On this Martin Luther King Jr. day we are once more reminded of the massive revisionism taking place within Right-wing circles. I've written about this repeatedly and focused deliberately on these points back in 2012 and 2014. This revisionism is something I noticed years ago and was left somewhat stunned to hear figures like Glenn Beck and Charles Colson attempt to appropriate the King legacy and argue that somehow his ideas were resonant and representative of their own. It was a re-writing of the history and yet few seemed to notice.
King was opposed by Evangelical figures in his day.
Identified as a theological liberal (which he was), a communist (which he
wasn't), he was denounced and decried as being divisive and harmful to American
society. The Church leaders who supported him were not Evangelicals, Confessionalists,
and conservatives, but liberals and progressives.
He was also criticised for his personal immorality. Rumours
and stories floated about regarding his marital infidelities and perversion –
and many of these stories were true. In many respects King was not a person to
be admired by the Christian community. In terms of Christian ethics, he was in
many ways a rank hypocrite and deserves condemnation for his shameful conduct.
This does not excuse the opposition to him. Rather than being
rooted in genuine Biblical doctrine and ethical concerns, the reaction was
largely fed by a corrupt and immoral Establishment class and yes, a great deal
of racism. Conservatives opposed integration and resented King and his
movement.
I remember this did not change in the 1970's or even into the
1980's. He was loathed and spoken against in the Fundamentalist and Evangelical
circles I inhabited and grew up in. My wife who grew up in the same circles but
on the opposite side of the United States had the same experience and the same
memories.
Now it would be one thing if Evangelical leaders repented of
past words and deeds but that's not what happened. By the 1990's the rhetoric
suddenly changed. Why? There are several factors and one has to remember the
time.
The Martin Luther King Jr. holiday was signed into law by
Ronald Reagan in 1983 and slowly the states began to adopt it although many
remained resistant right up until the end of the 1990's. It's hard to even
imagine that today as things have changed a great deal. Fundamentalist Bob
Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina still opposed mixed dating and
marriage into the 1990's and George W Bush created a scandal when he visited
there during his 2000 campaign. I can assure you a great deal of the opposition
to the King holiday and the resistance of accepting of him as a cultural hero remained
within Right-wing and Evangelical circles – though you would never know that
today.
By the 1990's, the cultural tide was changing. Mixed-race
couples used to get shouted at and insulted back in the 1970's and 1980's, but
by the 1990's, that kind of response was going out of style as they say. Some
Blacks were becoming prosperous. Oprah Winfrey (right or wrong) was a respected
cultural icon and sports figures like Michael Jordan were popular and respected
by the mainstream and the middle class. Society was changing its attitudes
about race and the Evangelical community realised that after the disasters of
the 1980's – the failures of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, to
keep their movement alive they would need to change the narrative and expand
their numbers. The Black Church (viewed as a potential ally in the culture war)
was sitting there, comprised of vast numbers waiting to be tapped, and as the
Democratic Party was shifting away from working class interests into an embrace
of identity politics – which yes, included minority issues, but it also
included sodomy and other moral issues opposed by the Black Church. Many
believed it was time for the Evangelical movement to win these people over to
the Republican side.
As a quick aside, it's interesting to note that the Black
Church has been and remains largely friendly toward feminism and as the
Evangelical movement sought out the Black Church, they too were embracing feminism
at a rapid pace. Interviewing a Black female 'pastor' on Evangelical radio
would have been unthinkable even in the 1990's. Today no one raises an eyebrow
and the norms of career-focused women and single motherhood are part of the
Evangelical mainstream.
In terms of strategy, Evangelicals didn't repent of their
opposition to King and his ideals, they simply changed the narrative and
pretended that they had supported him all along. And by the 2000's, they dared
to argue that King was on their side and stood for the principles they did. Men
like Glenn Beck and others wove together an impossible tapestry suggesting that
their libertarian notions of rights and freedoms, combined with the
opportunities of the free market (and maybe even their international
militarism) were somehow consonant with the message of King. It's a case of
gross revisionism and yet by promoting any Black person that would embrace the
Right-wing line into media stardom they've been able to give the narrative a
degree of credibility. As far as the Black Right-wing figures that have
embraced and promoted this trickery and deceit, what can we say? They're either
very ignorant of their own cultural past or they're simply rank sell-outs and
have no integrity.
Some have realized that perhaps the Democratic Party's
positions are not in the best interests of their community – at certain points.
And undoubtedly the DNC is corrupt, self-serving, deceitful, and when it comes
to the Black community – it's often patronising. The Right has used the
abortion issue to reach out to the Black Church and with some success. The
success is limited however by the fact that Black intellectuals and others on
the Left will point out that abortion can't be viewed in isolation from its
other social factors. This is not to excuse it but to focus solely on abortion
is to turn a blind eye to other deep and pervasive social problems. As always,
the Right attempts to oversimplify issues and frankly a lot of the time that
kind of approach works with the public – all the more in this age of social
media and mass distraction.
Would King stand with the Republicans today? Of course not.
And these Right-wing figures have also chosen to ignore a key component to
King's legacy, the one point that (I think) he truly deserves some serious
admiration. In April of 1967 he came out publically in opposition to the
Vietnam War and spoke in unabashed terms regarding US imperialism, and he
rightly identified the United States as 'the greatest purveyor of violence in
the world today'.
He connected the causes and criminality of the war with
economic inequality, US poverty, and at other times connected these notions
together with the larger questions of race, militarism, and materialism. As a
result he called for economic redistribution, and for a complete change in
America's value system.
He even specifically attacked US policy and the nation's
murderous and destructive tactics within Vietnam. He criticised civilian deaths
and argued the US was spiritually killing itself.
Did the Evangelical movement support him? Did the Right? No,
in fact they all turned against him more than ever and he also lost a lot of
Democratic support as well. Billy Graham who had never actually supported him
(despite the attempts made by some to suggest so), turned overtly hostile to
him.
A year later he was dead and I am among those who believe
that while he was greatly opposed by the political Right in the United States –
and particularly by J Edgar Hoover of the FBI, it was the anti-Vietnam posturing
that finally turned Establishment hostility into a call for his death. Given
the context of 1967-1968, there was a real fear that the Civil Rights movement
could merge with the anti-war movement. Others like Hoover believed that King
was a communist, and while he wasn't, he certainly had some professed
communists near to him. They believed the movement was receiving funding and
support from the Soviet bloc, which in fact it was not. They feared him and
viewed him as an existential threat to American society and they wanted him
silenced.
An examination of the King assassination reveals many
inconsistencies and requires an undue degree of credulity if one is to believe
all that is found in the official account. Even King's own family didn't
believe that James Earl Ray was the assassin. King's story in this regard
parallels the other dubious narratives regarding the Kennedy brothers and some
of the other assassinations of the period. To accept the official stories is to
beggar belief.
King is rightly viewed as a hero by the Black community and
there are aspects to his message and character that can be admired by all. One
need only to look at the alternatives represented at the time by movements such
as the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers – groups who mocked and ridiculed
King.
As with many things, the King legacy is a complicated one. He
was a complicated man and yet I certainly understand why he is looked up to.
Though it must also be said that had he not been gunned down his legacy might
be very different.
But the notion that somehow his beliefs and mission resonates
with the Right is not just ridiculous, it's a lie. No one else that was
actually part of the movement would agree with the Right's narrative. You
certainly don't see Jesse Jackson giving credence to the notion while appearing
on FOX. While corruption ensued in the movement and there's no doubt that
figures like Jackson, and Al Sharpton are highly corrupt – nevertheless, they
do represent something closer to his legacy and represent his values. These are
figures hated by today's Right and the truth is they hate King and would hate
him if he were alive today. This revisionism is a sleight-of-hand trick that
they've managed to pull off.
And given that Christians are actively promoting and
participating in this lie, what does that say about them?
See also:
https://proto-protestantism.blogspot.com/2012/01/civil-rights-and-evangelical.html
https://proto-protestantism.blogspot.com/2014/03/revisionism-manipulation-and-distortion.html
https://pilgrimunderground.blogspot.com/2021/11/justified-cynicism-regarding-gops-2021.html