By: Mike Kelly
Retired Pastor
I was born before it became OK to separate a person’s private morals from their public responsibilities and before we had a press that sought out private immoralities to expose them for all to see.
I grew up believing that our morals were meant to be consistent in public and in private, and I doubt I have really overcome that way of thinking.
None of us are perfect, but there ought to be some kind of alignment between our public life and our private life.
If I publicly declare that Jesus is my Savior, then my life should reflect some effort to walk in his ways.
Like we see today in the discussions about Charlie Kirk? Was he who he portrayed publicly? It appears he was, and that adds to the way we interpret his message.
That brings me to what got this article started. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday on January 20 honors this leader of the Civil Rights Movement and Nobel Prize Winner dedicated to nonviolence. It’s important not to overlook his role in America. We need to recognize his vision and leadership in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960”s.
In his Poor People’s Campaign, he sought to reorder our national priorities from funding war, tax cuts, and bailouts for the rich to ensuring every person the opportunity for a good education, health care as a human right, a decent job, and a viable income.
Beyond civil and voting rights, he pursued a nonviolent, moral revolution with a vision of a world without violence, hatred, war, poverty, and oppression. That’s something I could sign on for.
He was also a Christian and an ordained minister, as am I. But his morals were about the same as the proverbial alley cat. His best friend, Ralph Abernathy, said that “he had encounters with various women (even) on the night before his April 4, 1968, assassination at a Memphis, Tenn., hotel.”
I find that lifestyle very offensive, and that makes it very difficult to know how to react to this holiday. Was his private life such that we should tell our children to emulate him?
Should we name our children, streets, bridges, and even schools after him? In about 18 months, all the files that the FBI gathered on King will be released. It will certainly paint MLK in a different light than generally understood today.
Racism is a moral issue. And since it is a moral issue, shouldn’t the morality of its spokesperson be considered in the discussion? Didn’t the immorality of Jimmy Swaggart enter into people’s opinion of his message?
And, what about the Catholic priests who have been exposed alongside the protestant mega-church pastors who have recently fallen? Doesn’t their immoral behavior blacken the name of Christ and Christianity?
Maybe what one says is removed from what one does. I don’t think so, but we seem to believe it does as a society. What does it say about us that we elected as president a man convicted of sexual assault and 34 felonies for falsifying documents?
We need to speak out with force and clarity that racism and bigotry are unacceptable in any form. But speaking out against evil is not enough. We need to order our mindset to understand that our inner person is the core of who we are and ought to be mirrored in our public appearance.
Especially, we Christians should live as citizens of heaven, conducting ourselves in a way worthy of the Gospel, focused on Christ.
It’s about demonstrating heavenly values (unity, morality, faith) in our earthly life. Our sins are real and visible to the discerning, but our goal ought to be to live a life worthy of our calling so that we do not destroy the message we have come to declare.
Like MLK, we are all fallen people. But, it feels to me like there ought to be an awareness of the kinds of lives men and women live before we lift them up as public symbols of good or more, of Godliness.
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Mike Kelly is the founding pastor of Bryan’s Grace Community Church (retired) and Board Chairman of Bryan’s Sanctuary Homeless Shelter and Williams County’s Compassion (free) Medical Clinic.