“I Am Fundamentally a Clergyman”

Martin Luther King Jr., “The Un-Christian Christian,” Ebony, August 1965, 77.Google Scholar

A 2010 poll of Californians conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute indicates that black Protestants are more likely than mainline Protestants to hear negative messages about homosexuality from their clergy (Adam Muhlendorf, Rabinowitz/Dorf Communications, “New Poll: Only One in Five Californians Say Proposition 8 ‘Good Thing,’ ” news release, July 21, 2010). This finding is generally reflective of related national trends. In 2009, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found in its poll that black Protestants are more likely than mainline Protestants to describe homosexuality as morally wrong. The poll indicated that 76 percent of white evangelicals and 65 percent of black Protestants believe that homosexuality is wrong, compared to 40 percent of mainline Protestants and 39 percent of Catholics (The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, “Majority Continues to Support Civil Unions: Most Still Oppose Same-Sex Marriage,” poll release, October 9, 2009). On a similar note, in a 2012 report on “Changing Attitudes on Gay Marriage,” The Pew Forum indicated that while 46 percent of mainline Protestants and 52 percent of Catholics favored same-sex marriage, only 33 percent of Black Protestants and 14 percent of white evangelical Protestants did so (The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, “Changing Attitudes on Gay Marriage,” pewforum.org/ same-sex-marriage-attitudes).Google Scholar

Members of black churches have gathered together on occasion to deal with negative attitudes toward gays and lesbians (see, for example, Neela Banerjee, “Black Churches’ Attitudes Toward Gay Parishioners Is Discussed at Conference,” The New York Times, January 21, 2006).Google Scholar

For biblical and theological references on this phenomenon, see Horace L. Griffin, Their Own Receive Them Not: African American Lesbians and Gays in Black Churches (Cleveland: Paulist Press, 2006).Google Scholar

For additional critical reaction to perspectives on homosexuality in black churches, see the following essays in Delroy Constantine-Simms, ed. The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities (Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2000), 76–121: Delroy Constantine-Simms, “Is Homosexuality the Greatest Taboo?” 76–87; E. Patrick Johnson, “Feeling the Spirit in the Dark: Expanding Notions of the Sacred in the African American Gay Community,” 88–109; and Horace Griffin, “Their Own Received Them Not: African American Lesbians and Gays in Black Churches,” 110–21.Google Scholar

For a conservative and scholarly treatment of the New Testament on homosexuality that does not dismiss biblical texts as inapplicable to the contemporary world, see Richard B. Hayes, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation—A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1996), 379–406.Google Scholar

For a critical review of the sexual ethics of Billy Graham, see Karen Lebacqz, “‘Keep Yourself Pure’: Social Justice and Sexual Ethics,” in The Legacy of Billy Graham: Critical Reflections on America’s Greatest Evangelist, ed. Michael G. Long (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008): 49–61.Google Scholar

This answer is republished in Donald E. Demaray, ed. Blow, Wind of God: Selected Writings of Billy Graham (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1975), 17–18.Google Scholar

Billy Graham, World Aflame (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1965), 22.Google Scholar

King identified himself as a liberal. See Martin Luther King Jr., “The Sources of Fundamentalism and Liberalism Considered Historically and Psychologically,” The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Volume 1: Called to Serve, January 1929–June 1951, ed. Clayborne Carson et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 239. King’s liberalism, which is distinctly different from the relatively conservative theology of his father, Martin Luther King Sr., has two primary branches: the social gospel tradition preached by Benjamin Mays and the formal personalist tradition King embraced during his years in seminary and graduate school.Google Scholar

Even though King identified himself as a liberal, Lisher questions the depth of King’s commitment to liberalism (Richard Lisher, The Preacher King: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Word That Moved America [New York: Oxford University Press, 1995]). As Lisher puts it, “No matter how many times he repeated the liberal platitudes about the laws of human nature, morality, and history, King could not be a liberal because liberalism’s Enlightenment vision of the harmony of humanity, nature, and God skips a step that is essential to the development of black identity. It has little experience of the evil and suffering borne by enslaved and segregated people in America” (53).Google Scholar

Martin Luther King Jr., “An Autobiography of Religious Development,” The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1:363.Google Scholar

Martin Luther King Jr., “How to Use the Bible in Modern Theological Construction,” The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1:251–56.Google Scholar

I am grateful to Mark D. Jordan of Harvard University for introducing me to Bailey and for helping me understand the history of Christian liberalism during King’s lifetime. Jordan’s new book, Recruiting Young Love: How Christians Talk about Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), offers an excellent history of US Christian perspectives on homosexuality.Google Scholar

See John Wolfenden et al., Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1957).Google Scholar

Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (London: Longmans, Green and Co., Ltd., 1955), x.Google Scholar

See, for example, “The Consultation Clinic: The Church and the Homosexual,” Pastoral Psychology, November 1951, 49–57; quoted in Heather Rachel White’s impressive 2007 Princeton University dissertation (“Homosexuality, Gay Communities, and American Churches: A History of a Changing Religious Ethic, 1946–1977”), 35. The turn to psychiatry was modeled for pastors as early as 1943 by Harry Emerson Fosdick, the famous minister of Riverside Baptist Church in New York City, who publicly recounted his need for psychiatric advice when counseling a homosexual youth. “Doubtless I had heard that there was such a disease as homosexuality, but never knowingly had I met a homosexual, so that when a humiliated youth came to me with that problem, or something that looked like it, involved in his distressing situation, I knew that I must have help” (Harry Emerson Fosdick, On Being a Real Person [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1943], viii; quoted in White, “Homosexuality,” 27). Fosdick did not understand homosexuality as a familiar problem “of religious faith,” but as one “whose genesis and diagnosis I could not guess, and before which I stood helpless” (viii). Martin Luther King Jr. was familiar with Fosdick’s books and used them liberally for his own sermon preparations.Google Scholar

One year before the conference, Robert W. Wood, an American clergy member, published Christ and the Homosexuals: Some Observations (New York: Vantage Press, 1960). Wood used Bailey’s biblical interpretation and Fletcher’s situation ethics to help make the argument that one could be both Christian and homosexual. Wood even argued that “homosexuality is the creation of God (since God is the creator of everything); and as such it is just as good as any other creation of God” (154). The book won critical acclaim in US gay publications, but it fell rather flat elsewhere. In 1960, Wood also picketed on behalf of gay rights at the US Civil Service Commission (see Chapters 6 and 7).Google Scholar

Elizabeth Steel Genne and William H. Genne, ed. Foundations for Christian Family Policy: The Proceedings of the Conference (New York: National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., 1961), 171.Google Scholar

This account draws from the historical sketch in Donald Kuhn, The Church and the Homosexual: A Report on a Consultation (San Francisco: Council on Religion and the Homosexual, 1964); and “Agenda for the Consultation on Church and the Homosexual,” [1964?], LGBT Religious Archives Network (lgbtran.org). This excellent website posts founding documents of the Council on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH).Google Scholar

See John A. T. Robinson, Honest to God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1963);Google Scholar

and Joseph Fletcher, “The New Look in Christian Ethics,” Moral Responsibility: Situation Ethics at Work (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967).Google Scholar

Fletcher’s work is a reprint of a lecture he had given at Harvard Divinity School in 1959. Fletcher would later expand on this theme in his Situation Ethics: The New Morality (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966).Google Scholar

Robinson’s work sparked a fury of criticism. See, for example, Harvey Cox, ed. The Honest to God Debate, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1963).Google Scholar

For critical reactions to Fletcher’s work, see Harvey Cox, ed. The Situation Ethics Debate, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968).Google Scholar

Alastair Heron, ed. Towards a Quaker View of Sex (London: Friends Home Service Committee, 1963), 21.Google Scholar

Heather Rachel White notes that from the mid- to late 1960s major US newspapers ran articles on the efforts of church leaders to decriminalize homosexual practices (White, “Homosexuality,” 6). Examples during King’s lifetime include Emmanuel Permutter, “Catholics and Episcopalians Differ on Law for Sex Deviates,” The New York Times, November 26, 1964; “Church Group Hits Law on Sex Behavior,” The Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1967;Google Scholar

John Dart, “Cleric Urges Churches to Give Homosexuals Aid,” The Los Angeles Times, October 3, 1967;Google Scholar

Edward B. Fiske, “Episcopal Clergyman Here Call Homosexuality Morally Neutral,” The New York Times, November 29, 1967;Google Scholar

and Edward B. Fiske, “Religion: Views on Homosexuals,” The New York Times, December 3, 1967. The leading publication of mainstream Christianity addressed decriminalization during King’s lifetime in “Treading Lightly in a Delicate Subject,” The Christian Century, September 18, 1957, 1092–93;Google Scholar

Winfred Overholser, “Homosexuality? Sin or Disease?” The Christian Century, September 11, 1963, 1100–1101; and “Reappraising Laws on Homosexuality,” The Christian Century, May 26, 1964, 669–70.Google Scholar

In passing references, King had also stated his opposition to premarital sex, extramarital sex, sexual promiscuity, and sexual obsession in the “Advice for Living” column he wrote for Ebony magazine, as well as in a few of his sermons. For examples of the columns, see Martin Luther King Jr., “Advice for Living,” The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Volume 4: Symbol of the Movement, January 1957–December 1958, ed. Clayborne Carson, Susan Carson, Adrienne Clay, Virginia Shadron, Kieran Taylor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 306, 504.Google Scholar

For examples of the sermons, see Martin Luther King Jr., “The Crisis in the Modern Family,” The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Volume 6: Advocate of the Social Gospel, September 1948–March 1963, ed. Clayborne Carson, Susan Carson, Susan Englander, Troy Jackson, and Gerald L. Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 210; “Man’s Sin and God’s Grace,” Papers IV, 382; “Draft of Chapter II, ‘Transformed Nonconformist,’ ” Papers IV, 469. But it is important to note that King never sought to develop, let alone present, any coherent, detailed, and systematic sexual ethic.Google Scholar