Last summer marked sixty years since the March on Washington. This summer, it will have been sixty years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Next summer, it will have been sixty years since Bloody Sunday, the Selma march, the passage of the Voting Rights Act. In other words, the accomplishments of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., are shrinking into the rearview mirror — not because his impact is fading, but because the Civil Rights Movement’s residue is everywhere.
Microsoft runs ads with a gallery of activists, from the legal pioneer Bryan Stevenson to the revered diplomat Andrew Young. They’re not there to suggest that Windows 11 helps them make the world a better place: No one opens a laptop or pushes a power button at any point in the spots; in fact, Stevenson appears to be reading off a paper yellow with age. Instead, they spend the commercial — “Dear Coretta” — talking to the camera, as if it represented Dr. King’s widow. “Were it not for Coretta Scott King’s sacrifice,” Stevenson explains, “we would not be able to stand where we are today.”
Even when state, local, and federal officials hamstring their institutions’ talk about race or pursuit of diversity, they’ve been known to quote King’s words in the March on Washington — they want students and employees to be known “by the content of their character,” rather than the color of their skin. (CNN has a story about just that this week.) His statements have become a sort of political talisman, and the heir to his pulpit at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist found in it a springboard to the U.S. Senate.
And the Rev. Dr. King himself is ubiquitous in American life and art: His profile juts out of a gigantic stone obelisk at a monument in Washington, D.C.; churches he led, seminaries he attended, and venues where he spoke earn protection as historic sites; and his name adorns streets, boulevards, and schools in Black neighborhoods from sea to shining sea.
Even if he’s become the de facto patron saint of the Black struggle, King isn’t a saint in the elevated, liturgical, sense. It’s unlikely that he’ll ever become one, at least in the Catholic church. He was Baptist, and, anyway, named for the monk who split the Church in two in 1517. But it’s not conjecture, hyperbole, or speculation to say that Martin Luther King might be the closest America Protestants have ever come to churning out a saint: At the turn of the century, Pope John Paul II added King to a list of 10,000 people to be potentially recognized as Christian martyrs. Not only did the move put the slain Reverend’s sacrifice level with the deaths of, like, evangelists in the Roman persecution, but it mirrored a Church process — canonization, beatification — that, for Catholics, coincides with sainthood.
I’m writing this at the crest of King’s critical reputation. Unlike a lot of American icons — Jefferson, Washington, Elvis Pressley — the changing times have smiled on him. The campaign of revision and re-examination that’s been a cutting agent to his contemporaries’ moral authority hasn’t left King unscathed, but it has left his vision unsullied, and it’s easy to forget that there was nowhere to go but up at the time of his death.
Perhaps, in the interest of saintliness, it shouldn’t be.
Growing up around evangelical Christianity — its books, its broadcasts, its intimated values system — I often heard the phrase counterculture. For the hippies who walked the earth around the same time as King, counterculture meant producing deviance en masse: Great flowing manes where the craven cut their hair, bare feet and communalism where squares bought houses and shoes, free loving and everyone else flag-waved and ring-chased. They were different, intentionally so, in ways that were easy to spot and easy to scorn.
For evangelicals — and, due to evangelicalism’s influence in Christian mass media, everyone else in the faith — counterculture meant something entirely different. Christianity has been dominant, ‘96 Bulls dominant, for the entire history of the post-Roman West. It faced battles — the Crusades, the horrific conquests in the Americas, and so on — but it almost always came out on top, and the faith’s biggest battles were often with itself over, like, internal development. So, when evangelicalism was coming into its modern form after World War II, the vast majority of Americans self-identified as Christian. Our cultural institutions carried its fragrance. The only way to really have a Christian counterculture was to argue that its tenets were more stringent than normal Christians could accommodate. That could take different forms in different sects, but it often involved churches stretching the Scriptures to legislate themselves into a countercultural force: No drinking, no skirts above the ankle, and so on. When traditional Christianity’s influence waned in pop culture, it meant espousing the kinds of conservative, civil values that had fallen out of favor with, like, advertisers and entertainers. But there was another way to think about the concept of countercultural Christianity, too.
The Rev. Dr. King wasn’t a fire-breather or fundamentalist in the least. His theology was cut from the so-called social gospel, a hitherto-controversial doctrine holding that Christians’ responsibilities weren’t just, or even primarily, spiritual: Instead, being saved meant you had a duty to work for the improvement of the material lives of the people around you. The social gospel itself was controversial enough that it was part of what inspired the oilman Lyman Stewart to pay for the printing of The Fundamentals in the first place.1
When King was jailed during the Birmingham Campaign of ’63, his main rhetorical opponents happened to be local pastors. For them, Job No. 1 of the pastorate was to maintain a tenuous peace between the city’s segregated, subjugated communities, and King’s campaign against racial oppression threatened to upset the apple cart. So, King wrote them his iconic Letter from a Birmingham Jail — not just to defend the righteousness of his own cause by laying bare the necessity of nonviolent resistance, but to ask his fellow clergymen what, exactly, they were doing by standing on the sidelines. In its pages, King explains that the Civil Rights Movement’s protestors steel themselves to face beatings and mistreatment without striking back; itemizes every remedy, and every negotiation, they tried to initiate with the authorities before taking to the streets; and juxtaposes the anxious complacency of Alabama’s moderate white religion with the example of the early church. Unlike his critics, King declared, Christ, the apostles, and their disciples didn’t build “a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion.” Theirs was “the thermostat that transformed the mores of society” — and turned the world upside down.2
Whatever King was, he wasn’t bound to public opinion. Gallup’s polling showed that he became more unpopular as his profile rose, and he moved from anti-segregationism to anti-war to anti-poverty activism. But his 33 percent approval rating in 1966 is really just a number: On the occasion of his death, felled by an assassin’s bullet during a union drive in Memphis, Tenn., some of America’s most famous and longest-tenured politicians came out of their offices to throw shade at him. Rick Perlstein listed some of their responses in his iconic political retrospective, Nixonland: Then-California governor Ronald Reagan, perhaps the most popular politician of the late 20th century, went so far as to say that his killing was what was bound to happen when “people started choosing which laws they’d break.” Strom Thurmond, South Carolina’s arch-segregationist senator, released a statement suggesting King had reaped a “whirlwind, sowed years ago when certain preachers and teachers started telling people that each man could be his own judge in his own case.” When John Conyers, Black congressman from Detroit, proposed that King’s birthday become a national holiday, his resolution went absolutely nowhere for years. (In the 1990s, Arizona even passed on hosting a Super Bowl rather than incorporate the by-then-federal MLK Day.)
This is a slight paraphrase, but at the end of The Two Popes, Benedict turns to Bergoglio and says something along the lines, “You know, when God told St. Francis to restore the Church, he thought they were talking about a building!” The wisecrack is that God hasn’t cared about buildings in a long time, and He hasn’t cared about them in themselves, ever. Churches, religions, rituals — they’re just containers for the people who dive beneath their warmth as sites of refuge and worship. King used the church — and its institutions — to show us something we might not have seen otherwise: That our concept of humanity and human dignity could be expanded; that the bigotries so banal in so much of America were arsenic in the throat of God; that the work of holiness, while an individual struggle, also called for Hebrews 11’s “great cloud” and stretched far beyond the church’s walls — or imagination.
The essence of sainthood is often that holy acts can blur the lines between canon and conjecture; few Americans have a legend that has blurred from the reality quite the way King’s has. But the real holy reason to celebrate King isn’t that his principles feel dominant or victorious now; it’s that, for so long, he called the church to join a battle that felt like a loser, to take a beating from the tide and stand upright all the while.
Janine Giardano Drake, “Social Gospel and the American Working Class.” (2017)
King, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” (1963)