In all the recent 50th anniversary coverage of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, there’s been little which has engaged with his vocation as a Christian theologian, preacher and minister.
Journalist Gary Younge, in his documentary on the speech for Radio 4, acknowledged that the speech was a powerful piece of rhetoric, shot through with biblical imagery, shaped by a long homiletic apprenticeship and impressively packaged in “the vernacular of the black church”, but there is no sense for him that the speech has to be heard theologically. I’m reminded of Christopher Hitchen’s bold assertion in God is not Great that King was “in no real as opposed to nominal sense… a Christian” (Christianity is a religion of violence, King a faithful proponent of non–violence – ipso facto).
Perhaps we shouldn’t protest too strongly. After all, making windows into men’s souls is a rum business. King was an especially complicated character, whose private life was compromised and theology often heterodox. There is almost no phrase in the Nicene Creed with which he did not at some point express serious disagreement. He was clearly a ‘liberal’, attracted to the ‘social gospel’ and ‘liberation theology’ – these are words and phrases which religious and secular dogmatists often use to mean ‘not a real Christian’.
Additionally, he was not a brilliant theological scholar with a large body of work available for interrogation or an analysis of his views expounded over time. His graduate work was technically poor, almost as if he wanted to get it over and done with so he could concentrate on more important matters. It suffered from serious errors. He was awarded his doctorate by Boston University in 1955, but if you were to visit the library look at King’s Phd thesis you would find a note warning of flawed citation practices (aka plagiarism) appended. In a note prefacing the thesis Stanford University’s King Papers Project offers King some posthumous benefit of the doubt, on the basis that he was writing while already serving as a full time pastor.
King was, if anything, a critic of the Church – or should we say the churches and church leaders who often failed to offer any kind of support to the civil rights movement. Around half of his famous letter from Birmingham Jail is a frustrated reflection on the inaction of the white church. The advice of many white moderates to the civil rights movement to bide its time in the interest of public order was, for him, worse than the outright opposition of segregationalists.
Yet his tone is that of a wounded lover, not an angry apostate: “I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love… I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists”.
This hints at a qualified and complicated but real faith which tangibly grounded King’s work. For me, the most striking line in the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech is not the allusions to Isaiah and Amos, or the quasi–eschatological vision of a bortherhood of man worshipping their Creator, but King’s assertion that “unearned suffering is redemptive”.
This theologically loaded phrase is King’s attempt to define the civil rights movement as a non–violent. For him, it was the model of action for those who learn from the Sermon on the Mount and make themselves disciples of the man that preached it. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas points out that King knew that such a commitment entails a metaphysical proposal: “The willingness to accept suffering without retaliation must be based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice”. In other words, without some God–like reality over and above the daily experience of powerlessness and state brutality, the practice of non–violence is nothing better than a fond wish, and quite possibly a moral failure. You can argue that this is a false position, but you can’t argue that it is a secular position. Come to think of it, it’s not really a theologically ‘liberal’ position, since it doesn’t seek to rationally correlate faith with any immediate evidence, but it is a radical one.
Gary Younge’s thesis is that King’s speech is frequently misremembered and misappropriated, but for all his careful unpicking of the speech’s context and preparation, he’s in danger of doing some misremembering himself. If King’s dream – and King’s life – is cut from its theological root, then we have some difficult questions to answer. Fifty years on, and with so far to go to achieve everything that he worked for, why do we think that King’s dream was and is a real hope and not just hopeless delusion peddled by a naïve preacher?
