Civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. became a global hero after his assassination in 1968, and President Ronald Reagan cemented his legacy in 1983 by declaring his birthday a national holiday.
MLK still had detractors.
Most of them were academics who disagreed with his political views, but these arguments were mostly found in publications that few people read. For the most part, MLK was widely accepted, from the religious right to secular humanists, and for decades, no one questioned his civil rights legacy or his Christian faith.
There's a new breed of MLK detractors. Specifically, there is a hardline faction of Trinitarian Christians who are so convinced that "Jesus is God" that they condemn anyone who questions "the divinity of Christ." For these hardliners, the statements "Jesus is God" and "the divinity of Christ" mean the same thing.
However, some Christians do not consider the two statements to be synonymous.
Some Christians believe Jesus was God's divine son, but Christ is not coequal with God. Other Christians believe Jesus' moral teachings were divinely inspired; nonetheless, the historical Jesus never claimed to be God. This group of hardline Trinitarian Christians deems these theological perspectives heretical, and they feel that anyone who argues Jesus was not coequal with God is not a "real" Christian.
These hardliners claim that MLK rejected the notion that "Jesus is God," and they have set out on a mission to correct the historical record by informing anybody who would listen that MLK was never a Christian and should not be remembered as one.
Where are they getting this?
Coretta Scott King, MLK's wife, founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project in 1985 in collaboration with Stanford University. Their goal was to publish in numerous volumes all of MLK's major speeches, published writings, sermons, correspondences, and unpublished manuscripts.
One of the papers in this collection is a college essay titled The Humanity and Divinity of Jesus, which MLK wrote when he was 20 or 21 years old.
These hardline Trinitarian Christians have used a few statements from this essay to argue that MLK denied Christ's divinity. When these statements are taken from the essay and presented to the public as independent views on Jesus' divinity, MLK appears to deny that Jesus was divine, but this also takes MLK's statements out of context.
The hardliners highlight the following sentences from MLK's essay: The more orthodox Christians have seen his divinity as an inherent quality metaphysically bestowed. Jesus, they have told us, is the Preexistent Logos. He is the word made flesh. He is the second person of the Trinity. He is very God of very God, of one substance with the Father, who for our salvation came down from Heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary. Certainly, this view of the divinity of Christ presents many modern minds with insuperable difficulties. Most of us are not willing to see the union of the human and divine in a metaphysical incarnation.
The last sentence, according to these hardliners, is MLK's denial of Jesus' divinity, which disqualifies him from being a Christian. Now, let us put MLK's words into proper context.
Before that paragraph, MLK wrote: The conflict that Christians often have over the question of Jesus' divinity is not over the validity of the fact of his divinity but over the question of how and when he became divine. MLK states clearly that the dispute isn't over the fact of Jesus's divinity; it's over "when" and "how" he became divine.
MLK's paper doesn't address the "when." It focuses on the "how."
Orthodox Christians answered the "how" question by claiming a metaphysical incarnation. In other words, Jesus was born God, but a central tenet of Christian theology is that he is both entirely human and completely divine. A metaphysical incarnation suggests that Jesus is more God than human.
MLK's essay accuses orthodox Christians of denying Jesus' humanity.
MLK wrote: The orthodox attempt to explain the divinity of Jesus in terms of an inherent metaphysical substance within him seems to me quite inadequate. To say that the Christ, whose example of living we are bid to follow, is divine in an ontological sense is actually harmful and detrimental.
Why is this harmful?
Because the term Christian refers to being "Christ-like." Jesus provides an example for believers to follow. That means there must be human attributes to aspire to; otherwise, Christianity is a setup for failure because Christians cannot imitate God.
MLK explained Jesus's divinity in human terms. He stated: We may find the divinity of Christ not in his substantial unity with God but in his consciousness and in his unique dependence upon God. His devotion to God and the intimacy of his trust in God account for his status as the ultimate revelation of God. It is the work of a man who has most likely surrendered his life to the divine spirit.
If the hardliners claim that MLK is not a trinitarian Christian, they may have a valid point. However, insisting that MLK is not a Christian due to his nontrinitarian beliefs is a profoundly false accusation.