Headlines abound to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the anniversary of his birth. Far fewer commemorate Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. A simple Google search turns up seven times as many results for Doctor King as Reverend King. As ever, the Left pounces on euphemistic language to obscure the real nature of its object.
The Left celebrates Martin Luther King for all the wrong reasons. CNN tweeted praise for King, not because he healed racial division by preaching the Gospel, but rather because “he’s an environmental hero” and “he was a socialist before it was cool.” (Side note: socialism is not now and has never been cool.) We don’t regularly refer to pastors or ministers as “doctor.” None but the most pretentious and insecure humanities professors insists on the title. Fr. Joseph Ratzinger became Cardinal Ratzinger and later Pope Benedict XVI, but never “Dr. Ratzinger.” No one refers to the Protestant pastor Timothy Keller as “Dr. Keller.” Why does the Left uniformly pretend Martin Luther King Jr. carried a stethoscope?
Martin Luther King earned a doctorate in systematic theology with a dissertation exploring A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman. He offered his ample intellectual and rhetorical gifts to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was even named, or rather renamed, after the German Christian theologian. The secular Left prefers a generically respectable Martin Luther King Jr. who peddled the shallow virtues of diversity, tolerance, multiculturalism, environmentalism — you name the cause celebre du jour — because the progressive agenda fundamentally opposes the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. animated by love of God.
As clips from “I Have A Dream” and “Letter From A Birmingham Jail” fill your social media timelines today, take a moment to watch Reverend King’s final and most magnificent speech, “I’ve Been To The Mountaintop” — his last public exclamation before being gunned down the following day.