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Martin Luther King Jr. as a Baptist

In 1517, a German morality professor at Wittenberg named Martin Luther published his Ninety-Five Theses criticizing the state church for clergy abuse because the church received money for forgiveness. Salvation came through paying a fee and not by genuine repentance of the heart and true moral change. Because of Martin Luther’s actions, Protestantism was born. And you hear it, at the root of the word Protestant is protest. Protestants protested that there wasn’t enough freedom, freedom of the people to learn about and experience the inclusive love of God on their own. Freedom is what began Protestantism and one hundred years later freedom created the first Baptists.

The first Baptist church popped up in Amsterdam with Thomas Helwys as its pastor and eventually spread to London with John Smyth. And then, when these Baptist separatists came to the new world, Roger Williams was among them. He was credited with the beginnings of Baptist life in America. Roger Williams started the colony of Rhode Island where religion and citizenship were separated. Yet, those first Baptists in America were persecuted and hated by other colonies around them because of their views against state control and their unwillingness to baptize infants. So, early Baptists knew what it was like to be persecuted in early America.

Roger Williams, the founder of Baptist life in America, fought for freedom. His views on religious freedom and tolerance, coupled with his disapproval of the practice of confiscating land from Native Americans, earned him the wrath of the American church and banishment from the Massachusetts Bay colony. So, Williams and his followers settled on Narragansett Bay, where they purchased land from the Narragansett Indians and established a new colony governed by the principles of religious liberty and separation of church and state. Rhode Island became a haven for Baptists, Quakers, Jews and other religious minorities. And Roger Williams also learned native languages and befriended and included native peoples and all persecuted peoples. So, you can see, at its core, early Baptist belief was founded on protest, on inclusion, and on freedom.

Just as the beginning of Protestantism and Baptist life began with the name of Martin Luther in Germany, that same freedom, inclusion, and protest followed in another Martin Luther three hundred years later in the American South. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and then later Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. And just like Roger Williams, Dr. King was an avid supporter of Native American rights. You see, when the early Baptists were on these shores, racial hatred against Native Americans was strong. And in Birmingham and Montgomery, Dr. King worked for desegregation for all dark-skinned children, including native born children. It was the Baptist thing to do.

King believed, as stated in his Nobel lecture, that poverty, racism, and war could only be eliminated by nonviolent means. Nonviolence is ultimately love of neighbor. Love was King’s moral imperative. In 1967 in an address to the anti-war group Clergy and Laity Concerned, he said: “When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: ‘Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God.’”

This Godly love was evident in King’s mother, who was an accomplished organist and choir leader and who took him to various Baptist churches to sing, where he received a good bit of attention for singing, “I Want to Be More and More Like Jesus.” And I think those are good words for us today. It would be well for us to be more and more like Jesus who loved those on the margins and welcomed all to the middle of the circle. It would also be well for us to be more and more like the one who through protest, nonviolence, and freedom, showed love to the world, the good Baptist, Martin Luther King Jr.

Pastor Mike