“Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, the command to love one’s enemies is an absolute necessity for our survival.” – Strength to Love

“Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering…for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted.” – “Beyond Vietnam”

On Monday, President Biden praised how Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “courageously stood for the sacred idea that embodies the soul of America.” Meanwhile, in South Carolina, Vice President Kamala Harris asked the crowd, “I pose a question that I do believe Dr. King would ask today: In 2024, where exactly is America in our fight for freedom?” Like Vice President Harris, I also believe that Dr. King would pose this question—but he would ask it directly of an administration that continues to enable a genocide in Gaza and provide the weapons to carry out mass death.

It is not new to notice how Dr. King’s prophetic and provocative ministry has been hollowed out by politicians—on both sides of the aisle—who wish to claim his mantle without pursuing the radical revolution of values he prescribed. But this tension is particularly glaring in given current U.S. participation in an ethnic cleansing that has already killed more than 24,000 people in Gaza—including 10,000 children—and displaced 1.9 million people. To truly reckon with how Dr. King would evaluate this moment, we must turn to his core theological convictions: An opposition to American empire grounded in nonviolence and solidarity with suffering people.

When President Biden praises how Dr. King “embodied the soul of America,” he gets the matter backward. Dr. King saw how the nation worshipped violent white supremacy and called it to repent—bending the nation’s soul toward the fierce love he saw in Jesus. King was stark, even caustic, in his analysis of our country. (There’s a reason why two-thirds of its citizens viewed him unfavorably while he was living.) And this was particularly true—and particularly controversial—in the way he reacted to American violence in Vietnam.

If you read Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech again, there are entire sections that feel like he could have spoken them yesterday to describe the Palestinian people’s suffering. “They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops,” Dr. King said, “They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury.” His words conjure images of American-made bulldozers destroying historic Palestinian olive groves, the flattening of neighborhoods, and the staggering truth that twenty people in Gaza have now been killed for every Israeli who died on October 7^th.

And let’s be clear: Dr. King’s heart would also have been shattered by the harrowing violence committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians. He would be horrified by anyone who tries to use decades of apartheid to justify rape and murder. Brought up among a people who lived underneath the structural violence of segregation, he knew what it meant to live under laws designed to dehumanize, and yet he believed with all his being that the means of revolution were just as important as the freedom he demanded. But if those were his moral demands for oppressed people, he would be doubly horrified by the way leaders in the U.S. and Israel are using tragedy to justify military violence.

One of the most challenging aspects of Dr. King’s theology—to both some of his contemporaries in the struggle for Black freedom and modern readers alike—is how fervently he believed in a Christian ethic of nonviolence. “When Jesus says, ‘Love your enemies,’ he is setting forth a profound and ultimately inescapable admonition,” King writes in Strength to Love, “The chain reaction of evil—hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars—must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.” There is no room in this theology for a “just war.” There is no cover for politicians who use words like “collateral damage” to explain away thousands of deaths. There is only the prescient conviction that violent response will only seed more violence.

So, when Dr. King says, “I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken,” we must hear the clear condemnation of U.S. support for barbarism in Gaza—how deeply he would appalled that our government vetoed a United Nations demand for ceasefire after countries voted 153-10 in favor. King’s sympathy would be with the people in Palestine who are suffering, and the people in Israel who are further endangered by this bloodshed. He would demand peace through nonviolence because that was the ethic that guided his life. And he would be infuriated by leaders who quote his words while violating his work.

Indeed, watching the Biden administration take unilateral action to send more weapons to Israel, another set of King’s words come to mind: His letter from Birmingham jail. “I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate,” King wrote, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White citizens’ Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.” If President Biden continues his present course, he is conforming to the America King condemned, not the one he dreamed we might become.

But one final truth from King comes to mind for this moment: “The time is always right to do what is right.” It is not too late for the Biden administration to change course, to use our unparalleled diplomatic power with Israel to force an end to this violence—to pursue peace by “meeting physical force with soul force.” From a purely utilitarian perspective, as the Republican party prepares to nominate a fascist and a criminal, President Biden must emphasize the difference in their candidacies by embracing what is just and moral. But it is also his moral obligation when he chooses to place Dr. King’s words inside his own mouth.

Visit Jacqui Lewis’ website here.