Ancient and modern case studies in group apologetics: part 2

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the ordeal of illegality

Epigrams

When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows…

We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: “Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?” “Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?” - Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr.

In my previous post I analyzed Philo’s On the Embassy to Gaius, an account of Philo and fellow Judaeans’ apologetic missions to the Caligula administration, as well as an apologia directed toward Judaean and pagan readers of his account. Philo’s book reveals a Judaean group self-image willing to accommodate itself to multiple conflicting essences ranging from the most peaceful and pious under the Roman civil religion to the most violent and uncompromising.

I demonstrated how the interaction between this fluctuating group self-image and Rome pushed the Roman civil religion toward ever more cosmopolitan, tolerant, culturally relative, and liberal revaluations of its own internal value hierarchy. I discussed in my conclusion how Philo’s aspirational reform project to assimilate the Roman civil religion into Judaism, and Judaism into the Roman civil religion, was a long-term failure. In a prior post on apologia, I demonstrated how such cosmopolitan apologetic projects were not limited to ancient Jews and Christians, calling into question genealogies of cosmopolitan morals that look only to abstract and written value systems as causes or origins.

In Martin Luther King Jr.’s great Letter from Birmingham Jail, we see a reformer sitting at a similar crossroads leading on the one hand toward reform and Black inclusion and on the other toward Black exclusion and radicalism. We further see how MLK’s reform apologetics push the American civil religion, through devaluations of the outside world and reinterpretations of civil religious values, toward more inclusive and cosmopolitan transvaluations of its existing values, while also opening up a path toward the exclusionary and Afrocentric historical revisionism that dominates the most prominent expressions of Black identity today, like The 1619 Project.

MLK’s Letter is a response to an open letter published by reform clergy (Episcopalians, Methodists, Roman Catholic priests, Presbyterians, Baptists, and rabbis) after King had been arrested and imprisoned in Birmingham jail for violating an injunction. The clergy letter sympathized with the overall reform goals of desegregation and Black civil rights but called for reform through the legal system while decrying MLK’s tactical embrace of nonviolent but illegal disobedience. The clergy viewed such tactics as untimely and tending to produce violent or disruptive social discord. In other words, the clergy had hit MLK with an OPTICS CHECK.

Thus, just as Philo was tasked with legitimizing Judaean nonviolent but illegal disobedience of Roman law, as well as special treatment of Judaeans under the Roman civil religion, so MLK is tasked with legitimizing his illegal disobedience while calling for special treatment under the American civil religion.

It seems counterintuitive today to say that MLK was seeking special treatment for American Blacks, but his apologetic arguments were by no means seen as intuitive and sound by most Americans at the time. If they had been, there would’ve been no reason for MLK to resort to nonviolent illegal behavior to promote them.

MLK was attempting to reform a civil religion which, from its inception, had justified a racial caste system that placed Blacks at the very lowest rung of society, analogous to how the Roman civil religion justified situating the Egyptian pagans Philo stigmatizes at the lowest rung of Roman society. Although recent revisionist genealogies of progressivism posit Puritanism as the origin of modern American equality, Full Citizenship for the American Negro was hardly seen as necessarily following from Scripture by American Puritans. A cursory glance at the life and works of Cotton Mather attests to this conclusion.

The civil religion at the time of MLK’s Letter was enormously hostile toward Black radicalism and tolerant of the indifference of middle class blacks and whites toward MLK’s civil rights movement. Thus, MLK’s apologetic task is twofold: he must reframe as legitimate what the civil religion would’ve frowned upon at the time -- black radicalism, nonviolent civil disobedience, black resentment of themselves and whites -- and devalue, once again by reference to the civil religion, the indifference and moderation of non-racist Americans that the civil religion tolerated at the time, but which reflected poorly upon his version of the Black group self-image.

These defensive strategies bleed into another narcissistic defense, splitting, which divides MLK’s world between the all-good Black group and its subservient allies, and everyone else, hostile or indifferent to that group self-image. In this way, the all-consuming tyranny of abstract omnipotence inherent to group narcissism forces everyone to take a side.

This apologetic effort is tied to an overarching activist agenda to secure material concessions from American society, which activism is, like the Judaean apologia in Philo’s Embassy, underwritten by the threat of violence and social discord.

The Pillars of the American Civil Religion

MLK’s letter consists of a series of arguments that pull the American civil religion toward the universal and cosmopolitan by appealing to pillars of the American civil religion itself, which by King’s time had been modified through previous apologetic and revolutionary movements to accommodate religious and white ethnic diversity, but had only partially been expanded after the Civil War and through recent Supreme Court decisions to cover racial inclusion.

As discussed in my Primer, the Protestant non-denominationalism of America was first broadened to encompass Protestant, Catholic, and Jew, and then broadened again to encompass white ethnic cultural diversity. At the same time, we saw the expansion of America’s relatively restrictive Roman Republic and Enlightenment-style liberal democracy to a more fulsome and inclusive form of democracy, which had outlawed the chattel slavery embraced by America’s Puritan founders and brought the franchise to a larger set of white and black Americans, including women.

The civil religious authorities to which MLK appeals in his apologetic arguments are secular philosophy and science, popular sovereignty, American history, and Abrahamic scripture. However, the bulk of his argument is religious or theological-philosophical, largely because his audience is clergy. I’ve accordingly broken down his arguments into Secular-Historical and Religious.

As with Philo’s project, MLK’s apologia includes mild devaluations of the outside world, which transfer blame for unacceptable Black behavior onto the country, whites, religious leadership, middle class Blacks, and any other enemies of his movement. In each case, MLK’s primary goal is to say that what was once perceived to be just under the civil religion is in fact unjust, and that such things are unjust precisely because they violate the civil religion as reformed by MLK.

Secular-Historical Apologetics

Uncivil racial discrimination and psychoanalysis

Like Philo, MLK’s movement attempted its own “embassy” to the empire to stop violent persecution, secure equal treatment under the law, and prevent the erection of the modern group-narcissistic equivalent to humiliating idols. MLK argues that he exhausted the legal reform process to no avail, stressing that the “white power structure” largely ignored their pleas, and that local business leaders made half-hearted commitments to desegregate and remove “humiliating signs” from storefronts.

The injustices of which MLK complains range on a spectrum from clearly abhorrent and likely illegal to more benign and ambiguous, given the prevailing understanding of the American civil religion. Thus MLK invokes brutal lynch mobs, local police violence, Black poverty, and socially deprecatory and exclusionary practices that provoke feelings of inferiority based upon Black group identity.

In the following quote, MLK lists incivilities that contribute to a self-annihilating sense of what he calls “nobodiness” in Black people

when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”

I don’t intend to diminish these experiences. I know I wouldn’t like to be burdened with such disrespect from society on account of my whiteness and related imaginary traits that strangers ascribe to me. What I want to highlight here is how his experiential accounts mirror the inner turmoil of the narcissist described here, who constantly fights to preserve an abstract self against internal and external threats to the validity of a self-image.

It’s helpful to recall that group narcissism is a metaphor, and that just as with individual narcissists and their assessments of themselves and the world, group narcissism can produce accurate assessments of the group and the world. What’s important is that MLK’s statements in this context suggest a pattern of reasoning that originates with insecurity about the incongruence between an abstract group self-image and the outside world.

MLK asks the clergy to consider what it’s like,

“when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky

MLK additionally warns that such feelings of inferiority cause young Black people to develop “an unconscious bitterness toward white people.”

Here we see psychoanalysis performing a defensive function by projecting the causes of Black psychological insecurity and resentment toward white people entirely upon the outside world. MLK in this context calls upon the Enlightenment or Scientific pillar of the American civil religion to moderate the Biblical and classical-philosophical pillar, which for MLK unfairly burden black individuals with responsibilities they shouldn’t shoulder.