Dr. Harding is a historian and onetime confidant of Martin Luther King. Amy brought him on the show mainly to ask about his contribution to Dr. King's historic speech to the Riverside Church in April 1967, in which King announced his opposition to the Vietnam War. Dr. Harding returned again and again to the theme that King's Christianity obliged him not merely to assist, but to embrace, the downtrodden and heavy laden. Thus, in discussing the mainstream media's hostile response to King's latter-day social activism, Dr. Harding suggested that we still have “a hard time dealing with the Martin Luther King of the last three to five years [of his life]”:
We’re having difficulty because this King was saying to himself and to the people all around him, to use his words, “I choose to identify with the underprivileged. I choose to identify with the poor.” In a time like ours, where even our best presidential candidates are stumbling over themselves to identify with the middle class and the needs of the middle class, which is wonderful, marvelous, necessary, but at a time when we seem to have forgotten that we are still the richest nation in the world with a major population of very poor people, Martin King is hard to hear, because he did not forget the poor people. Indeed, the further he went into his life, the more deeply he entered into the experiences of the poor and chose to identify with those experiences in such a way that eventually he was saying, “I must help to organize the poor so that they do not have to live this life consistently in our nation.”And this, with respect to the accusation that King shifted his attention from the domestic poor to issues of international policy:
King saw these issues not simply as what we call foreign policy issues. King was most deeply a pastor, and King saw these issues in terms of what they were doing to the poorest, weakest, most vulnerable people in this country, as well as what they were doing to the poor of other countries, particularly, in this case, Vietnam.In other words, King witnessed the oppression visited upon the powerless by the powerful, the unfortunate by the fortunate, and recognized that his faith required him to side with the former. That was equally true of the Christian ethics of the Methodist church, in which I was raised. Like the Baptist faith of Dr. King and the Catholicism of Mother Theresa, the Methodist church of the 1960s and 1970s placed great emphasis on the Jesus who went among the poor, the desperate, and the cast out. The theme appears again and again in the New Testament, but is perhaps most vividly exhibited in the fact that Jesus touched lepers. As a child I was told that lepers were required to warn others of their approach by calling “Unclean!” as they passed through the streets. Yet Jesus not only went to them, accepted them; he laid his hands on them.
I think this principle -- that it is a great virtue to touch the untouchables -- is the highest and noblest idea the Christian text has to offer. I do not claim that it is unique to Christianity, but I know of no other foundational religious text that lends itself so readily to an ethics of socially active compassion. And yet such an ethics is intrinsically inimical to concentrated power and privilege in all their forms. Not surprisingly, then, it is not Christ's compassion, or indeed any of his ethical teachings, that lent Christianity its historical influence. Those ideas were, at best, a sugary coating for Christianity's memetic exploitation of much deeper psychological and emotional vulnerabilities, and its utility to various political actors in enhancing and securing their own power.
But the memetic mechanisms of historic Christianity are a topic for another time. The point here is that there has always been a good Christianity alongside the bad one. Its followers and practitioners tend to be quieter and less noticeable than better known self-appointed spokesmen. But they are allies of all good-hearted people, and dare I say, may even have things to teach the rest of us -- like how important it is, in the end, to touch the untouchables among us. In attending to the least fortunate, we express the best in ourselves, and that is a meme for whose propagation the Christian gospel deserves considerable credit.