What would Martin Luther King, Jr. do?

You have heard of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., right? If you’re drawing a blank, you might be excused. For amidst all the strife and violence we are witnessing, rooted in claims about “systemic racism,” no one is discussing his vision. And there’s a reason for that.

What we are witnessing (and, for some readers in urban areas like Minneapolis, experiencing) is an implicit rejection of King’s vision. This radical movement is revolutionary, driven by the Marxist, anti-family organization formally known as “Black Lives Matter” (to be distinguished from the broader, important claim that black lives do in fact matter), is rooted in a rejection of everything Western, finding it to be rotten to the core.

Revolutionary movements always want to erase the past and start from scratch. The inaugural year of a revolution becomes “Year Zero” on a new calendar, such as happened with the French Revolution. The French revolutionaries tried erasing all vestiges of the past. Even the months were renamed with concoctions like Thermidor, because most months bore the names of Roman gods, families, and emperors. January comes from the god Janus, while June and July come from the noble Junii and Julii families (the most famous member of the latter being Julius Caesar), and August memorializes Gaius Octavianus, whom we know better as Caesar Augustus, under whom Jesus was born (see Luke 2).

And so the past must die. There’s a reason today’s revolutionaries are destroying statues not only of Confederates and slaveholders but also abolitionists(!) and saints. Even statues of Our Lord and the Blessed Virgin Mary have been defaced and destroyed. Every statue is a monument to the past, and must be erased in an act of damnatio memoriae (the damnation of memory) so that the revolutionaries can begin with an absolutely blank canvas to refound history in a new Year Zero. The destruction of statues isn’t a judgment on the individuals they record in stone and marble but on history itself.

The new progressive vision is racialist, even Maoist, setting racial identity groups against each other culturally, legally, economically, and politically, so that those groups who deserve to lose find themselves either marginalized or (God forbid) eliminated altogether—some Black Lives Matter (BLM) leaders have called for this. Damnatio memoriae leads to damnatio personae (damnation of persons), as Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, Mao’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia demonstrated. And that’s why King’s vision finds no footing today.

For King’s vision was ultimately Christian and colorblind—he was interested in racial reconciliation on Christian principles, not domination and subjugation rooted in postmodern critical theory. He closed his famous “I Have A Dream” speech of August 28, 1963 with stirring words anticipating “that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

King also believed in Natural Law, and quoted St. Thomas on the subject in his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail:” “To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.” Today’s revolutionaries hate Nature and its Law because it gets in the way of their grand designs, which, if one looks at the website for the “Black Lives Matter” organization, involves things besides racism like transgenderism and pansexualism.

King also delivered a famous sermon in 1957 entitled “Loving Your Enemies,” and in his context his enemies were hardcore racists in the Deep South: segregationists and members of the Ku Klux Klan in a time when a lot of black men, women, and children were murdered in lynchings, many of them quite brutal, public, and carried out in a carnivalesque atmosphere. Preaching on Our Lord’s words in the Sermon on the Mount, “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you,” King intoned, “Far from being the pious injunction of a utopian dreamer, this command is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization. Yes, it is love that will save our world and our civilization, love even for enemies.” He was committed to loving the racists who hated him for his color, and (something that BLM ought to think about) rejected violence: “Violence creates many more social problems than it solves… as the Negro, in particular, and colored peoples all over the world struggle for freedom, if they succumb to the temptation of using violence in their struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos. Violence isn’t the way.”

King’s colorblind vision of peace, then, was rooted deeply in the Western, Judeo-Christian intellectual and moral tradition—the very things BLM hates. He knew that this tradition wasn’t perfect; while he condemned Communism absolutely, he critiqued the oppression, colonialism, and imperialism that all too often had marked the West. But he knew that the Western, Judeo-Christian tradition had borne forth God’s own truth into the world, among many other things the truth that every man and woman, black, white, and otherwise, is created in the image of God and thus equal in God’s sight, and thus should be equal in man’s sight. Peace and reconciliation in our day, then, depend on a rediscovery of King’s vision, and that means recovering the riches of the Western, Judeo-Christian tradition on which he drew.

Republished from The Catholic Servant, Minneapolis, Minn. Used with permission.