Replay: Celebrating The Forgotten Martin Luther King

[This essay first appeared here on January 16, 2006]

I don't really care what anyone thinks about the following statement, so I say it without hesitation: The 1960's in America were pretty sick years. I have no nostalgia for them; no awe of their alleged liberation or romance for their upheaval, no glee over the sexual and drug revolutions. I stand in protest of the 1960's and their legacy.

And one salient feature of the illness of the 1960's was the shocking death of Martin Luther King Jr. It is not shocking in that it was unexpected, for even Dr. King anticipated it, I believe, in his very final speech. It was shocking in that it was emblematic of truly profound social conflicts that marred that decade, perhaps the most vulgar and violent one, in America's history. Dr. King, after all, was a pacifist in a tumultuous and vicious fight for equality among the races. That his death, his martyrdom, may have spurred Americans toward a more just and kind world is disconcerting, as death should not be required for what seems intuitively to be a simple lesson: All men are created equal.

Of course, as a man bent toward the philosophical, I ask myself whether it is indeed true that all men are created equal. Is it? If we are strict Darwinists, if we are secularists without appeal to God or some transcendent force responsible for mankind's existence and equality, then we must concede that equality is not an ontological (metaphysical) reality. Evolution, in its dynamic "natural selection" process, abhors equality, as disparate species fight and morph for dominance and survival, with nary a hint of egalitarianism. To the secular mind "equality" must be a religious fiction created by that secularism, for there is nothing in the entire cosmos that even resembles "equality." As I've stated elsewhere, including here at Contratimes, neither "equality" nor "rights" exist in any place other than the faith-based imagination of secularists.

Unless, of course, there really is a God. Then one can indeed talk, not only of "equality" but of "rights" as well, rights rooted in the imago dei, the image of God. And that is why the concepts of "rights" and "equality" are rooted in theological language in the founding documents of America. If there is no God, there is no equality and no rights, except in that fictive realm wherein the secular mind places them. If there is a God, there is at least the potential for there to be real qualities to equality and rights; a real, ontological quality.

Of course, the philosopher in me also sees this astounding problem: If there is indeed a God, then only humans are equal one to another, for God surely is not equal to His creation. In short, a world wherein God exists is hierarchical, with God sitting in the highest seat. With that said, it is no wonder secularists abhor a theological structure for social governance, as God confounds their love of absolute equality.

While today we celebrate the memory of Martin Luther King, I would like to celebrate what is absolutely forgotten about Martin Luther King. And what is forgotten is that Dr. King held no expertise in social or political scheming; he was not trained to be a rebel or a revolutionary. No, Dr. King was first and foremost a Christian theologian and ordained minister. Sadly, in most celebrations of his life, these seem to be the first things that are forgotten about him. I wonder, how would this make him feel?

Today is really a religious holiday, but you wouldn't know it. It is a holiday celebrating the liberating power of the Gospel, the very power that liberated a young Martin King when he first attended church, and when he first attended college. It is a day, not of civil rights, but of the power of love and justice and this wild notion that God loves ALL MEN EQUALLY, which manifests itself in justice and truth in the Christian Savior walking the streets offering a message of hope to the oppressed and harassed: those persecuted by the powerful; those harassed by the terrors of their own sins. It is right to be civil, and it is civil to be right; but neither truth means anything without the civilizing and righteous power of the Christian God who calls all men and women unto Him: that neither Greek nor Jew, neither slave nor free; neither man nor woman nor black nor white, are to be excluded from His banquet hall. This is not unconditional universalism, but that universalism with a caveat: that all invited guests must first accept the invitation, shedding their filthy clothes for the formal clothes that come as a result of God's sacrifice, with all men and all women attired in the grace of God's forgiveness. Those who refuse the invitation, or the forgiveness, remain, freely, outside to dine alone. The maître d' bids them Bon appetit! if they would just humble themselves and accept their reservations.

But this great day is for me in many ways a day of sorrow, for the great man Dr. Martin Luther King is cheapened, gutted and reduced to something other than he was, for he was not a secular member of the vanguard; his power was not intrinsic to him; his cause was a cause that has nothing, ultimately, to do with him at all. For it is God's cause, and Dr. King knew that, and he embraced that powerful fact. How sorrowful that our schools and culture want to forget what ultimately made Dr. King a great man.†

For me, Dr. King represents the fight to keep the cardinal virtues together in harmonic balance. G. K. Chesterton argued that the Protestant Reformation smashed the union of the cardinal virtues, causing them to run amok, befouling the earth with their zeal. Just think of love, hope, faith, justice, prudence, temperance and fortitude helter-skelter on the earth, unbound from each other. Justice untethered becomes a church or legal fund or race riot insisting on its own verdicts, neglecting the temperance which is mercy. Temperance alone turns into flagellation and legalism. Prudence in isolation turns into the idolatry of caution, dreading the imperfect choice. Love runs to and fro without the truth of justice or the restraint of self-control, and blindly affirms acts and deeds that true love, in balance, would not countenance or so casually condone. Today, I can hear Dr. King call for the orthodoxy which holds all of these virtues together, the orthodoxy of Christ. It is this part of Dr. King's message that I remember today with sadness, for it is the part of his message and his life that is forgotten.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

†There are those who don't think Dr. King was a great man, but I think otherwise. His peccadilloes, his sins, do indeed count against him. But all of us have these charges against us. What made him great is that he held to his convictions without being paralyzed by the fact that he was a man of imperfections. Too many of us permit our imperfections to sway us from our course. We fall prey to one of the greatest social evils, which is the fixation on the purity of the messenger rather than on the accuracy of the message. It is the "Who are you?" fallacy. It is the devil's line of discredit.

When Michael Helps Michael

His name was Michael Briggs, and he was 35 years old. I did not know him, but I wish I had. He was a good father of two boys; he loved his wife, Laura. And he loved to help people. In fact, he was awarded the highest honors for helping rescue normal folk -- as normal as you and me -- from a burning apartment building in the early morning hours in July 2004.

Michael was a police officer in Manchester, NH. He worked on what was dubbed the "Jeep Patrol," that late-night shift where cops tour neighborhoods on mountain bikes. He loved his job, his colleagues, and the neighborhoods he watched so carefully. Today, and tomorrow, and for days to come, those neighborhoods and colleagues will gather together in small clutches of grief -- candles and cards and flowers in shaking hands -- and they shall find solace in memory, and inspiration in courage.

Michael Briggs probably did not know that the man he was approaching at 2:45 in the morning was familiar to him, even intimately familiar. Nor could the man he was approaching, Michael "Stix" Addison, 26, know that the cop who came toward him was someone who had helped him in a moment of pain and panic; Officer Briggs had responded to a shooting at an apartment in March 2003 and, as the first officer on the scene, gave first aid to a wounded Addison, who suffered a gunshot wound to the collarbone in the incident. Neither man could have known the brutal irony of a hero cop helping a bleeding man more than three years ago as they now came within a few feet of each other on this early Monday morning, heartbeats still vibrant, a wedding ring round Briggs' warm finger.

Pain and panic had brought them together before; it would separate them now in a twitch of a finger on a trigger. One Michael would stand in the darkness; one Michael would collapse on the asphalt, blood pouring from his brain. A dying man who gave succor and aid to a man had in fact given comfort to his killer; Michael Addison would runaway, too selfish to return a favor.

The granite of our little state shakes beneath our feet. There are no gauges or seismographs to record the quake that courses from the tip of a finger to a head hitting the pavement, and then on through to the collapsing hearts of thousands. Sadly, these quakes happen all day long. But we cannot feel them all, too many waves coming from too many sorrows, but we strain to feel what we can. Some of us will feel this local sorrow, the sorrow of a family and friends that we have not met. But we know them nonetheless, because Michael Briggs is the sort of man we all meet everyday, in our homes, our churches, our synagogues; he is that man on the street who smiles and waves and will lay his life down for you and me and Michael Addison in a flash, in a final heartbeat. Knowing men like him, we know his family, we know his friends. We know their grief.

Tomorrow there is a funeral, a massive procession through crowded streets, perhaps thousands lining the route. Take a moment and pray for two little boys, a widow, and a man just courageous enough to kill the man who helped him live so he could think about what he has done, and what has been done for him.

Peace, at least for just one minute.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

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