Several hundred thousand people turned out for the recent "Restoring Honor" rally led by Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. Some of the statements that were made by Beck and Palin at this rally were quite remarkable. "Something beyond imagination is happening," Beck said, "America today begins to turn back to God."
The event was held on the same stage of the Lincoln Memorial where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous "I have a dream" speech exactly 47 years earlier. Palin reminded the people of this, "You have the same steel spine and moral courage as Washington and Lincoln and Martin Luther King" she said. "It will sustain you, as it sustained them." And later, "I think that Martin Luther King would have been proud."
Although Martin Luther King Jr. is best remembered for the things he achieved in the areas of racial injustice, people sometimes forget his emphasis on the methods of non-violence, love for enemies, and treatment of the poor and societal outcasts. Using some of MLK's own words, I wonder if he might say something like this to today's society:
"I must continue by faith or it is too great a burden to bear and violence, even in self-defense, creates more problems than it solves. Only a refusal to hate or kill can put an end to the chain of violence in the world and lead us toward a community where men can live together without fear. Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives."
"Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love."
"The time has come for an all-out world war against poverty. The rich nations must use their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the unschooled, and feed the unfed. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for 'the least of these'. Deeply etched in the fiber of our religious tradition is the conviction that men are made in the image of God and that they are souls of infinite metaphysical value, the heirs of a legacy of dignity and worth. If we feel this as a profound moral fact, we cannot be content to see men hungry, to see men victimized with starvation and ill health when we have the means to help them. The wealthy nations must go all out to bridge the gulf between the rich minority and the poor majority."
"It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it... The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government."
This is not meant as a political statement. From a Kingdom of God standpoint, there seems to be very little to admire in any political party at this time. At the same time, however, it is hard to ignore the striking contrast between the words of MLK and those who would like to use him for their own political advantage.
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