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MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. AND THE LIGHT OF OTHER FAITHS First Speech in the Union Theological Seminary Interfaith Cycle, Delivered September 10, 2012
Eboo Patel
O n Sunday April 2, 1967, the New York Times ran a front page interview
with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His promise to deliver “a major policy
paper” on the Vietnam War set the nations’ political and religious
leaders on edge and made many of his closest allies nervous. Stanley Levi-
son—who Taylor Branch calls King’s “closest white friend and the most
reliable colleague of his life”—was so concerned about King’s plan to
offer a raw critique of the War that he drafted substitute language for
the strongest words. King insisted on staying his course.
The speech was sponsored by Clergy and Laity Concerned About
Vietnam, one of the best-known and most-respected antiwar organiza-
tions at the time. Union Theological Seminary, whose president John
Bennet had reviewed a draft of King’s address, was a cohost. Every one
of the 2700 pew spaces and 1200 folding chairs in Riverside Church
was full. Buses had been arriving throughout the afternoon, the over-
flow line stretched down 120th, and the ovation King received when
he stood up to enter the pulpit went on so long he had to quiet the
crowd to begin.
“I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my
conscience leaves me no other choice … a time comes when silence is
betrayal. And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.” It was
the opening of perhaps the most courageous, and certainly the most con-
troversial, sermon of his life.
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Many in King’s own camp had cautioned him to focus on civil rights
at home, and steer clear of war and peace elsewhere. To them, King said:
“I believe the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church … leads clearly to
this sanctuary tonight.” He spoke of how the War was draining resources
away from antipoverty programs while at the same time sending droves
of poor Americans to their death, of how segregation and war were both
poisoning America’s soul. He spoke of the responsibility he felt to live up
to his Nobel Peace Prize, a commission that required him to think
beyond national boundaries. And he spoke of faith.
King opens his discussion of faith with the line: “I … have to live
with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ …
the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them.”
He continued: “As I try to explain for you and for myself the road
that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that
was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction … to
be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed
is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood …” King quotes the first epis-
tle of Saint John on love and ends the speech with a line from Amos on
justice.
I remember being stunned by the realization that faith played a cen-
tral role in the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. Shocked first by
the plain fact of it, and second by how long it took me to see the obvious.
At a different stage in my life, I simply skipped over the faith parts of
that Beyond Vietnam speech. I wanted the politics, not the path that led
there. After all, I only had time for the important stuff. It’s a pretty good
metaphor for how I viewed faith itself for many years—as irrelevant.
I think that’s why I was so excited about this invitation to give a
cycle of lectures here at Union. As much as any institution in American
history, Union Theological Seminary is responsible for making faith—in a
life-giving, humanity-uplifting, nation-changing way—relevant and inspir-
ing. Union has long known that faith matters, both in the hereafter, and
in the here and now.
It is a conviction that, more than ever, seems worthy of articulation. I
came of age in an era in which we forget that Martin Luther King Jr was
a Christian, in which as Paul Simon sang, “Faith is an island in the set-
ting sun.” We live at a time when the discourse around faith is far more
destructive—in an era that increasingly believes that conflict between
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different religious communities is inevitable that the Muslims (or maybe
the Hindus, Sikhs, or Buddhists) are coming to get us and that religion
poisons everything. Faith, particularly in urban liberal circles, has gone
from being viewed as irrelevant to being viewed as toxic.
At this time, giving voice to the electric current of faith that moti-
vated King’s conviction, spotlighting especially the jolt it was given by his
interaction with other faiths, seems more important than ever.
One of the most inspiring things about King is the forthrightness
with which he called out the source of his courage. “I am many things to
many people,” King once said, “but in the quiet recesses of my heart, I
am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher. This is my being and
my heritage, for I am also the son of a Baptist preacher, the grandson of
a Baptist preacher and the great-grandson of a Baptist preacher.”
And just as King’s story cannot be told without understanding the
role faith played, so is it impossible to understand King’s faith story with-
out recognizing the interplay between his Christian faith and what he
learned from traditions outside of Christianity. The purpose of this talk is
to peer into that place where King’s Christian faith intersects with the
faiths of others and to ask the question: what might have been happen-
ing there and what relevance might it hold for us? The more that I study
King, the more I believe that the intersection of his Christian faith with
the faiths of others is fundamental to his life and his work. Indeed, I
believe it is the energy at that intersection that brought King to Riverside
Church the night of April 4, 1967. There were currents and threads evi-
dent that night from outside the circle of King’s Baptist tradition.
The great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who King marched with in
Selma, served as one of the respondents. King quotes the Sufi poet Omar
Khayyam. He calls for “our loyalties to become ecumenical rather than
sectional”, anchors this vision of a “worldwide fellowship that lifts neigh-
borly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation” in an “uncondi-
tional love for all mankind.” And then goes on to say that love is the
“force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying
principle off life. This Hindu-Muslim-Jewish-Christian-Buddhist belief
about ultimate reality … (Is that) Love is somehow the key that unlocks
the door….”
In King’s speech, there is a reference to the Buddhist leaders of Viet-
nam, and another reference to how King’s heart has been burning on the
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issue of the War for two years. Those few lines provide the window into
how it was that King chose opposition to the War as his subject that
evening. It might have been Jesus who called King to Riverside Church,
but it was the Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh who pushed him there.
In 1965, the great Vietnamese Buddhist monk sent King a letter in
which he wrote: “I am sure that since you have been engaged in one of
the hardest struggles for equality and human rights, you are among those
who understand fully, and who share with all their hearts, the suffering
of the Vietnamese people. The world’s greatest humanists would not
remain silent. You yourself cannot remain silent … In writing to you, as a
Buddhist, I profess my faith in love, in communion, and in the World’s
humanists, whose thoughts and attitudes should be the guide for all
humankind.”
They met the following year, in Chicago; Thich Nhat Hanh said to
King: “You know, Martin, in Vietnam they consider you a Bodhisattva”—
the Buddhist term for an enlightened being who chooses to return to the
world to teach compassion. It was immediately after that meeting that
King first announces his opposition to the war. And in January 1967,
three months before King came to Riverside, he nominated Thich Nhat
Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize. “His ideas,” King wrote in the nomina-
tion, “if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world broth-
erhood, to humanity.”
At a time when the Catholic–Protestant–Jew paradigm written about
by Will Herberg in 1955 had only just begun to take root, King was fol-
lowing a path set out by a quiet monk from a religion that many Ameri-
cans had barely heard of.
The influence of Thich Nhat Hanh on King is reminiscent of another
figure in King’s life—Gandhi. It’s a well-known admiration. A statue of
the Mahatma greets you as you approach the entrance to the King Center
in Atlanta, and a picture of Gandhi hangs above a pensive-looking King
on the cover of his autobiography. While it wasn’t King who called for
the bus boycott in Montgomery, it was King who served as its sustaining
fire for the 380 days that people walked to work, risked their livelihoods
and their lives.
Much like how Jesus calls King to Riverside but Thich Nhat Hanh
pushes him there, so Christianity creates the category of nonviolence in
King’s mind, but studying Gandhi fills in the action plan. Consider how
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central Christian love is to King’s conviction, and then listen to him
reflect on how Gandhi helped him see it anew: “As I delved deeper into
the philosophy of Gandhi my skepticism concerning the power of love
gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time its potency in
the area of social reform. Prior to reading Gandhi I had about concluded
that the ethics of Jesus were only effective in individual relationships.”
King goes on: “When the protest began, my mind was driven back to
the Sermon on the Mount, with its sublime teachings on love and the
Gandhian method of nonviolent resistance … Living through the actual
experience of the protest, nonviolence became more than a method to
which I gave intellectual assent; it became a commitment to a way of life.”
In 1959, King goes to India to see Gandhi’s legacy up close, and the
first sermon that King preached when he returned to Montgomery was
on the 22nd of March 1959, Palm Sunday. The subject was Gandhi. The
lines in there would be challenging to any Christian audience at any
time, in any place—I can only imagine how it was received in mid-cen-
tury Montgomery, Alabama. King says, “It is one of the strange ironies of
the modern world that the greatest Christian of the twentieth century
was not a member of the Christian church.”
As he nears the closing of his sermon, King offers a prayer: “O God,
our gracious Heavenly Father; we thank Thee for the fact that you have
inspired men and women in all nations and in all cultures. We call you
different names: some call Thee Allah; some call you Elohim; some call
you Jehovah…”
He ends with an altar call: “We open the doors of the church now. Is
there one who will accept the Christ this morning just as you are?”
One of the current giants at Union Theological Seminary, Professor
Paul Knitter, describes the job of the Christian theologian as the chal-
lenge, “to make sense of the world in the light of Christian belief … and
to make sense of Christian belief in the light of our experience and
knowledge of the world we live in.” He goes on to say, “I have come to
realize that I have to look beyond the traditional borderlines of Christian-
ity to find something that is vitally, maybe even essentially, important for
the job of understanding and living the Christian faith: other religions.”
Professor Knitter is, I believe, putting into words the internal process
that many of us face in the interaction of our tradition with the
traditions around us. To reflect with Christian symbolism: if the vertical
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of the cross is the connection between the believer and the divine, and
the horizontal symbolizes the relationship between the believer and
humankind, we are talking now about the place the two intersect.
What goes on at that intersection, especially in that special realm of
how cosmic traditions mix and mingle? How does the encounter with other
traditions impact the way we view our own? How do our home traditions
influence the way we understand others? How to describe how King must
have felt reading Gandhi, or being called a Bodhisattva by Thich Nhat
Hanh?
One of my favorite King images is called the World House. King
writes, in the same year that he gave his Beyond Vietnam sermon: “This
is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a large house, a
great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together—black and white,
Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Mos-
lem and Hindu—because we can never again live apart, we must some-
how learn to live with each other in peace.”
At a time when the clash of civilizations theory still dominates, when
the evening news regularly carries the story of conflict between religious
communities, when the forces of religious prejudice are not shy, King’s
vision of a world in which people of different ethnic, racial, and religious
backgrounds live together in equal dignity and mutual loyalty is highly
relevant. I must say it is the external part of the World House that we
focus most of our energies on at Interfaith Youth Core—training leaders
who can not only prevent conflict but cultivate understanding and bridge
social capital between different faith groups.
But it seems to me that there is an internal architecture as well. The
house within King can only be described as Christian, from the founda-
tion to the roof. But certain rooms, perhaps whole levels—the rooms and
levels where the deepest parts of King’s faith lived—were lit by other tra-
ditions. Love and nonviolence were fundamentally Christian values for
King, but he learned to see them in new ways under the light of Thich
Nhat Hanh’s Buddhism and Gandhi’s Hinduism. It is very possible that
King might never have come to Riverside Church, might not have contin-
ued with the Bus Boycott after he received the threatening phone call or
the firebombing of his home, had he not come across Gandhi and Thich
Nhat Hanh. They provided the light in which King could clearly see the
rooms of love and nonviolence in the house of faith within him.
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