View this post on the web at [link removed]

In a desperate attempt to turn attention from non-stop questions about the Epstein files, Trump released a quarter million pages of FBI files on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. yesterday. According to David Garrow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of King, the 6,000 digitized documents now available via the National Archives added little to public knowledge. “I saw nothing that struck me as new,” he told the New York Times.
Not only is the information old news. The obsession with discrediting King is older than the FBI itself. J. Edgar Hoover, founder of the FBI, inherited his suspicion of Black leaders from mentors in military intelligence who surveilled King’s father and grandfather before him. After the March on Washington in 1963, Hoover’s FBI called King “the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation,” and doubled down on a counter-intelligence strategy to discredit him. King was marked as dangerous because the moral movement he was leading was effective. It was exposing the policy violence of a system resistant to change.
Trump has taken-up the same tired tactics Hoover deployed to try to deflect the critical questions of his own base. But Trump doesn’t seem to realize that by going back in time to Hoover vs King, he has placed himself on the losing side of a moral struggle at the heart of the American story.
Like most strategies of the Trump regime, this attempt to deflect by discrediting King seems to have bubbled up from the network of organizations that connect Trump to his currently disgruntled base. Ahead of the King holiday last year, Charlie Kirk began arguing that the MAGA faithful should stop celebrating King.
Kirk runs Turning Point USA, the well-funded youth arm of MAGA’s Christian nationalist shadow network. He’s built an organization to manipulate sincere young people’s earnest desire for righteousness by using cultural wedge issues to persuade them that God hates Democrats. If Trump isn’t perfect, at least he isn’t a godless Democrat, this movement says. And they say it on repeat through social media posts, podcasts, and flashy conferences. Last year, Kirk floated the idea that King should also be smeared as godless.
It was a strategy right out of Hoover’s FBI: discredit the movement with the moral authority to exposes Trump’s hypocrisy by attacking the personal character of a moral leader most Americans honor.
This is what Trump hopes the FBI file dump will offer his base – not answers to the questions they have been asking about his association with Epstein, but a satisfying deflection. It’s a strategy designed to make the MAGA base ask, if King was a flawed man, who are they to criticize Trump?
But Trump doesn’t understand a foundational truth of the gospel King preached and the nonviolent philosophy that guided his moral leadership: the power of truth-force isn’t in the perfection of those who embrace it. In fact, the power of a moral movement lies in its capacity to work through people who are honest about their imperfections.
In a 1963 sermon to his home congregation at Ebeneezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Dr. King asked the congregation to consider how this gospel truth was part of their own experience:
Can you remember the surprise and disappointment that gripped you when you discovered that after all of your sincere effort—you discovered that after all that you had done through your resolutions to get rid of it—the old habit was still there? And out of amazement you found yourself asking, “Why could I not cast it out?” And in this moment of despair, you decided to take your problem to God.
Instead of asking him to work through you, you said, “God, you must solve this problem for me. I can’t do anything about it.” As the days and months unfolded, you discovered that the evil was still with you. God would not cast it out… .
What then is the way out? Not by our own efforts. And not by a purely external help from God. One cannot remove an evil habit by mere resolution. Nor can it be done by simply calling on God to do the job.
The spiritual truth King asked his flock to consider is one that was highlighted centuries earlier by his namesake, Martin Luther, who became the founder of Protestant Christianity by emphasizing how divine grace empowers human beings at precisely the point when we recognize our own weakness.
This is the bedrock reality of faith that Donald Trump finds personally offensive. At a forum in Iowa when he was running for President for the first time in 2015, Trump was asked if he had ever asked God for forgiveness. His answer: “I am not sure I have. I just go on and try to do a better job from there. I don’t think so. I think if I do something wrong, I think, I just try and make it right. I don’t bring God into that picture. I don’t.”
We’ve both been pastors long enough to know that someone who cannot see his own need for forgiveness is dangerous to other people. King knew this too. He preached that the moral force of grace which works through imperfect people also has the power to bring about justice in an imperfect society. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s mission to “Save the Soul of America” wasn’t about converting individual Americans to Christianity; it was a commitment to put social grace into practice through a moral movement that anyone could join – not by their own effort, to use King’s words, but by a “purely external force.” It’s what Jesus was talking about when he said “love casts out all fear.” It’s what Gandhi had called “soul-force.” It is the power of nonviolence to lift us above our personal flaws and limitations in a moral movement.
Kirk and Trump have miscalculated because they do not understand this reality at the heart of the human story - a truth that is, in fact, also the best of the American tradition. The moral movements that have pushed us toward a more perfect union were not led by perfect people; they were made up of imperfect people in every age who recognized the power of truth to unite them in an effort bigger than themselves. This is the truth we teach in our congregations when we read the passage that says, “when I am weak, [God] is strong.” It’s the same truth our moral movements have shown America.
The J. Edgar Hoovers of our past have surveilled perceived enemies, smeared the character of people who opposed them, waged counter intelligence operations against popular movements, and taken covert action to terminate people who would not bow to their threats. This is the strategy of authoritarians throughout the history of the world, and it is where Trump has put his trust.
But it is not the most powerful tradition we have inherited. The best of our religious and moral traditions reveal a force more powerful—a way of love in which imperfect people, empowered by truth, can receive the grace of a “way out of no way” – a moral movement that exposes the lies of religious nationalism and opens up space for individuals and social structures to be transformed.
Since the King family won their civil trial against Lloyd Jowers and his co-conspirators, including agencies of the US government, in 1999 – the only trial ever held for the murder of Dr. King – James Douglass has devoted his life to understanding not only what killed Dr. King, but also what his death reveals about how America might still be transformed by a moral movement. His book, Martyrs to the Unspeakable [ [link removed] ], is due out this fall. Douglass told the Washington Post yesterday, “I think we knew more than enough long ago to know that the United States government killed Dr. Martin Luther King.”
While this may still be news to many Americans, it was a reality Dr. King understood well. King knew his own imperfections, and he knew the worst of his nation’s injustices were not only willing to kill poor and vulnerable people; they were determined to silence him by any means necessary. Still, he chose to trust the way of nonviolent love.
Trump may intend the King files as a distraction, but it’s possible their release can help us focus on the truth their release intends to obscure. Perhaps no one knows this better than his daughter, Dr. Bernice King, who continues the work of her parents at the King Center.
“Most of all, I encourage compassionate action and strategic use of Kingian nonviolence in working to defeat what Daddy called the triple evils of racism, militarism, and poverty,” she wrote in her response for Vanity Fair [ [link removed] ]. We encourage you to read her piece and spread her call to action in response to Trump’s action:
As [Daddy] said in his book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, “We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. This may well be mankind’s last chance to choose between chaos and community.”
Let us choose community and, in Daddy’s words, “make of this old world a new world.”
Thanks for reading Our Moral Moment w/ Bishop William Barber & Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Unsubscribe [link removed]?