A secular holiday for a religious figure?

This is not an original thought, but someone once observed that the best way to domesticate a threat is to give the threat its own holiday. Yesterday and today, last week or this week, many people will be observing Martin Luther King Jr. Day with little attention given to how much of a threat his thought was—and still is— to the American status quo. For instance, we celebrate the nonviolent civil rights movement exemplified by King… while maintaining two wars and barely mentioning that King was an opponent of the Vietnam War in particular and all war generally. Racism and prejudice still affect many groups of people, although its explicitness is less evident. Racism and prejudice show up in more slippery and coded ways—as well as institutionally.

These are two immediate and general ways of taking stock of where we’ve come from and where we are. But today I am instead interested in the secular/religious border that “MLK Day” transcends. I do not have any of my text books from my K-12 days with me, but it always seemed to me that the story of Martin Luther King (the civil rights leader, not necessarily the economic, social, or anti-war activist) ran like this: “King, who was a preacher/pastor, was an important figure in the civil rights movement.” I think that history books, either for brevity or due to a religious blind spot, give short shrift to much of the role King’s faith played in his thoughts on how the civil rights movement should proceed. Then again, religious historians often complain about religion being ignored in American history. The nonviolent stance of the marchers and protesters working with King was not a PR stunt to show the viciousness of southern whites (although it certainly did that thanks to television), but the logical outworking of a theological imperative.

I contend that the history should be amended to read more like this: “King, who was a preacher/pastor, lived out his religious philosophy (i.e. the Gospels) in the public square as an important figure in the rights movement.” At least this accurate portrayal will be heard in some churches. While I do not wish to go so far as saying the religious camp can claim King's legacy over secular society, it is most accurate to say that the nonviolent civil rights movement was a religious movement with profound secular implications; the perceived boundary between the secular and the religious were frequently breached.

“Aha! Robert, aren’t you just magnifying the role of religion since you are a Christian? Aren’t you trying to sneak theology into schools?”

I could be. I think it is necessary to keep King’s Christian context in mind every time he is mentioned. This is important precisely because distancing King from his theology leaves one with an impoverished sense of why and how he acted the way he did. Even though I greatly admire King because his Christian faith is meaningful to me, good history also demands that we be accurate.

An extreme example of distancing King from his religious faith is evident in reading the work of “new atheist” Christopher Hitchens, who writes that King’s “legacy has little to do with his theology.” While Hitchens and others (including King) are quite correct that Christianity was a major force in maintaining the racial status quo in America, divorcing King from his theology shows a profound ignorance of King’s intellectual biography. King was not a humanist when he stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, as Hitchens asserts in his false reading…you’d also have to ignore the content of the “I Have a Dream” speech to reach that conclusion. It is little exaggeration to say that Hitchens’ method of concluding if something is religious is directly determined by how terrible the thing is. Hitchens exemplifies how the legacy of King could be divorced from the man’s own thought, unless historians and Christians publicly hold to a more accurate reading of King.

Luckily, King did write a short, easily accessible intellectual autobiography in 1959, full of choice tidbits. I will offer the bits that stood out for me, but of course I think the piece bears full reading, and your doing so will be more rewarding for you than my abridgements. In this short reading, it should be apparent that King understood his social activism in profoundly religious terms…and aside from domesticating King by giving him a holiday he would not want, the danger of having a secular holiday for a religious figure is that we forget why he acted in the first place.
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Below are the tidbits. I’m going to let King speak for himself, but I’ll put some brief personal commentary in italics.

“Liberalism provided me with an intellectual satisfaction that I could never find in fundamentalism. I became so enamored of the insights of liberalism that I almost fell into the trap of accepting uncritically everything that came under its name. I was absolutely convinced of the natural goodness of man and the natural power of human reason.”

“Liberalism’s contribution to the philological-historical criticism of biblical literature has been of immeasurable value and should be defended with religious and scientific passion.”

“It was mainly the liberal doctrine of man that I began to question. The more I observed the tragedies of history and man’s shameful inclination to choose the low road, the more I came to see the depths and strength of sin. My reading of the works of Reinhold Niebuhr made me aware of the complexity of human motives and the reality of sin on every level of man’s existence.”

King and Niebuhr seemed to be on good terms even though they had some slight disagreements. King sent Niebuhr an inscribed and signed copy of one of his books, and Niebuhr, already having bought the book, gave the unsigned copy to his son and kept the signed copy.

“I also came to see that liberalism’s superficial optimism concerning human nature caused it to overlook the fact that reason is darkened by sin. The more I thought about human nature the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin causes us to use our minds to rationalize our actions. Liberalism failed to see that reason by itself is little more than an instrument to justify man’s defensive ways of thinking. Reason, devoid of the purifying power of faith, can never free itself from distortions and rationalizations.”

“In spite of the fact that I had to reject some aspects of liberalism, I never came to an all-out acceptance of neo-orthodoxy. While I saw neo-orthodoxy as a helpful corrective for a liberalism that had become all too sentimental, I never felt that it provided an adequate answer to the basic questions. If liberalism was too optimistic concerning human nature, neo-orthodoxy was too pessimistic.”

“… I also gained a new appreciation for the philosophy of existentialism. My first contact with this philosophy came through my reading of [Søren] Kierkegaard and [Friedrich] Nietzsche. Later I turned to a study of [Karl] Jaspers, [Martin] Heidegger and [Jean Paul] Sartre. All of these thinkers stimulated my thinking; while finding things to question in each, I nevertheless learned a great deal from study of them. When I finally turned to a serious study of the works of Paul Tillich I became convinced that existentialism, in spite of the fact that it had become all too fashionable, had grasped certain basic truths about man and his condition that could not be permanently overlooked.”

“The gospel at its best deals with the whole man, not only his soul but his body, not only his spiritual well-being, but his material well-being. Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.”

“I do not want to give the impression that nonviolence will work miracles overnight. Men are not easily moved from their mental ruts or purged of their prejudiced and irrational feelings. When the underprivileged demand freedom, the privileged first react with bitterness and resistance. Even when the demands are couched in nonviolent terms, the initial response is the same. I am sure that many of our white brothers in Montgomery and across the south are still bitter toward Negro leaders, even though these leaders have sought to follow a way of love and nonviolence. So the nonviolent approach does not immediately change the heart of the oppressor. It first does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new self-respect; it calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had. Finally, it reaches the opponent and so stirs his conscience that reconciliation becomes a reality.”

This is what it means to be a realistic—dare I say almost pessimistic?—pacifist. King knew so very well that death and suffering could so easily come from his convictions.  It is something that all pacifists need to wrestle with.

“In recent months I have also become more and more convinced of the reality of a personal God. True, I have always believed in the personality of God. But in past years the idea of a personal God was little more than a metaphysical category which I found theologically and philosophically satisfying. Now it is a living reality that has been validated in the experiences of everyday life. Perhaps the suffering, frustration and agonizing moments which I have had to undergo occasionally as a result of my involvement in a difficult struggle have drawn me closer to God. Whatever the cause, God has been profoundly real to me in recent months. In the midst of outer dangers I have felt an inner calm and known resources of strength that only God could give. In many instances I have felt the power of God transforming the fatigue of despair into the buoyancy of hope. I am convinced that the universe is under the control of a loving purpose and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship. Behind the harsh appearances of the world there is a benign power. To say God is personal is not to make him an object among other objects or attribute to him the finiteness and limitations of human personality; it is to take what is finest and noblest in our consciousness and firm its perfect existence in him. It is certainly true that human personality is limited, but personality as such involves no necessary limitations. It simply means self-consciousness and self-direction. So in the truest sense of the word, God is a living God. In him there is feeling and will, responsive to the deepest yearnings of the human heart: this God both evokes and answers prayers.”

Take that Hitchens!