As we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. and his legacy, it’s important to appreciate just how hard-fought this holiday was.
Shortly after King’s assassination, Democratic Representative John Conyers introduced a bill to make King’s birthday a national holiday. One might assume that this was an easy affirmative vote, and the bill quickly cleared both houses of Congress. But, in fact, the legislation wasn’t even considered until over a decade later! And when considered in the 1979 session and again in 1980, it was defeated—with Republican Senators John McCain and Jesse Helms leading the opposition.
Finally, in 1983, the bill passed with an overwhelming majority and in spite of President Reagan’s threatened veto. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day still faced some hurdles, however.
Some states refused to honor the holiday. Utah held out the longest, failing to recognize the holiday from 1986 to 2000. Instead, Utah only observed “Human Rights Day.” That euphemism still remains popular in Utah and Idaho.
Utah’s reluctance to honor King was undoubtedly influenced by the state’s dominant religion: Mormonism. Many LDS authorities were vehemently opposed to the civil rights movement.*
Perhaps the most prominent LDS voice against what he called the “so-called civil rights movement” was Ezra Taft Benson. Benson served as president of the LDS Church at the time when Martin Luther King Jr. Day became a federal holiday. And while he never publicly denounced the holiday, he nonetheless helped shape Utah’s negative perception of King. Of King, and just a year after his assassination, Benson wrote, “the kindest thing that could be said about Martin Luther King is that he was an effective Communist tool. Personally, I think he was more than that.” The view that the civil rights movement and its leaders were a front for some communist agenda was a constant theme of Benson’s; he once even espoused it in General Conference.
Benson was widely known for his conservative politics–both in and outside the church. For his views on civil rights and communism, he won praise from the far-right John Birch Society and was even considered as a running-mate for segregationist third-party candidates Strom Thurmond and George Wallace.
I’m glad that Martin Luther King, Jr. Day triumphed over politics and prejudice. King—or rather, what he represented—is worth honoring. His message, though, has been neutered in recent decades (ironically, because of the federal holiday that bears his name). Most remember him only as a slain civil rights leader, but he was more than that. And to appropriately honor his legacy, we must first understand it.
Benson and the Republican in Congress weren’t entirely wrong about King: he was a radical. While no communist, King was a critic of capitalism and a champion of the poor—advocating things like affordable housing and health care. His economic views also informed his opposition to the Vietnam War, which he felt was an aggressive act of colonialism. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death,” he said.
America has made significant (though insufficient) strides toward racial tolerance since the civil rights movement. Prescient though he was, I don’t think King could have predicted the election of a black president. But with our continued occupation of Iraq, escalating involvement in Afghanistan, and the inaccessibility of health care for millions of Americans, much of King’s dream is still unrealized.
So let’s recommit ourselves to that dream today and work to see it realized in this new year.
*In a 1947 letter to USU sociology professor Lowry Nelson, the First Presidency called interracial marriages “most repugnant” and “contrary to Church doctrine.” Apostles Bruce R. McConkie and Mark E. Petersen not only defended the church’s black priesthood ban, but went further in arguing for segregation more generally. McConkie wrote that blacks were a “spiritually inferior” race who were consigned to be “a caste apart.” And Peterson told an audience at BYU that “the Lord segregated the Negro” and asked, “who is man to change that segregation?”
As we recommit ourselves to King’s dream, let’s not let it be hijacked by bogus descendants of the civil rights tradition – like the pro-choice movement. If you want to fight for civil rights in our day, the rights of the unborn are THE civil rights issue of our time.
King’s legacy on this has been hijacked. Though we don’t have any statements from King on the matter, there is very little doubt that King was pro-life. There are many reports that King called abortion a “form of genocide” in some of his sermons. But he was killed before the abortion debate reared its head, so we have no official statements from him.
Pro-choicers point out that King supported Planned Parenthood (and King definitely supported birth control), but Planned Parenthood was at the time pro-life (contraception was its main issue). Here is what Planned Parenthood was saying in the 1960s about abortion:
“Is birth control abortion? Definitely not. An abortion kills the life of a baby after it has begun. It is dangerous to your life and health. It may make you sterile so that when you want a child you cannot have it. Birth control merely post-pones the beginning of life.” (Is Birth Control Abortion, Planned Parenthood pamphlet, Aug. 1963, p.1)
And yes, King accepted the Margaret Sanger Award in 1966, but I can only presume that when King accepted he was unaware (as most remain) that Sanger was a racist eugenicist who hoped to control the black population.
Believe it or not, Jesse Jackson was vehemently pro-life. He was the featured speaker at the 1977 pro-life march in Washington, saying:
“There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of a higher order than the right to life, that was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore outside your right to be concerned.
What happens to the mind of a person, and the moral fabric of a nation, that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience? What kind of a person and hat kind of a society will we have 20 years hence if life can be taken so casually? It is that question, the question of our attitude, our value system, and our mind-set with regard to the nature and worth of life itself that is the central question confronting mankind. Failure to answer that question affirmatively may leave us with a hell right here on earth.”
In 1973 he said abortion is “too nice a word for something cold, like murder.”
He once wrote Congress (could not find the date) saying: “As a matter of conscience I must oppose the use of federal funds for a policy of killing infants. In the abortion debate, one of the crucial questions is when does life begin. Anything growing is living. Therefore human life begins when teh sperm and egg join.”
There is a bit of forgotten history about those leading the civil rights movement. It is sad how Jesse Jackson sold. I prefer to believe that the King would not have.
Here is a link to an article Jackson wrote in 1977. While I disagree with his view on contraception, I want to stand and applaud at his vigorous and clear defense of life in the article. This will startle some people:
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/nvp/consistent/jackson.html
I would also add that many advocating the legalization of gay marriage have hijacked Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy.
Martin Luther King believed in God and he thought that he was doing the work of God by promoting civil rights. I learned that as a little boy growing up in Oklahoma. It’s funny how secularists want to also hijack his legacy.
“I would also add that many advocating the legalization of gay marriage have hijacked Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy.”
But with the blessing of some of his family, Marc. His wife said that she was confident that King would’ve supported same-sex unions. To me, I don’t really care whether he did. I give those issues that King campaigned on–poverty and war, for example–greater priority than gay rights.
And Jake: Secularists can certainly lay claim to some of the civil rights successes. I’ve never heard anyone rob King of his Christianity; at most, all that secularists claim is they marched alongside King–as did Catholic clergy and other groups. King didn’t and couldn’t have worked without these allies outside the black community.
In particular, secularists like Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin were great allies of the civil rights movement. Randolph, a union organizer, even organized a march for black civil rights in the early 1940s, long before the popular movement over a decade later.
I just find it ironic that secularists on this site are very hostile to Christianity but want to pay tribute to a Baptist preacher. Maybe it’s not so ironic, I don’t know. I think it is great that you do want to pay tribute to Martin Luther King. He was a great man.
Jake: How narrow-minded we would be to throw out Dr. King’s contributions to the civil rights movement because we disagree with him on religious matters. He may not have been a secularist, but it would seem that he’s certainly a humanist.
Were King only a Baptist preacher, I’d see the irony and your point. But of course King was more than just your run-of-the-mill preacher.
Again, it would be wrong for secularists to claim King as their own. I don’t think they’ve done this, though. It’s more curious to me that traditional Christians would try to claim King as their own, given that King was a Gnostic heretic. In his writings, he denied things like the virgin-birth and resurrection of Jesus, as he felt these teachings were too heavily influenced by Greek thought and pagan religions—Mithraism being one such influence.
Mike – he was a great humanist. But clearly his humanism was informed by and frankly made possible by his Christian convictions about the nature of God and man. My oft repeated challenge: can an atheist and/or materialist ground a humanism as robust as King’s Christian humanism? (Disclaimer: I don’t know much about King’s theological writings, other than those on his own religious experiences, so am not in a position to judge his orthodoxy as a Christian).
You use the word “secularist” like its a swear word. And we’re not hostile to just Christianity, we’re hostile to all religions.
Our support for MLK is not ironic. While King himself may have been motivated by his own interpretation of what his Christian background demands, many (white) Christians were vehemently opposed to the Civil Rights movement–justified by their own biblical interpretations. Christians have been abolitionists and slave-holders both, although the Bible has a lot to say defending slavery. For many Christians in the 60′s, their own skin color was a better predictor of their support or opposition than was the fact that they were Christian.
I would argue that Dr. King’s legacy has nothing directly to do with his being a Baptist preacher. One of the greatest triumphs of the Civil Rights movement–and one King no doubt recognized–was in its universality. His goals and methods transcend his religion (methods largely inspired by and copied from a Hindu) and all people can participate in them. The Civil Rights movement was inherently a secular issue, and there is no snarky irony in an atheist honoring MLK’s achievements.
More generally, gays and atheists today often face differing kinds of discrimination of varying degrees of subtlety in their day-to-day lives. Depending on which part of the country you’re in, coming out as either one could result in loss of your job, the failure of your business, damage to your property, threats, etc. You’re incredibly unlikely to ever be elected to public office. At the minimum, there is a general social stigma that’s quite stressful to live with.
And if you’re gay, this scales all the way up to assault, kidnapping, and death. Gay people in the United States in the 21st century have been lynched, beaten, dragged behind trucks, and stripped of their clothes and tied to fences. Even just the suicide rate among gay teens should be alarming. While even this doesn’t compare to five centuries of institutionalized slavery and racism, and is a smaller problem, it’s still a gigantic and omnipresent stain for the “world’s freest country” to have.
Hijacked? Nah. This is definitely a question of civil rights. Legalizing gay marriage would send a fundamental message that gay people are equal members of our society (although, of course, plenty of people don’t actually think they are). I agree with Jon that–on a global scale–war, poverty and ignorance are more critical problems to deal with, but this isn’t a dichotomy. Both issues can be dealt with.
James, I don’t think it’d even be fair to say that we are necessarily hostile to all religions. “Hostile” just seems like a very loaded word. “Critical” might be better. I mean, I can’t imagine any SHAFTers harboring hostility toward, say, Jainism–a rather innocuous religion.
Of course. It was mostly a symmetry thing using the same word Jake did. It’s just a pet peeve of mine when people think that “secularists” are all out to “get” the Christians, or that we never criticize, say, Islam.
Although criticism is almost always interpreted as hostility–case in point, Jake above.
Honestly, when it’s not done tactfully, it might as well be considered hostile.
Has anything I’ve said in this thread been tactless?
For tone in text, this is a sincere question, not a defensive whine.
Aside from “And we’re not hostile to just Christianity, we’re hostile to all religions.” ?
But you clarified that already. I hope you didn’t think I was trying to say you were being hostile, your post was pretty calm. In fact, for the most part this blog has been way better than I (pessimistically) expected. It’s just that with figureheads like Dawkins and Hitchens, it’s understandable that his default word choice was “hostile”.
Sorry, you can’t get off the hook that easy. It is certainly the case that some atheists (and many of her loudest public voices) are HOSTILE to religion and to Christianity in particular (if only because the atheists we all know are western and so are understandably reacting to Xianity more than other religions). Hitchens gets so overheated you wonder how badly he snagged a sweater in sunday school as a child. The general tone I get from many of the famous neo-atheists is not just one of “criticism” (as if it is even-tempered and objective) but one of militant anger. Now I am sure this is not true of all atheists, but I think it is fair to say that hostility is the public tone of the most vocal and famous atheists. After all, the public face of atheism these days is not atheism but anti-theism. The tone of this movement is overwhelmingly (though I grant not universally) angry and hostile. In fact, Hitchens has said “I am neutral about religion, I am hostile to it.”
And, frankly, I don’t think the secularist agenda is as benign as James suggests. Numerous public policy initiatives have been advanced that are openly hostile to the place of religion in the public square. See Martha Coakely (loser of MA Senate race) who recently suggested devout Catholics should not work in emergency rooms. See the general erosion of religious conscience clauses. For instance FOCA, which would require Catholic hospitals to perform “procedures” Catholics deem intrinsically evil. See the same-sex marriage law in MA that forced Catholic charities to close all of their adoptive services in the state of MA. The list goes on and on.
I agree with Mike L: I think SHAFTers should generally (though not universally) be applauded for their normally even and non-hostile tone.
This is random, but I’m sitting next to a guy in the Old Main honors lounge who bears a striking resemblance to MLK, Jr. And no, not just because he’s black.
Ask if he’s a Christian Humanist!
I see what you mean about the word choice, Mike L, but he did say “I just find it ironic that secularists on this site are very hostile to Christianity . . .”
Chris Hitchens is admittedly quite angry. Dawkins occasionally says phenomenally stupid things. So? I don’t have to agree with them on everything. Even so, Kleiner, you use the phrase “militant anger”, which seems out of scale to me. “Militant” atheists shout on TV debates and publish books. Militant religious blow themselves up, attack opposing congregations, this sort of thing. Y’know, actual paramilitary behavior.
In fact, I personally would rather be associated with guys like Carl Sagan, Bertrand Russell, or hey, even George Carlin. Hitchens does not speak for me.
As for the “secularist agenda”, that sounds a whole lot like “gay agenda”. All your examples are probably things I would oppose. Religion definitely has a place in the public square, i.e. debated and discussed in the marketplace of ideas. However, our society must remain secular, in the sense that no one religion is preferred, endorsed, or supported in any way by the government or any organization funded with public money, nor should public policy be made based on any one religion’s beliefs, and people’s rights to worship wherever they want or not at all remain intact. I don’t know how “secular” came to mean “anti-religious”, but it’s very wrong.
If Coakely suggested that, she’s worse than I thought. Although I fail to see how allowing same-sex marriage forces the Catholic church to shut down adoption services. I seem to remember reading a news story that suggested the church issued an ultimatum to prevent the marriage bill from passing. Honestly, I don’t see the causality there, unless they did it to prevent adopted kids from being raised in an evil god-hating same-sex household or something.
I should have been more clear that I was more responding to “Although criticism is almost always interpreted as hostility” than “case in point, Jake above.”
We totally need more Sagans and Russells. Dare I say billions and billions of them?
It’s pretty ridiculous to suggest that allowing same-sex marriage would violate religious liberties. If your congregation does not support gay marriage, don’t perform gay marriages. If a justice of the peace or a more liberal clergyman officiates a gay marriage, that hasn’t harmed anyone’s right to worship how they please.
It seems that many religious people consider the very existence of the concept of gay marriage a violation of their First Amendment rights, though.