King’s Conservative Mind
His was not a world of moral relativism, but of self-evident truth and moral law.

any Americans will be invoking the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., looking to his words and example for inspiration today. They ought to think twice if they assume King is nothing more than the voice of modern liberalism.

There are many things, of course, which conservatives do not like about Dr. King. For one, he became too close, later in his career, to the welfare state. He was enamored of the theology of the Social Gospel, the movement that undermined much of mainstream Protestantism in the twentieth century. Later in life he was a vocal opponent of American involvement in the Vietnam. And we now know that in his scholarship and personal life King was far from perfect.

Nevertheless, let me suggest three ways in which King's message is profoundly conservative, and relevant today.

First, of course, concerns the question of race. King dreamed of a nation for his children where they would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. He dreamed of a color-blind society, based on the equality of all Americans and their sharing of equal unalienable rights.

The American dream, King said at Lincoln University in 1961, "says that each individual has certain basic rights that are neither conferred by nor derived from the state. To discover where they came from it is necessary to move back behind the dim mist of eternity, for they are God-given. . . . The American dream reminds us that every man is heir to the legacy of worthiness."

An agenda that advocates quotas, counting by race and set-asides takes us away from King's vision.

Second, Dr. King believed in moral character. He spoke of self-improvement and self-help, in both moral and practical terms, and believed in the work ethic, and thrift, and spoke against crime and disorderly conduct.

He also stressed the importance of the traditional family. Indeed, King's fears about black family breakdown led him to become one of the few civil-rights leaders not to reject Daniel Patrick Moynihan's controversial 1965 report that warned of rising illegitimacy rates among blacks.

This forgotten aspect of King's thought is told in the current issue of City Journal by Joel Schwartz, who suggests that King turned to the welfare state when he became disheartened by the emergence of the black underclass.

Third, Dr. King embraced not multiculturalism but the Western tradition of knowledge, wisdom and faith, reaching back through the likes of Reinhold Niebuhr, John Locke, and Martin Luther to Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, and Plato. And he firmly embraced this nation and its commitment to ideals rooted in that great tradition.

"When these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters," King wrote in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, "they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence."

King's was not a world of moral relativism, but of self-evident truth and moral law. When he spoke of his dream he was appealing not to what divides us but to what we have in common, to the larger principles and ideals which transcend our diversity.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s understanding of these things — human equality, individual character and moral truth — has great implications for our politics and policies today. While all Americans recall his ringing words, honest liberals, and discerning conservatives ought to remind us of King's real legacy.