Two revolutionaries: MLK and Malcolm X in 1964.

It’s extraordinary to me how such a polarizing figure as Martin Luther King has apparently been embraced by the whole society, with street and school names and a national holiday. Conservatives like the Heritage Foundation hold lectures and symposiums honoring his legacy. He is surely a much more radical figure than any of other people who are so widely celebrated by the American mainstream in its holidays and public life.

I could understand it a little more easily if he had “only” stood for full inclusion of African Americans in capitalist society, so that he would have measured it a complete success if there ever came a time when African Americans were rich, middle class and poor in the same ratio as whites, and had no more glass ceiling to the U.S. presidency and boardrooms than whites (a day that is still very far off, of course, despite our current president — as Pastor Lynice Pinkard said in church today about Obama, “Audre Lorde told us that we can never dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools”). The conservatives who praise MLK, apparently think this is what he did stand for. How many of them celebrate this quote by King?

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Or this?

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.”

The “Founding Fathers” were revolutionaries, but they were also men of property, some as slaveowner, and including in some cases owners of human property in the form of slaves, and also in another sense as husbands. They were not Christian revolutionaries in the sense that King was.

The Christian revolutionary tradition has risen, died and risen again through the centuries. In the 20th century it was not by any means solely promoted by Martin Luther King. It also lived vividly in many movements and groups from the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch through Liberation Theology to more recent feminist and queer theology. We have just been celebrating the work of Mary Daly (a self-described post-Christian but one with deep Christian roots and much influence on Christian radicals) on this blog, here and here.

Gary Dorrien on the Tikkun Phone Forum tonight

Few scholars know the long history of radical Christian thought and practice better than Gary Dorrien, the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and professor of religion at Columbia University. An Episcopal priest and author of thirteen books, he has a long history of involvement in anti-imperialist and racial justice organizations. In the last two issues of Tikkun, in “Society as the Subject of Redemption: The Relevance of the Social Gospel” and “Commonwealth Economics: Christian Socialism as Tradition and Problem” (not available online until March 1, so buy your copy at a bookstore or online here), Dorrien took a lucid and brilliant look at radical Christian social thinking.

Today, Monday January 18, he is my guest on the Tikkun Phone Forum at 6 pm Pacific time, 9 pm Eastern time. You are invited to join us:

Call 1 888 346 3950 and ENTER CODE 11978#. There is no phone charge to you. We pick up the charge as our thanks to our subscribers and financial supporters. All readers of this blog are invited to phone in for free to the Tikkun Phone Forum once, and then we ask that you subscribe to the magazine, or join our support and teaching organization the Network of Spiritual Progressives, or donate to us, since those are the three ways we survive to create the magazine, this blog, and our conferences. If you really cannot afford to contribute, you are welcome to participate, but please try to bring in some friends who can!

I tend to set up the Phone Forum interviews during the last few days of our deadline mania for a print edition of Tikkun, when I at last know whose article is appearing for certain in the magazine and whose Phone Forum appearance can therefore be promoted in their article. I forget that there are religious and national holidays I should be paying attention to. So it was pure coincidence that we have one of the world’s experts on radical Christian thought on MLK Day. But it is appropriate to highlight the entire Christian radical tradition in which MLK worked and lived.