c. 2003 Religion News Service

(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J., and a fellow of the George H. Gallup International Institute in Princeton, N.J.)

(UNDATED) “Never before have I written so long a letter. I’m afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?”

Thus the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. concluded his now famous “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” Written 40 years ago this week, the letter was a response to the public rebuke of King’s civil rights campaign in Birmingham by eight white Alabama clergymen.

At issue for the clergymen _ as well as for the Birmingham city officials who were their parishioners _ was the presence of “outsiders” from other parts of the nation who, in the view of the local power structure, had undermined the city’s peace by enticing many of the city’s Negro citizens into protesting Birmingham’s segregation laws. In their view, the demonstrations and economic boycotts employed by the protesters constituted “extreme measures” which threatened to “incite … hatred and violence” though the actions themselves were “technically peaceful.”

Leveraging their positions as prominent religious leaders who were viewed as moderates on the racial sensibility scale, the clergymen _ an ecumenical mix of Catholic, Protestant and Jewish clerics _ were seeking to claim the moral high ground by urging the Negro community to “withdraw support from these demonstrations” while observing what they called “the principles of law and order and common sense.”

For King, this rebuke, published in the local Birmingham News, represented yet another rejection by the very religious establishment he had been appealing to since the Montgomery bus boycott nearly 10 years before.

His jail cell response served as a primer as well as an apologia. Because he preferred to believe that his accusers were indeed “men of genuine goodwill,” but also men whose collective moral compass had gone awry, King set out not only to defend his movement but also to remind his readers of the biblical mandates that necessitated the movement.

For King, his role as a purveyor of the “gospel of freedom” was merely a continuation of the prophetic tradition of the Jewish and Christian faiths. Similarly, his embrace of civil disobedience in defiance of unjust laws was grounded in the Judeo-Christian understanding of the intrinsic dignity of all human beings.

At the same time, he placed the civil rights movement and its participants squarely within the American tradition, noting that “the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.”

After he warmed to his subject, King then changed gears and, in the vernacular of the streets, flipped the script on his accusers. Specifically, he indicted the church for failing to meet the standards of its own prophetic tradition.

“In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro,” he declared, “I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. … And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which makes a strange, un-biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.”

As a result, he intoned, “the judgment of God is upon the church as never before.” It is at this point where, in my opinion at least, the symbolism of a jailhouse epistle takes on its greatest significance _ not only for King’s accusers but for the present generation as well.

King’s imprisonment, though short-lived (indeed, it lasted only nine days), nonetheless carried with it a much greater potential for danger than many of the celebrity-filled, smile-for-the-cameras, civil disobedience events of today. In King’s day, the movement was always financially challenged, which meant that bail money was often in short supply. Failing to make bail meant spending time in a Southern jail, which, for a black man, was the worst possible nightmare.

To make matters even worse, King’s imprisonment in Birmingham was spent in solitary confinement, known among prison inmates everywhere as “the hole.” It was there that in time-honored fashion, King clandestinely received writing paper and, in an equally clandestine manner, passed the letter’s manuscript, piecemeal, to his attorney.

This image of King, juxtaposed with those of his more socially acceptable accusers, gave his pronouncement of divine judgment a ring of authenticity that was all the more palpable in light of King’s stated embrace of the church’s humble roots.

Forty years later, the church’s judgment still hangs in the balance. While many in the church are valiantly wrestling with how to convey transcendent truths in a postmodern age, there still are those who, in King’s words, remain “archdefenders of the status quo.”

King’s warning, sounded so many years ago, remains relevant today: “If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the (21st) century.”

KRE END ATCHISON