Three months before King laid out his religious treatise justifying civil disobedience in a Birmingham jail cell, he attended the 14–17 January 1963 National Conference on Religion and Race. The conference, gathering some seven hundred religious Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish leaders at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago, advertised itself as the first ecumenical conference organized to address race relations. Despite his jam-packed schedule and additional duties organizing the Birmingham campaign, King attended all four days of this conference, attending workshops and recruiting clerical support.
He also served as the conference’s keynote speaker, and his address, entitled “A Challenge to the Churches and Synagogues,” presented racial justice as a neglected holy mission. Much as he would later reiterate in the Letter, he called out clerical bodies for remaining silent behind “the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows” and argued that if the Church remained silent, “it will forfeit the loyalty of millions and cause men everywhere to say that it has atrophied its will.” He expressed frustrations with “otherworldly” religion, saying that it “stresses the total and hopeless depravity of all mundane existence,” but ignored how it “must also be concerned about man’s social conditions. Religion deals not only with the hereafter but also with the here.” [1]
He then provided guidelines for clergy to engage in the freedom struggle and urged them to provide theological defenses for integration, for their places of worship to practice racial justice, and for denominations to lend full support to civil rights causes. The conclusion, however, is especially interesting: he conceded that laws, while important, can only do so much. Rather, “fears, prejudice, pride, and irrationality … will be removed only as men are possessed by the invisible inner law which etches on their hearts the conviction that all men are brothers.” Religious bodies needed to reiterate “the invisible inner law which etches on their hearts the conviction that all men are brothers and that love is mankind’s most potent weapon for personal and social transformation.” [2] Put simply, King claimed that churches provide a unique venue for the racial reconciliation needed to bring about a more just society, even as they also must engage in the social causes beyond.
King’s message resonates even more today, as religious bodies cling to only a shadow of their former relevance. The shared goal of brotherhood remains pressing, and I can attest how it has bridged diverse people. I had the chance to take part in an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship summer urban plunge in San Jose that wrestled with approaching differences, including racial and socioeconomic, to learn and engage with God’s call for the city. My academic career has also placed me in diverse faith initiatives, including my recent attendance at New College Berkeley’s King retreat this year, where we wrestled with the call of bringing our faith to engage with the politics of our day.
That said, King’s challenge is not an easy one. Although Christian apologists today often overemphasize the civil rights movement’s religious roots, such declarations elide the numerous challenges organizing faith communities then and now. One such example took place in Little Rock, Arkansas, where churches by and large failed to rally around the Little Rock Nine desegregating Central High School in 1957 and similar school desegregation initiatives taking place in the city afterward. Studying how churches reacted, sociologists Ernest Q. Campbell and Thomas F. Pettigrew concluded that their overall impact was minimal. They observed that while only a few pastors there were outright segregationists, other pastors personally sympathetic toward racial desegregation were still ineffective in producing a more favorable climate. They explained this was due to ministers’ reluctance to challenge their congregations, as even neutral congregants might view pulpit endorsements as divisive and potential controversy could risk the pastor’s current livelihood and future career prospects. [3]
It’s worth pointing out that this argument places less emphasis on those who then believed in divinely ordained white supremacy or are today afraid that their congregations will believe the Sermon on the Mount is woke. Instead, it places responsibility on the many churches that reject flagrantly racist or Christian Nationalist claims but still deprioritize social engagement as optional rather than obligatory.
I had the unique chance to engage this firsthand when I became the interim youth director for my home church, an evangelical Chinese church in the South Bay. Like a sports coach arriving in midseason, my appointment was due to unfortunate circumstances: internal church disagreements with the senior pastor had metastasized into a vote of no confidence that led the church’s entire pastoral leadership to resign. I was identified as the best emergency candidate due to past youth ministry experience, and I would serve in that role from June 2018 to July 2022 under interim English and Chinese pastors and unclear church direction.
Such an environment demanded high amounts of pastoral energy, and my first years were spent building relationships with parents and keeping some semblance of normalcy. When it came to social issues, I knew many members leaned more traditional, and I therefore cloaked advocacy behind a teacher mode. Channeling my academic background, I made sure when wading into potentially controversial topics to outline multiple perspectives and to cite my sources. Campbell and Pettigrew’s study singled out this rhetorical strategy in their study, calling it the “every-man-a-priest technique,” where clergy labeled their views as opinions and allowed that others “may hold a different opinion, which I assure you I will respect.” They observed that strategies like these allowed clergy to register disagreement but weakened their overall impact. According to them, “If religious interests and cultural values conflict … failure to apply the moral imperative with significant strength leaves him more subject to persuasion from opposite (segregationist) forces that are not so restrained.” [4]
Following this strategy allowed me to raise some counterprogramming. As one example, when the church scheduled speaker Christopher Yuan to discuss biblical sexuality, I felt the imperative to ensure that my youth understood all sides of the argument. Knowing that they rarely encountered Biblically based inclusive arguments on their own terms, I incorporated published Christians like Matthew Vines. I also protected myself by choosing counterarguments from respected conservative thinkers like Timothy Keller that rejected soundbites but also ensured nuanced appeals. And instead of advocating for full inclusion, I retreated to the less controversial point of opposing outright homophobia, a view few parents would contest, where their children are concerned. It’s not a high bar, but I also saw the church reject otherwise-qualified pastoral candidates for much less.
And after some trial and error, I discovered that the congregation was generally receptive to King’s biblical wisdom. Despite the presentist assumption that an exclusively biblical view naturally leads to conservative politics, it turns out that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, the son and grandson of preachers, knew his way around the Bible far better than most who occupy today’s pulpits. And while many in that church distrusted explicit appeals to a social gospel and elevated the idea of one’s own personal relationship with Jesus, they still recognized that the imago Dei is in all. Taking advantage of that shared ground, I learned to highlight King’s exegesis. For example, I chose to commemorate a King Holiday by taking King’s sermon on Luke 16:19-31, the story of the Rich Man (or, as King would say, Di-ves) and Lazarus, noting how King concluded that Dives’s damnation was due to his explicit neglect of the poor rather than implicit moral failings. [5]
I was still serving as youth director when police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in footage streamed across the globe. As protests sprang up globally, I recognized this as a rare moment for our church to also wrestle with its complicity of silence. I led a few church leaders through a book study of Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise; my youth group and a few interested people from partner churches also did an additional summer Zoom study on a hodgepodge of texts, including King’s “A Challenge to the Churches and Synagogues.” Chances like these felt unique to most participating, one of those rare opportunities to engage with people across political and theological divides in respectful discussion. There were several positive signs: one youth told me that her mother had instructed her to pay attention to my studies, even though she herself leaned politically right. I also believe my example helped inoculate my youth from Christian Nationalist ideas and instead understand that true Christianity always has an uneasy relationship with the state.
But looking back, I can feel that my few attempts were simply overwhelmed by the onslaught of conservative talking points, and the ground I cultivated for mutual compromise and respect collapsed during my last years there. I was disheartened when pulpit supply preachers began declaring critical race theory as some unholy takeover, anathema to Christianity, despite never tackling #MeToo or rising food insecurity or other very pressing issues relevant then and now. And when my wife sought to defend the Biblical case for racial justice on the internal Facebook group, she received comments that suggested her opinions were bordering on heretical.
One year later, the deacon board sought to add to the statement of faith a clause clarifying that Christian marriage is between one man and one woman only. While I knew most held this view, only a small minority there would deem it so crucial as to shape their fellowship. Rather, church leaders were getting advice from other Chinese churches in the broader area that a loose statement of faith risked legal challenges from liberal law groups who might sue them for gender discrimination. I learned their own source was an Alliance Defending Freedom pamphlet, the legal organization behind such lawsuits as Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. More importantly, the board felt that making such a change would enable them to pursue other reforms more centered around church governance, allowing them to bring some measure of stability. With that unspoken goal very much in the forefront of people’s minds, my public dissent in the congregational meetings and private notice of my resignation made little impact.
Yet perhaps the real story is how I managed to stay in that ministry as long as I did. I do believe my home church has faithful Christians who were open to God’s leading and genuinely desired brotherhood. However, they proved susceptible to broader cultural forces that preyed upon their fears of losing power and influence. Yet in serving there, I felt called to present a different vision, rooted in the same Bible they believe but enshrining empathy, service, and compassion. It didn’t prevail then, but I left feeling like I had honored my own personal calling at that time.
And even in today’s divided world, I believe that King’s challenge for churches to pursue and promote brotherhood can provide a way forward. People today still long for community, genuine fellowship, and spiritual connection, and sadly, for many, the only barrier between them and exploring faith is the church’s poor witness. Therefore, like the church of the Apostle Paul’s day or King’s time, we face the same call to live out Romans 12 and “be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds.”
[1]King, “A Challenge to the Churches and Synagogues,” in Race: Challenge to Religion (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1963), 157.
[2]Ibid., 165–166.
[3]Ernest Q. Campbell and Thomas F. Pettigrew, Christians in Racial Crisis: A Study of Little Rock’s Ministry (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1959).
[4]Campbell and Pettigrew, Christians in Racial Crisis, 104–105.
[5]King, “The Impassable Gulf (The Parable of Dives and Lazarus),” Sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, in The Papers of Martin Luther King, vol. 6: Advocate of the Social Gospel, January 1948–December 1963, online at: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/impassable-gulf-parable-dives-and-lazarus-sermon-dexter-avenue-baptist-church
David Lai is Assistant Editor of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. A San Francisco Bay Area native, he also has over a decade of experience youth directing at Asian American churches in the Bay Area and in Kentucky, currently serving as the Education Team Lead at Aldersgate UMC Palo Alto.