The Backway Forward
On April 4, 1954, a short but stocky black preacher stood at the pulpit within the humble walls of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, and delivered a sermon. The title: “Going forward by going backward.”
“There is something wrong with our world, something fundamentally and basically wrong,” Martin Luther King, Jr., began. “What is the cause of our world’s ill?’” he asked. “It seems to me that if we are to find the cause of our world’s ill we must turn to the hearts and souls of men.”
America in 1954 was in a troubled state. Segregation was rampant, and hate rather than love was, it seemed, the triumphant act of each day. People saw each other more as foes than as brothers and sisters. Skin color and hair texture determined attitudes, even law.
It was not yet the America that Reagan could idealize in 1989 as Jesus’s city on a hill, where all people lived in relative harmony and enjoyed what the framers of the Massachusetts Constitution called the “safety and tranquility” of “their natural rights.”
The country—even the world in general—had once again lost its way. The hearts and souls of people, as King observed, were cold and hardened. The vision of freedom, of unity, of love, was mocked rather than embraced. Something was indeed fundamentally and basically wrong.
“Our problem,” King theorized, “lies in the fact that our material and intellectual advances have outrun our moral progress.” America, he added, stood supreme in material success, “but the moral and spiritual ends for which we live stand almost in a state of oblivion.”
Decades earlier, in 1926 (the Roaring Twenties), Calvin Coolidge warned of such a time. Standing in Philadelphia on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, America’s 30th president made a plea: Don’t forget first principles.
“Governments do not make ideals, ideals make governments,” he said. “We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These things did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material progress … will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp.”
America, propelled by science and technology, Coolidge warned, could very well forget “the reverence which [the founders] had for the things that are holy.”
By 1954, America stood unrivaled in what Coolidge called “pagan materialism.” But it had indeed lost reverence for first principles—those both fundamentally spiritual and political.
“Our problem,” King said, “lies in the fact that through our scientific genius we have made of the world a neighborhood, both through our moral genius we have failed to make it a brotherhood.” The only real atomic bomb Americans needed to worry about, he said, “is that atomic bomb which lies in the hearts and souls of men, capable of exploding into the vilest of hate and into the most damaging selfishness.”
“My friends,” King exhorted, “if our civilization is to go forward, we must go back and pick up those precious moral values that we have left behind.”
One hundred years earlier, Lincoln stood in Peoria, Illinois, and made a similar argument. “We began by declaring that all men are created equal,” he said of slavery and its defenders, “but now [we say] that for some men to enslave others is a ‘sacred right.’” The spirit of America’s first principles and the spirit of slavery and oppression, Lincoln said, “are utter antagonisms; and the former is being rapidly displaced by the latter.”
America’s moral robe was “soiled and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it,” he said. “Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution.”
To King, as for Lincoln, God represented everything good—all that America truly was and could be. God was to them, in a sense, America’s first principle. “We must put God back into the center of our thinking,” King said. “[Material things] can never be substitutes for God, for long before any of these things came into being, we needed God, and after they will have passed away, we will still need God.”