On This MLK Day

 So I teach MLK's "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" to my freshman, ostensibly as an emulateable example of parallelism, amplification, and other effective rhetorical strategies.  Of course, given the subject matter,  the class discussion inevitably enters more meaty directions.

For example, most students nod along approvingly at Dr. King's virtuoso take-down of racist thought and institutions, and his justification for disobeying unjust laws, and of the need for "creative extremists."  Let me be clear before proceeding that I deeply admire Dr. King's accomplishments, radical non-violence, and uncompromising moral clarity; but the complications begin immediately, the moment I ask what would happen if we all decided to disobey all laws we deemed unjust?  (The Southern segregationists, after all, thought integration was unjust). "Anarchy" comes the confessed student response.

Where then do we draw the line between social stability and "creative extremism," between needed and unneeded tension?  That line is as difficult to parse today as in 1963.

At LDSBC, I complicate this dilemma further by pointing out that, in the LDS faith, we have an Article of Faith and Scriptural commands to "obey the laws of the land," "for he that keepeth the laws of God hath no need to break the laws of the land" (D&C 58:21).  There is no qualifier for whether the laws be just or unjust.  So where then do we stand in relation to Dr. King?

I tell them how the Church was able to build a Temple in Soviet East Germany during the Cold War precisely because the Saints trapped there kept "the laws of the land," and the Communist authorities knew that; obeying "the laws of the land" moved the work forward.

More darkly, I tell the story of the LDS youth working for the Underground in Nazi Germany, who listened to BBC Radio and spread the word about Nazi atrocities and how the war effort was actually going, and for their troubles were not only executed by the state, but also excommunicated by the Church; they had broken the commandment of God to "obey the laws of the land."

And of course, when Missouri passed the flatly-unjust Extermination Order, those Saints obeyed the law of the land and left.

I give 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 preparing to cross the plains from Illinois to Utah, when all of sudden a black man from nearby Missouri appears, 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 hide 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?

After a brief silence, the super-majority of students confess that they would help the slave hide--even the students who only a minute ago claimed that we should just always do whatever the Prophet has said.  The more thoughtful say they would pray about it--then help the black man anyways.

Some even admit that they would help him because their conscious 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're saying. (Your conscious takes precedence over God?  I don't ask that rhetorically) (To quoth Thoreau, "Why then does every man have a conscious?").

To date, only two students have said they wouldn't help, and in both cases their concern was about how violation of federal law would affect the safety of their families, not about whether they squared with the "law of the land."

Then, to complicate the issue even further, I point out that those aforementioned German youth were later posthumously reinstated into full fellowship by a frankly-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"; and as one student helpfully pointed out, although missionaries are forbidden to swim, if you see a small child drowning in a pool, I sure hope you jump in to save her.

Most students, then, resolve this conflict between conscious 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 which commandments trump which?  When two commandments conflict, which do we obey?  What is our criteria?  And we are back where we started.

What suddenly struck me this last week as I taught MLK's "Letter," is that this clash of commandments is not peripheral to doctrinal consideration, but are actually central, even fundamental to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  No less a doctrinal-conservative as Boyd K. Packer has taught that Justice and Mercy are eternal principles, yet are also in opposition to each other, an irreconcilable paradox that it took the awful price of the Atonement to resolve.  "Mercy cannot rob justice," nor can justice rob mercy.  The 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, but central to religious experience.

This fraught tension is best articulated in Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling," his unparallelled analysis of 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 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 the just laws of God themselves (namely, thou shalt not kill).

This is the paradox of faith; the commandments can be contradictory, the ethical principles at play seem to cancel each other out.  Why then, asks Kierkegaard, does Abraham not just throw his hands in the air and just 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 such would not have let him off the hook; even my atheist students at SLCC recognize that the tension between social order and social justice is a fine line not so easily resolved or distinguished--David Foster Wallace said we all worship something, and whether that's our God or our own personal set of inviolable ethical principles, still there is going to be contradictions between our most deeply-held beliefs.

Kierkegaard stands in awe of Abraham, then, because Abraham effects the most sublime example of what Kierkegaard coins "the leap of faith"--contrary to certain critics, faith is not an uncritical acceptance of wild fancy over fact, oh no, faith actually accepts the presence of skepticism and doubt, faith beholds the irresolvable tensions quite soberly.  If our Church teaches that doubt cannot exist where faith is, it's not because faith ontologically eliminates doubt, but rather because faith faces down doubt straight in the eye.  Faith is not knowing everything and knowing you don't know everything, yet leaping anyways.  Faith embraces the awful paradox.

For Abraham, the paradox was resolved by the ram in the thicket; for Christ, it was resolved by the cross and the resurrection.  As for us and MLK, it is resolved on a case-by-case basis, leaving us to grapple with the tensions and paradoxes at all times.  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. Perhaps this is why the Atonement had to be infinite, to account for the full paradox of faith.