Where Do We Go from Here by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr

Author:Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [Luther King Jr., Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0068-7
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 1968-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

IV

Among the forces of white liberalism the church has a special obligation. It is the voice of moral and spiritual authority on earth. Yet no one observing the history of the church in America can deny the shameful fact that it has been an accomplice in structuring racism into the architecture of American society. The church, by and large, sanctioned slavery and surrounded it with the halo of moral respectability. It also cast the mantle of its sanctity over the system of segregation. The unpardonable sin, thought the poet Milton, was when a man so repeatedly said, “Evil, be thou my good,” so consistently lived a lie, that he lost the capacity to distinguish between good and evil. America’s segregated churches come dangerously close to being in that position.

Of course, there have been marvelous exceptions. Over the last five years many religious bodies—Catholic, Protestant and Jewish—have been in the vanguard of the civil rights struggle, and have sought desperately to make the ethical insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage relevant on the question of race. But the church as a whole has been all too negligent on the question of civil rights. It has too often blessed a status quo that needed to be blasted, and reassured a social order that needed to be reformed. So the church must acknowledge its guilt, its weak and vacillating witness, its all too frequent failure to obey the call to servanthood. Today the judgment of God is upon the church for its failure to be true to its mission. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.

A religion true to its mission knows that segregation is morally wrong and sinful. Segregation is established on pride, hatred and falsehood. It is unbrotherly and impersonal. Two segregated souls never meet in God. Segregation denies the sacredness of human personality.

Deeply rooted in our religious heritage is the conviction that every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Our Judeo-Christian tradition refers to this inherent dignity of man in the Biblical term “the image of God.” “The image of God” is universally shared in equal portions by all men. There is no graded scale of essential worth. Every human being has etched in his personality the indelible stamp of the Creator. Every man must be respected because God loves him. The worth of an individual does not lie in the measure of his intellect, his racial origin or his social position. Human worth lies in relatedness to God. An individual has value because he has value to God. Whenever this is recognized, “whiteness” and “blackness” pass away as determinants in a relationship and “son” and “brother” are substituted. Immanuel Kant said that “all men must be treated as ends and never as mere means.” The immorality of segregation is that it treats men as means rather than ends, and thereby reduces them to things rather than persons.

But man is not a thing.

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