Revdarth.com

I read this commentary on CNN.com today by Roland Smith echoing the comments of Sen. Obama on Monday and was struck by his comparison to the current debate to a message delivered by Martin Luther King in 1967. Smith writes:

When Wright was castigated for being anti-American for saying “God damn America!” — which was not delivered in his speech about September 11, 2001 — I couldn’t help but think about that famous speech Dr. King gave at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, when he blasted America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

King was disowned by many of his supporters, was denounced as a traitor to the nation and his speaking fees dried up.

See, even the man who many conservatives quote today with fervor, was treated as an outcast in his own country.

One of the most significant classes I took while in seminary was “The Ethics of Martin Luther King” taught by Dr. Peter Paris. Paris led us through an examination of King’s actions, writings, and speeches. One of the most referenced books I have from my seminary days came from this course - A Testament of Hope : The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. - I continue to be struck by the relevance of King’s words to today.

Yes, we have come a long way since King was one of the leaders of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, but once again, it is so obvious we have a long way to go.

I did not remember King’s message that Roland Smith referred to, but I found it online (gotta love the internet):

Text of the message

MP3 audio of the message

While the message is obviously focused on the specific issue of calling America to stop the war in Vietnam, King does not miss the ultimate larger issues at play.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Those words echo to us today as we continue to fight an unjust war in Iraq, we continue to exponentially increase military spending at the cost of programs that lift the poor and oppressed in our society, and so forth.

UPDATE: An update on previous post - Roland Martin blogged about the larger context of Rev. Wright’s sermon.