Walter Rauschenbusch

You are the great-grandson of Louis Brandes, the first Jewish justice on the United States Supreme Court.

You are the descendant of Walter Rauschenbusch, who is one of the influential theologians of the social gospel movement.

Questions about faith, democracy, religious pluralism, and what we owe our neighbors are not exactly new territory for your family, right? Right.

Yeah, I mean, this is something that was totally ingrained in me from a young age.

He read voraciously on theology and philosophy.

Of note were his studies on Walter Rauschenbusch and his notion of a church responsible for social justice, but especially on Karl Marx.

King appreciated Marx's critique of unbridled capitalism, but he never embraced communism due to its atheistic views.

In 1951, King Jr. graduated from Crozier and continued his education at Boston University.

And so we can think then about the kingdom of God, and we can think about the kingdom of evil.

These are two of Rauschenbusch's terms there, Walter Rauschenbusch being one of the primary figures who founded the social gospel.

The social gospel, there are folk who came before Rauschenbusch, right? He reaches the height of his sort of stature around 1908, 1912.

But the first founders of the social gospel were Unitarian Christians.

Congregationalist pastors, Peabody being one of them, George Taylor being another, these individuals who were both leaders in congregations and then also leaders in seminaries, because the birth of the seminary happens within the relatively similar dates to this time period.