even though we always say that you go through Jesus to get to God, Jesus did not always put on that restriction,” he said then. Twenty-five years later, that perspective seems intact.

When I tell Jackson that some of his theology troubles evangelicals, he pauses for several seconds and then spells out his differences. “God is older than Genesis, and he did not stop with Revelation. The Bible is a holy book but not the only book of God. God is not book-challenged. God cannot be omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient and be limited to 5,000 years of biblical history. He is much bigger than that.”

Learning to be Somebody

To truly understand Jesse Louis Jackson, it has been said, you have to go back to Greenville, South Carolina. He was born there on October 8, 1941, in the poorest section of town, to a 16-year-old unwed mother. His father was the next-door neighbor, a married man in his mid-30s.

Growing up, Jackson felt stigmatized by the ignoble circumstances of his birth. He learned as a young boy that his mother’s husband—the man whose surname he had taken—was not his biological father. In later years, Jackson would tell the story of how other kids taunted him, saying “Your daddy ain’t none of your daddy,” and “You ain’t nothin’ but a nobody.” Jackson’s biological father went on to become one of the most well-to-do black men in town, but Jackson could only look in from the outside. He longed for a relationship with the man. He recalls that he cried a lot.

But Jackson’s family instilled in him a strong sense of his somebody-ness, which helped him overcome his early insecurities. He decided to respond to the negative looks and remarks by excelling at all that he did. He became an honor-roll student, a high school football star, and, most importantly, an energetic young leader at his Baptist church.

In the 1996 biography Jesse, he told journalist Marshall Frady, “Church was like my laboratory, my first actual public stage, where I began to develop and practice my speaking powers with more and more confidence. After a while, it got to where you couldn’t hardly hold me back. I’d sit there watching [other preachers], but all I was really seeing was myself up there in that pulpit.”

Those who have closely followed Jackson’s career suggest that his hyperactive compulsion to be seen, heard, and accepted is driven by some deep-seated need to prove his self-worth. Rage has also played a part. It was one of the consequences of growing up against the ugly backdrop of legalized racism. Jackson experienced the dehumanizing effects of Jim Crow segregation firsthand—riding at the back of buses, using back doors to enter restaurants, not being able to check out books from the public library or play football against all-white high schools. He told Frady, “You felt the whole society was just out to erase you.”

The most vexing instances of racism, however, came from the Christian community. Jackson recalls the irony of growing up in the shadow of Bob Jones University, “which had the audacity to preach to us about having saved lives while they advocated a white supremacist God.” And then there were the white churches where his father did janitorial work. “The strange thing,” he says, “was that my father could clean up a church on Sunday afternoon but couldn’t attend it on Sunday morning.”

More than a decade later, while attending Chicago Theological Seminary, Jackson watched the opening salvos of Martin Luther King’s march on Selma on the late news and suddenly recognized his destiny. The next morning, he stormed into the cafeteria, jumped on a table, and began challenging his mostly white classmates. “We’ve been studying the cost of discipleship,” he shouted. “Now we have a chance to validate it with our lives. Who’s going with me to Selma?” Jackson rallied 20 of his fellow seminarians—and five professors—and launched a caravan to Alabama.

Once in Selma, Jackson took only two days to rustle up a meeting with King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and to persuade MLK himself to bring him on as his Chicago point man. Jackson headed up Operation Breadbasket, the economic-empowerment wing of the SCLC that he would ultimately commandeer to form his own organization. That was March 1965—three years before King’s assassination. From then on, Jackson glued himself to King and quickly earned a reputation as the one member of the SCLC entourage who had the right mix of charisma, brains, and vision to legitimately succeed his mentor. Jackson has spent the last 34 years of his life, with varying degrees of success, trying to do just that.

“Jesse Jackson represents a kind of bridge between the social-gospel voice in the African American religious community that was prominent during the civil rights movement and the contemporary focus on economic development, individual prosperity, and assimilation into the American middle class,” says Robert Franklin, president of the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta.

Franklin cites Jackson’s Wall Street Project—his ambitious campaign to confront what he calls the “economic apartheid” of American capitalism—as the most recent example of his efforts to bring African Americans and other minorities into economic power. Under this banner Jackson has approached major corporations, demanding that they expand their opportunities for minorities or risk being boycotted. Last year, Toyota was targeted after running a print advertisement that some felt was racially insensitive (the ad featured a close-up of a black man’s smiling lips and teeth and a Toyota SUV imprinted on the man’s gold tooth). The company apologized and later announced an $8 billion long-term commitment to increase management opportunities and dealership franchises for African Americans.

Some have labeled these efforts “shakedowns” and accused Rainbow/PUSH of pocketing a portion of the money. Jackson says any money that his organization receives—usually in the form of donations from those his efforts have benefited—is simply a thank-you gift. He, in fact, considers the Wall Street Project a natural continuation of Martin Luther King’s work during the civil rights movement. “It’s the final phase in the process,” he says.

Glenn Loury, professor of economics and director of the Institute on Race and Social Division at Boston University, agrees that the project can appear opportunistic, but he doesn’t necessarily think it’s inappropriate. “I’m realistic about the way that America works. There are backrooms where powerful people do deals. The people on Wall Street understand that.”

What Loury does question is how far-reaching the campaign will be. “Real economic development for African Americans must occur from the bottom up,” he says. “Most of the 30 to 35 million African Americans are workers. Creating a few black millionaires is not going to change the facts on the ground for most of those people. What we need is education, human capital, and a strong economy.”

Robert Franklin concurs. He adds that Jackson’s dependence on older civil rights strategies—boycotts, marches, protest politics—may not be well suited to the “challenges and opportunities for progress in today’s society, where the skills of negotiation, merit, and demonstrated excellence are important.”

Still, in the end, it is not campaigns on Wall Street that people will connect with Jesse Jackson. One always comes back to Jackson’s role as a spiritual leader. It is at the root of his work. That is why the revelation of his moral failure last year left many wondering whether he could ever recover his credibility.

Saving Humpty Dumpty

The tragic irony of Jackson’s recent troubles is that he would father a child illegitimately after he himself entered the world under the same painful conditions. In an NPR commentary broadcast after the news broke, Robert Franklin smartly coined the term “unoriginal sin” to describe the sad course of events. Jackson and his wife, Jacqueline, have been married for nearly 40 years and have five grown children. His 3-year-old daughter is the result of an affair with Karin Stanford, a former Rainbow/PUSH staff member. The fallout has led to an allegation that Jackson misused donated funds to pay child support to Stanford, a claim he denies.

For his part, Jackson refuses to discuss the matter beyond his initial statement that asked his friends and supporters for their “forgiveness, understanding, and prayers.” Still, when addressing other issues, he occasionally invokes biblical themes of redemption that hint at something more personal. “We must honor the ethic of the Ten Commandments,” Jackson told me, “and if we fall and break them or disobey them, it’s only through mercy and grace that Humpty Dumpty is put back together again.” The love-child scandal was indeed a messy fall for Jackson. But his young daughter is more than a symbol of moral collapse and scandal. She is a real human being who, despite Jackson’s ongoing financial support, will not have the steady presence of her father in her life.

Jackson’s public reemergence took place at Salem Baptist Church, just three days after his shocking announcement. When I asked his friends and supporters about the scandal and the brisk pace of his reinstatement, most agreed that, personally, they would have preferred Jackson to spend a little more time away from the public eye.

“He should have taken an indefinite leave in order to get his personal affairs back together with his wife and children,” says Moody’s Dwight Perry. Others said they knew about the scandal long before it became public, and believed Jackson was truly remorseful. And, like Jackson himself, many of them appeal to biblical examples of failure and restoration—not to minimize their friend’s actions but to affirm God’s grace.

“Yes, he fell, and he should repent and be sorry,” says Jerald January, who now leads Vernon Park Church of God in Chicago. “But with the way a lot of our evangelicals treat Jesse, I don’t think David would have been able to be king anymore.”

James Meeks echoes that sentiment: “David had a baby out of wedlock and he had Bathsheba’s husband killed. Is David no longer a credible witness? … Just because [Jackson] is out doing his work doesn’t mean that he’s no longer repentant for what he did. He still might be personally lamenting and repenting before God.”

The Jackson Paradox

On most Fridays at 10:30 A.M., about 25 Chicago ministers gather at the Rainbow/PUSH headquarters to take part in a meeting convened by Jesse Jackson. The pastors pray together and talk about strategies for improving their churches and communities. Jackson launched the weekly gatherings as part of a new Rainbow/PUSH program called One Thousand Churches Connected, which provides churches with resources for teaching money management to their members.

But this meeting is also an excuse for Jackson to nurture his connection with the local church. In fact, it was at a similar meeting six years ago that Jackson met James Meeks. The two became fast friends. Jackson invited Meeks to join the delegation of clergy who went with him to Yugoslavia in 1999 to lobby Slobodan Milosevic for the release of three American soldiers, and he eventually named Meeks his heir apparent at Rainbow/PUSH. Meeks realizes that some people view his association with Jackson as odd, but he ignores the critics. “We have a good friendship. The Bible says iron sharpens iron. We get the chance to play off of each other’s ideas and to scripturally compare decisions that are being made. I help him be more conservative; he helps me be more liberal.”

The ministers at the Friday meetings are a varied crop—old, young, traditional, contemporary, male, female. Time after time, when I ask them about Jackson’s importance, each insists that he still has much to offer—not just as a political figure but also as a Christian minister.

“Rev. Jackson has an acute gift of social exegesis and analysis of the condition of America and the world,” says Christopher Bullock, pastor of Progressive Baptist Church and an ardent Republican. “I think we do him a disservice by not viewing him as a serious critical thinker theologically.”

Jackson may be a serious thinker. But he is also a cunning politician and, at heart, an old-fashioned country preacher. “My values come out of a conservative Christian orientation,” he told Marshall Frady. “Probably would surprise a lot of people to know I think that way, but it’s what I really believe, deep down in my soul.”

And therein lies part of the public’s ongoing frustration with the man: He is forever too political to be embraced as a true minister but too religious to be accepted as a formidable politician. Yet it is the ambitious juggling of these two roles that make Jesse Jackson who he is.

And despite serious disagreements with him on theological issues and political methods, many Christian leaders in Chicago—and across the nation—believe he’s still got the goods. “At the end of the day, look at what he’s achieved,” says Bullock. “That’s the bottom line in my opinion—what he has done for the kingdom of God, what he has done for the advancement of civil rights, what he has done for the human community. He has brought hostages home. He feeds people. He does a lot of things the press will not cover.”

Edward Gilbreath is an associate editor of Christianity Today.

Related Elsewhere

Also appearing on our site today:

CT Classic: You Can Pray If You Want ToA 1977 interview with Jesse Jackson.

The site of Salem Baptist Church of Chicago has a short bio on Pastor James T. Meeks. Books by Meeks are available at Christianbook.com.

Dwight Perry’s Breaking Down Barriers: A Black Evangelical Explains the Black Church is available at Amazon.com.

The Rainbow/PUSH Coalition Web site has a Jesse Jackson bio, a list of board of directors, archived speeches, and information on Jackson’s “1,000 Churches Connected” initiative.

In 1996, PBS’s “Frontline” did a great documentary, “The Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson.” It features interviews with Jackson’s wife, his biographer Marshall Frady, and friends. In addition, the site has an except from Frady’s book, audio files and transcripts of speeches, and a biographical timeline.

New York magazine’s Jan. 7, 2002 issue included an interesting piece on the relationship between Jackson and his onetime protege, Al Sharpton (“Rev vs. Rev“).

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