Martin Luther King Jr.’s challenge to the American church’s capitalist God of war.
As an extension of his fight against racist laws at home, Martin Luther King Jr. became increasingly critical of US policies abroad. Indeed, many speculate that King’s progressively strident critique of US militarism and intervention, particularly in Vietnam, and his challenge to American market priorities were factors that accelerated plans for his assassination—the 50th anniversary of which we recently marked as a nation. Among his many detractors were white clergy who, already incensed at King’s challenge to segregation and Jim Crow, were dumbfounded that he would move to oppose US warmongering and to call out the evils of capitalism. As King’s confrontation revealed, their theology was not only implicated in their racist vision of society, but also in a worldview that prioritized economic supremacy by any means necessary.
On April 4th, 1967, exactly one year to the day before he was murdered, King gathered with other religious leaders to protest the war in Vietnam at the Riverside Church in New York, where he delivered his famous sermon, “Beyond Vietnam.” As he began, King addressed his critics, those who asked, “Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?”; “Peace and civil rights don’t mix.” To such complaints, King responded: “the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.”
As King proceeded to clarify, global liberation and decolonization movements were linked with the civil rights struggle in the United States. The fight against US intervention and aggression abroad was tied to the battle against white supremacy at home, for both addressed, in King’s words, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”
King tellingly exposed the motivation behind America’s violent, militarized aggression: the “need to maintain social stability for our investments … and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.” King called out the “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.” In response, King identified the urgent need to forsake “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.”
That American Christianity and unbridled, militarized capitalism make good bedfellows can be evaluated in light of a longer history of the implication of Christian thought with the economy and monetary power.
While his civil rights platform appealed to all people of good will and to adherents of various faith traditions, King took care to specifically address Christian America—his fellow clergy and “brothers and sisters” in the faith. As glimpsed in his celebrated “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” King felt burdened to speak back to the religion of the majority. He understood that challenging the racism of white Christian America was an uphill battle, and he grew frustrated with the intractability of white clergymen and parishioners. This was a fight for the soul of the American church, an in-house struggle to help his white brethren recognize their captivity to a different—and highly destructive—vision of God.
This God of the majority not only had little problem with racial animus and oppression; the deity also evidently approved of the relentless pursuit of economic growth, prosperity, and even domination. Like the deity it worshipped, the white American church that countenanced slavery, Jim Crow, and ongoing segregation, was also a church that largely condoned US aggression abroad to protect investments and economic interests, assuaging itself, King warned, by the “prophesying of smooth patriotism.”
Christian thought has long been bound up with and has even contributed to racialized thinking. The commitment to segregation and racial injustice that King confronted in the white American church can thus be partly assessed in light of the longer Christian theological investment in racial categories. Similarly, the fact that American Christianity and unbridled, militarized capitalism make good bedfellows can be evaluated in light of a longer history of the implication of Christian thought with the economy and monetary power.
Where did this toxic vision of an American capitalist God come from? The sources are diverse and multiple, deriving in part from the Christian traditions that went into forging this nation, ones that had long construed God as a victorious economic administrator. As I recount in Divine Currency, key ancient theologians who contributed central tenets of Christian doctrine used ideas of economic governance and monetary practice to paint a picture of how God managed the world and redeemed humankind.
The early church father Eusebius of Caesarea, among many others, portrayed God as stewarding spiritual and material goods strategically, adeptly managing a return on the investment of sacred resources. According to this early, yet determinative, doctrine, this God also used economic exchange to topple a satanic adversary, liberate captive humanity, and extend divine territory into the realm of death. According to thinkers such as Irenaeus of Lyon, Origen of Alexandria, and Gregory of Nyssa, God did not eschew, but rather embraced, economic tactics and used a divine currency in the battle for the kingdom of God.
Ensconced in the theologies, liturgies, and paeans of praise inherited by Christian communities over the centuries was a portrait of God who was, among many things, a conquering economist and savvy resource manager. Inheriting this theological-economic transcript, the manifest destiny of the promised land of Christian America could then reflect, like its Lord, righteous conquest by economy, carried out in the name of transactions that would be purportedly redemptive for those involved. While homegrown American religious movements such as the prosperity gospel may be dismissed as extreme, they merely manifest the nascent logic of the nation’s Christian majority, a logic that approves of economic success and dominance as reflecting the will of the One who used economy in a cosmic war to save the world.
Clearly, King launched his critique of this God from within the same Christian tradition, one that also exhibited longstanding unease about wealth and concerns about the pious use of money. This reveals the broad and ambivalent sourcebook conveyed in such thought and makes the tactics of confrontation much more challenging, as King discovered. For this transaction-minded, triumphant God of the majority cannot be simplistically dismissed as an idol: it lays claim to the same Scripture and traditions, appeals to the same authoritative theologies, and draws the devotion of so many ostensibly faithful brethren. Hence King’s arduous in-house struggle, grappling with the minds and hearts of the American church, in order to compel “the richest and most powerful nation in the world … [to] lead the way in this revolution of values.” Reckoning with the apparently orthodox and mainstream sources of this vision of an economically victorious God is necessary before liberation from such conceptual and spiritual captivity might be achieved.
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