Hardworking Hope in Honor of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Attending to the Conditions of our Souls for Democracy

This essay is dedicated to the Rev. Dr. Ronald E. Peters and all my friends at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary who studied King and other Black theologians with him. He and those students were gentle and loving with my white fragility in discussions in class, at dining room tables together, in the halls of the women’s dormitory, and in those sweet nooks and crannies of PTS.

It is also dedicated to the men and women who I met and worked with in the margins of the Greater Pittsburgh area and across the country, ministering to the region’s and country’s poor and sick, as we organized, protested, and always, letting our voices be heard. Thank you all my sisters and brothers. You are the heroes of our communities.

Welcome to this combination of the weekly analysis and commentary of Reflections on Power, Culture, Society and Monday Meditation number 3 for It is January 20, 2025

Today we celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is also the second inauguration of Donald J. Trump.

I am Meg Park. Today is one that every American, North, Central, and South will remember. It is one to be remembered the world over. The history books will take note. Which side are you on? Let us go to King.

Why I am writing today

In light of the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963) in The Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. this essay will address the health of the Christian Church today and how it can move justice, mercy and peace forward in the US republic so that we can remain a democracy.

The Christian Church is still called to be salt and light in the world, as it always has been. The Letter will support my thesis that the Christian faith writ large in America is in even more peril than democracy. If we have lost our saltiness, “what good is it for other than to be thrown out and trampled underfoot” (Matthew 5: 13).

King spoke to the lukewarm at best, white Christian pastors who criticized him for what they thought was trouble he was causing in 1963. Sixty-two years later where are we? We must stand against this current antidemocratic movement for it is certainly not merely lukewarm.

Let us get our grounding with the changing faith of the American Christian Church.

I. White Christian Nationalism: A Definition for What it Means to Be Christian in 2025

There is little and in some cases, zero defense for the way white protestant churches responded to the civil rights movement or any of its leaders in the 1960s. The Christian church was much more homogenous than it is today. Whereas the critics of King could easily be considered white supremacists or at least would need to defend themselves against such a label, it is less likely they would fit the definition of “white Christian nationalism”.

That leaves the question to be what is happening in protestant churches today?

“A common misunderstanding would be that [white Christian nationalism] is the same thing as being a patriotic Christian,” said Philip Gorski, chair of the Department of Sociology at Yale. “Patriotism is an adherence to the ideals of the United States, and nationalism is loyalty to your tribe and not the country.” Yale ISPS Understanding White Christian Nationalism

The informed citizens of the 1930s, 1960s, and 2020s understood the dynamics of authoritarians who use grievances to grab the attention of those who might follow them. Sinclair Lewis brought to our attention in the 1920s the character of Elmer Gantry. The “Rev. Dr.” Gantry was a womanizing, drunk who loved money as much as women and became a major moral [sic] and political leader. He sure could get a crowd going!

We may be well acquainted with authoritarian leaders who use existing grievances to pit one part of the population against another and present a scapegoat. This phenomenon is less a religious or theological argument than a political takeover.

“This is not a culture war,” Katherine Stewart said. “It’s a political war over the future of democracy.” Money Lies and God Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy

Anthea Butler, the Geraldine R. Segal, Professor in American Social Thought and Chair of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, said

Butler also spoke in October of 2022 at the Yale Institute for Social and Policy Studies of the racial dynamics in the appeal of authoritarianism to groups who feel they have been anointed by God to take political power, and how the internet allows people to adopt and share false beliefs.

NAR - A new movement on an old theme in a barn in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania

Photo: Grid Magazine

King was not writing the Letter to the preachers or congregations of the charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation. According to her accounting of one of these meeting places, The Gateway House of Prayer in a barn in The Army of God Comes Out of the Shadows Stephanie McCrummen tells a story that is not likely to be seen in a Baptist Church or any traditional protest church in King’s day or old fashioned mainline churches.

“What was happening in the barn in Lancaster County did not represent some fringe of American Christianity, but rather what much of the faith is becoming. A shift is underway, one that scholars have been tracking for years and that has become startlingly visible with the rise of Trumpism.

“At this point, tens of millions of believers—about 40 percent of American Christians, including Catholics, according to a recent Denison University survey—are embracing an alluring, charismatic movement that has little use for religious pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy.

“It is mystical, emotional, and, in its way, wildly utopian. It is transnational, multiracial, and unapologetically political. Early leaders called it the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, although some of those same leaders are now engaged in a rebranding effort as the antidemocratic character of the movement has come to light.”

Here is the crux from Stephanie’s article, the NAR formula was powerful in giving people with grievances a sense of empowerment or billions of dollars to spend on bending the politics of the country to their will instead of messy democracy. That formula was the “7 Mountains of Society,” and it gave formerly hopeless people a sense of purpose in life.

Photo: ChristianWorldmedia.com, Apostle Henry Sherman

The 7 Mountains

1) Media

2) Government

3) Education

4) Economy

5) Family

6) Religion

7) Arts and entertainment

This 7 Mountain theory is antithetical to Christianity. The Christianity that grew from Judaism, which Jesus of Nazareth taught, is the opposite of this aggressive power grab. It is as anti-Christian as it is anti-democratic.

II. Birmingham and the heart of Christian discipleship.

King has vitally important perspectives for our social movement today and for our democracy, but especially for Christians, and substantially moreover, ministers of the Word.

He wrote his Letter to protestant Ministers of the Word on April 16th, 1963 from a jail cell. He was serving a sentence for participating in civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama. He rarely took time to defend himself against his opponents. But eight prominent white, “liberal” Alabama clergy, published an open letter earlier in January. They called on King to allow the battle for integration to continue in the local and federal courts. They warned him that his nonviolent resistance, with, as they judged, “outside agitators” would have the effect of inciting civil disturbance. Doctor King wanted Christian ministers to see that the meaning of Christian discipleship was at the heart of the African American struggle for freedom, justice, and equality.

III From the Letter at length

“I'm here in Birmingham because injustice is here, just as the eighth-century prophets left their little villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord”, say, at the Lord beyond the boundaries of their hometowns. Just as the apostle Paul left his little village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet in cities of the Greco-Roman world, I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular hometown. Like Paul, I must constantly. Respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

“Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. Tied in a single garment of destiny, whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives in the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere in the country” (290).

“You may ask why direct action?... Isn't negotiation a better path? You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such a creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue it seeks, so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.

“I just referred to the creation of tension as a part of the work of the nonviolent resistor. This may sound rather shocking, but I must confess that I am not afraid of the word tension. I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth.

“Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and haft truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisals, we must see the need of having nonviolent, gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood (291).

“My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. History is a long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give out their privileges voluntarily.

“Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture, but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals. We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed. … “We must come to see with the distinguished jurors of yesterday. Justice too long delayed is justice denied (292).

King recounted an experience with profound pathos in seeing his 6-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son as he watched them internalize the abnormal inferiority and the accompanying depression and bitterness seep deep into their souls as their personalities became distorted from the hate of others.

His response to the “liberal” white pastors,

“One may well ask; how can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others? The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws. There are just and there are unjust laws. I would agree with Saint Augustine that an unjust law is no law at all.

“Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.

“Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the whole soul and damages the personality. It gives a segregated or a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.

“To use the words of Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher, ‘Segregation substitutes the I-it relationship for the I-Thou relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things’. So segregation is not only politically, economically, and sociologically unsound, but it is morally wrong and sinful.

Paul Tillich has said that “sin is separation”. The sine qua non. Without sin, there would be no segregation or other dehumanizing othering of any men, women, or children of any identity. King continues,

“I must confess that over the last few years, I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negros’s greatest stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Counciler [sic] or the Ku Klux Klan, but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers a negative peace, which is the absence of tension to a positive peace, which in the presence of justice, who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek. But I can't agree with your methods of direct action. Who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man's freedom, who lives by the myth of time, and who constantly advised the Negros to wait until a more convenient time?

“Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

“I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice. And that when they fail to do this, they become dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

“I'm coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of Goodwill. You will have to repent in this generation, not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of good people (296)

“We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be Coworkers with God and without His hard work, time itself, becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.

“Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative Psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

” I have No Fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham. Even if our motives are presently misunderstood, we will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America… out of a bottomless vitality, they continue to thrive and develop. If the expressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us. The opposition we now face will surely fail inexpressible. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands (301).

“One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for the best in the American Dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage and thusly carrying out our whole nation back to those great walls of democracy, which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Yours for the cause of peace and brotherhood. Martin Luther King, Jr.

End of part one audio.

IV. Still asking Where do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?

Remember now what was said in the first decade of this millennium. Immediately following the planes flying into the World Trade Centers, and for years Americans demanded to know “Where are the ‘good’ Muslims?”

We feared speaking truth to power as “see something, say something” encouraged us to suspect our neighbors of being not merely unpatriotic, but sleeper terrorists. We wanted the “good” Muslims to speak truth to power for us. Rage against the brown-skinned people wearing different materials on their heads and the men in black beards was the passive if aggressive path. The path of least real resistance. What about the “good Christians” speaking out about the hate and violence in our country now?

V. Consider joining the community at Reflections for Monday Meditations

Perhaps it is for all of us, of every faith, to ponder what Jesus taught his disciples. Read Matthew chapters 5 through 7. When we’re done, let us read them again. Go to Matthew chapter 25. Ponder it. Savor it. We will consider the basics this year.

Outside the time dedicated to Monday Meditation, we can read the entire book of Mark. It is a small narrative of the sandals on the ground, of Jesus walking in first-century Palestine. It is doable on a weekend. Underline in red what Jesus said. Then, underline in blue what he did—just the verbs.

We can dig through what Luke, the physician, saw and interpreted of his walk with Jesus and his message. See what Jesus did and experienced in the desert and focus on what he did then. Remember, this is a physician telling you what he thinks is important for the health of the church and believers under severe oppression from a hostile government.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’ (Luke 4: 18-19)

Note what he did immediately following that and for the rest of his ministry: being with those with mental illness who were cast out of society, he healed fevers and various other diseases, including a woman with a chronic hemorrhage—the most untouchable in her society. He cuddled children in the streets and visited people at home and in prisons.

It would seem a faithful person cannot be Christlike and not feed and clothe the poor; cannot be Christlike and not welcome the stranger that crosses the border, cannot be Christlike and allow the sick to be neglected and die prematurely; cannot be Christlike and not treat women as equal partners as he did.

We can then go to the book of John, Jesus’s friend. Meditate on chapters 14 through 17 this year as John opens to understand who Jesus is and begins to grieve the coming loss. Pericope by pericope (small sections set apart). Look at what went before and after a section. Be grounded in the historicity and earthiness of it.

Monday Meditations are brief meditations contemplate throughout the week together in community in the spirit of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life together. Simply taking time to focus for five to 8 minutes on spiritual truths that transcend faith traditions such as hope, love, persistence, courage, and leaning on others. Fifty-two weeks in a row.

Justice work is just plain hard work. The monument to Martin is granite. Granite - formed in the white-hot heat of lava, buried under the unmeasurable pressure of mountains, rising, cooled by wind, and ice, worn by water to finally be exposed as the epitome of unyielding endurance.

Photo © Destination DC

And after you have rested a bit, contemplate what Dr. King has to say to us as citizens of this country, guardians of our democracy and the gospel of freedom and hope, justice, mercy, and a humble walk with God, in the knowledge now of the antithetical New Apostolic Reformation; see what is in your Bibles.

Especially to those who will stand behind pulpits as ministers of the Gospel. As Christians, and especially those who have the burden of the pulpit, it is our God-given duty, of the vows we take to generate those tensions King spoke of. You’ve heard the admonition to journalists from Finley Peter Dunne on the role of the press, and no doubt preached it – “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”. Generate tension when and where you see it and walk through it with others. Trust that courage will come with the taking of action, be it writing, preaching, teaching, social media, or conversations over coffee or dinner. Courage is supplied with the step.

Erik Erikson, the famous developmental psychologist posited that the last and most mature stage of human development -- not everyone reaches it – is generativity. That is, making sacrifices for future generations.

My commitment is to stand in that pulpit wherever I am for 2025.

VI. For my pastoral brothers and sisters, elders, deacons, seminary professors, and all believers in mercy, justice, and a humble walk with God in fear and trepidation I give you this

‘And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: ‘I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.

For you say, “I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.” You do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. Therefore I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich, and white robes to clothe you and to keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen, and salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see.

I reprove and discipline those whom I love. Be earnest, therefore, and repent. Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me. To the one who conquers I will give a place with me on my throne, just as I conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne. Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.’ (Rev. 3: 14-22).