Brandon Vogt loves MLK

Last updated on: January 28, 2013 at 9:13 am by Dave Griffey

Brandon Vogt loves MLK 2013-01-28T09:13:00-04:00 Dave Griffey

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And gets an earful from the growing tide of folks saying ‘wait a minute.’ He does link to Father Barron, who also has much glory and honor and praise to give to Dr. King. I know, in the past I’ve been somewhat harsh on my appraisals, not so much of Rev. King, but of the god worship directed at him. As one who worked with some inner city missions in my ministry days, and came across many African American ministers of a variety of stripes, my starry-eyed view of the post-Civil Rights era was dimmed. I used to think it was a holdover of racists white ideology to think there were equivalents in the Black community to racist white guys. But more than once I ran into Blacks who held more hatred for whites than Khrushchev had for shoes. Not all were that way of course, but enough that it was beyond a negligible number. Which made me wonder what part of King’s message they actually followed. What I noticed was an almost propensity for many to lean more toward Malcolm X than King’s message, all the while flaunting King as the end all to everything.

Plus, I just happened to be of that particular generation that was old enough to remember the death rattle of pre-Boomer liberalism, and young enough to see the emergence in full force of our post-Christian, post-traditional culture. So growing up, I listened to more than one teacher or professor draw a thick line between hip, enlightened progressives who were all about the brave new world and the backward thinking, hayseed hicks and bigots and dolts who did such quaint and mindless things like, you know, venerating old dead people. I can remember lectures in which the statues of Jefferson and Lincoln and the Washington Monument were just evidence of how low and pathetic the old way was, and why it was time to break the chains of simple minds and small thinking.

So naturally it came as quite a shock when the issue of a national holiday for Dr. King came up, and I noticed many who had mocked President’s day and ridiculed the celebration of other traditional heroes were the first to line up and demand unqualified official veneration of Dr. King. I also noticed the turmoil and vitriol that accompanied the debate as states that didn’t want to follow suit were threatened, and districts that questioned adding another day off of school were called racist and summarily smacked down in the name of this new tolerance.

Again, the irony being that this sort of ‘we’re beautiful, you’re evil’ seemed like so many things that weren’t based on Dr. King’s teachings. I know, Dr. King was a complex person, as all great men and women are. As all not-so-great men and women are. Some of his tactics have been questioned in recent years. In the secular world, some younger atheists are meeting the challenge of ‘what about Dr. King’, when stating religious people never do good, by trashing Dr. King. Others have now begun to look at certain potential missteps on the part of the good Reverend.

For me, even if he turns out to be the scum of the earth, and his holiday reduced to a time for furniture sales, what he did will still be noteworthy. But not for what it, and the holiday celebrating it, became. To me, it is noteworthy to remind ourselves that no matter how noble the cause, causes are taken up by flawed people, and almost inevitably screwed up by their flawed followers. And yet, we still need to remember the better parts of what was accomplished. We need to remember the good that Dr. King accomplished and focus on that, without the need for starry eyed hero worship or just using it as a prop for less King-like tactics. And, to be consistent it might be time to start applying the lesson to other people and movements as well. Perhaps like those other dead guys like Jefferson, Washington, and various former heroes of our old, simple nation, if not applying this principle to the nation itself.

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