Martin Luther King Jr.’s political thought offers a compelling and distinctive response to the challenges of racial injustice—one that addresses limitations neither Rawlsian liberalism nor critical race theory fully resolve. Rooted in agape love, nonviolence, the Black social gospel tradition, and philosophical personalism, King’s moral and political philosophy overcomes key limitations in each tradition by advancing a pastoral vocation aimed at reshaping political convictions and moral character. Through nonviolent direct action, King forged a model of legal and political engagement capable of enabling structural reform through moral transformation.
This article places King’s thought in conversation with contemporary liberal theory, liberal legal thought, and critical race theory to show how his philosophy and ministry offer both a corrective to their limitations and an advance in the pursuit of a just society. In his culminating and final 1967 monograph, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. argues that achieving a truly just society—what he called the beloved community—requires going beyond constitutional law into the area of human rights.Footnote 1 In King’s view, policies that are not constitutionally mandated, such as universal income and a Medicare-type program for housing, are required for human well-being and therefore a truly just society.Footnote 2 Recognizing that the values and convictions prevailing in American life would not lead to the beloved community, he called for a “revolution in values,”Footnote 3 a “qualitative change in our souls,” and a “quantitative change in our lives.”Footnote 4 In other words, King understood that making progress toward a truly just society would require a radical change in existing political convictions and the moral character of our individual and collective lives.Footnote 5
King, as a philosopher-pastor, offers a multilayered approach to achieving a just society that remains urgently relevant. Formed in the Black social gospel and trained as a systematic theologian at Boston University, King sought in his pastoral vocation to shepherd society along a dynamic model of social change that alters underlying political convictions sufficiently to achieve legal reform, which in turn alters habits and attitudes, which then makes further social progress possible.Footnote 6
In what follows, I argue that King’s thought, brought into dialogue with Rawlsian political theory, liberal legal thought, and critical race theory offers not merely a supplement but a vital corrective that addresses key limitations in each. In particular, unlike both King and critical race theory, Rawlsian political theory and liberal legal thought largely overlook the need to change the underlying political convictions that are at the root of racial injustice. Although critical race theory, like King, emphasizes the importance of extra-legal attitudes in producing and sustaining injustice, it does not cogently reveal how those extra-legal attitudes or the political convictions they shape can be transformed. Despite its importance, critical race theory, standing alone, does not supply an effective means of progress toward racial justice.
In contrast to both liberalism and critical race theory, King’s political theology, which combines pastoral vocation, an experiential approach to truth, and a commitment to wielding nonviolent coercive power, offers a promising path for fostering changes in existing political and moral convictions and the political support necessary for structural change. In the figure of King, we see that the vocation of the pastor offers a means of reshaping political convictions and shepherding society toward justice in a manner that eludes the vocation of the pure scholar. From this insight, I offer that scholarship at the intersection of Christianity, race, and law might have its most practical impact in the hands of the pastorate.
Liberal Legal Theory and Contemporary Liberal Political Thought: Ignoring the Domain of Power and Politics
Liberal Legal Theory
The mainstream liberal, Enlightenment-inspired view of law assumes that law as a discipline is autonomous from political and cultural forces.Footnote 7 It thereby assumes that legal ideals of racial equality can be adjudicated and enforced rationally, objectively, and without the taint of racial bias found in political and cultural life.Footnote 8 In this way, although laws are brought about through the political process, once adopted, law is the domain of reason and objectivity rather than the subjective, indeterminate domain of political life.Footnote 9 Consistent with this emphasis on reason and objectivity, mainstream liberal civil rights discourse has historically identified racism with irrational bias.Footnote 10 Under this approach, liberalism has assumed that racism is remedied through rational, objective application of a colorblind ideal of law.
Liberal legal theory’s identification of racism with irrational bias and its confidence in the power of law’s capacity to protect against such bias treats law as insulated from political and cultural forces and the racial bias that infects those forces. As a result, in its abstraction away from the realities of everyday life, liberal legal theory does not offer a practical path to racial equality that grapples with disparate racial power. For this reason, critical race theorists criticize liberal legal theory as exalting a view of law as unbiased and rational when law and legal institutions are embedded in and infected with the racial biases that prevail in broader cultural and political life. In this way, in maintaining that law and legal reasoning are rational and objective and ignoring racial power, liberal legal theory perpetuates racial subordination. Much like liberal legal thought, contemporary liberal theory does not adequately address the role of convictions and disparate racial power in producing racial injustice.
Contemporary Liberal Political Theory
Contemporary liberal political theory, notably in its dominant form as articulated by John Rawls, is distinct from the mainstream liberal view of law.Footnote 11 For my purpose here, the most relevant distinction is that Rawls’s theory introduces constraints on the realm of politics through the idea “of an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines.”Footnote 12 Through the device of the overlapping consensus, Rawls’s theory attempts to avoid imposing a conception of the “good”—that is, a comprehensive view—and thereby defends a vision of a liberal, pluralistic democratic society.Footnote 13 In contrast, concerned with positive law and legal interpretation, as practiced in legal institutions mainstream liberal legal thought does not propose moral constraints on political discourse.Footnote 14 Thus, to state the obvious, judges adhering to the liberal legal view of law as autonomous and rational do not seek to constrain political discourse.Footnote 15 They instead purport to apply the law at issue before them.Footnote 16
Contemporary liberal theory’s tendency to restrict public political discourse to the reasonable effectively ignores realist conceptions (which of course have affinities with critical race theory) of the domain of politics and power as a sphere dominated by interests rather than guided by morality, reason, and rationality.Footnote 17 In particular, as philosopher Bernard Williams has argued, the dominant form of contemporary liberalism makes morality prior to politics.Footnote 18 Placing the moral prior to the political, Rawls makes no real effort to chart a path from where we are to the society he envisions.Footnote 19 Genuine problems of conflict and power go unaddressed.Footnote 20 Rather than addressing these questions, Rawls offers a theory for safeguarding rights and liberties that are already in place,Footnote 21 and so a call like King’s for a “revolution in values” and a revolution in collective life does not emerge.Footnote 22
For this reason, the dominant form of contemporary liberal theory, the Rawlsian tradition, has been criticized as “incapable of conceptualizing genuinely political notions such as power and conflict.”Footnote 23 Moreover, as Williams has observed, liberalism’s moralizing approach to politics is seen in American political culture and legal theory, where Congress is identified with “politics” as defined by interest-seeking and the United States Supreme Court is, among liberal scholars, frequently treated as engaged in “principled reason.”Footnote 24 Political theory and legal reason are thus contrasted with the sphere of conflict and power that characterizes politics.Footnote 25
The contrast between the moralizing theory of liberalism and the domain of politics reflects the difference between the conclusions of a supposedly autonomous moral reason and political convictions.Footnote 26 Whereas liberal moral reason attempts to abstract from historical contingencies to arrive at reasonable arrangements that all can accept, actual political convictions are highly contingent, greatly shaped by “previous historical conditions, and of an obscure mixture of beliefs (many in-compatible with one another), passions, interests, and so forth.”Footnote 27 In this sense, mere political convictions should not be identified as simply reflecting the conclusions of autonomous moral reason.Footnote 28
Because political convictions are the product of highly contingent variables, reason and rationality cannot readily resolve deep political disagreements to the satisfaction of all.Footnote 29 Such conflicts are instead resolved through the political process—that is, the realm of power and power struggles.Footnote 30 As a result, by constraining politics to the reasonable, Rawls’s theory does not offer a practical path to resolving the unreasonable in the political life of actual societies.Footnote 31 It either assumes that people will be reasonable or (without offering a practical path toward achieving its vision of society) offers a regulative ideal that liberal, pluralist democracies should pursue.Footnote 32
Legitimacy and Consent: Neglecting Power and Politics in Favor of Principled Reason
Whatever their differences, neither contemporary liberal theory nor mainstream liberal legal thought focus on politics and power. Thus, imposing constraints upon political discourse, the dominant form of contemporary liberal theory does not treat political life as we know it but instead posits that a liberal political morality should govern political life. Similarly, according to liberal legal thought, whatever the vagaries of the political process, the law and policy that emerges from the political process is subject to principled interpretation and application.Footnote 33 Thus, in contrast to liberal political theory, liberal legal thought is not directly focused on political legitimacy. Rather, liberal legal thought takes the legitimacy of American political authority for granted. It further assumes that reason is able to resolve legal questions, including questions concerning deeply contested topics, such as racial justice. Moreover, as Williams suggests, with respect to politics liberal theory and legal thought mirror one another, with liberal theorists and legal thinkers tending to identify Congress with politics and the Supreme Court with “principled reason.”Footnote 34 Accordingly, for their own reasons liberal theory and legal thought each ignore deep-seated political conflict in favor of a focus on ideals of reasonableness and principled reason that are bound up with liberalism’s conception of legitimate political authority.
Liberalism’s tendency to bifurcate politics and law is bound up with liberalism’s commitment to resting the legitimacy of law and political authority upon consent, whether actual or hypothetical.Footnote 35 In particular, if law merely reflects the interests of a powerful group reasonable people may withhold consent.Footnote 36 In this way, concern with legitimacy motivates the imposition of reasonableness conditions on political discourse.Footnote 37
However, as Williams argues, liberalism lacks a sufficient theory of why the liberal account of the person (as autonomous) that underlies the legitimacy of liberal political theory reflects an advance in moral knowledge that justifies liberal political authority as opposed to being a mere historical contingency.Footnote 38 Thus, because liberal political theory does not account for the fact that the acceptance of liberal political authority is itself a historically contingent fact, liberalism lacks an adequate account of legitimate political authority.Footnote 39
According to Williams, legitimate political authority requires an appeal to justice that involves recourse to an impartial standpoint that reflects more than the desires or the interests that people may have.Footnote 40 Crucially, the needed impartial standpoint is an “authority with power to enforce.”Footnote 41 Williams takes it to be universally true that possession of authority as opposed to mere power turns on the acceptance of a legitimation story.Footnote 42 Perhaps most importantly, for Williams, what counts as an acceptable legitimation story for any particular society is historically contingent rather than derived, as in liberalism, from purportedly universal but in fact historically contingent theories of the person.Footnote 43
Because of the powerful role of racial power in shaping and perhaps determining US law, critical race theory implies that on questions of race the legitimation story of US law is in question and perhaps rejected. However, critical race theory’s tendency to focus on racial power and interests as the driving forces of law (as opposed to liberal consent and consensus) does not point the way to a legitimation story that mainstream legal thinkers—thinkers in the liberal tradition—can accept. In contrast, as discussed later, in King’s method of altering political convictions, we find a path that aligns with liberalism’s emphasis on consent.
Rejecting the Division between Law and Politics: Racial Domination and the Illegitimacy of US Law
Critical race theory rejects the ideal of autonomous reason and the possibility of principled, objective reason that animates liberal political theory and liberal legal thought.Footnote 44 In contrast to contemporary liberal theory’s effort to promote liberal political morality, critical race theory argues that racialized power and interests inevitably infect the political process.Footnote 45 In particular, white racial interests and associated political convictions powerfully influence US political and legal institutions.Footnote 46 Thus, according to critical race theory, white interests are furthered by a colorblind legal regime that fails to address substantive racial inequality and thereby leaves intact numerous advantages that historical and contemporary racism confers on white Americans.Footnote 47 In short, critical race theory denies that law and legal interpretation reflect Enlightenment, liberal ideals of rationality and objectivity but insists that law is shaped by disparate racial power.Footnote 48 Indeed, according to Derrick Bell’s influential interest-convergence thesis, disparate racial power so decisively shapes law that Black progress occurs only when it aligns with white interests.Footnote 49
Because of its insistence that law is deeply infected by racial bias and extra-legal political considerations critical race theory has been described as reducing law to politics.Footnote 50 As the above discussion of liberalism suggests, liberal thinkers find critical race theory’s reduction of law to politics problematic.Footnote 51 From the perspective of liberalism, perhaps most problematic is the implication that if law and legal analyses reflect power and interests rather than principled moral reason, reasonable people may not consent to the law.Footnote 52 In other words, as critical race theory’s liberal critics have perceived, because liberalism rests the law’s legitimacy upon the consent of reasonable people, critical race theory suggests that US law lacks legitimate authority.Footnote 53
In addition, given the role of politics and interests in critical race theory’s understanding of the law’s treatment of race, critical race theory teaches that the law and legal interpretation reflect underlying political convictions, which are in turn shaped by racial positionality and racial interests. As a result, setting aside whatever contribution liberal ideals of political morality might hypothetically make to the law’s legitimacy, critical race theory implicitly teaches that theories of political morality do not in fact constrain our political practice. Similarly, critical race theory’s view that racial power deeply influences law entails the rejection of the liberal tendency to associate courts with the ideal of principled reason.
Perhaps more important, as noted in my discussion of Bernard Williams, critical race theory can be interpreted as claiming that because law reflects a political process that is infected with interests that seek to maintain a racially unjust status quo and because legal interpretation also reflects racial bias, law and legal decisions lack authority legitimated by a story that critical race theory and (according to the theory’s inner logic) people of color accept.Footnote 54 Setting aside the problem of how a presumed perspective of color avoids essentialism, if critical race theory is correct that US law is complicit in perpetrating and maintaining racial domination, it follows that absent false consciousness people of color would not consent to their own domination. In this way, critical race theory implicitly rejects the legitimacy of US law on questions of racial justice.
Critical race theory can be understood as arguing that by incorporating the perspectives of people of color, specifically their experiential knowledge of racial oppression, US law can be put on the path to addressing racial subordination and thereby acquire legitimacy.Footnote 55 In particular, according to influential threads of critical race theory, political convictions about the nature of race and racial justice in the United States are shaped by the disparate experiences of white and non-white Americans.Footnote 56 Moreover, as a result of their different experience, victims of racism are said to have an experiential knowledge of racism that white Americans do not have.Footnote 57 Because this experiential knowledge provides insight into the nature of racism, if law is to address racial subordination, law should incorporate the perspectives—that is, the standpoints—of people of color. Indeed, according to some theorists, the law should not just incorporate but defer to the perspectives of people of color.Footnote 58 In short, critical race theory holds that legitimating US law requires an appeal to standpoint theory—the epistemological claim that social location and identity provide a basis for knowledge.
However, critics have objected to critical race theory’s position that privileged experiences provide knowledge to which others should defer.Footnote 59 Among other things, critics point out that racial minorities do not share a single point of view with regard to what the experience of racism entails about policy prescriptions.Footnote 60 Critics have also rejected the suggestion of deference as erroneously denying that lack of experience of racism entails inability to evaluate proposed solutions to racial discrimination.Footnote 61 In other words, critics reject the claim that deference should be accorded to policy prescriptions based upon privileged insight into the nature of racism. Thus, for example, if colorblindness is to be rejected it ought not be rejected based on the special insight of people of color but for reasons all people can access.
Accordingly, while standpoint theory implicitly purports to explain the gap between critical race theory’s understanding of racial subordination and liberal legal theory, the criticisms reviewed here indicate that critical race theory’s critics do not find the explanation from standpoint theory persuasive. Perhaps more important to my concerns in this article, at bottom, contests over the knowledge claims and policy proposals that advocates of standpoint theory advance largely reflect disagreements over the nature of racism and (by extension) the requirements of racial justice, that is, conflicting political convictions.Footnote 62
As a method of attempting to alter differences in underlying convictions that arise from differing experiences—that is, standpoints—critical race theorists have introduced counternarratives—stories that convey the lived experience of racism—that aim to challenge the dominant mindset or point of view.Footnote 63 However, because of its tendency toward skepticism of objective truth,Footnote 64 and skepticism regarding the ability of human beings to fully apprehend insights into subordination of standpoints in which their own identities are not positioned,Footnote 65 critical race theory does not clearly explain why counternarratives should be accepted as true,Footnote 66 which in turn calls into question the persuasive power of counternarrative as a method of altering underlying convictions.Footnote 67 Similarly, seeking to alter underlying convictions through standard argumentative techniques (rather than narrative) appears inconsistent with critical race theory’s own skepticism toward reason.Footnote 68 As a result, it is difficult to discern in critical race theory a cogent framework for altering underlying convictions. Indeed, given the influence in critical race theory of Derrick Bell’s claim that racism is so ingrained in the fabric of our social structures and collective life that while racism may adapt and take new forms, racism is permanent, even if counternarratives can alter underlying convictions, it is not clear that critical race theory would expect significant improvement in racial subordination.Footnote 69
Progress against racial subordination is of course compatible with the persistence of white supremacy. Put differently, to make inroads against racial inequality is not necessarily to eliminate it. Moreover, as sociologist Matthew Hughey has shown, whites who hold anti-racist political convictions can nonetheless remain committed to ideals of white identity that are functionally bound to white supremacy in ways that strongly resemble white nationalists’ constructions of white identity.Footnote 70 As a result, if white anti-racists can subscribe to white supremacist notions of white identity, to alter political convictions toward racial justice is not necessarily to root out white supremacy.
Yet empirical evidence suggests that the civil rights movement made significant progress against racial subordination at least in part as a result of the movement having an impact on political convictions in the direction of greater racial equality.Footnote 71 In particular, using instrumental variable analysis (a tool for drawing causal inferences from data sets), political scientist Omar Wasow has shown that nonviolent civil rights era protests increased voter support for civil rights, led to positive media coverage of these protests (which influenced political convictions), and “played a critical role in tilting the national political agenda toward civil rights.”Footnote 72
Since the civil rights era, white commitment to explicit white supremacist ideology has dramatically changed.Footnote 73 Dramatic shifts in racial attitudes have occurred in a variety of specific areas, including but not limited to far less support for the ideology of white biological superiority, anti-miscegenation laws, de jure segregated schools, and white assertions of a supposed right to a racially exclusionary neighborhood.Footnote 74 However, despite these and others changes, white racial attitudes and political convictions reflect an absence of strong support for proactive government efforts to increase racial equality, persistent anti-Black stereotypes, “significance affective and socioemotional distance” from Blacks, and white racial resentment.Footnote 75
The partial and imperfect improvement in white racial attitudes since the civil rights era is accompanied by equally partial and arguably unimproved (or even worsened) Black-white gaps in specific areas. In the criminal justice system, “[w]hile Black people account for 12% of the local populations, they make up approximately 33% of the incarcerated population,” a rate of incarceration nearly five times that of the white population, and “Black people are more than twice as likely to be arrested for drugs despite not selling or using [at] higher rates.”Footnote 76 Furthermore, while the Black-white wealth gap has narrowed marginally since the 1960s, at the current rate of progress it would take 780 years to close; likewise, the Black-white income gap would take 513 years to close.Footnote 77 And Black Americans continue to face discrimination in housing and rental markets, and racially disparate health care outcomes.Footnote 78 Thus, while substantial improvements have occurred in many areas of Black life including, for example, with respect to the poverty rate, high school and college graduation rates, and (recently) an historically low Black unemployment rate, on many metrics racial disparities persist and in some areas only slight gains have been made.Footnote 79 As a result, the record of post-civil rights improvement in Black life is mixed.
Although improvements in white racial attitudes and various measures of Black life are mixed and uneven, since the civil rights era American life has moved in the direction of equality. Thus, because racial progress has occurred, racial progress is possible. Of course, that progress can be made against racial subordination does not establish that it can be eliminated root and branch. For this reason, the fact of racial progress does not supply a basis to firmly reject critical race theory’s thesis that racism is permanent.Footnote 80 On the other hand, the thesis is untestable, as there is no way of definitively proving or disproving whether racism will exist for all time even if greatly ameliorated.Footnote 81
Setting aside the problem of testability, the thesis that racism is permanent is buttressed by critical race theory’s interest-convergence thesis—that is, the claim that racial progress is only made when white interests align with relieving racial subordination. According to the interest-convergence thesis, progress against racism only occurs when relief from racism serves white interests, such that racial progress and regress are cyclical and racism permanent despite apparent progress.Footnote 82 However, as Justin Driver has noted, the interest-convergence thesis suffers, among other things, from the problem of irrefutability.Footnote 83 Moreover, the interest-convergence thesis is undermined by evidence, discussed above, that the nonviolent civil rights movement positively impacted collective support for civil rights and ushered in dramatic changes to white racial attitudes.Footnote 84 In particular, in the face of empirically documented increased white support for racial equality and sustained and widely held repudiation of normative and official white supremacist ideology in the form of such things as Jim Crow and anti-miscegenation laws, it is not plausible to maintain, as the interest-convergence thesis does, that Black progress occurs only when it aligns with white interests.Footnote 85 Rather, white collective attitudes toward Black equality have in fact dramatically shifted—albeit unevenly and imperfectly. As a result, even if the interest-convergence thesis’s assumption that white racial interests dominate the sphere of politics and power is plausible, and we assume that white racial interests have shifted in ways that support continuing forms of racial subordination, it is not plausible to maintain that there has not been a real change in white collective attitudes that renders unduly reductive the identification of Black progress with the alignment of white interests.
The evidence shows that white racial attitudes have changed and that on a variety of metrics Black life has improved. Indeed, there is no real question that the forms of racial subordination present in slavery and the Jim Crow era were more vicious and categorical than the forms present today. But even while racial progress has been made, as we have seen, the mixed record of improvement underscores the extreme challenge that resolving racial subordination presents. Given the nature of democratic politics, if structural reform is necessary to make further significant progress toward racial inequality, altering political convictions is essential for addressing racial subordination and for achieving King’s vision of the beloved community.
The Journey Toward Revolution: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Pastoral Reshaping of Political Convictions, Law, and American Life
Through his long years of difficult struggle to free the nation from white supremacy and to realize the beloved community (collective life organized around agape love), Martin Luther King Jr. understood as well as anyone the difficulty of making progress against racial subordination and eventually eliminating white supremacy.Footnote 86 Indeed, according to King “racism is a way of life for the vast majority of white Americans, spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and denied, subtle and sometimes not so subtle—the disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic.”Footnote 87 Well aware of the depth and extent of the task, King did not identify with optimism but with a “realistic hope” that is “based on a willingness to face the risk of failure and embrace an in-spite-of quality.”Footnote 88 Reflecting this realist sensibility regarding the challenge of white supremacy, King focused his efforts on persuading moderate whites toward the cause of equality.Footnote 89
King aimed to reshape the political convictions of persuadable whites in the direction of racial equality, which in turn facilitated racial progress, including national civil rights legislation.Footnote 90 Reshaping political convictions to support government efforts to address racial subordination was a first step. Altered political convictions could alter collective life by enabling civil rights legislation that could remove obstructions, such as segregation laws, to a just society, which could in turn change habits and indirectly alter sentiments.Footnote 91 A change in attitudes could produce a change in law, followed by a change in habits, and a change in hearts.Footnote 92 Put differently, King subscribed to a dynamic model of social change entailing mutually reinforcing and, more accurately, overlapping components in the sense that changes in political convictions, laws, habits and the heart bled into one another and could make further change possible.Footnote 93 Thus, in a 1967 address to his staff, King explained that the freedom movement needed to go beyond reform to a revolutionary phase. This phase would seek a “revolution of values,” “a radical redistribution of economic and political power,” and King emphasized that “the whole structure of American life must be changed” in the direction of the beloved community.Footnote 94 As discussed in more detail later, for King, nonviolence as a method and as a way of life is the essential, indispensable means of altering political convictions and the ultimate goal of achieving the beloved community.
King’s complex and multilayered approach to social change was the fruit of all that went into him, including and perhaps foremost a life begun in the womb of a Black family and the southern Protestant Black church;Footnote 95 the Black social gospel tradition;Footnote 96 the northern Black prophetic tradition;Footnote 97 the white social gospel;Footnote 98 liberal Protestantism and philosophical personalism;Footnote 99 prophetic American civil religion;Footnote 100 Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism;Footnote 101 Henry David Thoreau’s notions of noncooperation with evil and civil disobedience;Footnote 102 and Gandhian nonviolent direct action.Footnote 103 Added to his immense intellectual, rhetorical talents, charisma and other personal qualities, the foregoing influences converged in King to constitute him as the consummate philosophical-prophetic-pastoral activist of American, if not all of modern western history.Footnote 104
While here it is not possible to cover scholarly assessments and disagreement regarding how King as political-theologian creatively synthesized these various influences, it is possible to briefly capture the essence of King’s philosophical outlook. Christian personalist philosophy constituted King’s “basic philosophical position.”Footnote 105 It holds that personhood (human and divine) is all that is real, and that because human beings bear the image of God, and God values human persons, the latter have infinite value.Footnote 106
The high value that King’s personalism attributed to individual human beings was joined with a formation and commitment to a vision of Christian life and ministry rooted in the outward, justice seeking tradition of a distinctly Black social gospel tradition, though the white social gospel, especially Walter Rauschenbusch, also deeply influenced King.Footnote 107 King’s social gospel put him in sharp contrast with Black and white traditions of otherworldly focused forms of Christianity focused solely on individual salvation.Footnote 108
King’s commitment to the social gospel helped to form his vision of church-state relations.Footnote 109 For King, the church was not to be walled off from the state but, offering prophetic critique, serve as its conscience.Footnote 110 Accordingly, the notion that religion and politics should be separate directly conflicts with King’s vision of church-state relations.Footnote 111 For King, the state can be “a force for good and a force for evil,”Footnote 112 but through prophetic critique the church helps to make the state a force for good that lives up to the ideals of democracy, equality, and freedom contained in American civil religion.Footnote 113
King shared Reinhold Niebuhr’s and liberal theology’s search for truth and rejection of dogmatism.Footnote 114 From Niebuhr’s realist theology, King gained a deeper appreciation of reason as an instrument for rationalizing self-interest rather than as a reliable force of principled morality.Footnote 115 Niebuhr’s emphasis on the importance of power and coercion in the context of collective justice also left a lasting mark on King.Footnote 116 But King rejected Niebuhr’s realist insistence that groups, as inevitably immoral and driven by considerations of power and interests, are incapable of moral transformation and meeting the standard of Christian love.Footnote 117 Although King recognized the significant role of power and interests in collective life, in light of his commitment to the social gospel and a more optimistic conception of humanity’s moral capacities, it is perhaps unsurprising that King regarded Niebuhr as failing “to deal adequately with the relative perfection which is the fruit of Christian life.”Footnote 118 As Kenneth Smith and Ira Zepp Jr. conclude, King’s optimism regarding the possibility of realizing the beloved community stemmed from his belief in the possibility of spiritual growth.Footnote 119 Thoreau’s idea of a “creative minority” improving the state through noncooperation with evil and civil disobedience aligned with King’s vision of the church as the conscience of the state.Footnote 120 In Gandhi’s method of nonviolent direct action, King found a means of social change that cohered with the ultimately spiritual, pastoral project of restructuring American society around agape love and cultivating collective spiritual growth toward the beloved community.Footnote 121
Drawing on his family roots and the Black church, King thus creatively synthesized varied theological and philosophical resources into a subtle, nuanced understanding of the role of power, truth, and agape love in making progress toward the beloved community. Distinctly different from liberalism, King shares critical race theory’s understanding of the profound importance of power in the struggle for justice.Footnote 122 However, as discussed below, in contrast to critical race theory, King sought to moralize the concept of power. Additionally, unlike liberalism, King did not propose to moralize political discourse by imposing reasonableness constraints.Footnote 123 As evident in his call for a “revolution of values,” King sought to change underlying political convictions. Indeed, facing the constant threat of assassination and intense hatred of the Black freedom movement, hypothetical reasonableness constraints would not have served King’s purpose. He needed to directly grapple with the harsh reality of deep-seated and unreasonable convictions and political conflict.Footnote 124
King believed that achieving a just society requires transforming the values that animate American life. King’s experiential approach to apprehending truth aligns with nonviolent direct action to usher in new experiences that enable a pastoral reshaping of underlying political convictions. Because King sought to directly alter lived experience, in King the pastoral vocation goes beyond, though it includes the reasoned argument of the scholar. This dimension of King’s ministry reflects his deep roots in the prophetic tradition as a rhetorical mode that through poetic invocation makes available new perceptions of reality.Footnote 125
The Inadequacy of Existing Rights and the Need for a Revolution in Values
King’s appreciation of the chasm between reason and law, on the one hand, and actual political life, on the other, is clear. He maintained that “[l]aws only declare rights; they do not deliver them.”Footnote 126 He maintained that the oppressed must organize to transform declared rights into “effective mandates.”Footnote 127 However, King did not believe the US Constitution an adequate foundation for a truly just society.Footnote 128 He therefore proposed to amend the constitution with a new social and economic Bill of Rights.Footnote 129 As amended, the constitution would provide a universal annual income and shelter through what King referred to as a “Medicare for housing.”Footnote 130 Recognizing the revolutionary nature of these proposed amendments, in a 1967 address to his staff at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King stated, “We have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights, an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society. We have been in a reform movement … But after Selma and the voting rights bill, we moved into a new era, which must be the era of revolution. We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power.”Footnote 131
The redistribution of power that King envisioned entailed a transition from a “‘thing’-oriented society to a ‘person’-oriented society.”Footnote 132 Critically, the redistribution of power was not only from white to Black but from the wealthy to the poor of all races.Footnote 133 Hence King’s call for a new society that would eliminate poverty through programs, such as a universal guaranteed income, a “Medicare for housing,” and a deepening of democracy by making citizen participation more effective in major areas of social concern, including education, welfare programs and government subsidized housing.Footnote 134
However, King was acutely aware that existing political convictions would not support the radical restructuring of American life that he proposed. He therefore called for a “radical revolution of values”Footnote 135 and a “qualitative change in our souls,”Footnote 136 maintaining that “the only way to ultimately change humanity and make for the society we all long for is to keep love at the center of our lives.”Footnote 137 For King, organizing life around love is to adopt nonviolence as a way of life, which he in turn identified with internal nonviolence (the spirit) and external nonviolence (outward conduct).Footnote 138 Understood within this central, paradigmatic thread of King’s thought, the “revolution of values” for which he called reflects a recognition of the need to change the underlying convictions that form the bedrock of American political culture. Moreover, in his focus on reshaping political convictions, King’s method of change provides the consent, as discussed above, that liberal theory desires and which critical race theory does not appear to pursue.
The Inadequacy of Mere Reason: Using Nonviolent Coercive Power to Usher in New Experiences and to Reshape Underlying Convictions
Importantly, King believed in absolute truth and the value of reason in achieving insight into truth.Footnote 139 But like Gandhi, in whom he found inspiration, King embraced an experimental approach to grasping historical and experiential truth.Footnote 140 Moreover, although Gandhi’s experimental approach to truth played a vital role in shaping the adult King’s philosophical outlook, from childhood experiences of white supremacy King learned experiential truth about being Black in a white world.Footnote 141 Descended from generations of enslaved and oppressed Black people, and himself experiencing life in a white supremacist, Jim Crow culture, King had a clear sense that apprehension of truth was tied to lived experience.Footnote 142 Thus as King scholar Lewis V. Baldwin states, for King “[t]ruth entailed an accurate grasp of the human plight based not only on what is observed but also on what is experienced in the personal and collective lives of flesh and blood human beings.”Footnote 143
The insight that social truths are apprehended through experience aligns with King’s belief that nonviolent protest produces a creative tension that exposes and lays bare social injustice.Footnote 144 Reflecting this insight, King emphasizes that reason and persuasion alone are insufficient.Footnote 145 Rather, ethical appeals must be accompanied by nonviolent coercive power that “dramatize[s]” societal evil and brings pressure to bear that induces change.Footnote 146 Thus, in King’s thought, nonviolent activism facilitates an encounter with the injustice present in the negative peace of oppressive but normalized social conditions.Footnote 147 In other words, nonviolent activism can make the lived experiences of oppressed communities available for those who are not oppressed, thereby conveying experiential knowledge that a negative peace may otherwise veil.Footnote 148 Thus, in the words of James Baldwin, whom King approvingly quotes, “we, with love, shall force our [white] brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”Footnote 149
King’s emphasis on the role of experience in grasping truth is reminiscent of critical race theory’s claim, discussed above, that oppressed people have experiential knowledge. However, there are significant differences between King and critical race theory. First, while for King, experience is a basis for grasping truth, King maintains an unambiguous commitment to objective truth.Footnote 150 In contrast, as discussed above, critical race theory tends toward skepticism of objective truth. Second, in producing creative tension, nonviolent direct action works as a form of coercive power that can make injustice and the lived experience of the oppressed accessible. In contrast, as discussed above, to the extent it attempts to change the dominant mindset underlying the status quo, critical race theory appears to rely primarily on counternarratives—stories that convey the lived experience of racism—as a method of challenging the dominant mindset or point of view.Footnote 151
Accordingly, a critical difference emerges here between King and critical race theory. As discussed above, because the latter is generally skeptical of objective truth, it does not clearly explain why counternarratives should be accepted as true, thereby calling into question the persuasive power of counternarrative.Footnote 152 Perhaps more importantly, relying on persuasive power counternarrative lacks nonviolent direct action’s capacity to exert coercive power to make lived experience concretely accessible and visible in the everyday world. Put differently, while counternarratives articulate the experience of the oppressed, as scholarly tools they lack nonviolent coercive power’s capacity to alter the lived experience of people who may otherwise be unwilling to seriously engage counternarratives.Footnote 153 Moreover, although he often drew on the reasoned argument of the scholar, in his vocation as a pastor-activist King deployed nonviolent direct action to bring racial oppression to the surface, making it concrete and accessible, which helped to guide the nation in the direction of justice.Footnote 154
Communications scholar Davi Johnson’s study of the Birmingham campaign offers a detailed analysis of how nonviolent action rendered oppression palpable, thereby moving white moderates to embrace change and sweeping national legal reform toward racial equality. In particular, as images of white state violence against nonviolent protestors poured out of Birmingham, the “nation winced” at the barbarism on display.Footnote 155 Thus, as Davi argues, while King’s verbal rhetoric in “Letter From Birmingham Jail” rhetorically cast the civil rights movement in moral terms, King’s “strategic visual rhetor[ic]” of nonviolence “ma[de] racism visible by exposing its action on black bodies.”Footnote 156 The power of the imagery led President Kennedy, for the first time, to declare civil rights a “moral issue” and called Americans to “examine his or her conscience and actively pursue racial equality.”Footnote 157 Perhaps most significant, the naked brutality photographed in Birmingham is “credited with transforming the psyche of the nation and bringing about the necessary momentum for massive legislative changes, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act.”Footnote 158
Although King deployed nonviolence effectively, critics have long questioned the morality of urging oppressed people to face violence, including death, without resort to self-defense.Footnote 159 For example, Malcolm X decried nonviolence as a philosophy whites would not adopt that denies Black people the right of self-defense.Footnote 160 Nonviolence thus inflicts upon the oppressed a double-injustice of enduring unjust suffering in the pursuit of justice. In Malcolm X’s stronger language: “it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.”Footnote 161
In contrast to Malcolm X and other critics, according to King, the end (the beloved community) is preexistent in the means (nonviolence).Footnote 162 Thus, while the right of violent self-defense may seem natural and nonviolence may appear to inflict a double-injustice, violent self-defense impedes the achievement of a truly just society and thereby perpetuates injustice.Footnote 163 Furthermore, from King’s Christian personalist standpoint, violent self-defense constitutes a transgression against an attacker’s infinite worth (that is, dignity), violates the moral law, and contradicts the goal of building community around agape love.Footnote 164
In addition to rejecting violence on philosophical grounds, King rejected it for tactical and practical reasons. King believed that Black violence would reduce white support for Black equality, a claim that recent empirical work validates.Footnote 165 Recent empirical work also bolsters King’s judgment about the tactical prudence of nonviolence. In particular, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan’s study of 323 nonviolent and violent campaigns between 1900 and 2006 finds that nonviolent resistance is nearly two times more effective than violence.Footnote 166 Significant, and consistent with King’s judgment and Wasow’s recent findings regarding the impact of violence and nonviolence on support for civil rights, Chenoweth and Stephan find that nonviolent campaigns have multiple advantages over violent methods of change, including generating wider participation and lower moral barriers.Footnote 167 With regard to the latter, although nonviolent campaigns present risks, including physical risks, the “killing [entailed in violent campaigns] adds a new moral dimension” and poses risks to those who adopt violent methods.Footnote 168 Finally, King also emphasized that, given the small proportion of Blacks in comparison to whites, violence was an impractical path to achieving Black freedom.Footnote 169
The foregoing abbreviated rendering of King’s defense of nonviolent resistance does not change the basic fact that nonviolent protest is risky and potentially fatal. Yet every choice in response to oppression has costs. Thus, engaging in violence can be fatal and, as King noted, is futile for achieving the goal of Black freedom.Footnote 170 As King understood, and as critical race theory has effectively shown, as reformist channels of change, the courts and the ordinary political process have limited effectiveness due to disparate racial power.Footnote 171 Finally, to avoid the costs of nonviolent resistance one might do nothing or adopt separatism of a Black nationalist variety. But for a person committed to agape love and to the principle, as was King, that people are created for brother and sisterhood, neither quietism nor permanent separatism are morally viable options.Footnote 172 As important, insistence on avoiding personal sacrifice is deeply inconsistent with both the Black social gospel tradition that formed King and much of the Christian tradition stretching back to Christ himself, who exalted the laying down of one’s life for another.Footnote 173 Within this framework, contrary to those who might ask whether whites have a right to demand nonviolence from Blacks, reflecting a long tradition of Christian thought associating sin with illness that dates back to the early church, King understood white supremacy as a sickness that all people, white and Black, were morally obligated to treat with the healing medicine of agape love.Footnote 174
Uniting Love and Power: Shepherding Society in the Direction of Justice
King understood white supremacy and the struggle for a just society in profoundly spiritual terms. It should therefore be unsurprising that in 1967, King declared that his only ambition was “excellence in the Christian ministry,” and that he did all his civil rights work because he considered it “a part of [his] ministry.”Footnote 175 Importantly, in King one can discern an understanding of the pastoral vocation that is positioned to shape collective experience in a way that the work of the scholar does not. If reason alone is insufficient to achieve justice in part because new experiences are necessary to alter underlying convictions, an important use of scholarship at the intersection of Christianity, race, and law may be to inform pastoral work that like King’s seeks to usher in new experiences that alter underlying convictions toward racial justice.
In my use, pastoral refers to guidance and the spiritual care of others, and the scholarly life or academic life refers to the activity of a learned person who produces research that furthers a particular area of study. Although, obviously, one person can be both a pastor and a scholar—indeed, King was trained as a scholar and produced books and other writings and offered speeches that furthered, among others, the disciplines of theology and political philosophy—keeping in mind the difference between the two is useful for understanding the pastoral vocation’s relative advantage (in comparison to the exclusively scholarly vocation) in reshaping underlying convictions.Footnote 176 As discussed above, King’s training in philosophy and theology shaped his understanding of the relationship among love, power, nonviolent direct action, and spiritual guidance. It is in King’s understanding of the relationship between love and power that we see how nonviolent direct action can be understood as a form of pastoral spiritual guidance.
Significantly, King criticizes the common tendency to depict love and power as “polar opposites.”Footnote 177 According to this mistaken view, “[l]ove is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love.”Footnote 178 Rejecting the rendering of love and power as “polar opposites,” King unites them, writing: “What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”Footnote 179 King thus envisions love and power—that is, justice—as partners.
On this point, King is distinguished from critical race theory. Consistent with his political theology and reflecting his use of nonviolent coercive power, rather than embracing power understood as mere interests or racial power, King insists upon a moral vision of power. Pointing to Gandhi’s pathbreaking example, King thus contrasts the “positive” power of love and nonviolence and the destructive power of hate and destruction.Footnote 180 Reflecting this contrast, elsewhere King asserts that the destruction of property and people will not bring about the revolution of values necessary to achieve a truly just society.Footnote 181
Consistent with his understanding that civil rights work is a form of ministry, King described the Black freedom movement as “a spiritual movement.”Footnote 182 Significantly, given that his only ambition was excellence in the ministry, it is plausible to interpret King as pastoring the nation along the spiritual path of the civil rights movement, including (indeed, perhaps foremost) in leading and guiding people toward the use of nonviolent direct action and (ultimately) to nonviolence as a way of life.Footnote 183 Thus, contrasting the destructive power of violence with the spiritual nature of nonviolent coercive power, King writes, “We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. … Do to us what you will and we will still love you.”Footnote 184 Crucially, for King, wielding “soul force” is a means of breaking the cycle of hatred and violence and turning one’s enemy into a friend through bringing pressure to bear that makes new experiences available and changes the oppressor’s underlying convictions and so actions and thus collective life.Footnote 185 Thus, as noted above, King approvingly quotes Baldwin’s assertion that “we, with love, shall force our [white] brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”Footnote 186 Accordingly, King’s understanding of civil rights work as integral to his singular ambition of excellence in ministry reveals him as the leader of a spiritual movement that deployed nonviolent coercive power to pastorally usher in new experiences capable of unsettling and reshaping underlying convictions.
Unlike the scholar’s overriding, even exclusive or near exclusive dedication to reasoned and often abstract arguments, as a pastor, King’s charter to provide ministerial guidance and spiritual care encompasses reason but also attends to the suprarational aspects of human existence. Thus, while maintaining an unwavering commitment to objective truth and attentiveness to the importance of experience in apprehending truth, King’s pastoral work addresses—and, because it extends to spiritual care, arguably goes beyond—what critical race theory describes as “mindset—the bundle of perceptions, intuitions, and received wisdoms that all of us bring to our experiences and that constitute the background against which legal discourse is carried out.”Footnote 187 As a result, King’s concern with the human condition and justice in collective life is too wide and too deep for liberalism’s proposal that political discourse be confined to the reasonable. Likewise, rather than identifying political convictions with the conclusions of autonomous moral reason, for King, oppressive political convictions are rooted in the failure to adopt a nonviolent way of life, which includes both external actions and inner attitudes.Footnote 188 King thus states that nonviolent resistance “not only avoids external nonviolence or external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit.”Footnote 189 It is perhaps for this reason that King believes achieving a truly just society—what he called the beloved community—requires a “qualitative change in our souls.”Footnote 190
King’s focus on what might be called soul formation is uniquely within the sphere of the pastoral vocation. Moreover, King understood the pastoral vocation as dedicated to the task of attending to the dialectical relationship inherent in the task of refashioning individual souls and collective life in the direction of justice. King writes: “Above all, I see the preaching ministry as a dual process. On the one hand, I must attempt to change the soul of individuals so that their societies may be changed. On the other I must attempt to change the societies so that the individual soul will have a change. Therefore, I must be concerned about unemployment, slums, and economic insecurity. I am a profound advocate of the social gospel.”Footnote 191
King’s focus on soul formation extends his work beyond the discursive sphere of the scholar down into the woof and warp of everyday life, including his frequent efforts to link nonviolence as a way of life (as opposed to a mere tactic) to the achievement of the beloved community.Footnote 192 Yet, as King shows in his frequent uses of his philosophical and theological education, the scholar can inform the pastor’s efforts to shepherd society in the direction of justice. As such, scholarship at the intersection of Christianity, race, and law might inform the work of pastors who like King seek to usher in new experiences that reshape inner convictions and thereby expand the achievable horizons of justice.
Conclusion
King is distinguished from both liberalism and critical race theory. In particular, given his insistence on the need for a “radical revolution in values” and his belief that justice requires soul formation, King is unlikely to have embraced liberalism’s proposal to restrict public political discourse to the reasonable. He was also too familiar with the workings of power and the unreliability—even faithlessness—of the courts to be seduced by liberalism’s tendency to divorce law from politics. On the other hand, whereas critical race theory often associates power with amoral interests or racial power, King, rejecting the tendency to dichotomize love and power, distinguishes between constructive and destructive power, and thereby moralizes power. While he shares critical race theory’s emphasis on the importance of power and the lived experience of oppressed people, King’s understanding of the positive power of nonviolent direct action offers a coercive yet morally grounded method that can usher in new experiences that can reshape the underlying convictions that sustain racial injustice. That reshaping, in turn, opens the path to structural reform and to further alterations in habits, attitudes, and the heart—changes that can, in turn, generate further structural reforms necessary to achieve King’s vision of a society organized around “persons” rather than “things.”Footnote 193
Because of the importance of King’s pastoral vocation to the reshaping of convictions and his dynamic, multilayered approach to social change, scholarship at the intersection of Christianity, race, and law might have the most practical impact in the hands of the pastorate (and by implication, divinity schools and seminaries) who seek to follow after the example of Dr. King. However, it would blink reality to suggest that either pastors or churches have the same influence today as they had during King’s leadership of the civil rights movement. On the other hand, the fact of diminishing pastoral and church influence today does not mean pastors and churches are fated to a future of little influence. Rather, what we do today, including what we do as scholars, will shape the future of the love tradition that makes Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. the towering moral figure of American history.
Acknowledgments and Citation Guide
Thank you to John Witte and the McDonald Agape Foundation for their generous support of the symposium in which this article appears. Thank you also to the editors of the Journal of Law and Religion, especially Silas Allard and copyeditor Ellen Wert; and to Isaiah Lauwerys for citation checking in the preparation of this article for publication. I have no competing interests to declare. Citations in this article follow the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed.
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