It’s that time of year again.
Today, Americans “celebrate” the Martin Luther King, Jr. national holiday.
Schools are closed. The mail won’t come. The obligatory hosannas have begun.
And in 11 days, we’ll have Black History Month, which used to be called February, as the late columnist Sam Francis often quipped.
Bad as it is to turn over a perfectly good month to an affirmation of racialist collectivism, it’s not as bad as the annual holy day for a man who was not holy at all.
He was a Marxist, if not a communist. He was an enthusiastic participant in orgies. He plagiarized a large portion of his Ph.D dissertation. And he was not, as many believe, in a theological sense, a believing Christian.
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That last might be the most significant and unfortunate truth about King, an ordained Baptist clergyman.
Plagiarism, Communism, Perversion
If King was accomplished at anything, he was an accomplished and prodigious literary thief.
Of course, the plagiarism is well known. Yet an important matter isn’t just that King plagiarized, but how and why he got away with it: His liberal white professors gave him a pass because he was charming young black man.
“He was being patronized by his liberal, white professors,” wrote the late historian Ralph Luker, who was intimately familiar with King’s academic career. “That clearly was not the case when his undergraduate teachers at Morehouse evaluated his work. But when he went to predominantly white institutions in the North, King received extra-ordinarily high grades for academic work which was not only often heavily plagiarized, but was otherwise quite unexceptional…. The temptation to over-reward a charming young African American student who told his liberal white professors in the North almost exactly what he knew they already deeply believed about a subject was simply overwhelming.”
King also plagiarized his famous “Letter From Birmingham Jail” and “I Have A Dream” speech, and again, his politics were Marxist, and he surrounded himself with communists. As The New American has noted, he repeatedly said blacks were justly owed “affirmative action” jobs as a form of monetary reparations for slavery.
Said Julian Bond, a King tub thumper who flatly denied the amusing revisionism that King was a Republican conservative, “We’ve made him into a different kind of person than he actually was in life.”
What King Wrote
Indeed we have, and not just because we ignore the truth about his ideology and adultery.
Americans made him into a different person for another reason. Few know that he was not likely a “Christian” in any meaningful theological sense. King explicitly denied the central tenets of the faith.
In denying the divinity of Jesus Christ, King flatly wrote that “Jesus was by no means omniscient,” and the “orthodox view of the divinity of Christ is in my mind quite readily denied.” King also denied that Jesus Christ was born of a virgin, as the Gospel tells us. Christians invented the idea, he wrote, because they could not explain the “uniqueness of quality and spirit” that Jesus possessed and had “no knowledge of the scientific.”
King also denied the resurrection, and had done so from an early age: “From a literary, historical, and philosophical point of view,” he opined, “this doctrine raises many questions. In fact the external evidence for the authenticity of this doctrine is found wanting.”
Finally, King believed that Christianity was a mere outgrowth of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian mystery religions that “conditioned” people to accept the faith, which was a mere “trend in the social order or in the historical cycle of the human race.”
So Martin Luther King, Jr. wasn’t merely a literary thief, a communist sympathizer, and philandering pervert. He was an anti-Christian huckster who denied the fundamental truths to which all real Christians give assent.
That can mean only one of two things. Either King merely wrote but did not believe what his leftist theology professors wanted to hear — that Christ was not fully God and fully man and did not really rise from the dead — which means he lied to them. Or he believed what he wrote, which means he lied to millions of Americans, who sympathized with him because he carried the title “reverend” and used Christian teachings. He didn’t believe Christ was God, but he conscripted Him to fire radical ideas with the patina of Divine mandate.
Neither one says much for the only American we are all supposed to celebrate with a national holiday.
Photo of Martin Luther King, Jr.: National Archives at College Park
