The Heavenly and Hellish Legacy of Martin Luther King: Systemic Evil and the Cleansing of Memory

Personal Mortal Sin and Deep Evil

There is personal sin that is mortal, that kills the life of the soul, that breaks the relationship with God, that enslaves one in despair, sterility, futility, and isolation. But there is much worse: aggressive, contagious, pandemic evil; malice that cries to heaven for vengeance; that which we must flee with all that is in us; or if we are entangled, we must fight to the death, willing to spill blood, to be tortured and destroyed rather than submit or comply. I will call this: Deep Evil.

We get glimpses of this in Mordor, the Empire and its dark side, Hannibal Lecter, Keith Ledger's Joker and Kevin Spacey's Keyser Soze. We encounter it full-stop in Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol-Pot, Idi Amin, serial rapists and pedophiles.

It is aggressive, imperialistic, contagious. At once natural, preternatural and supernatural, it is impervious to mere human agency: social action, education, therapy...all this is futile, even laughable and ridiculous in the face of hard, cold, deep evil. I used to tell our confirmation candidates that baptism brings you into the Kingdom of God; but confirmation empowers you to bring others in; makes you a soldier of Christ; compels you to confront, absorb, engage evil in its strongest forms; anoints you to defend, expand, advance the Kingdom of God. Similarly, in the Dark Empire, we distinguish personal baptism into sin and full anointing into expansive evil: the first draws you into hell, the second explodes hell into this world.

To be sure, personal sin is never private: it overflows necessarily to others. A porn habit may seem discrete and limited; but consider: the hours on the internet leaving one without rest and refreshment for work; the toll on the marriage; the way one looks at the waitress or store clerk; and the emasculation, shame and castration of one's own virility. But Deep Evil goes to another level: this is the pornographer recruiting and corrupting starlets, the pervert giving it to the young, the pimp enslaving and demeaning young girls. Case in point: the legacy of the Kennedy family is particularly vile, not because the virile men were unable to restrain their lust, but because the paterfamilias Joseph intentionally introduced his own sons to the life of lust. This passed over into Deep Evil: the tragic family and its perverse political party has been living out that legacy for the last half century and more.

Axis of Evil: Four Kingdoms of Systemic Sin

In my moral universe, four systems, kingdoms of evil stand out as incarnations of "hell on earth:"  the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis; enslavement of the Africans and the destruction of their families in our South; the communism of Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong-un, and Xi Jinping; and the sexual violation of the young and women by male predators as it has been systemically institutionalized in Cultural Liberalism.

The holocaust of the Jews was short-lived and over just prior to the birth of our boomer generation, but holds a supreme position in the history of evil: it targeted an entire population, women and children and innocents; and that group specifically because it has lived for millennia in intimacy with the true God and carries on earth His law and thought and longings. Our parents, the Great Generation, is "Great" in large part because they fought, died and defeated this Evil. Post-1945 every moral conscience will ever bow the head in dread, in horror, in sorrow for the inconceivable Shaol.

The slavery of Africans in distant in time: it ended with different bloody conflict in 1865 but survived in mitigated form until 1965. The destruction of systematic racism by the Civil Rights Movement was final, complete and utterly triumphant. It stands as perhaps the supreme, sublime achievement in 20th century USA. It is a credit to the moral integrity of a still-largely-Judaeo-Christian America (immediately before it collapsed into secular nihilism) and especially to the extraordinary, really supernatural,  spiritual resiliency, vigor, gentleness and fortitude of Christian Afro-Americans. However the horrific consequences, specifically upon the black family and the black man, survive and have been intensified by a trilogy of diabolic dynamics that exploded exactly at the time of the Civil Rights victory: the liberation of sex from fidelity and fecundity, the creation of a welfare culture of entitlement, and the emasculating mythology of perpetual black victimization, "Black Power" then and "Black Lives Matter" now.  This "victim narrative" is pernicious in many ways: it diminishes or denies the tremendous Christian vigor of Afro-Americans; it slanders the wholesome, welcoming racial awareness (with marginal exceptions) that swept our society in the 60s and afterwards; it castrates black men, stereotyping them as impotent victims overwhelmed by an oppressive society and in need of salvation by the Mother-State and liberal elites; it scapegoats and disparages the very ones, police...(yes we know there are bad actors...this is a fallen world!)... who risk their lives to protect us.

The systemic evil of communism flourishes today in China and North Korea. The abortion of the unborn especially femicide; the brutal repression of all religions; the utter suppression of human rights and liberties:  this is systemic, diabolic evil in pure form. The hope that a market economy in China would lead to other liberties has now been utterly discredited. We are clearly moving into the clear bi-polar world of liberty (however imperfect) versus slavery that defined the Cold War of 1945-1989. This conflict, like that with the Soviet Empire, is more than diplomatic-economic-military, it is Culture War but even more Spiritual Conflict. We will need prayer, praise, sacrifice, deliverance and holiness of life. We may need another John Paul II.

John Paul II's Combat with the Systems of Evil

In his youth, Karol Wojtyla combated Nazism intimately: he barely escaped death a number of times; he worked in the underground theater, waging culture war at the risk of his life; he studied to be a priest when all Polish priests were rounded into concentration camps and many killed. Even as a child in a Polish culture marred by antisemitism he affectionately befriended Jews. For most of his adult life he waged cultural/spiritual warfare with communism: quietly, covertly, heroically, intelligently, and victoriously. He had no connection with the slavery of Africans but himself suffered, as had his beloved Poland for centuries, a form of servitude to Germany and Russia. So, he shared a hunger for freedom and a disgust for oppression which gave him an empathy for the longings of the Afro-American and an admiration for their fierce, gentle spiritual resiliency. Throughout his pontificate, he waged another war: against with the Cultural Liberalism of the West. His Theology of the Body was already the definitive answer to the Sexual Revolution. He engaged the secular, decaying West...notably the Clinton abortion crusades at Cairo and Peking...in a pervasive, persevering defense of the holiness of sexuality and the sacredness of innocent life, born and unborn.

It is painful to contrast his pontificate with that of our current pope.  Pope Francis is himself certainly no Marxist or cultural liberal. But he is more than inept as a cultural warrior; he has been played by the dark forces as a naive quisling, a well-intended collaborator, an enabler. He abandoned the Chinese underground Church of martyrs and heroes them into the hands of  the vicious Communist Party. He has appeased liberal elites, implicitly renouncing John Paul's crusade for chastity and fidelity, in an effort to gain acceptance.  His politics is vague but he seems to lean towards Peronism, a soft fascism. He is transparent in his disdain for American capitalism and conservativism in contrast with his two predecessors who defined themselves against Nazism and Communism and therefore had a relatively positive, if critical (in regard to cultural liberalism), view of the USA. Any effort to reconcile his papacy as a continuity with his two predecessors self destructed in the catastrophic summer of 2018: destruction of the John Paul II Institute for the Family, death penalty change to catechism, the agreement with Communist China, and the entire McCarrick/Vigano debacle which hangs as a dark judgment over this pontificate.

Martin Luther King

For his incomparable leadership of the Civil Rights Movement, an outstanding Christian social movement, King has rightly been venerated for over 50 years. I can think of no one who rivals him in the reverence extended across races, religions, schools, media and all mainstream institutions. Yet, it became widely known after his death that he was a compulsive womanizer. Recent reports estimate that he had affairs with 40 women. This sad fact has been entirely avoided and implicitly denied across our culture. This is strange: the number one cause of the poverty of women and children, black or white, is infidelity, promiscuity and abandonment by the predatory male. King clearly fit this profile. He was granted the standard liberal dispensation enjoyed by the Kennedy's, Clinton and so many others: private life doesn't really effect public life. If ever there was a lie straight from hell, it is this! Marital fidelity is the bedrock basis for all social justice; promiscuity, infidelity and violation of women/children is social injustice and violence in its purest, most personal, intimate, systemic, diabolical form.

Things may be getting much worse for the memory of this undeniably great man. David Garrow, highly esteemed, liberal-leaning historian and Pulitzer-winning author of a biography of King has unearthed FBI memos alleging that he participated in an orgy where a woman was raped. The memo details that a drunken King laughed and encouraged another pastor in the act. It appears that there was a group that celebrated such orgies, even referring to the women victims as "parishioners." The actual FBI tapes are scheduled to be released in 2027 and at that time we should know with greater certainty what did and didn't happen. The tapes were part of J. Edgar Hoover's spying on Reverend King that originally concerned communist influence but became obsessed with his sex life. Skeptics suspect that the memos may be FBI fabrications to discredit King; but Garrow and others who have studied this fear that they are credible...heartbreakingly so!

It is charitable and prudent to withhold judgment: rash judgement, especially against such a treasured man, is itself serious sin. However, we may at least entertain the possibility that the allegations are true and what they would mean. They would mean that Reverend King had passed deeply into deep, systemic evil: the collaborative violation of women in their vulnerability. What will the Me Too Movement make of this? What of intersectionality? Would not a Womanist response be fiercely angry?

However, in the best case scenario, in which the memos are false, his history of infidelity and predatory aggression (albeit consensual) remains. Sexual sin is always grave as it involves human (eternal) life, the intimacy of the human heart and soul, and the iconic sacredness of the male/female body. Violation and abuse, intrinsic to adultery and fornication, are contagious and pernicious in the shame, trauma, guilt and grief they inflict on the victim. Adultery and fornication are already, even short of gang rape, well into systemic, deep evil!

Sins of our Fathers and the Cleansing of Memory

The Old Testament is largely a chronicle of the sins of the fathers, patriarchs, kings who triggered the Exile. It is a history of infidelity. To remember the sins of our fathers is to renounce them, to protect ourselves from repeating them. It is essential that we know and recall...with contrition, awe, and grief...the sins of our fathers. This is not to accept some vague collective guilt...as in white privilege and guilt. But it is to break the invisible spiritual/psychic bonds which chain us to an evil event of the past. Acts have consequences; the present is a result of the past; memory that is denied, avoided or repressed only increases its disastrous efficacy. If my father or grandfather was a gangster, an adulterer, a Nazi torturer...I need to know that. For starts, I need to pray for his soul, lest he be abandoned to purgatory (and not in hell) in isolation. But I need to know for myself, for my own  children and grandchildren, lest the spiritual legacy of evil be unconsciously handed on.

At this moment we are watching as rioters are destroying statues of iconic figures of our past, especially those associated with the Confederacy. I have myself sympathy with a
cleansing of our memory in that we consider the role such figures played in the practice and defense of slavery. Slavery in our South was such a deep, systemic and consequential evil that we should not honor those who actively advocated for it and defended it. Putting myself in the shoes of a descendant of slaves, I would be deeply offended. Orderly, legal removal of such statues and renaming of our military forts is part of the purification of memory that John Paul the Great taught us to practice. I personally have great respect for General Robert E. Lee. I inherited this from my great-aunt Agnes whose father was recruited (probably compelled right off the boat from Ireland) into the Southern Army and may have fought with Lee. But clearly his personal virtue does not allow that he be honored in the public arena since he defended slavery.

Conclusion

With Reverend King we again encounter Deep Evil in a most troubling form: a profoundly good man who is at the same time deeply evil. Very troubling! Just recently we faced this same mystery in Jean Vanier, an iconic and historic figure in the care of the disabled. Again in his case, we cannot dismiss his misbehavior as the dalliances (with consenting adult women) of a weak, flawed but good man. He took advance of younger women who came to him for guidance as a spiritual father; he practiced spiritual incest; and he rationalized it as itself a spiritual practice in an inconceivably perverse distortion. We have had Maciel and McCarrick and a litany of demonic/inspiring figures. This disturbing Mystery of such good and such evil co-inhabiting a person is beyond explanation.

We do well to pray for these men, for their souls.

We do well to pray for ourselves:  Deliver us from Evil!