Martin Luther King appealed to "God's law" which surpassed human law. His Biblical roots and Biblical perspective are generally overlooked today. The late Charles Colson sets the record straight:
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“I have a dream,” he said, “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.’ ”
While we know of the speech, most people are unaware that King also penned one of the most eloquent defenses of the moral law: the law that formed the basis for his speech, for the civil rights movement, and for all of the law, for that matter.
In the spring of 1963, King was arrested for leading a series of massive non-violent protests against the segregated lunch counters and discriminatory hiring practices rampant in Birmingham, Alabama. While in jail, King received a letter from eight Alabama ministers. They agreed with his goals, but they thought that he should call off the demonstrations and obey the law.
King explained why he disagreed in his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail. “One might well ask,” he wrote, “how can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer “is found in the fact that there are two kinds of laws: just laws … and unjust laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws,” King said, “but conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
How does one determine whether the law is just or unjust? A just law, King wrote, “squares with the moral law of the law of God. An unjust law ... is out of harmony with the moral law.”
Then King quoted Saint Augustine: “An unjust law is no law at all.” He quoted Thomas Aquinas: “An unjust law is a human law not rooted in eternal or natural law.”
This is the great issue today in the public square: Is the law rooted in truth? Is it transcendent, immutable, and morally binding? Or is it, as liberal interpreters argue, simply whatever courts say it is? Do we discover the law, or do we create it?
Many think of King as a liberal firebrand, waging war on traditional values. Nothing could be further from the truth. King was a great conservative on this central issue, and he stood on the shoulders of Augustine and Aquinas, striving to restore our heritage of justice rooted in the law of God.
Were he alive today, I believe he’d be in the vanguard of the pro-life movement. I also believe that he would be horrified at the way in which out of control courts have trampled down the moral truths he advocated.
From the time of Emperor Nero, who declared Christianity illegal, to the days of the American slave trade, from the civil rights struggle of the sixties to our current battles against abortion, euthanasia, cloning, and same-sex “marriage,” Christians have always maintained exactly what King maintained.
King’s dream was to live in harmony with the moral law as God established it. So this Martin Luther King Day, reflect on that dream—for it is worthy of our aspirations, our hard work, and the same commitment Dr. King showed.
Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963.
Read the text of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.
Visit the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute website.
St. Augustine, City of God (Penguin Classics reprint, 2003).
Me: Thank God for all that Martin Luther King did to rectify wrongs towards the Black people of this nation that had been enshrined in law and carried out in practice. But there remains much work to be done, as Brian Brown (President of the National Organization for Marriage) reminds us. Citing King's moral stance (as did Colson), Brown applies that same moral stance to other areas today. He writes:
Marriage is the very type of relationship that Dr. King would no doubt have recognized as just, rooted as it is in the moral law, observed over thousands of years as an eternal law, in perfect harmony with the law of God. It is a profoundly just institution that brings men and women together and provides children with the best opportunity to be raised by a mother and a father.So many of our laws and policies today are out of harmony with natural law and nature's God. The killing of the preborn innocent in the name of privacy; the euthanizing of the infirm in the name of compassion; the destruction of embryonic humans in the name of advancement; the protection of pornography purveyors and the merchants of violence in Hollywood and the video game industry in the name of free speech; and the restructuring of instutions like marriage to provide emotional satisfaction to politically powerful adults, even as they strip from the law the right of children to a mother and father.