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Martin Luther King and the Separation of Church and Hate
by Dr. Charlie Webb
| "So the question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for love?" asked Reverend King in his 1963 letter from Birmingham Jail. He was addressing the many white religious leaders who had labeled Reverend King's civil rights marches and sit-ins as "unwise and untimely." |
At that time, "Negroes" were completely barred from most Southern hotels and universities. Public facilities separated people with "white" and "colored" signs. There were some majority Black counties "without a single Negro registered to vote." So many Black churches were bombed in Birmingham that it became known as "Bombingham." And most Southern states still enforced anti-miscegenation laws. |
Forty years later most of us have never heard of "miscegenation," which is literally a mixing of the races. More specifically these laws forbade marriage between "whites" and other "races." Non-whites were traditionally and legally treated as second-class citizens. |
Today we have other citizens who are legally segregated and suppressed. Most notable are the gay men and gay women of America, who are still forbidden to marry. Among the opponents of change, most of the hate spews from the pulpits of the self-righteous. |
What did Martin Luther King say that could still guide us today? Would he define today's anti-gay laws as just or unjust? "An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself. This is difference made legal." |
(How clear and undeniable.) |
"Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority." |
(Is this the only way bigots can feel good about themselves?) |
"We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was 'legal'…It was 'illegal' to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany." |
(Just as slavery was "legal" in the Bible and in the United States, and it was "illegal" to help runaway slaves.) |
"There are two types of laws. There are just laws and there are unjust laws…One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." |
(Rev King has now shifted the moral high ground toward love through civil disobedience against unjust laws.) |
"The contemporary church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the archsupporter of the status quo." |
(Amen!) |
Many civil and religious laws are unjust. The Rev Martin Luther King has given us a yardstick to measure them. Any person or church that wishes to be on the side of goodness and love must learn how to stand up for equal rights and justice. Otherwise, we are only hypocrites. |
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