Parting the Waters (15 page)

Between father and son, ideological differences erupted again during the Christmas holidays of 1949, when young King decided to divide his time between preaching at Ebenezer and studying the works of Karl Marx at home. Communism was a subject of feverish public interest at the time, with the second Alger Hiss trial under way in New York and a Communist government celebrating its recent victory in China. Harry Emerson Fosdick had preached a widely publicized sermon at New York's Riverside Church earlier that year in which he argued that the Communist movement had stolen two dormant aspects of traditional Christian appeal: the psychology of conversion, and the Social Gospel's commitment to the oppressed. King read
The Communist Manifesto
and some interpretations of Marx and Lenin before framing an objection to communism that would serve him the rest of his life. In a suitably erudite but pat phrase, he came to reject communism because of its “historical materialism and ethical relativism,” meaning Marx's doctrine that economic forces alone determine the path of history and Lenin's teaching that what was good in politics was to be defined continuously by the vanguard party according to the needs of the revolution. King objected that these cold, scientific doctrines left no room for moral forces to act in history, or for moral standards to rise above the Machiavellian, tyrannical tendencies of politics.

To Reverend King, M.L.'s fancy phrases were no better than quibblings over alien notions. No good preacher needed to read a lot of books to decide that communism was un-Christian, he declared, fulminating against having all that Communist propaganda in his house. This would remain a sore point. For the younger King, it was all the more difficult because some of his most faithful intellectual mentors constantly urged him in the opposite direction. Melvin Watson, chairman of the More-house School of Religion, was one of a generation of Negro intellectuals—many of them stalwart Baptist preachers—who quietly amassed expertise on Communist doctrine because of explicit Soviet promises on race and the downtrodden. “The Communist theorists were definitely not materialistic after the fashion of the Greek atomists,” wrote Watson, after listening to King preach against communism at Ebenezer. “Marx's…variety of materialism is very difficult to refute and is a very disturbing phenomenon.” Watson sent King a number of sophisticated but avuncular critiques, always with the cheery salutation “Dear Little In-Coming Doctor!” He urged King not to be discouraged by the Ebenezer congregation's response to his lecture on dialectics. “Some people did sleep,” Watson noted, “but some would have slept regardless of the theme.”

The elder King took a new approach when he delivered his son for his final year at Crozer. No longer the stern figure who recoiled from the pool tables and departed as quickly as possible, Daddy King arrived in his finest three-piece suit, a gold watch chain dangling from his vest pocket, and made his presence known—shaking hands gregariously, complimenting the professors on their learning and the students on their prospects, telling everyone how proud he was that M.L. was finishing up his Bachelor of Divinity degree and would be joining him permanently at Ebenezer the next year. The seminarian himself stoically endured this performance, later telling his friends that his father was prone to exaggeration. He did not intend to join Ebenezer at the end of the year, nor any other church. Early that fall he wrote an open letter to the Ebenezer congregation, thanking the members for their support the previous summer “in the absence of our pastor,” stressing the fact that his father was still master of the church. He also sat down with his adviser and favorite Social Gospel professor, George Davis, to discuss the first-rank graduate schools at which he might obtain a doctorate in the philosophy of religion. His first choice was Yale, Davis' own school. By November, he had applied to Yale, to Boston University, and to the Divinity School at Edinburgh University in Scotland. Yale turned him down in spite of his exemplary record at Crozer, but the other two schools accepted him before the Christmas holidays. This left King with a decision to make, and also with the familiar task of discussing with his mother how best to tell his father.

King already was aiming for further graduate study when he first read Reinhold Niebuhr during his last year at Crozer. The experience did not change his plans, but it appears to have changed nearly everything else, including his fundamental outlook on religion. Before Niebuhr, King wanted to pursue his doctorate for reasons of pleasure, inertia, and prestige. He had enjoyed Crozer beyond all expectation. He wanted to keep studying, especially since his future and its inevitable clash with Reverend King's agenda was not yet resolved in his mind. He wanted a doctorate because it would place him in rarefied company. (Drawn to distinguished titles, he and his friends wrote letters to each other playfully appending long strings of advanced degrees to each other's names, in the manner of British scholastics.) After Niebuhr, King experienced for the first time a loss of confidence in his own chosen ideas rather than inherited ones. The Social Gospel lost a good deal of its glow for him almost overnight, and he never again fell so completely under the spell of any school of thought, including Niebuhr's. Although the Niebuhr influence went to the heart of the public and private King and affected him more deeply than did any modern figure, including Gandhi, the connection between King and Niebuhr would be obscured by complicated twists of time, race, and popular imagery.

 

The publication of Niebuhr's
Moral Man and Immoral Society
in 1932, when King was three, marked the beginning of the end of classical liberalism in American theology. Niebuhr had come to teach at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1928, by way of Yale Divinity School and a thirteen-year ministry in Detroit, having achieved considerable fame as a champion of the auto workers and Negro migrants struggling to survive in Henry Ford's town after World War I. He was also an internationally prominent pacifist who had served several terms as president of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
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For that reason,
Moral Man and Immoral Society
caused a howl of betrayal among practically all nonfundamentalists interested in religion, because Niebuhr attacked the Social Gospel's premise that the steady advance of reason and goodwill in the modern age was capable of eradicating social evils. His chief target was the eminent John Dewey, the last American philosopher to have a large popular following. Niebuhr ridiculed Dewey's notion that ignorance was the principal cause of injustice, stating instead that it was “our predatory self-interest.” There was no evidence, said Niebuhr, that human beings became less selfish or less predatory as they became better educated. War, cruelty, and injustice survived because people were by nature sinful.

Niebuhr accused the liberal world of being “in perfect flight from the Christian doctrine of sin.” Intellectuals winced at the sound of the word itself, and modern theologians expressed shock that one of their idols was debunking the central idea of progressive history. To admit evil as a permanent aspect of the human character, as Niebuhr did, was to confound the theologian again with the question of what kind of God would permit such suffering, and why, and to cast doubt on the prevailing intellectual notions about the meaning of history. Such an idea threw Christians back to hard realists like St. Augustine, who believed that each person had to choose “love of God in contempt of one's self,” or to Martin Luther, who held that man was a craven sinner in desperate need of divine grace.

Niebuhr did not go quite that far, although he did later admit to an unfashionable respect for Augustine as a man who “saw very clearly that it was not the mind which governed the self, but the self which governed the mind.” What Niebuhr did was to invent his own distinction between the character of people acting in large social groups as opposed to their character as individual people. Human nature was such that individuals could respond to reason, to the call of justice, and even to the love perfection of the religious spirit, but nations, corporations, labor unions, and other large social groups would always be selfish. Society, Niebuhr argued, responded substantively only to power, which meant that all the forces of piety, education, charity, reform, and evangelism could never hope to eliminate injustice without dirtying themselves in power conflicts. He ridiculed, for example, the notion that moral suasion would ever bring fundamental economic and political rights to the American Negro in Detroit or anywhere else. “However large the number of individual white men who…will identify themselves completely with the Negro cause, the white race in America will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so. Upon that point one may speak with a dogmatism which all history justifies.”

Having committed heresy against the Social Gospel, and against the doctrine of progress itself, Niebuhr turned upon the Marxists, whose ideas had influenced him profoundly since his ministry in Detroit. Acknowledging that the Marxists understood the need for power to establish justice, he attacked them for pretending to have discovered a science of history even though Marx offered only an “apocalyptic vision” of triumph over selfishness and oppression, “in the style of great drama and classical religion.” Believing unreservedly in their false science, Niebuhr wrote, Marxists fell easily into blind tolerance of the injustice inherent in their creed, which, “charged with both egotism and vindictiveness,” proclaimed it the destiny of Marxists to speak for the poor and to exact vengeance upon the non-poor. According to Niebuhr, the inevitable result was a naïve credulity as well as “a policy of force and fear.”
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He denounced Stalin's “policy of ‘liquidating' foes”—in a book published in 1932, years before most observers in the United States realized that such a policy really existed.

Moral Man and Immoral Society
created a sensation in intellectual circles, transforming Niebuhr into a stark iconoclast. Mainstream liberals, such as the editor of the
Christian Century
, were disturbed by the Marxist themes that remained in his work, while Marxists hated him for criticizing Stalin. One Communist reviewer, after denouncing Niebuhr for spreading “the sauce of Christianity” on his political analysis, decided that he was “worse than a thug.” Horrified Social Gospel reviewers implied that Niebuhr's emphasis on sin made him a traitor to progress, or even a fundamentalist. That same emphasis might have endeared him to religious conservatives, but they could not bring themselves to compliment a man who routinely questioned the literal truth of the Bible and who criticized Franklin Roosevelt as too conservative.

By the time King read
Moral Man and Immoral Society
in the fall of 1950, Niebuhr was transformed yet again and had risen in stature to become a weighty public figure. During the intervening eighteen years, Hitler had changed Niebuhr's theory of immoral society and implacable evil from a theologian's semantic invention to the most hotly debated topic on the globe. Niebuhr worked personally to help intellectuals escape from Germany, bringing Paul Tillich to teach with him at Union, and he founded
Christianity and Crisis
during World War II, primarily to counteract the influence of the American pacifists he once had led. After the war, he joined Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, and other prominent liberal politicians in creating Americans for Democratic Action, whose purpose was to promote anti-communism among liberals—a theme that would help put John Kennedy in the White House. In the Cold War, as in the war against the Nazis, Niebuhr's thought to some degree followed his fame.

In the book, King came fresh upon the earlier Niebuhr—a great theologian with an inner drive very much like his own, who had shocked the religious world in 1932 and now King in 1950 by declaring that the evil in the world was bigger than either the Social Gospel or Marxism. Both creeds hoped to see the meek inherit the earth, said Niebuhr, but the spiritual forces were too shy or too pure to fight the harsh world of evil, and the materialistic forces were too mechanical or too conspiratorial to allow the humanity which justice needs to breathe. The Social Gospel avoided the grit of politics; Marxism abhorred the church and all forms of idealism. To Niebuhr, they represented together the overriding tragedy of the age—“modern man's loss of confidence in moral forces.” By “moral,” he meant the mediating unscientific realm of justice, which combines love and politics, spiritualism and realism. Morality was a compromise of religion and politics, necessitated by the special character of the immoral society.

This talk of morality pushed a number of buttons inside King. Morality was the preacher's traditional fallback position. In moments of religious doubt, which King had experienced and always would, a preacher who could not talk about salvation could always talk about the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount. If racial justice was not God's cause, it was at least a moral one. It did not bother King a great deal to hear religious conservatives say that the Social Gospel was too secular to be religious, but it was quite another matter to hear Niebuhr say that the Social Gospel did not touch the evil in the world and was therefore not moral. Hitherto, King and his Negro friends at Crozer had been able to drift along toward their degrees, thinking that if they performed as well as whites in school, preached the Social Gospel, helped as many Negroes as possible to rise to full skills behind them, and all the while encouraged the racial enlightenment of progressive white people, then they could make a contribution toward social justice whether or not their religious qualms subsided. If Niebuhr was correct, however, any Social Gospel preacher was necessarily a charlatan, and the Negroes among them were spiritual profiteers, enjoying the immense rewards of the Negro pulpit while dispensing a false doctrine of hope. Such a prospect deeply disturbed King, who already felt guilty about his privileges compared with the other Negro students at Crozer. Daddy King's unabashed pursuit of success embarrassed him, and he would always be extremely sensitive about money. The shocking implication of Niebuhr's book was that Daddy King was correct in his emphasis on sin and honest in his belief that the minister should try as hard as anyone else to get ahead. By this light, the Social Gospel offered King little more than the chance to become a hypocrite.