"Dr. King was an exemplary human being by every standard that I know. I can't be sure that he was actually a Christian; I can be grateful to the extent that he was not one..."
#MLK2019

When he told his oppressed people that he was going to preach from the Book of Exodus about the story of the enslaved who made it to the promised land, it's a very good thing he didn't mean it...

That horrible story says that the tribe he's leading are allowed—empowered, in fact, ordered by God—to kill everyone who gets in their way, rape their women, massacre their children, sparing only the females of marriageable age,...

...and steal the land and property of any tribe they don't destroy. Or do. Well, just as well that *isn't* what he was saying, right?

From {{God is Not Great}}

...Dr. Martin Luther King began to preach that his people—the descendants of the very slavery that Joseph Smith and all other Christian churches had so warmly approved—should be free.

It is quite impossible even for an atheist like myself to read [Martin Luther King's] sermons or watch recordings of his speeches without profound emotion of the sort that can sometimes bring genuine tears.

Dr. King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," written in response to a group of white Christian clerics who had urged him to show restraint and "patience"—in other words, to know his place—is a model of polemic.

Icily polite and generous-minded, it still breathes with an unquenchable conviction that the filthy injustice of racism must be borne no longer.

. @taylorbranch's magnificent three-volume biography of Dr. King is successively titled "Parting the Waters," "Pillar of Fire," and "At Canaan's Edge." And the rhetoric with which King addressed his followers was designed to evoke the very story that they all knew best . . .

—the one that begins when Moses first tells Pharoah to "Let my people go." In speech after speech he inspired the oppressed, and exhorted and shamed their oppressors. Slowly, the embarrassed religious leadership of the country moved to his side.

Rabbi Abraham Heschel asked, "Where in America today do we hear a voice like the voice of the prophets of Israel? Martin Luther King is a sign that God has not forsaken the United States of America."

Most eerie of all, if we follow the Mosaic narrative, was the sermon that King gave on the last night of his life. His work of transforming public opinion and shifting the stubborn Kennedy and Johnson administrations was almost done, . . .

[H]e was in Memphis, Tennessee, to support a long and bitter strike by the city's ground-down garbage collectors, on whose placards appeared the simple words "I Am a Man."

In the pulpit at Mason Temple, he reviewed the protracted struggle of the past years and then very suddenly said, "But it doesn't matter with me now."

There was silence until he went on. "Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And he's allowed me to go up to the mountain."

[cont.] "And I've looked over. And I have seen the Promised Land. And I may not get there with you, but I want you to know, tonight, that we as a people will get to the Promised Land!"

Nobody who was there that night has ever forgotten it, and I daresay the same can be said for anyone who views the film that was so fortunately taken of that transcendent moment.

The next best way of experiencing this feeling at second hand is to listen to how Nina Simone sang, that same terrible week, "The King of Love is Dead."

The entire drama has the capacity to unite elements of Moses on Mount Nebo with the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane.

The effect is scarcely diminished even when we discover that this was one of his favorite sermons, and one that he had delivered several times before, and into which he could slip as occasion demanded.

But the examples King gave from the books of Moses were, fortunately for all of us, metaphors and allegories. His most imperative preaching was that of nonviolence. In his version of the story, there are no savage punishments and genocidal bloodlettings.

Nor are there cruel commandments about the stoning of children and the burning of witches. His persecuted and despised people were not promised the territory of others, nor were they incited to carry out the pillage and murder of other tribes.

In the face of endless provocation and brutality, King beseeched his followers to become what they for a while truly became; the moral tutors of America and of the world beyond its shores.

He in effect forgave his murderer in advance: the one detail that would have made his last public words flawless and perfect would have been an actual declaration to that effect. But the difference between him and the "prophets of Israel" could not possibly have been more marked.

If the population had been raised from its mother's knee to hear the story of Xenophon's "Anabasis," and the long wearying dangerous journey of the Greeks to their triumphant view of the sea, that allegory might have done just as well.

As it was, though, the "Good Book" was the only point of reference that everybody had in common.

At no point did Dr. King—who was once photographed in a bookstore waiting calmly for a physician while the knife of a maniac was sticking straight out of his chest—even hint that those who injured and reviled him were to be threatened with any revenge of punishment . . .

. . . in this world or the next, save the consequences of their own brute selfishness and stupidity. And he even phrased that appeal more courteously than, in my humble opinion, its targets deserved.

In no real as opposed to nominal sense, then, was he a Christian.

This does not in the least diminish his standing as a great preacher, any more than does the fact that he was a mammal like the rest of us, and probably plagiarized his doctoral dissertation, and had a notorious fondness for booze and for women a good deal younger than his wife.

He spent the remainder of his last evening in orgiastic dissipation, for which I don't blame him. (These things, which of course disturb the faithful, are rather encouraging in that they show that a high moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.)

But if his example is to be deployed, as it often is, to show that religion has an uplifting and liberating effect, then let us examine the wider claim.

The entire self-definition of "the South" was that it was white, and Christian. This is exactly what gave Dr. King his moral leverage, because he could outpreach the rednecks.

But the heavy burden would never have been laid upon him if religiosity had not been so deeply entrenched to begin with.

As Taylor Branch shows, many of King's inner circle and entourage were secular Communists and socialists who had been manuring the ground for a civil rights movement for several decades . . .

... and helping train brave volunteers like Mrs. Rosa Parks for a careful strategy of mass civil disobedience, and these "atheistic" associations were to be used against King all the time, especially from the pulpit.

Indeed, one result of his campaign was to generate the "backlash" of white right-wing Christianity which is still such a potent force below the Mason-Dixon line.

When Dr. King took a stand on the steps of Mr. Lincoln's memorial and changed history, he ... adopted a position that had effectually been forced upon him. But he did so as a profound humanist and nobody could ever use his name to justify oppression or cruelty.

[Martin Luther King] endures for that reason, and his legacy has very little to do with his professed theology. No supernatural force was required to make the case against racism.

One wishes every day that Martin Luther King had lived on and continued to lend his presence and his wisdom to American politics.