Was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Saved?

I can't believe the stuff I'm reading on this thread. "Rev." Martin Luther King was a religious fraud who never believed any of the traditional supernatural dogmas of chrstianity. Yet this is never brought up by his critics, who choose to dwell on his adulteries and his Communist connections.

While adultery is a capital offense, human nature is weak and he's far from the only preacher who has fallen. As far as Communism is concerned, do you honestly think that American Blacks, for whom only Communists stood up for most of a century, care that he was pro-Communist? They will only ask if Communism is so bad, where were the rest of you when we needed you?

King's unorthodox religious beliefs (showing him a complete fraud as a Baptist) is the one and only issue which might cause Blacks to reassess their opinion of him, yet you're all saying it's no one's business! Why does everyone want to sweep King's phony leftist "theology" under the rug?????

bump

You might want to re-read this thread. Not everyone is saying that. Not everyone is focusing on things other than theology. Not “all”.

What does it matter?

That’s between him and God.

There’s nothing that can be done about it now.

I enjoy your posts on the religion forum immensely, but I disagree that it doesn’t matter for the simple fact that he is often held up as a model of Christianity (and often by those who have every reason to know better). I don’t think it’s ever a matter for indifference when famous people are held up as models of the faith — particularly when it’s anything but obvious that they were even believers! Discernment is always of paramount importance in selecting who we put on a pedestal for emulation.

Just wanted to let you know I actually went to the article linked at your site. Very informative. No wonder our cities are still plagued by liberation theology. LT does not have Christ at its center and that is the problem. LT uses a perceived Jesus Christ which is clearly not the Jesus Christ of the Bible.

If you go to the site there is a link to another article which lays out King ‘s theology and beliefs. I was surprised he sounded more like a JW or atheist.

What does it matter?
That’s between him and God.

There’s nothing that can be done about it now.

Et tu, metmom?

Martin Luther King the Baptist minister was a total fraud. He was a typical liberal Protestant who rejected all the historic doctrines.

This needs to be exposed for all to see, not covered up while people continue to yap about adultery and Communism.

MLK claimed to be working for liberty. and notwithstanding the egregious racial bigotry of his time, he should have completely rejected the murderous tyranny of Marxism and communism as an unacceptable palliative in ANY context.
I wish to make it clear that I think that Martin Luther King was a man of enormous courage, charisma, and intellect that profoundly altered the course of American history and made it a better country in so far has its promise of justice for all is concerned.

This does not mean however that his legacy to the Civil Rights movement has been one of unalloyed good. I believe much of his bequeathment resulted in an over reliance on big government statist solutions to problems within the black community that require individual initiatives to correct. Martin Luther King’s frequent references to this nation’s founding documents are well known. His reflections on Communism are much less well known and undoubtedly contributed to his general philosophy. We owe it to ourselves to examine the effects of this legacy and contextualize it so has to solve the problems facing the black community today.

While King himself was not a communist, he did business with communists and was influenced by them. This delicate subject, made more so given the martyrdom and subsequent lionization of King, should nevertheless be broached as a means of providing insight into some of the darker forces that worked their way into what was essentially a pro American, conservative, Christian civil rights movement.
King surrounded himself with communists from the beginning of his career. His closest advisor Stanley Levison was a Communist. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, formed in 1957 and led by King, had Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth as Vice President who was at the same time president of the Southern Conference Education Fund, an identified communist front according to the Legislative Committee on un-American Activities, Louisiana (Report April 13, 1964 pp. 31-38). The field director of SCEF was Carl Braden, a known communist agitator who was also involved in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which counted Lee Harvey Oswald, the communist assassin of President Kennedy as a member. King maintained regular correspondence with Carl Braden. Bayard Rustin, a known communist, was also on the board of SCLC.
Dr. King addressed the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., 1957, previously known as the Commonwealth College until the House Committee on un-American Activities sited it as a communist front (April 27, 1949). HCAA found that Commonwealth was using religion as a way to infiltrate the African-American community by, among other techniques, comparing New Testament texts to those of Karl Marx. King knew many communists associated with the Highlander school.
King hired communist official Hunter Pitts O’Dell, 1960, at the SCLC. The St. Louis Globe Democrat reported (Oct. 26, 1962) “A Communist has infiltrated the top administrative post in the Rev. Martin Luther King’s SCLC. He is Jack H. O’Dell, acting executive director of conference activities in the southeastern states including Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.” Dr. King fired O’Dell when this became public but subsequently rehired him to head the SCLC New York office.

King himself expresses a Marxist outlook in his book “Stride Toward Freedom” when he stated, “in spite of the shortcomings of his analysis, Marx had raised some basic questions. I was deeply concerned from my early teen days about the gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty, and my reading of Marx made me even more conscious of this gulf. Although modern American capitalism has greatly reduced the gap through social reforms, there was still need for a better distribution of wealth. Moreover, Marx had revealed the danger of the profit motive as the sole basis of an economic system”

King, unfortunately, didn’t understand that it was Capitalism and freedom that was responsible for the successes the African-American community already had achieved in his day and the key to future success. By “better distribution of wealth” King meant state control over the economy. His contempt for “the profit motive” was unfortunate given that African-Americans should’ve been encouraged by their leaders to seek fair profit to the best of their ability. King’s leftist ideas contributed to an opening of the floodgates to such radicals as Stokley Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, the Black Panthers, as well as the burning and looting of African-American neighborhoods, the institutionalizing of poverty perpetrating welfare, the destruction of the family, drugs, violence, racism, and crime.

In “Stride Toward Freedom” Dr. King states “In short, I read Marx as I read all of the influential historical thinkers from a dialectical point of view, combining a partial yea and a partial no. My readings of Marx convinced me that truth is found neither in Marxism nor in traditional capitalism. Each represents a partial truth. Historically capitalism failed to see truth in collective enterprise and Marxism failed to see the truth in individual enterprise. The Kingdom of God is neither the thesis of individual enterprise nor the antithesis of collective enterprise, but a synthesis which reconciles the truths of both.”

King, like Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, had “a dialectical point of view.” The goal of the dialectic is authoritarianism. A nation, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, cannot be half free and half slave. By advocating socialism, King chose an imperious stand toward his own people in contrast to a stand for genuine freedom, self-rule, self-sufficiency, private ownership, and the accumulation of capital. King did not advocate the American system of free market capitalism. Instead, he stood for a system that has stunted the growth of African-Americans as well as the rest of us.

All Marxists believe in Hegelian Dialectics. This is a belief that “progress” is achieved through conflict between opposing viewpoints. Any ideological assertion (thesis) will create its own opposite (antithesis). Progress is achieved when a conclusion (synthesis) is reached which espouses aspects of both the thesis and antithesis.
For example, Hitler had a dialectical point of view. He rejected Marxist class warfare, but embraced the basic socialist idea of the insignificance of the individual compared to the collective state.

This belief in dialectical progress is why liberals and “progressives” pit the rich against the poor, old against young, black against white, men against women, homosexuals against straight, ad nauseam.

This issue is somewhat clouded by what Dr. King wrote in his 1957 book “Stride toward Freedom: the Montgomery story”, in which he wrote the following devastating critique of the sort of communism practiced in the Communist super state of the Union of Soviet Socialist republics.
“During the Christmas holidays of 1949 I decided to spend my spare time reading Karl Marx to try to understand the appeal of communism for many people. For the first time I carefully scrutinized *Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. I also read some interpretive works on the thinking of Marx and Lenin. In reading such Communist writings I drew certain conclusions that have remained with me as convictions to this day.
First, I rejected their materialistic interpretation of history. Communism, avowedly secularist and materialistic, has no place for God. This I could never accept, for as a Christian, I believe that there is a creative personal power in the universe who is the ground and essence of all reality-a power that cannot be explained in materialistic terms. History is ultimately guided by spirit, not matter.
Second, I strongly disagreed with communism’s ethical relativism. Since for the Communist there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything-force, violence murder, lying-is a justifiable means to the ‘millennial’ end. This type of relativism was abhorrent to me. Constructive ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means, because in the final analysis the end is pre-existent in the means.
Third, I opposed communism’s political totalitarianism. In communism, the individual ends up in subjection to the state. True, the Marxists would argue that the state is an ‘interim’ reality which is to be eliminated when the classless society emerges; but the state is the end while it lasts, and man is only a means to that end. And if man’s so-called rights and liberties stand in the way of that end, they are simply swept aside. His liberties of expression, his freedom to vote, and his freedom to listen to what news he likes or to choose his books are all restricted. Man becomes hardly more, in communism, than a depersonalized cog in the turning wheel of the state.
This deprecation of individual freedom was objectionable to me. I am convinced now, as I was then, that man is an end because he is a child of God. Man is not made for the state; the state is made for man. To deprive man of freedom is to relegate him to the status of a thing, rather than elevate him to the status of a person. Man must never be treated as means to the end of the state; but always as an end within himself.”
Martin Luther King Jr., *Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story* (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 92-93

Don’t forget that the above was written in 1957, a period in which the oppressions of the Soviet Union are painfully evident, evidenced by the brutal repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. At the time Stride toward Freedom was written, domestic attitudes toward communism could not have been more hostile. Toward the end of Dr. Martin Luther King’s life, the counterculture revolution of the sixties and the leftist tinted civil rights movement made favorable considerations of communism generally more palatable.
• King wrote in Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? “I am now convinced…the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.” But “to ensure that the guaranteed income operates as a consistently progressive measure” it “must be pegged to the median income of society, not the lowest levels of income” and “must automatically increase as the total social income grows.” So far, his proposal was not materially different from Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth program. This was from his later works, but he had voiced support for “a modified form of socialism” for some time. While accepting his Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, King told the press, “We feel we have much to learn from Scandinavia’s democratic socialist tradition and from the manner in which you have overcome many of the social and economic problems that still plague far more powerful and affluent nations. “Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic.”
•
• “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro.”; and
• “Within common law we have ample precedents for special compensatory programs.”

While Martin Luther King Day should be one of reflection and appreciation for what has been accomplished, and a reckoning of what still needs to be done, it should also be a day of understanding, in terms clear of emotionally driven rhetoric, where the civil rights movement went wrong. A major key to this understanding, I would contend, is the destructive effects that communist ideas and outright infiltration has had on the African-American community. Communists tried to use African-Americans as cannon fodder by stoking hatred and racial division. A predominantly white left-wing establishment promoted Black communists in order to preserve an informal system of oppression.
The fact is that he WAS a socialist and that goes to the heart of what went wrong with the civil rights establishment after the legal battles against codified discrimination were won.

I am a black man who has been getting calluses on my dome from butting heads with those in my community who refuse to relinquish big government statist solutions for the problems plaguing the black community in favor of free market solutions that are far more appropriate today. These forces frequently cite Dr. King and use his exhortations to government to lead the way. They specifically cite his socialist outlook as justification for their continuance. The two parent black family was destroyed by LBJ’s welfare state. That was the worst cultural calamity to EVER befall the black community in the US, and the most destructive force in its cultural life notwithstanding the imposition of Jim Crow law via the Supreme Court’s Plessy v Fergueson decision. MLK was a leading proponent for expanding the welfare state, whose baleful effects were just beginning to be seen in the black community.

MLK was a man of enormous charisma and courage and certainly a pivotal figure in the civil rights movement. There is much about him that I admire. An assessment of his life could creditably yield the adjective of great. Despite that, he does not deserve to be the ONLY American with his own holiday named after him. That honor should be reserved for only one person in American history, the greatest of all Americans, George Washington. More so than any other SINGLE figure in our history, he was the “indispensable man.” Without his courage, acumen, honor, and integrity, the US would simply not exist, and if it did, it probably would have been as a monarchy and certainly not as a constitutional republic.

The fact that MLK, Jr. has come to represent the ENTIRE face of the Civil Rights movement is a slap in the face to scores of people who accomplished much, those that were trying to do the right thing without necessarily seeking personal glory for themselves, let alone martyrdom to try to equal Christ, which is blasphemous on its face.
What of the heroic Republican federal officials from Reconstruction, for which almost nobody can name today ? Those men had NOBODY to pave the way for them. Even a Black Republican minister and Congressional candidate from Chicago, the Rev. Archibald Carey, Jr., who delivered the “Let Freedom Ring” speech before the 1952 Republican National Convention, has been forgotten (a speech largely plagarized by MLK, Jr). Nobody knows who Rev. Carey is today or what he spoke.

MLK’s birthday holiday was a sop to PC and a reflection of the DemocRAT Congress that voted it. The depth of MLK’s association with the most anti-freedom ideology (Communism) of our time will prove to very discomfiting when it is fully revealed. Additionally, MLK’s legacy to the modern day civil rights movement is a socialist bequeathment that of looking to big government solutions for many of the behavioral problems in today’s black community. MLK continues to cast a long shadow over most of the modern day civil rights establishment and black politicians who largely reject free market, educationally based solutions to the unique problems plaguing the black community.

I understand where you’re coming from.

I was thinking more along the lines of it being too late to do anything about whether he was saved or not. It’s not like anyone can present the gospel to him or anything. Your fate is sealed once you die.

We need to worry about those still alive who we can have an impact on yet.

The thing is, people are going to get all in a snit if they think that you’re attacking him. It seems counter productive to me to make an issue of it because most people don’t look beyond the obvious work that he did and they judge him on that. If someone is convinced that he was a Christian, then almost nothing you can say will convince them otherwise.

Christians understand the importance of correct theology but non-Christians just. don’t. get. it.

ping to post 50

No offense meant in that post ZC.

"This is specifically with regard to a person’s soul, and has little to do with observed behavior."

It has everything to do with manifest behavior.

The soul has 2 chambers, the nous/mind and the kardia/heart.

The nous processes and receives knowledge and converts it into an outward knowledge retained in the heart.

When we problem solve, we operate on the problem using our heart. Our behavior manifests our heart.

God the Holy Spirit sanctifies us via the human spirit, which places knowledge in our mind and through faith in Christ, sanctifies our heart, slowly cleansing away the portions of our hard hearts with the thinking from the new man.

As we are sanctified and grow in Christ, we also experience testing to verify we have indeed sanctified the heart through faith in Christ.

That testing is manifest outwardly by our behavior.

While we are not subject to the Law in this effort, our work is tested by faith to find that which remains pure.

We can discern others and their faith through faith in Christ.

“Christians understand the importance of correct theology but non-Christians just. don’t. get. it.”

True, but there are many Christians in this day and age who fall for the idea that the good he did and the “Reverend” in front of his name indicate a spiritual state that is not evidenced by his life in other areas, and I have to admit that that always bothers me. I don’t want to go to a talk or ceremony that holds him up as a model of virtue and Christianity when it’s not obvious his life was characterized by either one — and significant evidence that it was not. That’s what gets me. Christians should know better. (When I have to attend the in-service at my school on these days, I go late because I won’t sit through that. I refuse.)

I hear you.

ok....real slow this time, just for you....

You have NO RIGHT or basis for judging the fate of another person’s soul, based upon the behavior you observed.

You will next throw out the Hitler analogy, believing you’ve made a point.

99.9% of humanity does not fit in that little package, including MLK.

YOU have NO RIGHT to judge the fate of MLK’s soul!!!!

GET IT?

Obviously nobody other than God, who has given it to Jesus Christ, has the authority to judge a human soul.

BTW, it isn’t their fate, but rather a destiny which might be in question as a consequence of that judgment.

Fate is a pagan concept, not a Christian concept.

We do have the authority to discern a person’s faith.

We don’t know if Hitler was saved or not, though his behavior obviously manifest his major efforts were as an enemy of Christ. Believers out of fellowship can also commit the most heinous crimes imaginable.

Conversely, Saul was an enemy of Christ before his experience on the road to Damascus. Indubitably, Paul was a believer and made the Apostle to the Gentiles manifest his faith in Christ even after committing numerous atrocities against believers.

In regards to MLK, I discern the author of the article communicates more of the Gospel than what I have read from MLK’s work.

This needs to be exposed for all to see, not covered up while people continue to yap about adultery and Communism.

Does the fact that we have a national holiday in honor of a Communist fellow-traveler not bother you in the least? I find it hard to believe that somebody is more irritated with King's theology than with his politics. MLK's religious beliefs are his private matter, as is his adultery. Being a Communist sympathizer (if not an outright Marxist) is a very public matter, especially at the height of the Cold War.

You are welcome. My English teacher was an extraordinary woman. Not many people can get a bunch of HS jocks excited about Shakespeare and Chaucer. She took our class to see Monty Python and Holy Grail when we were studying Tennyson.

Easily one of the three best teachers I ever had.

Man that was deep.

I agree the issue should not be MLK’s final destination or try to figure out such things since it is above our pay grade. However I do see the importance of studying his “theology” so history does not paint a different picture.

If more “orthodox” Christians read his theological papers and opinions I think they would fall into the “shocked” or “disbelief” category.