When I first began teaching Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” over a decade ago, it was primarily because I was a last minute adjunct hire with an MA scrambling to slap together a college syllabus for the first time during the Great Recession; I was just throwing every famous essay I knew at the wall and seeing what stuck.  To my relief, the students responded well to “Birmingham Jail” despite its length, so it remained on my future syllabi, while so many other essays I’ve assigned over the years have fallen to the wayside.

And the essay is indeed exceptionally well written!  Its a rousing read, and more importantly, does a great job of modeling for students such effective rhetorical techniques as parallelism, amplification, reductio ad absurdum, and more.  Nevertheless, I still felt at the time a twinge of guilt for teaching something so “dated,” as though it were an artifact from some incomprehensibly foreign era; I had in the back of my mind that I should really find something more “contemporary” and “relevant” to replace it with.

Oh, to be that young and naive again.

For needless to say, I no longer feel that way about “Letter From Birmingham Jail;” and every time there’s yet another round of white hand-wringing about riots and protests in response to yet another act of flagrant police brutality and murder, I’m reminded again of Dr. King’s scathing indictment of “the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice,” calling out those who “deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But […] fail to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations,” reminding them that “everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.'”^[1]All three of these excerpts, by the way, are excellent examples of parallelism, wherein an implicit contrast is set up between two nouns, in order to maximize their rhetorical impact: … Continue reading

That last stunner was in response to an implicit accusation of hypocrisy by his opponents, who asked how he can urge everyone to obey the 1954 Supreme Court ruling against segregation, but then break the law themselves in parading without a permit, the technical charge he was in jail for^[2]I had a cop in my classroom once, who exclaimed in shock that Parading Without a Permit is a Class B Misdemeanor–“a parking ticket!”–certainly not something you spend 11 days … Continue reading.

Intriguingly, Dr. King takes this accusation seriously, and spends several pages discussing the difference between a just law and an unjust law, marshaling together an array of quotations from such heavy-hitters as St. Aquinas, Paul Tillich, and Martin Buber, all in order to explain why “I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.”

Dr. King belabors this point because, as I in turn ask my students, what would happen if we all decided to disobey the laws we deemed unjust? (The Southern segregationists, after all, thought they were fighting for “States rights” and against injustice as well)^[3]as did the psychopaths who stormed the capitol just last year, for that matter. “Anarchy,” comes the confessed student response. But then, to obey all laws, no matter what and no matter how monstrous, is how we end up with the Nuremberg defense od Nazi war criminals.  The all-important question then becomes: how do we determine which laws must be obeyed and which must not be obeyed?

This question became especially complicated back when I adjuncted at LDS Business College^[4]now Ensign College, where my students would, like everyone, sing the very self-satisfied praises of Dr. King (as with the prophets, we tend to prefer dead civil rights leaders to living ones). I would then point out  that we have an Article of Faith about “being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law,” paired with scriptural injunctions declaring that “he that keepeth the laws of God hath no need to break the laws of the land” (D&C 58:21).^[5]Certainly my Dad quoted these scriptures to me ad nauseum as a teenager whenever I began speeding in the family car There is no qualifier in either of these passages for whether the laws be just or unjust. So where then do we stand in relation to Dr. King, whom we all claim to find so inspiring?^[6]These students were all born long after 1978, so were blissfully unaware that Ezra Taft Benson claimed the entire Civil Rights movement was a communist plot in his 1968 political screed An Enemy Hath … Continue reading

I would remind students how, for example, the Church was able to build a Temple in East Germany during the Cold War purportedly because the Saints trapped there kept “the laws of the land,” and the Soviet authorities knew it; obeying “the laws of the land” moved the work of the dead forward.

But while we’re in Germany, I also had to cite the story of Helmuth Hubener^[7]who was even the subject of a popular BYU play back in the ’60s! See David Conley Nelson’s very excellent Moroni and the Swastika, the German LDS youth in the early ‘40s who boldly disseminated BBC Radio reports of Nazi atrocities, and for his troubles was not only executed by the Third Reich but excommunicated by his Branch President; he had, after all, broken the commandment of God to “obey the laws of the land.”

At this point in the lesson, the students who’d been so enthusiastic about “obeying the law of the land” and following the Prophet but a minute earlier had fallen silent.  I would then offer a thought experiment: it’s 1851, and Congress has just passed the Fugitive Slave Act, making it a federal felony to aid and abet an escaping slave. You’re in Nauvoo, preparing to cross the plains to Utah territory, when all of sudden a black man from nearby Missouri appears, panting out of breath, begging you to hide him from slave-trackers hot on his trail. “I want to join my family in freedom up North!” he begs, “Please, you Mormons hate Missourians too, right? You gotta help me!” It is a divine commandment to obey the laws of the land, and the law of the land at that moment is that you must turn that man over to the slave-trackers. What do you do?

(All this, and I hadn’t even mentioned Utah slavery and Brigham Young’s priesthood ban!)

Yet there wasn’t a single semester I taught at LDSBC wherein the super-majority of students didn’t end up saying that they hoped they would be the sort of person^[8]whether they would have been able to escape the immense prejudices of the 19th century—outliers like Thoreau and John Brown notwithstanding—is of course a different question; but then, … Continue reading to help an escaping-slave hide–even the students who had piously claimed only a minute earlier that we should just always do whatever the Prophet has said. Some of the more thoughtful students said they would pray about it–then still help the man anyways.

Some even admit that they would help him because their conscience wouldn’t let them do otherwise, no matter what the commandment says–and I’m not sure they recognized the full import or implications of what they were saying. (Your conscience takes precedence over God? But then, if we don’t follow our conscience, to quoth Thoreau, “Why has every man a conscience, then?”  I don’t ask this rhetorically).

During my entire (albeit brief) tenure at LDSBC, only two students said they wouldn’t help, and in both cases their sole concern was about how violation of federal law would affect the safety of their families escaping across the Great Plains, not whether their actions squared with the “law of the land.”

Then, to complicate the issue even further, I point out that that aforementioned Helmuth Hubener was posthumously reinstated into full fellowship by an embarrassed Church leadership; that we revere the American Revolution as divinely decreed, despite it being an undisputed example of disobeying the “laws of the land”^[9]what the British Empire quite reasonably concluded was High Treason; and as one student helpfully pointed out, although missionaries are forbidden to, say, go swimming or hug a member of the opposite sex, nevertheless if an Elder were to see a little girl drowning in a pool and no one else was around, we all sure hope he would jump in to the water and grab her.^[10]These are the sorts of things, btw, more than their average Seminary attendance or whatever, that make me think the Youth of Zion are gonna be alright

Most students, then, resolve this conflict between conscience and law by accepting that certain commandment trump others–that the duty to save life trumps mission rules, that battling injustice trumps the laws of the land, and so forth. But really we’ve only returned to square one, for if certain commandments trump others, then when and how do we determine which commandments trump which? When two commandments conflict, which do we obey? What is our criteria? What’s the hierarchy?

What finally struck me as I taught “Birmingham Jail” at LDSBC is that this clash of commandments is not peripheral to doctrinal considerations, not rare exceptions to the rule, but are actually central, even fundamental to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We are taught for example that Adam and Eve were commanded not to partake of the forbidden fruit, and to “be fruitful and multiply,” and that these were mutually exclusive commands. No less a doctrinal stickler than Boyd K. Packer has taught that Justice and Mercy are eternal principles, yet are also in total opposition to each other, an irreconcilable paradox that it took the awful price of the infinite Atonement to resolve. “Mercy cannot rob justice” (Alma 42:25)–nor, by corollary, can justice rob mercy (“I will have mercy, and not sacrifice” -Hosea 6:6). This constant clash of commandments and principles is why Jesus had to be raised on the cross. The dilemmas presented by Dr. King are not theoretical thought experiments at all, but central to our life, society, and religion.

This fraught tension is similarly articulated in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, his famed 1843 philosophical treatise on the Abrahamic sacrifice, and the “paradox of faith” he presents: Abraham is promised progeny like unto the stars in number, yet the very God who made that promise withholds on its fulfillment for not only years but decades–and when the covenant child is at last delivered, he’s promptly told to turn around and kill him, in violation of not only the covenant, but of God’s own commandments (thou shalt not kill; human sacrifice is a sin; and so forth).

This is the paradox of faith; the commandments can seem contradictory–and often are contradictory, even intentionally contradictory–the ethical principles at play all appear to undermine each other. Why then, asks Kierkegaard (and I’m paraphrasing here, obviously), does Abraham not just throw his hands in the air and walk away? “Forget it!” he could’ve screamed, “There is no rhyme nor reason to any of this, I will not violate my conscious, I’m going home!” Yet even that refusal would not have let him off the hook; he still would have been choosing which commandments to obey, and which to disobey.^[11]There are some thinkers who believe that Abraham actually failed the test of faith by sacrificing Isaac, but that will have to be a discussion for another day  He is trapped in the paradox either way.

For Abraham, the paradox was resolved by the ram in the thicket; for Christ, it is resolved by an Atonement that had to be infinite to take into account the full infinitude of the paradox. As for us, as marked out by MLK, it is resolved on a case-by-case basis, leaving us to grapple with these tensions and paradoxes at all times. Like most folks, I believe that MLK was inspired of God in the Civil Rights movement–and in my more fiery moments, that he served as a divine rebuke to our own failures to end the Priesthood ban on our own–even as I fully acknowledge the paradoxes his principles present.  And MLK is not the exception, for as Kierkegaard demonstrates, these paradoxes date back to Abraham and from before the foundations of the world.  How we grapple with these tensions is not just another test, but perhaps the test, of our character and divine potential.

And don’t think that you can escape the test whether you’re an atheist or a devout believer; the clearer your own personal moral codes, the more difficult the tensions become. I am convinced God intended it this way, to ensure that we would all be “tried, even as Abraham” (D&C 101:4).

Happy MLK Day.