Martin Luther King wasn’t just “Dr. King” he was a seminary-educated, ordained, Christian minister. His vision for black Americans was a religious vision. Though religion has become popularly associated only with conservative politics, religion’s ability to connect moral principles with ultimate visions remains a powerful asset for social change.
Watch a video of this worship service
Today we celebrate the birthday of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King. He was born on this day in 1929.
Long past his death, Rev. King is still very much with us. An annual holiday for his birthday. And a legacy that is endlessly debated and discussed. Incredible achievements. Indelible words. A legacy of lessons to be poured over, sifted through, duplicated or perhaps discarded. What did he do? What might he have done? And those who wish to be his disciples also ask, “how might we do this work, too?”
Today, in answering that last question, I want to remind us of an important aspect of Rev. King’s life that is not always given the centrality it deserves. And in modeling other aspects of Rev. King’s strategy for social change, I notice how contemporary activists miss this important tool that was so instrumental to Rev. King’s success: his religion.
He was the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King.
His maternal grandfather, Adam Daniel Williams, was Rev. Williams, the minister of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia.
His father studied for the ministry at Morehouse College. He married Rev. Williams’ daughter, Alberta, in 1926, and took the position of Assistant Minister at Ebenezer Baptist church, working under his father-in-law. When Rev. Williams died, in 1931, MLK’s father took over as Senior Minister at Ebenezer Baptist Church.
So MLK Jr. was raised in a home where religion was their life and livelihood.
The family read aloud from the Bible together and shared Bible stories at the dinner table.
His father taught him how to bear up under the insults and indignities of segregation using precepts of the Christian faith. The injustice of the social order was revealed to him through recognizing the different social model he learned though scripture and Jesus’ teachings.
Even his name, encoded Christian ethics.
He was born Michael King, not Martin Luther King. His father had been Michael King, too: Michael King Senior. In 1934, the Ebenezer Baptist church sent their pastor, Rev. Michael King to Berlin to attend the Congress of the Baptist World Alliance. The trip included visits to sites around Germany associated with the founder of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther.
In Germany, Rev. Michael King had an intense direct encounter with the history of the Protestant church, at the same time he and his group were also directly encountering the horror of the rise of the Nazi’s in Germany. One outcome of the Congress of the Baptist World Alliance in 1934 was a resolution linking religion and social reform stating, “This Congress deplores and condemns as a violation of the law of God the Heavenly Father, all racial animosity, and every form of oppression or unfair discrimination toward the Jews, toward coloured people, or toward subject races in any part of the world.” Another outcome of this visit was that upon returning home to Georgia. Michael King changed his name, to Martin Luther King, and he changed his five-year-old son’s name to Martin Luther King Jr.
MLK started Morehouse college early, at the age of 15. By the time he graduated at age 18 he had decided to pursue the ministry. According to the biographer Marshall Frady, MLK said that he was answering, “an inner urge to serve humanity.” He wanted to become “a rational minister with sermons that were a respectful force of ideas, even social protest.”
With a BA in sociology from Morehouse in 1948, MLK. then studied for the ministry at the Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania. He earned a Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1951. He then studied systematic theology at Boston University for a doctorate degree. He earned his Ph.D. in 1955, after having already been called to serve the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery Alabama in 1954, at the age of 25.
In Montgomery, at the end of 1955, during Reverend King’s second year in the ministry, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a white person.
Rosa Parks was also a church person, a lay leader in the AME church. Her strength also grew from her faith. She said later, of that fateful day, “I instantly felt God give me the strength to endure whatever would happen next. God’s peace flooded my soul, and my fear melted away. All people were equal in the eyes of God, and I was going to live like a free person.”
It was religion that gave the African American community in Montgomery the strength to endure the 385 days of the bus boycott, lasting all through 1956.
There were multiple black churches. The congregations were organized. The clergy met together. Community leaders had already been strategizing how to overturn segregation, meeting together for months before Rosa Parks was arrested. They were ready.
And when the bus boycott began, they used the church organization, the community bonds, and their faith, to inspire and sustain their protest. Church folks had long-standing relationships with each other. They were friends. They were accustomed to sharing what they had, one lifting up when another was down. And they had church secretarys, and deacons, and phone lists, and offices with typewriters, and willing volunteers waiting for instruction. They had people who could drive. And people who could watch children. And they had people who were willing to endure sacrifice for a great cause, because that was areligious value their faith had taught them.
They had religion.
And that made the activism work.
In the year following the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Rev. King and other ministers came together to create the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Rev. King would lead the Southern Christian Leadership Conference until he died.
In 1959, Rev. King left Montgomery and returned to Atlanta becoming co-pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist church with his father until he died, in 1968. He was a Christian pastor, a minister, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. until the day he died.
What should religion be for us?
As Unitarian Universalists what is our religion for?
In our Call to Worship, Vincent Silliman, a 20th century Unitarian minister, gives many poetical answers to the use of religion. He says:
“Let it be a voice of renewing challenge to the best we have and may be;
let it be a call to generous action.
Let religion be to us a dissatisfaction with things that are, which bids us to serve more eagerly the true and right.
Holding before our eyes a prospect of the better life for humankind, which each may help to make actual.”
Religion has power, for the people of faith who follow it, to inspire us to do the necessary work that will transform our lives, help and serve each other, and re-make the world we share. Religion has the power to sustain that work when we falter, to affirm the worth of our work when we doubt, to give us courage when we meet resistance. Religion gives us shared language and story and symbol we can use to persuade other to join us. Religion gives us new nourishment when our spirits grow weak. Religion gives us songs to sing when it’s time to mourn our losses, or to celebrate our victories.
As we face our own troubles and a troubled world, I want to encourage us to think of the model of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King as a model for how a powerful faith can be an inspiring and sustaining tool for our work, too.
With the rise of the religious right in the last 50 years we have come to think of religion and churches as the enemies of a just society. And with that perception, many activists are loathe to turn to churches for allies, and they shun the shared language and inspiring stories that religious traditions offer. Ungrounded and unconnected by anything except a personal sense of anger; activism, is unfocused, chaotic, weak, and ineffective. Movements burn out before they succeed. Groups can’t refer to a common cause. The focus of action is external on the perceived enemy, but neglects to do the internal work of institution building, community building, relationship building, and attending to the personal needs of the activists that are required to sustain a movement for the long haul.
And social change is always “long haul” work.
Our justice work need not be grounded in Christianity or the church per se, the way much of the Civil Rights movement was. Rev. King was also inspired by Gandhi, by humanist principles of justice and equality, even a little Unitarian Universalism in his love of quoting our minister Theodore Parker who was the source of the line, “the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice.”
So it’s not which faith, that matters, but it is some faith that matters. Having faith. Having something deep and powerful that you can sink your resolve into. Something that says you are working for something larger than yourself. Something big, and beautiful. Something that matters. And something that others believe in, too, who will work beside you in service to the shared vision.
People who share the same language. People who know the same stories and tell them over and over again. People who sing from the same hymnal, who know the same heroes and prophets, and who already have a history of loving each other and helping each other and defending each other when necessary.
People who gather, once a week, and turn their chairs in the same direction, to hear a shared word, to learn a common lesson, to be lifted, and strengthened, and inspired toward common purpose.
That’s when great things get done.