In the ’60s, white evangelicals condemned Martin Luther King Jr. In the ’80s, we lauded a convenient, hagiographic version of his life. How should we remember him now?
As the white editors of Christianity Today surveyed Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent civil disobedience on behalf of civil rights in the summer of 1964, they were not impressed. “For preachers to argue that ‘civil disobedience’ is justified helps to encourage those who would resort to violence,” CT declared that August.
A half century later, CT formally apologized for its opposition to King and the civil rights movement. By then, the magazine had published numerous pieces lauding King as an example of Christian love whose words and actions offered a needed call to repentance for white evangelicals.
But King remains an awkward figure for those of us who are both white and evangelical—two things that King was not. Many of us would like to herald him as a prophet, but when we do, we risk co-opting King for our own purposes rather than understanding him on his own terms.
White American evangelicals have typically reacted to King in one of three ways: (1) criticizing his Christian practice as heretical or hypocritical; (2) heralding him as a prophet of love whose teachings can heal our racial divisions and cleanse us of the sin of racism; or (3) highlighting his commitment to nonviolence and an alleged colorblind American ideal as an alternative to more militant forms of Black nationalism.
There is at least some truth in every one of these three reactions to King—but in each case, white evangelicals have frequently gone too far. In each case, we have too often tried to fit King into our own evangelical categories instead of understanding him on his own terms.
King’s non-evangelical Christian theology
King was not an evangelical. Evangelicals have traditionally seen the answer to the …
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