"I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word."
                                                               - MLK in the s/Spirit of Jesus

Reading/listening to Martin Luther King Jr. and his daughter Bernice (who writes and speaks in the same spirit), the relentless, cruciform love they preach is never about the passive acceptance of injustice to keep the pseudo-peace with people who look and live like me. Rather, they teach me to identify love with overcoming evil through active, nonviolent resistance to external oppression, inequity & exclusion and to internal enslavement to fear, deception & hatred. Their interpretation of Jesus is best verified by its proximity to the Cross and its deliberate recollection of the Exodus.

To my white brothers and sisters, whatever we say on MLK Day to honor his memory will no doubt appear to be performative virtue-signaling as if “ally” were some identity we can claim for ourselves. I accept that. We did that to ourselves. But let us at least avoid making our engagement blatant hypocrisy by co-opting the man’s own words to oppose his call to the work of justice—which included public opposition to all death-dealing via racism, war & executions. Better to at least remain silent in the guilt of our complicity. But far better still to hear and heed God’s voice through his Black prophets—and not merely one token day per year.

While we brag or complain about our 'deconstruction,' consider their gospel, forged in the furnace of Egypt, Babylon, Rome, and America over many millennia. While our cultured despisers cheer the end of faith in the West, I would ask, "Since when did Black faith not count? And why would we hope for and serve in its erasure? How “progressive” is that?" Rather, Rev. Thurman and Rev. MLK’s “religion of Jesus” (the gospel of nonviolent justice and anti-othering love) is, for me, a (final?) beacon of the Jesus Way amid the church’s broader meltdown. They have my full attention.