Martin Luther King Jr. vs. Charlie Kirk and the irreverent right

I can imagine the outrage from Republicans if Ibram X. Kendi wrote that Thomas Jefferson’s belief in the racial inferiority of the people he enslaved was the foundation upon which the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow laws were built.

Not even a clear acknowledgment of Jefferson’s role in writing the Declaration of Independence would spare Kendi from the wrath of pundits and politicians on the right. He would be accused of unfairly judging an important historical figure using modern terms and ideas that don’t fit the realities of the past.

Charlie Kirk, the founder of the influential conservative group Turning Point USA, is attempting this type of revisionist assessment of Dr. Martin Luther King,= Jr. with the hopes of stripping the civil rights icon of his place in the pantheon of American heroes.

Kirk took to social media on Monday to bemoan the “deification” of Dr. King, a cultural phenomenon he linked to the collapse of the black family, urban decay, and rising crime.

My sense is that concern for the black community is not the real reason Dr. King is in the crosshairs of conservative influencers.

Why?

Concern for the least, the last, and the lost should be a feature of American culture, not a recruiting tool for self-serving communists.

Because they claim the 1964 Civil Rights Act, his crowning legislative achievement, is the genesis of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which they see as the left’s preferred euphemism for discrimination against straight white men.

I share the frustration many conservatives have expressed about DEI’s elevation of personal identity over merit. I also know that the people who use their race, sex, and gender identity to demand access to opportunity, then deflect the accountability that comes with the job undermine their own cause.

That said, I predict attempts to blame King for DEI and diminish his cultural significance will fail because they are intellectually dishonest, historically unsustainable, and politically unwise.

Three main criticisms

Martin Luther King Jr.’s flaws and personal failings are neither new nor disqualifying.

King’s critics employ three general lines of criticism to challenge his legacy. Christians who question King’s theology point to his rejection of key tenets of the faith, including the divinity of Jesus. The critiques of King’s doctrine have merit, but the only people making them are typically biblically orthodox Protestants — the type of people who are called “fundamentalist” by corporate media.

The second major criticism of King was his social and economic philosophy, which typically gets compressed into accusations that he was a communist. As is often the case in life, the truth is far more complex.

Yes, King criticized capitalism and decried wealth inequality. He also advocated wealth redistribution and supported a guaranteed annualincome for all Americans. Those ideas, however, don’t make him a communist.

King’s belief that the exploitation of the working class was a feature of free market economics sounds similar to the same objections Tucker Carlson raised several years ago. Likewise, conservative support for the earned income tax credit and child tax credit demonstrates that every person in favor of social programs for the poor is not a Marxist. Libertarian economist Milton Friedman supported guaranteed income for Americans because it provided more economic and social freedom than traditional welfare programs.

King also explicitly rejected communism and stated it was incompatible with Christianity.

Now, let us begin by answering the question which our sermon topic raises: Can a Christian be a communist? I answer that question with an emphatic “no.” These two philosophies are diametrically opposed. The basic philosophy of Christianity is unalterably opposed to the basic philosophy of communism, and all of the dialectics of the logician cannot make them lie down together. They are contrary philosophies.

Lastly, King’s critics point to his moral failures, including adultery and plagiarism, as reasons he should be stripped of any honor. King’s personal shortcomings are well documented. Even his fellow progressives have pointed them out. The conservatives who subject King to such high standards of ethical conduct, however, don’t do the same for their heroes.

Conservatives chastise the left for judging America’s founders by today's moral standards. They claim the history of chattel slavery in America must be put in its proper context. They rotate between a handful of predictable responses, including that every society in human history had slaves and Africans sold other Africans into bondage.

These conservatives claim that the history of slavery in America should not be judged by today’s moral standards. Yet they blame Dr. King for the ideas they find objectionable today, more than 50 years after he was assassinated.

First, they grab a clip of King talking about racism’s impact on black Americans — one century removed from emancipation — and the need for radical social and economic changes to address poverty.

Then they make a few logical leaps and tenuous ideological connections and, with the wave of a hand, transform King from a civil rights leader who decried racial discrimination into a pink-haired DEI commissar who uses “she/they” pronouns and says too many white men are applying for positions within her company.

Communism vs. slavery

This type of sloppy thinking does a disservice to the conservative movement today. It also serves as a sharp contrast to the long history of serious thinking on religion, freedom, tradition, government, and the human condition that have defined the conservative movement for centuries.

It also communicates, especially to many black voters, that to some conservatives, communism is worse than slavery. In this warped worldview, people who favor wealth redistribution are guilty of an unpardonable sin, but those who bought and sold human beings can always be redeemed.

Someone’s political ideology must always be considered in context. Examining a person’s ideas about controversial issues is fair. Using an intergenerational daisy chain of political views to link one person’s ideas to someone who practices the opposite of those ideas decades later is not.

Martin Luther King Jr. doesn’t have to be deified to recognize his contributions to American society. People who are angry about the rejection of qualified white applicants for jobs should be thankful laws exist that explicitly ban discrimination on the basis of race. This is the reason white workers have won racial discrimination lawsuits against nonwhite employers.

The strongest advocate of a principle is the person who clings to it even when its benefits remain out of his grasp. This is what gave, and still gives, black Americans who lived through slavery and segregation a unique perspective on our founding principles as well as the space between the country’s creeds and deeds.

Their experiences shaped their outlook on America’s past and future. I would not be surprised if a Tuskegee airman who served his country honorably in World War II, only to be treated like a second-class citizen at home, had complex feelings about his nation in the 1960s. That’s part of the human condition, not the effects of Marxist infiltration of the civil rights movement.

If Charlie Kirk felt justified in calling a train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, a “war on white people” that demanded a robust government response, surely he can understand why Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders in the 1960s called for federal action to combat voter disenfranchisement, lynchings, and church bombings. Concern for the least, the last, and the lost should be a feature of American culture, not a recruiting tool for self-serving communists.