Christianity and Martin Luther King's Dream

[Geee]

American Thinker:

 

The nation commemorates the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's dream on August 28. In 1963, King gave what many communication experts view as the greatest speech of the past 100 years. Yet despite the speech's popularity, experts continue to miss or diminish one of the more essential characteristics of the speech's success: Christianity.

In the 1990s, I attended an academic conference where a communication scholar was presenting about a research question regarding why King so regularly employed the rhetorical form known as the jeremiad. That particular form of speech is based on the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah; it is a prophetic style of argument that calls an audience toward repentance and reconciliation with God's purpose. Ultimately, the scholar concluded in a perplexed tone that perhaps King was influenced by political groups such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Eventually a hand came up in the back, and a participant asked the scholar if he thought King's being a Baptist minister might have influenced his decision to use an Old-Testament rhetorical form. The scholar was completely surprised to learn that King was a Baptist minister.

It was in the 1990s when my own rhetorical study program at the University of Kansas dropped biblical allusions as a required recognition item for great speech study -- since students had such a hard time recognizing the allusions. Despite the rise of secular paradigms in the academy, King's speech and the larger civil rights movement remain fundamentally connected to Christianity. Had contemporary norms of "separating church and state" prevailed at the time, there likely would have been no civil rights movement.

[Pepper]

@Geee

 

The Reverend Martin Luther King would be crying today at the aftermath of the race hustlers.....