This neck of the woods is very liberal. All but one precinct in Forest Park voted between 77% and 88% for Harris, while in our neighbor to the east the vote was around 90%. And from what I hear and read in opinion columns, most of those would identify as progressives.
On the religious-to-secular continuum, progressives tend to fall toward the non-religious/anti-religion side of middle. According to the Pew Research Center data from 2014, only 15% of atheists identify as Republican or lean Republican, while 69% identify as Democrat/lean Democrat, and 17% have no political leaning.
As our village has become steadily more progressive, every congregation in town except Living Word has declined in membership or closed. And that makes me wonder if progressives realize how foundational Nicaean, mainstream Christianity was to Martin Luther King Jr.’s thinking and how strongly he came to disagree with some of the tenets of the 18th-century Enlightenment which have influenced the progressive world view.
Let me explain.
Taylor Branch wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning Parting of the Water, which most people consider to be the definitive King biography. Branch reports that when King was in seminary, he was drawn to Social Gospel theology, which in the mid-century 1900s was similar to the current progressive movement.
Walter Rauschenbusch was a prominent leader of the Social Gospel who, in his 1907 book Christianity and the Social Crisis, urged churches to prioritize addressing social problems over focusing on personal salvation.
Branch reports that King was all in on the Social Gospel until in 1950 he read Moral Man and Immoral Society by Reinhold Niebuhr. Branch wrote, “Niebuhr appears to have changed … [King’s] fundamental outlook on religion. … Niebuhr attacked the Social Gospel’s premise that the steady advance of reason and goodwill in the modern age was capable of eradicating social evil. Niebuhr ridiculed Dewey’s notion that ignorance was the principal cause of injustice, stating instead that it was our predatory self-interest.”
Niebuhr contended that “War cruelty and injustice survived because people were by nature sinful.” (82)
“Niebuhr,” Branch wrote, “combined an evangelical liberal’s passion for the Sermon on the Mount with a skeptic’s insistence on the cussedness of human nature.” (86)
Regarding Thomas Jefferson’s phrase “wall of separation between church and state,” Branch quoted Niebuhr as declaring, “There is no problem of political life to which religious imagination can make a larger contribution.” (86)
King wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, “I am grateful to God that through the Negro church, the dimension of non-violence entered our struggle. Non-violence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.”
These days I often hear progressives talking about rights. The word “rights” doesn’t appear once in the index of the 650-page collection of King’s writings titled, A Testament of Hope, but the word “love” or agape, the Greek word for love in the New Testament, has 25 entries.
“At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love,” wrote King in a 1958 piece titled, An Experiment in Love. “We are not referring to some sentimental or affectionate emotion. … It is the love of God operating in the human heart.”
Rev. Bill Teague, the pastor of Hope Tabernacle in Forest Park, does not focus on social issues at the expense of his members’ relationship with Christ, but at the same time he is the director of Logistics for the Proviso Township Ministerial Alliance Network (PTMAN). Every one of PTMAN’s monthly breakfast meetings begins with prayer, and on Jan. 17 the organization sponsored a three-hour forum for candidates running for Congress in the Seventh District.
Likewise the Community of Congregations in Oak Park and River Forest defines itself as, “an interfaith organization serving the western corridor of the Chicago region by supporting programs like Housing Forward, Beyond Hunger, Celebrating Seniors, and the Holiday Gift Basket Program.”
Rev. King would approve of the balance.
At least partly foundational to the progressive view of religion and human nature is the 18th Century Enlightenment. An AI summary of the movement states, “The Enlightenment view of sin shifted away from traditional Christian doctrines, particularly Original Sin, emphasizing human reason, autonomy, and capacity for improvement rather than innate depravity; thinkers argued against collective guilt, focusing instead on individual moral failing as a result of ignorance.
King, after his reading of Niebuhr, never again held that exalted view of human nature. He tempered his social action with an insistence on non-violence and a willingness to go to jail for breaking even unjust laws because the rule of law is needed to place guardrails around human “cussedness.”
If we progressives want to anoint King as our DEI “patron saint,” we have to somehow account for the fact that the foundation of his world view is biblical religion, and it’s at the core of his speeches, essays and, of course, sermons.
