King's Letter from Birmingham Jail

Today's Reading

Read Amos 5:21-24 again, the verse King quoted more than any other: "But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." This was the engine of his theology.

Read Luke 10:25-37 (the parable of the Good Samaritan) and notice that the Samaritan, in Jesus's telling, is the ethnic outsider who acts as neighbor while the religious insiders pass by on the other side.

Read Acts 5:27-32, where Peter and the apostles, ordered by the authorities to stop preaching, answer: "We must obey God rather than men."

End with Matthew 5:43-48, the heart of the Sermon on the Mount on enemy-love — which King returned to constantly as the foundation of nonviolent resistance: "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."

Reflection

In April 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, for participating in nonviolent civil-rights protests in defiance of a state court injunction. While he was in jail — for several days, in solitary — eight white clergymen of the city published an open statement in the local newspaper. They were not segregationists. They were moderates. They asked Black citizens to withdraw from "extreme measures," to be patient, to wait for the courts and the legislatures to do their work, to not let outside agitators stir up trouble. The statement was titled, with the unintentional irony of the comfortable, "A Call for Unity."

King read it in his cell. He began writing his response in the margins of the newspaper itself, then on scraps of paper, then on a legal pad his lawyers eventually smuggled in. The "Letter from Birmingham Jail" is the result. It is, by any honest measure, one of the most important documents of twentieth-century American Christianity. It is also a document the contemporary American church has, by and large, never properly received.

You should read the whole letter today if you can. (It is freely available; not long.) Three things in it are worth marking carefully.

First: King's diagnosis of the white moderate. This is the line that historians of the era return to most often, and it is genuinely shocking when you sit with it. King writes that he has nearly come to conclude that the great obstacle to Black freedom is not the open racist — not the Klansman, not the segregationist politician — but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers a negative peace (the absence of tension) to a positive peace (the presence of justice), who paternally tells the wounded that the timing is wrong, that "the time is not right," that progress will come if they wait. This is Jeremiah's diagnosis again — they have healed the wound of my people lightly, crying peace where there is no peace — applied with surgical precision to mid-century white American Christianity. The pastors King is writing to were not, in their own minds, the bad guys. They were the polite, respectable, theologically orthodox shepherds of the city's most prominent congregations. King looked them in the eye and said: you are part of why this is still happening.

Second: King's theology of just and unjust law. This is the section of the letter most people skim over and the section that most matters for Christian readers. When the white clergy ask King how he can break some laws while obeying others, King responds with a theological argument — drawing explicitly on Augustine and Aquinas. There are just laws and unjust laws. A just law squares with the moral law of God. An unjust one does not. "Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust." Segregation, King argues, necessarily degrades the personhood of those it segregates, and so cannot be a just law no matter how legally enacted. To break it openly, lovingly, willing to bear the penalty, is not lawlessness; it is, in the long Christian tradition of Daniel and the apostles and the early martyrs, a higher obedience. We must obey God rather than men.

This is not a fringe argument. Augustine made it. Aquinas made it. The Reformers made it about tyrannical magistrates. The American founders made it about King George. King is not improvising. He is standing in a long Christian line and applying it to Birmingham.

Third: King's vision of the inescapable network of mutuality. This is the moral metaphysic of the letter — and probably its most enduring contribution. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." This is not, despite some readings, vague liberal sentiment. It is closer to Paul's body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12: the eye cannot tell the foot, "I have no need of you." It is also closer to the Johannine note that to love God whom we have not seen requires that we love the brother we have seen (1 John 4:20). It is a Christian claim, made in Christian language, by a Black Baptist pastor to a body of white clergy who, on Sunday morning, would have sung the same hymns.

Now, the painful comparison. How did white evangelical leaders, broadly, respond to King in his lifetime? Almost uniformly, with caution, criticism, or silence. Jerry Falwell, in 1965, preached a sermon called "Ministers and Marches" arguing that pastors should stay out of civil-rights activism. Many others took the line of the Birmingham eight: not opposed to integration in principle, but opposed to King's tactics, his timing, his alliances. Billy Graham, who was personally further along than most of his peers — he integrated his crusades — nonetheless kept his public criticisms of segregation gentle and rarely confronted Christian leaders by name. Christianity Today, the flagship evangelical magazine, in the 1960s frequently published pieces urging caution about King and the broader civil-rights movement. The pattern is unmistakable. White American evangelicalism, with notable exceptions, was not on the front lines of civil rights. It was, on the whole, calling for slower change, more patience, less confrontation — exactly the posture King's letter named as the chief obstacle.

And then, after King's assassination in 1968, a strange thing happened. He became safe. He became a national hero. His face went on a postage stamp, then a holiday, then a memorial on the National Mall. The same evangelical world that had been quietly hostile to him in his lifetime began quoting him. The "I Have a Dream" speech became universal. The "Letter from Birmingham Jail" — uncomfortable, theologically dense, indicting — was quoted less, and almost never the parts about the white moderate or about unjust laws.

This is what happens to prophets, in every generation. Living, they are inconvenient. Dead, they are quotable. The same religious establishment that built the tombs of the prophets, Jesus said, killed them in the first place (Matthew 23:29-31).

If we are going to honor King now, we have to honor the actual letter. That means letting it convict us, sixty years on, in the ways the original recipients did not let it convict them. It means asking: where, in my life, am I devoted to order rather than justice? Where, in my church, has "let's not be divisive" become the cover for letting an injustice continue? Where am I telling somebody who has been wronged that the time is not right?

The time is never right, until it is. That is what the prophets, including this one, have been saying for three thousand years.

Going Deeper

Read the "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in full this week. Make a list of the three sentences that most disturb you. Sit with them. Do not move past them quickly to the consoling parts. Then ask: if a Black pastor in your own city sat in jail tomorrow and wrote a similar letter to your congregation, what would it say? What is the equivalent injustice in your local context that "respectable" Christians are mostly hoping will resolve itself quietly?

If you cannot think of any, that may itself be a Birmingham question.