A Discourse of Faith1111

1. A Discourse of Faith

When he was doing research for his study

Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Making of a Mind,

John Ansbro asked Wyatt Tee Walker,chief of staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference(SCLC) during several of the movement years, which writingsmost inﬂuenced King. Walker simply answered “Matthew,Mark, Luke and John.” Walker added that

“[t]he basis of Mar-tin Luther King’s ministry and mission was the ethics andmorality of the Cruciﬁed Carpenter from Galilee. . . . [F]irstand foremost he was an unapologetic proclaimer of the Gospelof Jesus of Nazareth.”

These statements illustrate the central-ity of religion in the activities of King.But this centrality also provokes questions as much as it pro-vides answers and it merits a careful examination if one wantsto understand how King’s rhetoric works. The basic influenceof the gospel and the ultimate grounding in Jesus Christ can-not be viewed alone. King’s faith was part of a public and soci-etal struggle that had many different dimensions, and his ren-dition and “use” of his faith must be viewed within the realmsthat this context constitutes.This first chapter is therefore concerned with this the mostfundamental element of King’s rhetoric: How does he use reli-gion and faith to signify, define, and understand? What are theconsequences of using religion and faith in this way? How ishis use of his religious faith related to the movement’s self-understanding and place on the American political scene andto King’s position between cultures?For these questions to be answered, the basic structure of the civil rights movement discourse as a whole must be ana-lyzed and its fundamental workings must be mapped out.

12Ring Out Freedom!

The Structure of the Discourse

The classic dichotomy of

idealism

and

materialism

is a fruit-ful tool with which to explore King’s religious rhetoric.

Ideal-ism

can be deﬁned as the notion that reality is ultimately con-stituted by ideas, thoughts, and knowledge and that any changeor progress in this world ultimately depends on these factors.

Materialism

can be deﬁned as the notion that reality is ulti-mately constituted by the practical activities of man

and thatany change or progress in this world is ﬁnally dependent onmaterial factors.

These notions can help to formulate a question that makevisible the construction of King’s discourse of faith: In whatways does King let idealistic values determine his descriptionof practical reality and what position does that practical real-ity—or materialism—have in relation to these values by whichit is described? The question becomes even more helpful if thequaliﬁcations of the notions are enlarged with the caveat thatit is meaningless to speak of objects or facts as existing inde-pendent from the concepts and terms by which we describethem, but it is also at least as problematic to, as idealism does,view these concepts and terms as reality in themselves. Thedichotomy between idealism and materialism as here deﬁnedpoints to a deep ambiguity in King’s rhetoric, but the caveatscan help us to understand how this ambiguity in itself is cre-ative.To further understand this ambiguity, let us turn to King’sspeech “The Church on the Frontier of Racial Tension,” givenbefore the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louis-ville, Kentucky, in April 1961. The speech is both thematicallyand rhetorically quite typical of King’s public speaking beforethis type of audience.

Its main theme is the place of the civilrights movement in relation to the responsibilities of the church,and its goal is to challenge the audience to realize that the churchis and must be the central institution of the struggle. The criti-cism the speech offers is aimed mainly at the passive attitudestill persisting within some quarters and the failure of some to