Jan 19, 2015 | Uncategorized
I just finished reading Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which I had never read from start to finish before, and I was struck by what a deeply intellectual and Christian man he was. I knew this, but reading his words themselves at length and not the man mediated by a secular media really brought this home. Many forget that the civil rights movement was driven by men, and women, like Dr. King who were deeply religious. In fact you might be tempted to think from the general cultural portrayal that the movement was primarily secular in nature, and that religion was somehow tangential to its driving force and success. Nothing could be further from the truth.
This isn’t to say that what we learn in school or popular culture ignores that he was a minister, or that his faith inspired him, but you’ll rarely see his Christian convictions given the emphasis it deserves as the very reason that he did what he did. His Christian faith was the driving force of his life, and Christians should never tire of reminding Americans that this was the case. King was no secular saint, and there would have been no civil rights movement if there had been no Christianity.
As you read the letter you will see that Christians don’t get off without blame for either being quite in the face of or endorsing the evils of segregation. As we see all throughout the Bible itself, God’s people are deeply flawed, fallen creatures, as was King himself. But the moral foundation of the Jewish religion that was fulfilled in Christ, gave the world a moral north star that always shines through the fog of fallen human nature. King is a perfect example, a prophet who changed the course of history, and like many of the prophets who came before, gave his life for it. Just like his Savior did.
Jan 19, 2015 | Uncategorized
We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet-like speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”; then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.
–Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail
Jan 18, 2015 | Uncategorized
In the New Testament the art of life itself is an art of imitation: can we, believing this, believe that literature, which must derive from real life, is to aim at being ‘creative’, ‘original’, and ‘spontaneous’. ‘Originality’ in the New Testament is quite plainly the prerogative of God alone; even within the triune being of God it seems to be confined to the Father. The duty and happiness of every other being is placed in being derivative, in reflecting like a mirror.
–C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections
Jan 17, 2015 | Uncategorized
There is no more delusive passion than hope; and it seems to be the happy privilege of youth to cull all the pleasures that can be gathered from its indulgence. It is when we are most worthy of confidence ourselves, that we are least apt to distrust others; and what we think ought to be, we are prone to think will be.
–James Fenimore Cooper, The Spy
Jan 17, 2015 | Uncategorized
There has been a lot written about secularism in the light of the terror attacks against the French Magazine Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish deli in Paris. French secularism with its roots in the French Revolution is quite different than American secularism. William McGurn puts it this way:
The question is whether French secularism is up to the challenge of defending itself.
At the heart of laïcité are two principles: first, that religion and the questions it raises have no role in French public life, and, second, that no one faith will be favored over others.
In theory, this latter ought to make France more attractive for a minority religion. In practice, this has not happened, in good part because many in France’s Muslim community don’t wish to be assimilated.
The received wisdom is that France — and Europe — must respond to the threat of radical Islam by rededicating themselves to their highly secularized selves. What no one asks is whether it might in fact be the way the French and the Europeans define a secular state that accounts for some of their weakness.
He says concisely and accurately:
Can you beat something with nothing?
Maybe, but it’s very difficult. In France, public life is completely devoid of any reference to a higher power; the public square is wiped clean of religion. Some radical secularists in America have tried to say America’s Founders intended such a secular state, but they would be mistaken. In fact our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, has five references to God itself! Our very liberty is grounded beyond the state, in the “laws of nature and nature’s God.”
We tend to forget that the liberties and prosperity bequeathed to us in Western civilization did not come from nowhere. In America, Christianity and the Enlightenment fused to make the most stable experiment in republican government in the history of man. It was not one to the exclusion of the other; any other reading of history is either dishonest or blind. That’s why when Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s he marveled that religion, i.e. Christianity, far from being a destabilizing force as the French believe it was, in fact was a glue that held society together. McGurn has a fantastic quote about the importance of the Judeo-Christian foundation of the West:
[A]s Britain’s Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks has put it, an understanding that “you cannot expect the foundations of Western civilization to crumble and leave the rest of the building intact.”
As Europe increasingly moves away from its Christian roots, this will certainly be put to the test.
As I’ve read about this discussion, I’ve thought of a tremendous book that is required reading if one is to have a healthy, and accurate understanding of secularism properly understood: The End of Secularism by Hunter Baker.
I just finished reading Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which I had never read from start to finish before, and I was struck by what a deeply intellectual and Christian man he was. I knew this, but reading his words themselves at length and not the man mediated by a secular media really brought this home. Many forget that the civil rights movement was driven by men, and women, like Dr. King who were deeply religious. In fact you might be tempted to think from the general cultural portrayal that the movement was primarily secular in nature, and that religion was somehow tangential to its driving force and success. Nothing could be further from the truth.
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