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Since it’s Jean-Paul Sartre’s birthweek and #Christianity is trending on Twitter, here’s a little thread about why Martin Luther King, Jr. thought Sartre was wrong about freedom. But first, a photo of Dr. King’s note card on existentialism 
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In his well-known account of his ‘pilgrimage to nonviolence’, King claimed that Protestant liberalism and neo-orthodoxy both left him dissatisfied: “each represents a partial truth”. Existentialism, he wrote, “in spite of the fact that it had become all too fashionable, 2/
had grasped certain basic truths about man and his condition that could not be permanently overlooked.” It got some things right, offering insight into finite freedom, anxiety, ambiguity. But early on in his “serious intellectual quest for a method to eliminate social evil,” 3/
King concluded that the existentialist premise that “man creates himself” had to be rejected on the grounds that: “no Christian can believe this. From the deeps of our moral consciousness springs the conviction that what we are, we owe.” 4/
America’s bootstraps individualism made it ripe for a certain reading of Sartre’s early existentialism, usually on the basis of ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’ (1946), since Being & Nothingness wasn't published in English until 1957 (after King wrote ‘All that we are, we owe’). 5/
But some American Christianities and theologians of liberation responded that it was not their Gospel to preach freedom without dependence. 6/
Quotations are from "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence" and "All that we are, we owe," both of which are available free online at the King Institute at Stanford 7/ https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/pilgrimage-nonviolence
7/ https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/pilgrimage-nonviolence
