The Half-Truths We’ve Told About MLK

As the white editors of Christianity Today surveyed Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent civil disobedience on behalf of civil rights in the summer of 1964, they were not impressed. “For preachers to argue that ‘civil disobedience’ is justified helps to encourage those who would resort to violence,” CT declared that August.

A half century later, CT formally apologized for its opposition to King and the civil rights movement. By then, the magazine had published numerous pieces lauding King as an example of Christian love whose words and actions offered a needed call to repentance for white evangelicals.

But King remains an awkward figure for those of us who are both white and evangelical—two things that King was not. Many of us would like to herald him as a prophet, but when we do, we risk co-opting King for our own purposes rather than understanding him on his own terms.