Martin Luther King, Jr. is America’s model Christian leader and true founding father

What does it look like to be an apprentice of Jesus Christ in America? What does it look like to be a community of Jesus Christ apprentices in America?

Since Jesus Christ didn’t live in America, I look for Americans who live or lived like Jesus Christ.

History seems a good place to start. Yet in the American pantheon, we find mostly men of war.

The life and teaching of Jesus Christ is out of place among such men. The one who taught love for enemies, mercy for those who don’t deserve it, and peacemaking as the DNA of God’s children seems out of place among our American heroes.

And yet there is one man in the American pantheon who put the teaching of Jesus Christ into public practice. There is one man in the American pantheon whose “beloved community” resembles the kingdom of heaven.

That man is Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In Dr. King’s time, the men who ruled America told us that might and violence were the only way to preserve and protect what is best about America. The Jim Crow South and Vietnam War exposed this claim for what it was: Madness. A madness that made us less, not more, American. Less, not more, Christian.

Dr. King was different. He took the words of Jesus Christ literally and put them into practice. Dr. King loved his enemy. He made peace on those who made war on him. He showed mercy to those who showed him no mercy. He taught those who followed him to do the same. Much like those who followed Jesus Christ, they were people society deemed “indecent,” “less-than,” “morally degenerate,” “not smart enough to make it without our help,” “unclean,” and “uppity.”

Those who practiced what Dr. King preached–what Jesus Christ taught–became the “beloved community” that Dr. King envisioned and the “kingdom of heaven” Jesus Christ established.

Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, but Thomas Jefferson did not practice what he preached. Jefferson was a politician who was not above saying one thing, but doing another. You could make a strong case that no public leader in America actually tried to live up to the Declaration of Independence until at least the Civil War. It was a short-lived, small-scale experiment that Jim Crow killed in its infancy.

Most people may associate Dr. King’s civil rights movement in the 1960s with black people. I think Dr. King would say that misses the point.

Dr. King’s movement was not about black people; it was about all people. Dr. King’s dream was not a dream for black people; it was a dream for America. America as it is meant to be did not start with the Declaration of Independence in 1776; America as it is meant to be started with Dr. King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in 1963. That speech, more than the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or the Federalist Papers, expresses and imagines what America could be.

And Dr. King and his “beloved community” of misfits practiced what they preached. They lived his dream even in the face of deadly and violent opposition. They loved their enemies. They made peace. They showed mercy. While the men in Washington almost lost America by waging war in Vietnam, Dr. King and his beloved community saved America by waging peace in the Jim Crow South.

For these reasons, Dr. King is more a founding father of our nation than any man who lived in 1776.

Dr. King, however, was not aiming to be American as much as he was aiming to be Christian. He was not aiming to build America as much as he was trying to form the “beloved community” of Christ. Dr. King looked at the life and teaching of Jesus Christ and tried as best he could to make it a present reality in 1960s America. The movement he started and the people he led give us the best glimpse yet at what Christianity looks like when put into practice in American society.

The life and work of Dr. King is what Christians and the church of Christ need to examine and imitate now.

That makes today, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, perhaps the most important observance of the year–both for Americans and Christians in America.