Lewis V. Baldwin - The Arc of Truth: The Thinking of Martin Luther King Jr.

This pattern of neglect in King studies is indeed inexcusable and perplexing, especially since Kinga clergyman steeped in the southern Black Baptist Church tradition said and wrote as much and perhaps more about truth and untruth than any other prominent figure in the twentieth-century Western world. The need for a major work on this topic became increasingly evident as I read through the collections of Kings unpublished sermons, speeches, interviews, and letters and as I reread his books, articles, and the seven volumes of his published papers, edited by Clayborne Carson and others. Thus, I decided to write The Arcof Truth: The Thinking of Martin Luther King Jr. I simply felt that the time had come for this book to be written and that I, having lectured and published extensively on King, could bring an informed and insightful perspective to the subject matter. This feeling was xiii reinforced by the countless conversations I have had over the years with colleagues and friends whose expertise lie in the fields of theology, philosophy, and ethics. While they did not read any portion of this work, it benefited from the intellectual excitement they provided. Other considerations proved equally pressing as I outlined the chapters of The Arc of Truth.

I thought this book might be especially appealing at a time when the lines between truth and untruth in our culture are becoming increasingly blurred and distorted, aided by the silence, blessings, and even active participation of many of the nations most influential political and religious leaders. Terms like alternative facts, crisis of truth, deliberate deception, fake news, half-truths, conspiracy theories, disinformation campaigns, and war ontruth pepper our political and public discourse, and many cultural and social critics refer variously to the credibility crisis, the posttruth age, the post-truth era, the new age of lies, the post-fact society, and the post-truth world. All too many Americans have become desensitized to lies, distortions, misinformation, and misleading statements. Truth and truth-telling are in danger of becoming essentially meaningless and irrelevant on so many levels. We cannot allow the assault on objective truth to become firmly established as the new societal norm. Otherwise, we will become unable to sustain any semblance of moral and spiritual health and will ultimately find ourselves living in a valueless society and world.

As this book shows, Martin Luther King Jr. has something to offer us at the levels of ideas and praxis as we face this critical dilemma. The Arc of Truth is also designed to contribute yet another layer to the burgeoning field of King studies, particularly in terms of how King sought to translate ideas into practical action and reality. Although King viewed and spoke of truth as the goal of the philosophical-theological life and the socioethical quest, his search for and reflections on truth were not merely about ideas. Perhaps more importantly, he also organized truth into a strategy and method to fight social evil and injustice, a point not sufficiently explored in the extant works on Kings ethics, philosophy, and theology. In more specific terms, the ways of truth for him became xiv inseparable from the ways of the cross, the ways of love, the ways of nonviolence, and the ways of civil disobedience.

When King spoke of the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice, he also had in mind the long arc of truth, for love and justice were for him dimensions and/or expressions of the activity of truth. In this sense, King bore a striking similarity to Mohandas K. Gandhi, one of his most important intellectual and spiritual sources. I should also say that writing this book gave me a new perspective on and appreciation for the meaning and power of truth. I now have a better understanding of truth not simply as spoken words but as ways of living and acting in the world. I am now more convinced than ever before that truth spoken accrues special power and meaning when it is also lived truth and truth applied in the context of human life and struggles.

Figures like King and Gandhi are endlessly fascinating, not simply because of what they believed and achieved in the context of the human condition and struggle, but because they epitomized that vital nexus between spoken, lived, and applied truth. This book is not and should not be the last word on Kings understanding of truth and on how he appropriated and applied truth to the struggle for human dignity, equal opportunity, justice, and peace. Hopefully, ethicists, philosophers, and theologians especially those with a deep interest in Kingwill become more intentional about exploring the topic from their own perspectives. Undoubtedly, they can significantly build on my own treatment of the subject. Lewis V. Baldwin July 2020 xv