Scotty McLennan

By Scotty McLennan 

The Rev. Dr. Martin King, Jr. said in his famous Drum Major sermon, preached in 1968 at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta where he was co-pastor with his father, “Yes Jesus, I want to be on your right side or your left side…in love and in justice and in truth and in commitment to others, so that we can make of this old world a new world” (1).  Forty years later, on January 21, 2008, Barack Obama preached from the same pulpit, exhorting his listeners to be “true to King’s vision of a beloved community…[to] pray together, and work together… in the struggle for peace and justice…to heal this nation and repair this world.”  For both King and Obama, the central Christian message was and is one of unity.  Obama has put it this way: “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America;  there’s the United States of America” (2).  King made it clear that “All life is interrelated.  We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny” (3). 

Barack Obama has a chapter on faith in his book The Audacity of Hope, and he explains there how he came to be a disciple of Jesus as an adult in Chicago after a childhood of skepticism about religion.  It was because he came to see the power of Christianity, and in particular of the black church, to spur social change;  it was because of “the biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and principalities;” it was because of the way he began to see “the Word made manifest” in maintaining “hope and dignity in the direst of circumstances” that he “was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptized.”  He writes, “Kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt God’s spirit beckoning to me.  I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth” (4).

It’s important to note that both Barack Obama and Martin Luther King, Jr. may be labeled liberal Christians.  Part of that means a commitment to rationality, not to blind faith.  As Obama puts it, “Faith doesn’t mean that you don’t have doubts, or that you relinquish your hold on this world...religious commitment does not require me to suspend critical thinking….or otherwise retreat from the world” (5).  King wrote of how he cherished religious liberalism’s "devotion to the search for truth, its insistence on an open and analytical mind, its refusal to abandon the best light of reason,” even as he appreciated conservative Christianity’s corrective of a “false idealism” that could be “too sentimental concerning human nature” (6).

King was never a Christian exclusivist, but instead he reached out to Jews, Hindus (especially in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi), people of all religions and none, including agnostics and atheists who he had in his inner circle (7).  Obama has said that he does “not believe that religious people have a monopoly on morality.”  He’s also insisted that “Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers” (8).

“Unity is the great need of the hour,” said King (9).  One God, one world, one humanity.  When Jesus illustrated the commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself, he reached out beyond his own religious community to laud a hated, heretical Samaritan for doing what two supposedly exemplary members of his own tradition didn’t do:  come to the aid of a man lying half dead by the side of the road, having been beaten and stripped by robbers.   Jesus welcomed Roman tax collectors, prostitutes, adulterers, and sinners of all sorts to eat at his table.  He asked those who wanted to be his disciples to feed the hungry, care for the sick, visit prisoners, and welcome strangers, no matter who they were.

Barack Obama reminded the congregation at the Ebenezer Baptist Church last year that before Martin Luther King, Jr. became an iconic civil rights leader, there was Rev. King the young preacher.  King was a Christian minister, first and foremost, and last and ultimately. King’s Christianity means integration, not segregation.  King’s Christianity means peace and justice for all, not hatred and oppression for some by others.  King’s Christianity means community-building through nonviolence, not devastation and destruction of community through armed struggle and war.  Said King, “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.   As long as there is poverty in this world, no man can be rich even if he has a billion dollars…I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be…This is the way the world is…this is the interrelated structure of reality…The world in which we live is a world of geographical oneness and we are challenged now to make it spiritually one” (10).

At Ebenezer Baptist Church, Barack Obama explained that “Unity is the great need of the hour…not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it’s the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country.”  He wasn’t speaking about our budget deficit, but about our moral deficit or our empathy deficit.  He was speaking about our inability to understand, just as Cain didn’t with Abel, that we are in fact our brother’s keeper; we are our sister’s keeper.  We have a moral deficit, Obama said, “when CEOs are making more in ten minutes than some workers make in ten months; when families lose their homes so that lenders make a profit; when mothers can’t afford a doctor when their children get sick…when innocents are slaughtered in the deserts of Darfur.”  Obama makes it clear that this isn’t just a matter of individuals’ contributions but of changing structures and institutional realities in order to ensure economic justice and basic human rights at home and abroad.  That’s particularly difficult to do when we have a politics in this country that seeks to drive us apart and put up walls between us.

Finally, Obama reminds us that “Scripture tells us that we are judged not just by word, but by deed” (11).  Jesus preached about economic and political change, but he also physically overturned the moneychangers’ tables in the temple.  He complained that those who were sick and in pain were not being attended to in a society in which the rich oppressed the poor, but he also personally healed many who came to him.  Likewise, Martin Luther King was an inspired orator, but he also marched in the streets, went to jail, and ultimately was killed when helping Memphis garbage collectors, slurred as “walking buzzards,” who were facing fierce opposition to their demands for union recognition, better wages and better benefits (12).  Barack Obama quotes words of the prophet Micah:  “What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God” (13).  As President he’s now in a position to fulfill at least some of his campaign promises by taking concrete actions to try to turn around the U.S. and global economy, to exercise effective diplomacy internationally, and to reach across aisles to create a new kind of bipartisan cooperation in solving our nation’s and the world’s problems.

That’s what Christian discipleship is ultimately all about.  That’s what the unity that Jesus called for requires – for King, for Obama, and hopefully for all of us, no matter what our religious or philosophical perspective may be. 

NOTES

(1)  Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Drum Major Instinct,” in James M. Washington (ed.), A Testament of Hope:  The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco:  Harper & Row, 1986), p. 267.

(2)  Barack Obama, keynote address delivered at the 2004 Democratic National Convention (Boston:  July 27, 2004).

(3)  Martin Luther King, Jr., “The American Dream,” in Washington, Testament of Hope, p. 210.

(4)  Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope:  Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York:  Crown Publishers, 2006), p. 208.

(5)  Obama, Audacity of Hope, pp. 207-208.

(6)  Martin Luther King, Jr., “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” in Washington, Testament of Hope, p. 35.

(7)  Susan Jacoby, “Martin Luther King:  The Irreplaceable Man,” (April 4, 2008), http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/susan_jacoby/2008/04/martin_luther_king_the_irrepla.html;  See also Hemant Mehta, "Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Humanists," (January 24, 2008), http://friendlyatheist.com/2008/01/24/dr-martin-luther-king-jr-and-humanists/

(8)  Barack Obama, “Call to Renewal Keynote Address (Washington, D.C.:  June 28, 2006), www.citizenlink.org/pdfs/06-24-08-obama-call-to-renewal.pdf

(9)  Barack Obama, a sermon delivered at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on January 21, 2008.

(10)  King, “American Dream,” p. 209-210.

(11)  Obama, 1/21/08 sermon

(12)  Barack Obama, “Remarks on Martin Luther King, Jr.” (Boston Globe, April 4, 2008).

(13)  Micah 6:8 as quoted in Obama, “Remarks on Martin Luther King, Jr.”