On Martin Luther King Jr., His Movement & His Mentors by Dr. Matthew Fox, Ph.D.

 Today we celebrate one of the greatest Christian saints of all time: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  

King had at least three mentors: Jesus, Howard Thurman, and Gandhi. One thing that made him great was his deep ecumenism, insofar as he humbly learned from a Hindu saint, Mahatma Gandhi, how to apply Jesus’ teachings to battling injustice—using a method called non-violent resistance.

Under King, that resistance brought down almost a century of Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and other evil structures that perpetuated racism 

and slavery even after the Confederacy lost its Civil War. Marching, facing firehoses, police dogs and police on horseback, filling jails, beseeching courts, politicians and presidents, ordinary citizens and church-goers of the movement MLK Jr. led, applied Gandhi’s spiritual practice that had taken down the British empire in India, without firing a shot.

Father Bede Griffiths, a wise monk and observer of India who lived fifty years in an ashram there, said this about Gandhi: He “was deeply influenced by the gospel, not only directly through the New Testament, but still more indirectly through Ruskin and Tolstoy.”   

Through its Indian adaptation, “the social gospel of Christianity”

underwent “a most significant transformation.” Gandhi demonstrated how the principles of the Sermon on the Mount can be applied to social and political life in a way which no one before him had done: he made the beatitudes a matter of practical concern in a way which few Christians have realized. Or accomplished.   One Christian did realize it: MLK Jr., with a powerful team behind him, implemented and adapted Gandhi’s practice based on the Sermon on the Mount, to American history. Courage as well as vision and intergenerational moral outrage steered to a greater good, accomplished what the civil rights movement achieved.     The immense sacrifices of that movement—including King’s and others’ martyrdoms—are in jeopardy today, sixty years later. Racism does not just disappear, it morphs into new forms. Each generation has to step up to challenge it in its own way.

   

 

Mahatma Gandhi (center) during his first public non-violent resistance action, the 24-day Salt March of 1930, which protested the British monopoly on salt. Source unknown. Wikimedia Commons.

 

President Lyndon B. Johnson meets Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the signing of the Voting Rights Act, August 6, 1965. Photo by Yoichi Okamoto (the first official presidential photographer). Wikimedia Commons.

 

Matthew Fox

Rev. Matthew Fox, PhD, author, theologian, and activist priest, has been calling people of spirit and conscience into the Creation Spirituality lineage for over 50 years. His 36 books (translated into 74 languages), as well as his lectures, retreats, and innovative education models, have ignited an international movement to awaken people to be mystics and prophets, contemplative activists, who honor and defend the earth and work for justice. To learn more, visit matthewfox.org