Building A Plenty Good Room Society: From Austerity to Abundance

Opening remarks on black Christian socialism from a book event at Princeton Theological Seminary

Good morning family,

I’m writing to share the written version of my opening remarks at Princeton Theology Seminary book event this week on Plenty Good Room. The remarks provide a brief argument on how black Christian socialism can how disrupt the Transatlantic policy consensus of austerity and instead foster an inclusive, reparative economy.

Good evening everyone:

Thanks for your presence here, virtually and in person, this evening. In particular, I want to honor the work of Dr. David Latimore and Princeton Seminary’s Betsy Stockton Black Church Studies Center for their visionary, impactful, and necessary work in the church, society, and academy.

My aim, tonight, is to make a case for what I call black Christian socialism as a viable, actionable faith tradition of political practice and economic activism. I’ll set the table a bit with some opening remarks, and then look forward to group discussion with Dr. Latimore, and with all of you this evening.

Introduction

I wrote Plenty Good Room while finishing my dissertation in 2024, on a separate topic. I don’t advise doing that, but confession is still good for my soul. In some ways, I’ve been writing the book since 2014, when I first published an article on faith and socialism for the Huffington Post. But the arguments came together and poured out of me like water last year. As I note in the introduction, PGR is part prayer, part appeal, part political theory. It’s a book that flows simultaneously from pastoral concern and my training as a political scientist.

In PGR, I assert that we need to move beyond simply condemning laissez faire capitalism, to move beyond virtue-signaling about anti-capitalist sentiments, to move beyond only denouncing neocolonial debt service burdens on formerly colonized nations, though there’s good historical, macroeconomic, and political reasons to hold all of those positions. And I do hold them. The church, among other groups, needs to break new ground, and if the argument is wrong, let it be productively, glorious wrong, and we’ll break further ground for more freedom, more equitable governance — different from government, governance — the next time.

So, how does the book title fit into all of this?

Book Title: Plenty Good Room

Plenty Good Room is a black church saying that’s linked to radical welcome and hospitality. As in – “there’s plenty good room for all at the foot of the cross”. As in – “there’s plenty good room in God’s kindom”. I support that strand of meaning and want black churches, indeed the full Christian communion, to be continually opening, continually affirming, continually learning. We need that, urgently.

But also: I argue that Plenty Good Room, that blessed black church proverb, can be understood as an anti-scarcity, pro-abundance claim about what societies choose to do with the surplus of God’s extravagant creation.

For example: the existence of sufficient water, wind, and solar power to meet the energy needs of the entire planet is an example of God’s surplus, of divine plenty. We have the renewable resources needed to create a green industrial sector while decarbonizing the grey, emissions-producing industrial work.

This surplus and plenty in society is not only an a priori, divine gift of say, natural resources, but also the human-authored result of supply chains, technology, infrastructure, and working people especially, bringing forth goods, services, and experiences that co-create the surplus value which makes financial and social value present in the first place. Here, the argument is informed by scholars like political theorist, Charisse Burden-Stelly, who notes that the often concealed, economic moment of primitive accumulation – land theft, enslavement, enclosure of the commons – is the originating move that makes racist capitalism itself, as well as all subsequent, macroeconomic and institutional development possible.

Within PGR, I start the historical clock for analyzing racial capitalism in the 1980s. A part of that decision is autobiography because I was born in the 1980s. But also: in that period, we see the transatlantic policy consensus of U.S. President Ronald Reagan and U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher aligning on purportedly free markets, gutting public services, crushing labor movements, and scapegoating minoritized populations. The roots of today’s anti-DEI movement are traceable, in part, to the 1980s, with its invocation of charges like reverse racism, anti-affirmative action messaging, talk of a colorblind society, the like.

This transatlantic policy consensus reinforces wealth inequality and legislates fiscal injustice through storylines laced with racialized, xenophobic, misogynic talking points.

The rapper Tupac Shakur, of blessed memory, talked about this period within the 1980s when he rhymed, “give the crack to the kids, who cares, one less ugly mouth on the welfare”. This lyric summarizes how a tight-fisted approach to public policy views the prospect of minoritized populations accessing public goods as another “ugly mouth” or as Elon Musk recently put it, a member of the parasite class”.

From the 1980s, 90s, early 2000s, 2010s, we see the consolidation of an austerity paradigm that remains in place for the next several decades, a paradigm that is justified in the press, in political space, and in some pulpits, as belt-tightening, as fiscal responsibility, as getting the house in order, sometimes you can even hear a sprinkle of Bible, if you don’t work you don’t eat, etc.

Notice, though: this austerity paradigm, this not-enoughness, isn’t a universally applied logic. It’s a contextual, demographically specific thing.

Consider the example of anti-indigeneity in sports teams. Well before Trump, Musk and them, and in metro areas that vote blue, we’ve only just begun to see the tiniest of justice-oriented pushback against sports teams named Atlanta Braves, Washington Redskins, Kansas City Chiefs. In response to such important, yet nascent efforts, the austerity pushback is often so variant of: this justice stuff is a nice thing to do, but it’s too expensive. It costs too much to redesign branding, reproduce jerseys, merchandise, etc. The basic idea, is that racial equity maybe worth a few press conferences, perhaps some non-binding resolutions from the public sector, but not any real commitment of resources and change in decision-making power.

Consider, also, the case of welfare reform in the 1990s. In that decade, then U.S. President Bill Clinton worked with both Democrats and Republicans, according to his across the aisle strategy of triangulation, to end his own party’s New Deal legacy of welfare. In practice, this meant moving from Aid to Families with Dependent Children to Temporary Aid to Needy Families. How was this austerity policy move justified? It was done, consistently, by Democrats parroting the idea that black poor folks are freeloaders in need of work requirements to access income support, that black single mothers are somehow deviant and devoid of initiative. Then, as now, an anti-black, anti-poor logic that fueled a austerity public policy agenda.

Austerity, this not-enoughness paradigm, is what economists, policymakers, and news outlets use as a principle of resource allocation, to help determine who gets what, which communities get excluded, and when all this happens. For example, fiscal policy in legislatures and monetary from the Federal Reserve routinely raises debt ceilings and runs beyond deficit thresholds during times of war, public health crisis, or economic recession, but the realities of roughly 137 million poor and low-wealth folk in America struggling to get by isn’t regarded as a social crisis meriting direct, sustained policy intervention.

In contrast to this austerity for the masses, the 1980s Transatlantic policy consensus did not adopt a hands-off, non-intervening approach to campaign donors and affluent families. For them, it’s been all hands on deck for income tax cuts, lowering capital gains tax, inconsistent Department of Labor enforcement of wage theft, looking the other way at corporate intimidation during union campaigns.

For the last 40 years, America’s political economy and culture has produced a distorted kind of plenty good room in terms of financial well-being for real estate firms, tech companies, financial institutions, and those who, in Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s language, are rich beyond conscience.

Here’s the picture: across the last four decades, we get austerity for the masses, while our political-economic choices hoard God’s surplus and the people’s plenty, justifying it all through some variation of “certain folk ain’t worth public investment”.

This ungodly sociohistorical contradiction between austerity for some when Plenty Good Room is possible for everybody is the theoretical premise of the book, and foundational, I’d argue, for not only on black Christian socialism, but for any kind of transformational project at scale.

Permit me one further comment about the project of black Christian socialism and this dialectic of austerity and abundance through biblical themes and then we can open up for questions.

Black Christian socialism is grounded in the “turn the world upside” potential of reading strategies for the Bible

Dr. Brian Blount, a former NT Professor at Princeton Seminary, argued against what he called the paleontological, dog and bone theory of exegesis in the first edition of True To Our Native Land, the first New Testament commentary produced entirely by black biblical scholars. The dog and bone exegesis theory holds that Bible meanings are fixed, that we have only one valid conclusion, and that everyone should agree that said, “universal conclusion” is a bone. My argument here is that singularity of meaning reading apply a “hermeneutic of austerity” to Scripture, as if any piece of literature, let alone sacred letters, could mean only one thing! This hermeneutic of austerity derives, even if well-intentioned, is nonetheless an authoritarian way of handling our Scriptures, one that robs us of other, better options of biblical interpretation.

In contrast to that dog and bone theory of exegesis, Blount argues for the meaning potential of texts, a hermeneutical approach that simultaneously focuses on a biblical text, a reconstruction of the history behind that text, and the meaning of that text for people like us who interpret and embody it. In this latter reading which emphasizes the potential for multiple meanings of a texts, we interpret Bible texts as filled with many, rather than a singular, layer of significance for freedom, with interpretation guided by the Spirit, community discussion, the life of Christ, etc.

In essence, Blount calls us to what I’d argue is a hermeneutic of abundance, where the multiple readings of Scripture, its surplus of meaning, is held open and elaborated in contrast to a hermeneutic of austerity, with its singular claims of “only one perspective”, or “the biblical worldview”.

Putting the entire argument together, black Christian socialism employs a hermeneutic of abundance, in order to push against racialized austerity and push for plenty good room societies, to push for distributed abundance of not only resources, but also the abundance of interdependence at every scale of relationships.

Let me take a text, briefly. Yes, I’m a political scientist, but I’m also a co-pastor, and every pastor ought to take a text sometimes.

Consider Mary’s Magnificat in Luke 1:46-56. One line of interpretation emphasizes Mary’s role as the God-bearer, as the prophet who declares God’s mercy from generation to generation. To that I say, bless the Lord. But we can and should say more, because there’s more meaning potential in the text. If we stop with only one meaning, we have a hermeneutic of austerity, but we can press further into the composite territory of multiple meanings in the text, through a hermeneutic of abundance. Mary’s Magnificat is also a song of revolutionary praise, perhaps history’s most enduring anthem of social reversal and economic justice. In these ten verses, Mary’s revolutionary praise argues that this God of mercy is also the Mighty One, verse 49, who has pulled the mighty down from their thrones and exalted the humble, that this merciful, Mighty God has sent the rich away empty and filled the hungry with good things.

This text is paradigmatic for the Luke-Acts narrative, we don’t get to good news for the poor in Luke 4, or sharing all things in common in Acts 2 and Acts 4 without first beginning with the surplus of meanings found in Luke 1. And if we read this text from a black Christian socialist framework, we read with contemplative attention, parsing through possible meanings, in order to find a fulcrum of interpretation with which to turn the world upside from white heteropatriarchal capitalist imperialism and towards a constructive kinship for the common good, towards what Dr. W.E.B. DuBois often called a cooperative commonwealth.

Who exemplifies this kind of black Christian socialist reading of biblical texts in previous moments and in our current moment?

Black Christian socialist readings have their origins in folks like Rev. Reverdy Ransom, an AME Bishop, and Episcopal Bishop Theodore Holly of Haiti, both of whom invoked the rich meaning potential of Scripture, as a resource for liberation and for a kind of socialism in the 1896 edition of the AME Church Review. Rev. George Washington Woodbey did the same as part of the Socialist Party in the early 20th century.

I’m skipping decades here a bit, but today, folks like Dr. Angela Cowser, a community organizer and professor at Louisville Seminary continues the tradition, or take former St. Louis, U.S. Congresswoman, Ferguson organizer, and Pastor, Cori Bush.

Before Bush and Cowser, we could point to Nannie Helen Burroughs, that renowned black Baptist in a included in Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s text for her cooperative economics work in DC in Nembhard’s pathbreaking genealogy of cooperative economics in her landmark text, Collective Courage: A History of African-American Cooperative Economics. Popp and Phillips Cunningham make a related but slightly different claim about Burroughs, arguing that she embodies a womanist rhetoric of labor justice for all, due to her public advocacy for, and founding of the first national women’s labor union in the country.

The point here is that there isn’t one singular meaning, but rather we have surplus meaning in Scripture, and that we therefore have plenty good room for adopting bold readings of the Bible for an inclusive, historically grounded, economic justice.

If we can identify and confront the conditions that produce austerity / abundance contractions in our political economy, and use a hermeneutic of abundance to do so, we can make some major headway.

If we can interpret the Bible towards justice and equally important, institutionalize versions of black Christian socialism, we just might upend the regime of white heteropatriarchal imperialist capitalism, and in the process lay down some foundation stones for constructing a plenty good room society.

One with distributed abundance for everyone,

One where the affluent can hear that their liberation is tied to the future of families whose work is largely responsible for their wealth,

One where all God’s people can live under their own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid.