Dr King

Recently, references to Dr Michael King (Martin Luther) raised some curiosity in this writer. Why was/is King so heartily revered by everyone? His penchant for the ladies is well known, his association with and tolerance of avowed Marxists is common knowledge, and his trajectory towards a kind of Jeremiah Wright type of social-justice gospel is visible in his later speeches and writings.

The spark of all this is tributes to Father Richard John Neuhaus, which I have been reading belatedly. Father Neuhaus claims "Martin" as a friend of his, and this somewhat naturally leads to doubts about the good Father's perceptual faculties. Not that one's friends are anyone else's business, but it seems strange that a man of Father Neuhaus's abilities would not have seen the Dr as either a cynical politician or a naive man of the cloth, culpably naive in being co-opted by fellow travellers and demagogues.

Is it just one's own personal distaste for people who go about blocking traffic and raising hell that makes one unable to laud the Dr and his memory?

To begin with, there should be doubts about the extent to which Dr King was actually a Christian, in the strict sense of the word. His doctrines would seem to have more in common with those of liberation theology than with orthodox protestant tradition. And, as a Christian, by what tradition or scriptural basis did he see fit to take up arms, so to speak, against injustice? Surely the right work of a minister is ministering. Did he bring more people to the Lord by his social demonstrations and speeches? Did he succeed in converting people to the gospel and did he, by his example, encourage others in Christian life? There are few testimonies to his spirituality, and he seems revered more as a kind of social leader than as a Christian minister.

The fact that he died may have something to do with it -- after all, one does not speak ill of the dead. However, many people have died, some violently, without being honoured as was the Dr.

The late, great Senator Helms attempted to obstruct the Dr's canonisation by the House and Senate, and failed. The FBI files were sealed, and the Dr's widow claimed that opening his papers and the related files would be devastating to the Dr's memory. So what kind of memory is this that must be shored up by legal barriers to getting at the facts?

The question of civil rights must be addressed -- was the Dr really the agent of change, or was desegregation in fact bound to happen sooner or later?

So is it one's own mean spiritedness that prevents one from joining in with the other adorants in the majority, or is there, on the other hand, something false about the whole hagiographic exercise and memory of the Dr?

Sadly, most blogs and websites claiming to tell the truth about the Dr are written by people with an agenda, and are thus not to be trusted any more than those written by liberals -- which of course we would never trust, a priori. We wait upon events. In 2033 the files will be opened, the boomers will be too old to care, and it may be possible to read or write the truth.