Martin Luther King Day

Reflecting on the holiday, I realize that there are so many admirable things to talk about when we talk about Dr. Martin Luther King: his humanity, his appeal to universal values and ecumenicism, and so on.  One thing I think liberals tend to miss is the man’s profound religiosity.  I think it’s interesting that so many people–including many very secular people–revere a man who was decidedly non-secular, and who would have found the idea that being Christian made you politically conservative bizarre, as would many other liberals of past times (the Roosevelts, William Jennings Bryan, Frederick Douglass, and many others I could name). I don’t object to this, and I hope that it leads to a wider understanding of the past of Christianity and liberalism, and the close connections the two have usually had for most of our country’s history.