Martin Luther King's Transcendent Conservatism
On November 26, 1960, a 31-year-old Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., stepped into a New York studio to appear on a program called "The Nation's Future." The young reverend was there to debate a Southern conservative journalist named James Kilpatrick on racial segregation, civil disobedience, and the Constitution. America's foremost champion of such disobedience, King had rocketed to national prominence following his leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott three years earlier, which catalyzed the non-violent protests at the heart of the civil-rights movement.
In this debate, King defended the actions of student activists affiliated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC challenged the regime of Jim Crow segregation through sit-in protests at segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina; Montgomery, Alabama; Atlanta, Georgia; and beyond.
Kilpatrick's principal concerns were the protection of property rights and the rule of law. King, by contrast, emphasized moral conscience and the conditions under which respect for law in principle required disobedience to certain laws in practice.
The wide-ranging debate between King and Kilpatrick traversed the terrain of moral philosophy, the wisdom of racial integration, and constitutional law. On the latter, Kilpatrick was frustrated by King's insistence that respect for law was somehow compatible with disobedience of the law. The two disagreed on whether the Constitution preserved the right of business owners to mandate racial segregation. Kilpatrick rejected King's assertion that local laws upholding segregation contradicted federal law and the Constitution.
King, for his part, advocated fidelity to the Constitution while also asserting a moral right to disobey local laws he felt were unjust (and accepting that those who did so would face legal consequences). Kilpatrick then pressed King on a hypothetical: If the Supreme Court of the United States should uphold the constitutional legitimacy of racial discrimination as a right of private business owners, would King and his fellow protesters "abandon all [their] further efforts to sit in? Would [they] say the supreme law of the land has been settled and we have a duty to obey it?" King, for the second time in their discourse, referenced the words of St. Augustine: "An unjust law is no law at all."
Invocations of Augustine notwithstanding, Kilpatrick might have thought King had painted himself into a corner. All American law rests on the Constitution and its legitimate authority. If one argues that a local law is superseded by federal law, disobedience to the local law may be rationally sustained in the name of federal law, and so on with respect to local and federal laws versus the Constitution. But when local, federal, and constitutional law agree, what legitimate basis for disobeying a law could there be that also expresses reverence for the law in principle?
King's references to conscience failed to persuade Kilpatrick. Was this not merely a guise for King to assert for himself the right to say whether a law is just or unjust? On what basis does a man's subjective conscience derive its justification, in the name of law, for defying the law of the land?
King was caught in his radicalism. Or was he? For King offered a means of testing the legitimacy of conscience as grounds to defy a government law — one that appealed to a still higher order of law:
I think this...on the basis of conscience — and how do we test conscience? On the basis of the insights of the ages through saints and prophets, on the basis of the best evidence of the intellectual disciplines of the day, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and...on the basis of all that we find in the religious insights of the ages — and I think we will all agree that any law that degrades human personality is an unjust law, and one's conscience should reveal that to him.
Although King considered contemporary intellectual disciplines, his ultimate evaluation of a law rested on discerning natural law as revealed across the chain of generations "through saints and prophets" and "the religious insights of the ages." King's view of the Constitution may or may not have revealed him as a political liberal vis-à-vis legal interpretation, but in his reverence for the Constitution and the divine origins of just law, he showed his commitment to non-violence and civil disobedience to be grounded in a transcendent philosophical conservatism — a disposition only recognizable to those who understand true conservatism as a cast of mind that defies contemporary ideologies in favor of truth that proves itself across time.
Odd as it might sound to contemporary ears, King's philosophical conservatism was part of the same tradition espoused by the man many call "the father of American conservatism" — Russell Kirk. Kirk and King never crossed paths so far as is known, though they would have starkly opposed one another on the political battlefield. Of 1964 Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, King said that he was "the most dangerous man in America," that he gave aid and comfort to the forces of segregation, and that he "gave respectability to views totally alien to the democratic process." And yet, some of Goldwater's words with which King might have taken issue flowed from the pen of Kirk, a mentor of Goldwater's who wrote some of the latter's key campaign speeches.
It is striking, then, that in retrospect, King and Kirk converged on certain first principles that rightfully mark King himself as part of a broader tradition of philosophical conservatism in America — even if neither man was likely to have realized this at the time. Both the political left and right today have much to gain from revisiting that convergence.
FROM PHILOSOPHY TO IDEOLOGY
The early to middle years of the 1950s saw the birth of two movements that would go on to define the parallel trajectories of American political and social life. The first was the civil-rights movement, and within it the non-violence of direct activism that had its origins in King's thought and the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955. Two years earlier, a book written by a little-known history professor at Michigan State College by the name of Russell Kirk effectively ignited the modern conservative movement.
One can easily identify a tradition of American liberalism as old as the American experiment itself. Perhaps its thesis statement appears in the Declaration of Independence, with Thomas Jefferson's assertion that "all men are created equal." But while conservatives and historians today might recognize a conservative tradition just as long, it was only when Kirk published The Conservative Mind that such a tradition became widely recognizable in those terms.
Until 1953, no one had broadly articulated a cohesive worldview that opposed liberalism's perceived errors. Conservatism was understood as a mere descriptor — an attitudinal disposition perhaps, but not a worldview. Kirk changed all this. Henry Regnery, whose namesake company published the book, reflected on its legacy more than 40 years after its initial release:
The impact of The Conservative Mind when it first appeared in 1953 is hard to imagine now. After the long domination of liberalism, with its adulation of the "the common man," its faith in mechanistic political solutions to all human problems, its rejection of the tragic and heroic...such sentiments as "the unbought grace of life," the "eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead," a view of politics as "the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which is above nature," came like rain after a long drought.
"It would be too much to say that the postwar conservative movement began with the publication of Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind," Regnery concluded, "but it was this book that gave it its name and, more importantly, coherence." Indeed, as much as popular memory might grasp for the names of William F. Buckley, Jr., and Barry Goldwater in recalling the pivotal figures who launched conservatism into a formidable and enduring national movement, each of these men would have quickly acknowledged Kirk as the key progenitor of the modern conservative tradition. Buckley put it well: "It is inconceivable even to imagine, let alone hope for, a dominant conservative movement in America without Kirk's labor."
Kirk gave coherence to the body of ideas that would eventually spawn movements like the Moral Majority, the Reagan Revolution, the Contract with America, and the Tea Party. But the conservatism of Russell Kirk was, in many respects, of a different quality than that which congealed into the conservative movement in the aftermath of The Conservative Mind.
Kirk's is a philosophy that valorizes community over the autonomous individual. As Kirk wrote: "True conservatism...rises at the antipodes from individualism. Individualism is social atomism; conservatism is community of spirit." This rests uneasily alongside the conservatism of, say, a Rush Limbaugh, who once remarked that "rugged individualism is what built this country" — an individualism grounded in enlightened self-interest and faith in oneself as the master of one's destiny.
Kirk's conservatism was one that considered materialism, even as a consequence of capitalism, destructive to the human soul. It also envisioned true conservative statesmanship as safeguarding the higher values and traditions of Western civilization. In The Conservative Mind, Kirk bemoaned the spiritual malaise brought about by state centralization and economic competition, maligning crass capitalism and socialism side by side:
Too stupid even to glimpse the necessity for revering and obeying the law that shelters him from social revolution, the capitalist lacks capacity sufficient for the administration of the society he has made his own....The man of thought already [has] been debased by the rule of capitalism or state socialism — two sides of a coin....Democracy, simultaneously the ally and dupe of this soulless material civilization, fails to fulfill the duties of sacrifice and leadership; so the structure of social organization collapses.
Kirk also wrote: "Only just leadership can redeem society from the mastery of the ignoble elite." Great conservative statesmen like Edmund Burke (whom Kirk identified as the true founder of the conservative tradition) "knew that economics and politics are not independent sciences: they are no more than manifestations of a general order, and that order is moral."
English philosopher Roger Scruton also acknowledged Kirk as a pivotal figure in the history of American conservatism, having proved it was "a proper philosophy" that could "hold its own against socialism and liberalism as a coherent body of ideas." Nevertheless, Scruton had criticisms of Kirk's conservatism, arguing that the latter's "political philosophy...is in the end unrealistic, and doesn't actually face up to the reality of the modern world." On Kirk's theoretical understandings of conservatism, he added: "I would put much more emphasis on law than he does, I suspect, and less on the transcendental and religious and metaphysical background."
In these critiques, one can begin to see why modern American conservatism began to diverge from Kirk's conception as decisively as it did. A bridge connects the world of political philosophy to the world of political practice, but once one has crossed that bridge, the mundane yet hostile implications of the competition for power assert themselves in both partisan politics and economics. While the religiosity of American conservatism became and has remained pronounced, the inner life of the American conservative movement has been driven more by fierce commitments to rugged individualism, economic opportunity, and a rhetoric of religious values not often attended by an emphasis on their corresponding virtues.
The philosophical conservatism of Kirk was romantic, spiritual, and also moral: It placed a deep emphasis on virtue, along with wisdom and prudence, as a necessary element for forming the character of individuals, communities, and civilization itself, and as the vital strapping of moral order. But in an era where the hard currency of power and influence is measured in votes, dollars, individual rights, intellectual and technological innovation, and material progress, Kirk's emphasis on the metaphysical, the spiritual, and the communal might have come to appear as so much window dressing on the more tangible concerns of prosperity, law, and liberty. Conservatism morphed over time from philosophy to ideology, leaving Kirk behind.
PILGRIMAGE TO NON-VIOLENCE
As foundational elements of Russell Kirk's philosophy now find themselves quietly neglected by the tradition he consolidated, many of these same elements were present, though articulated in very different form and fashion, in the philosophy of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
King's philosophy of non-violence was no mere tactical formula for effective activism; it was a worldview unto itself, resting on concrete metaphysical assumptions, a clear perspective on human nature, and a vision of the societal ideal proceeding from an understanding of the divine. King's own philosophy assumed a moral order and the reality of the human soul. To him, philosophical non-violence was virtue oriented and rooted in a higher conception of community, making it broadly resonant with Kirk's articulation of a "community of spirit" founded on richer soil than rugged individualism or the collectivist engineering of the state.
One cannot understand King's philosophy of non-violence without understanding his theology of love. He believed that love was a spiritual power that could beget social transformation. Love, in King's view, was the substance of God, indicative of God's benevolent will for the universe, and the foundational virtue anchoring the inner life of the practitioner of non-violence. King preached the following a week before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the segregated busing policies of the state of Alabama, in November 1956:
I still believe that love is the most durable power in the world. Over the centuries men have sought to discover the highest good. This has been the chief quest of ethical philosophy....What is the summum bonum of life?...It is love. This principle stands at the center of the cosmos.
He concluded this sermon by quoting the first letter of John: "God is love." Love in this sense, as King later explained, is distinct from sentiment:
In speaking of love at this point, we are not referring to some sentimental emotion. It would be nonsense to urge men to love their oppressors in an affectionate sense. "Love" in this connection means understanding good will....It is the love of God working in the lives of men.
In practice, philosophical non-violence entails severe moral discipline. The stoic equanimity with which King faced the wall of state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the poise with which demonstrators prosecuted the sit-in strikes, all emanated from a cultivated inner mastery aimed at refraining from not just physical violence, but also "internal violence of spirit." This meant that activists in the non-violent movement were obliged not to indulge in hateful thoughts toward their opponents — even as they received hateful treatment for their troubles.
As King understood, virtue is an inward reality. It has its seeds in the higher parts of our nature. But it is forged through action, discipline, and reflection. Like a series of concentric circles, the ordered will of God is linked to the proper ordering of the human soul, and the ordering of the human soul to the health of society. Kirk would have agreed.
Kirk did not have a pronounced relationship to love as a virtue the way King did, nor did King emphasize prudence as an anchor for righteousness the way that Kirk did. Kirk was undoubtedly more concerned with preserving key traditions and institutions of Western civilization than was King, while King summoned his moral urgency to challenge Americans to live up to the higher standards of Christian virtue.
In each of their dispositions, however, both Kirk and King were greatly invested in the overarching prerogatives of God's justice in society. Each saw this justice anchored in the moral reform of man. Thus does Kirk quote with approval the journalist and Christian apologist Paul Elmer More, who wrote in the early 20th century that justice is "the inner state of the soul when, under the command of the will to righteousness, reason guides and the desires obey....Justice is happiness, happiness is justice."
King did not depart from the essential components of this view, though he invoked them in a higher conception of social justice — one that stood in tension politically with both Kirk and More's skepticism of the term:
Finally, the method of nonviolence is based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice....[The nonviolent resister] knows that in his struggle for justice he has cosmic companionship. This belief that God is on the side of truth and justice comes down to us from the long tradition of our Christian faith. There is something at the very center of our faith which reminds us that Good Friday may reign for a day, but ultimately it must give way to the triumphant beat of the Easter drums.
For this reason, King aligned with Kirk on more than just the spiritual roots of justice: The two also recognized the ultimate limitations of reason.
THE BELOVED COMMUNITY
The concept of "reason" stands on tenuous ground in the conservative canon. Although conservatives valorize wisdom, they tend to view reason as an outgrowth of classical liberalism that flattened the realm of truth into the realm of the rational. Thus Kirk said of Edmund Burke that he "faced the necessity of re-stating, in the Age of Reason, the premises of men who have faith in an enduring order of life." The Enlightenment tendency to cast aside the transcendent in favor of a narrow and increasingly mechanical conception of reason marked the beginning of attempts to dislodge the wisdom of generations, provoking Burke and the tradition of philosophical conservatism in response.
Conservative thinkers do value reason; we can see as much in the words of Paul Elmer More. But when reason is divorced from reverence, spirit, and what Kirk called the "permanent things," it ceases to be a reliable path toward truth. This, perhaps more than anything, is the fatal flaw of liberalism to the conservative mind.
On this point, King and Kirk converge. King wrote the following in his essay "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence," reflecting on his path from theological liberalism toward a more conservative approach to human nature:
At this stage of my development I was a thoroughgoing liberal....I became so enamored of the insights of liberalism that I almost fell into the trap of accepting uncritically everything that came under its name. I was absolutely convinced of the natural goodness of man and the natural power of human reason.
King went on to assess the limits of reason as represented in the liberal tradition: "Reason, devoid of the purifying power of faith, can never free itself from distortions and rationalizations." Without the transcendent, reason becomes a means of justifying man's own prejudices. Intellect alone is a paltry power in the absence of the spirit.
King's chief complaint with respect to theological liberalism, however, was its conception of human nature — primarily its failure to acknowledge the realities and implications of sin:
The more I observed the tragedies of history and man's shameful inclination to choose the low road, the more I came to see the depths and strength of sin....I also came to see that liberalism's superficial optimism concerning human nature caused it to overlook the fact that reason is darkened by sin. The more I thought about human nature the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin causes us to use our minds to rationalize our actions.
Without recognizing the reality of sin, one can hardly be a conservative thinker, as any serious reader of Kirk would affirm. Kirk himself argues in The Conservative Mind that "belief in the dogma of original sin has been prominent in the system of every great conservative thinker," and that "[r]ecognition of the abiding power of sin is a cardinal tenet in conservatism."
One key way man's sinful nature expresses itself in the Christian tradition is in its tendency to elevate the material over the spiritual and the ideal. Of this tendency, Kirk was wary, revealing a sensitivity to this corruption that many conservatives who followed him have failed to possess. He invoked the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville, that great spectator of the American character, to make this case:
A native of the United States clings to this world's goods as if he were certain never to die; and he is so hasty in grasping at all within his reach that one would suppose he was constantly afraid of not living long enough to enjoy them. He clutches everything, he holds nothing fast, but soon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh gratifications.
In a 1967 address, King himself quoted a foreign critic of American society (referenced only as an Asian writer) in identifying materialism as one of America's "three great evils," alongside racism and militarism:
You call your thousand material devices labor saving machinery, yet you are forever busy. With the multiplying of your machinery, you grow increasingly fatigued, anxious, nervous, dissatisfied. Whatever you have you want more and wherever you are you want to go somewhere else. Your devices are neither time saving nor soul saving machinery. They are so many sharp spurs which urge you on to invent more machinery and to do more business.
In Kirk's analysis and that of Tocqueville (on which Kirk leaned heavily), this deadening of the "higher faculties of man" in pursuit of endless material absorption was not an American quality so much as an effect of democracy's leveling influence more generally. Democracy, as the great manifestation of liberal sentiments across the centuries, the mechanism by which hierarchy, noble aristocracy, and the politics of prudence were made to retreat, incurs Kirk's profound skepticism alongside that of nearly the whole body of conservative thinkers whom Kirk cites favorably in The Conservative Mind — Tocqueville among them. King, by contrast, was one of 20th-century America's great champions of democracy. One might consider this a critical divergence in Kirk's and King's philosophical points of view.
Yet Tocqueville also concedes the inevitability of democracy. He tells us, as Kirk recounts, that he is not necessarily against democracy, but rather finds himself opposed to the eradication of "variety, individuality, [and] progress" that the homogenizing will of the majority tends to bring about. The waning of religious reverence, Tocqueville understood, is part of a possible course of democratic decline that leaves human beings numb to one another in a distinctionless, materialistic, unfeeling multitude:
Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest....As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone.
A virtuous democratic citizen, in the eyes of Tocqueville, would seek to resist this fate — a fate in which, in the words of Kirk, "all ancient affections and groupings have been eradicated and materialism has been substituted for traditional duties." In his own way, King stood as a model for such a citizen — indeed, such a champion of democracy.
King's vision of democracy was one wherein we would see in the individual the imago Dei, or the image of God. It was not a vision of democracy rooted in a mere reactionary acceptance of the will of the majority — how could it be, given that King led the civil-rights crusade to defend the rights of the minority and the individual? King's vision of democracy was also not materialistic, nor voiding of human connection. He preached against a vision of social integration in which "men are physically desegregated and spiritually segregated, where elbows are together and hearts are apart....It leaves us with a stagnant equality of sameness rather than a constructive equality of oneness."
In the end, King's dream of democracy was rooted in the spiritual vitality of his vision of community. He called this vision the "Beloved Community": a society in which we are reconciled to each other across our differences, a reconciliation brought about by the persuasive moral power of love that yields a unifying commitment to the power of truth. It would seem like a wildly impractical notion — except that one can plausibly argue that King, in his practical activism, moved society a step in its direction. The humanizing cultural changes brought to bear on American society by virtue of the civil-rights movement and King's philosophy of non-violence continue to resonate.
Kirk, too, founded his philosophical conservatism on deep and spiritual commitments to community. "The conservative is concerned with the recovery of true community," he wrote. Kirk tended to emphasize the preservation of "local energies," "voluntary endeavor," and "a social order distinguished by multiplicity and diversity," but this simply restates the sanctity of human personality, a principle on which Kirk and King converge. This sanctity derives, in each man's worldview, from the molding hand of God. One cannot help but hear in King's vision of the Beloved Community a vision of a society in which grace reigns, and does so in a way that transcends sectarianism, racial differences, and the politics of tribe, even as it does not force humanity into uniformity.
This hardly sounds far from the 20th-century English historian Alfred Cobban's description of Edmund Burke, as recounted by Kirk in The Conservative Mind: "His ideal is neither Protestant Erastianism nor Catholic Theocracy; it is much more like the kingdom of God on earth."
TRANSCENDING IDEOLOGY
The conservative movement has endured wild swings in its relationship to King's legacy. One can observe this through the career of the greatest statesman the movement ever produced — Ronald Reagan. A billowing font of opposition to King's political agenda in his earlier years, President Reagan ultimately signed the King Holiday bill into law. Nevertheless, the social-justice movement that has long stood as the archenemy of political conservatism in America has since claimed King's activist legacy.
In 2014, this writer was a Republican nominee for Congress challenging California congresswoman Maxine Waters, one of America's most radical yet longest serving African American representatives. At the time, King was experiencing a surge of approval from within the conservative movement, based on the supposed revelation that the reverend himself was really a Republican as well as a Christian conservative.
This, of course, was not true — King was never a Republican, stood well to the political left on most issues, and theologically positioned himself somewhere between liberal and neo-orthodox. But the mistaken notion was based on real circumstances: that there were still many black Republicans in the early 1960s, that Southern Democrats opposed the civil-rights agenda, and that King's father was a stout Republican. When paired with the natural tendency to associate the black church with cultural conservatism and the genuine contrast between King's integrationist rhetoric and the militant identity politics of the anti-racist movement that followed him, it resulted in a happy moment in which conservatives discovered a renewed interest in King's life and work.
More recently, certain conservative commentators have painted King as the enemy of conservatism once again, the patron saint of the "woke" phenomenon they bemoan as destroying the dream of a colorblind America — the very dream King helped inspire. Arguments in this vein are as specious as the claim is extreme. The desire is to link King to the worst of modern identity politics. But King's successors have been about as faithful to his philosophy as those of Russell Kirk have been to his — maybe less so.
But can we then say that King was a philosophical conservative even as he espoused the political views of a leftist — perhaps even a quasi-socialist? Using Russell Kirk's philosophy as our standard, it would not be a contradiction in terms to do so. Kirk said of Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville that they were both liberals and conservatives; a distinction of the same sort applies to King.
To dwell on such questions of categorization, however, is to sacrifice too much to the ideological rigidities that squeeze the philosophy out of politics. As Kirk taught, true conservatism transcends ideology. In a later edition of The Conservative Mind, he added that it "is unnecessary, indeed, that a scholar call himself 'a conservative' to share substantially this understanding."
By reviving ancient truths both moral and social — truths discerned through the accrued wisdom of the ages, sought at the foot of the divine — King and Kirk led and seeded, respectively, the two most consequential movements of the 20th century. Their successors, left and right, broadly fail to evoke a similar reverence for, or even remember, the vital core of virtue that underlies all worthwhile human endeavors.
Those of us who aspire to the wisdom on which King and Kirk built their legacies would do well to honor the deeper philosophical commitments of those two men. For in them we see the true transcendence of conservatism.
