Martin Luther King, Jr.: Prophet, Priest, or King in American Civil Religion?

In his 1967 article, “Civil Religion in America,” sociologist Robert Bellah set off a half-century of debate and discussion concerning what indeed civil religion in America is. While Bellah established the basic structure of the idea, it was up to future scholars and thinkers to interpret, apply, extend, and critique his idea for their own contexts and interests. One extension is to observe both priestly and prophetic roles in American civil religion. Bellah himself noted the central role of the prophet, a person in American life who like the Old Testament prophets brought a word from above to call the nation to account. What he did not make explicit, though, is the role of the priest, someone whose main task is to intercede for the American people, bringing the blessings of heaven to bear on the needy and the earthbound.

These two modes occurred to me as I reflected on the life and legacy of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the day we set aside to honor and remember him. What role did King play in American civil religion? Was he a prophet? A priest? Or, perhaps, as his name suggests — was he a king?

Bellah observes that two key elements of American civil religion are the monuments and memorials. These are sites Americans visit to remember some great figure who played an important role in American history. Bellah mentions the war dead, but we can certainly extend the candidates to any great American we admire or revere.

Perhaps the central site of American civil religion is the National Mall, especially when you rope in Arlington National Cemetery. For now, let me just focus on the five monuments and memorials on the Mall devoted to single individuals: the Washington Monument, Jefferson Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, FDR Memorial, and MLK Jr. Memorial. It is striking to me that of these five, four of them belong to presidents. Not only does this betray the presidency obsession of American politics, but it also reveals the dominance of the priestly mode of American civil religion. It is, after all, the President who acts as high priest for the nation. “One nation under God” and “God bless America” may feel like empty slogans, but they represent an extension of the Puritan desire to seek God’s blessing on the American people and nation. As God’s chosen nation, the new Israel, the President invokes the blessing of God for America, sometimes for its own enrichment and sometimes to carry that enrichment to nations around the world who need it. To put it another way, we as Amerians don’t like to be told we’re doing the wrong thing or that America’s not that great or that maybe our history wasn’t always the best. No — we want to be blessed, and we look to the President to secure that blessing for us.

Now, the presidential role usually blurs the line between the priestly and the prophetic. Bellah notes that Lincoln played the role of the prophet in his opposition to the South. Certainly, Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom call the governments of the time to account, for the sake of freedom and equality. And we could surely say similar things about FDR and Washington.

But it’s in the fifth memorial, the one devoted to King, where we find the mode of the prophetic in its most prominent form. I don’t have the space to list all the quotes inscribed on that memorial. But to summarize, we find the following coming from the mouth of King the prophet: he chastises the American involvement in Vietnam; he admonishes us to love and not hate; he encourages us to pursue humanity and equal rights; he rebukes us for neglecting the economic and social rights of the oppressed and the downcast; and he calls us to pursue the presence of peace and not just the absence of violence. As a Christian minister, this is a natural mode for King, but there is something else going on. After all, as minister, it’s natural for King to play the priest. And yet, almost nothing on the memorial approaches an invocation of God’s blessing for America, no pleading with God to give us our due reward. Why not? What is going on?

One reason is this: King can play the role of prophet but not the priest because he is not in a position of formal power. The reason we need prophets in the first place is that those in power — those with the alleged authority to bring God’s blessing on America as priests or act on behalf of God as kings — are not living up to the standards of American civil religion. Many people have noted in recent years how unpopular King was in his day, and that only in recent times has he become more popular. Prophets bring an inconvenient word of truth, often yelling on the sidelines or protesting in the streets toward those in power, like King’s large body peering across the Tidal Basin toward the slaveholding Jefferson, calling on him and the rest of us to live up to our ideals. Prophets have inherent weakness, even if the words they deliver bear divine power.

While prophets are unpopular and often are killed for their prophecies (King, Lincoln, Isaiah, Jeremiah), the civil religion would not be complete without kings. Some have noted in recent days that King’s protest and prophecy almost always led to legislation. This is true, but given his formal powerlessness, King needed actual legislators to act on the prophecy to make it effectual. In the end, King needed Kennedy and Johnson and the Congresses of his day to pass civil rights and voting rights legislation, just like Nathan needed a David to do what was right. So do the prophets of our day, whoever they are.

One of the lessons of Dr. King, then, is that we should pay special heed to those who are marginalized. Not because they’re perfect, but because it’s unlikely those who carry the interests of the regime will speak a word of truth against it. It’s far more likely it’s the people we forget, discard, and dismiss who will have something to say to our nation that’s actually true. Unfortunately, it’s because they’re discarded that we’re unlikely to hear them at all.

One final postscript: American civil religion makes me very uneasy. It’s tempting for me to conclude that what America needs is a healthy mix of prophets, priests, and kings: some who bring a divine word of rebuke, some who seek God’s blessing, and some who live out the work of God in American life. But, at the end of the day, America is not God’s chosen nation, I’m uneasy about any political figure seeking the blessing of God for America, and American civil religion has always excluded one important name in all its documents, memorials, monuments, and speeches: the name of Jesus Christ. It’s tough to get behind a religion that’s half true and, in the end, empty.