The bulk of my bread and butter student loan payments come from a class I teach at a Catholic women’s college, “Introduction to Christian Ethics.” One of the texts I teach regularly is Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail (PDF).
One of the comments I often get is “He’s much more negative than they told us.” This isn’t said in an accusatory way — just an expression of realization that the version of King they got all their lives was extremely whitewashed. On this level alone, it’s satisfying to have the discussions about what King was doing. But there are some more specifics we go into.
1. King’s vision of justice is biblical. Before we read King, we read Amos in its entirety. King cites Amos in the letter as an example of the kind of extremist for justice King seeks to be. When we read Amos, we talk about the tension between the assumption Amos shares with his contemporaries that war is an appropriate mechanism of divine punishment and the reasons Amos thinks punishment is warranted. And the reason that comes up over and over and over again is the exploitation of the poor by the rich. The explicit continuity between King and the Bible makes King’s critique of racism and poverty inescapable for students of Christian ethics.
2. King affirms non-biblical sources of wisdom and insight. King is helpful for getting the students to see the difference between acting on one’s ethical principles and imposing one’s religion on others. While King is clearly a Christian thinker, he casts the Christian moral tradition in a larger context that affirms other paths to understanding justice. King hearkens back to the Greek philosopher Socrates and the secular figures of Jefferson and Lincoln as moral authorities and cites the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber on the I-Thou relation. For King, the biblical vision mandates a just society, not a Christian society.
3. King is firmly located in the liberal theological tradition. King cites the liberal theologians Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr in his letter. Both Tillich and Niebuhr graced the cover of Time magazine in the 1950s; liberal theology had a much greater cultural weight in the 1950s than it has had since the resurgence of the Religious Right in the 1970s. So, when King refers to these theological figures, he’s calling on familiar voices in the conversation of his day. Liberal theology affirms secular governance and dialogue with science in a way that has been eclipsed by the dominance of Evangelicalism in the last half century. On the one hand, this explains a great deal of King’s refusal to cast his ministry as the creation of a Christian nation. On the other hand, it also explains why King’s moral vision was religious — against the occasional objection that King was only a Christian “for show.”
4. King aims to increase social tension to force resolution, not to decrease tension by making everyone be nice to each other. The sanitized, white-washed version of King that my students gets leads to a bland multiculturalism where everyone “gets along.” While this goal is admirable, it overlooks the power dynamics that King was at pains to analyze. King’s entire letter is a defense of civil disobedience, of going against the prevailing moral norms, of making people uncomfortable so that injustice can’t be ignored. It is here that the connection to Amos becomes most pertinent. Both Amos and King strive to make people uncomfortable with their acquiescence to injustice. Amos does so by bringing a message of divine judgement that comes in the form of war. King does so through non-violent resistance. In both cases, something deeper than “being nice and accepting” is at stake. Both thinkers draw a clear line between a just society and an unjust society and make a demand that we choose one or the other in the commitments we make in our lives.