Martin Luther King, Jr., paraphrasing 19th Century Unitarian abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker is often quoted for saying, “The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice.” For King, as I understand it, that arc was bent by human hands reaching up and pulling it toward earth, but these were hands that offered themselves as a conduit for the transforming power and love of God. And these were hands that understood the blessing and the commandment of offering themselves to be such. In that context Strength to Love is a set of sermons about what is required to be part of this long bending and “Transformed Nonconformist,” the second sermon/essay in the collection, focuses on the piece of offering oneself to this work that is about learning to live always at odds with the world as it is.
The sermon isn’t pastoral in tone, at least it doesn’t read that way for me, but it is pastoral in its sensitivities. That is to say, it is a sermon that sees and responds to some of what life-working-to-transform-world can ask and can take from us. In a world that is shaped by forces that are not in line with love and equity, with reason and interdependence, it begins to name what is required for us not to be drawn into and complicit with the world as it is. And the beginning, is the requirement — no small feat — that we remain awake to all all that is broken.
Just to be so awake is an exacting ask, however. King speaks of the “anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority,” speaking with some scorn for those who surrender to that numbing conformity. However, he also must know, as a pastor, the emotional and spiritual and real-world cost of living in constant and intimate relationship to one’s own (and others’) suffering, sadness, fear, disappointment and the exhausting toll of living in opposition to the forceful current of the world and its stubborn brokenness.
In this frame, King sets offers a new identity to his people. Playing with and reclaiming the word “maladjusted” as a badge of honor. Jesus, he says, was “the world’s most dedicated nonconformist, whose ethical nonconformity still challenges the conscience of [humankind].” And he names the norms and structures humanity need to remain maladjusted to: Be maladjusted to a crass materialism, to the industry of war, to bigotry and segregation, sectarianism of all kinds, religious bigotry and the “self-defeating effects of physical violence” to name a few.
It is, in this sense, a pastoral move: To equip his people with a way to understand themselves particularly in the face of the shunning, social awkwardness and judgment of being one of those who calls out the injustices of the world. He gives them (gives us) a way to hold the boundaries against the social pressure to get quiet and get along. The pastor knows his people will have to learn to embrace feelings of being out of step and in tension with society and of being odd and outside the norms. He is shoring his people up for the long haul, buttressing them until, perhaps, they get comfortable being this way. “Christ Transforming Culture,” H. Richard Niebuhr would call this orientation, I think.
Niebuhr’s brother, Reinhold, would say (and King would agree) that the individual might be moral but in a group that morality is most vulnerable to erode. How then does a pastor shore up the individual’s resolve? How does the moral realist, the social change strategist build a person who can stay in the crowd, anchored to the transforming vision? It’s the age-old challenge of leadership? It is that quandary that calls King to invite his people to see themselves as forever nonconformist, intentionally, stubbornly maladjusted. To give them an identity that will endure swimming against the current, demanding the surrender of power knowing, as Frederick Douglass rightly observed just over 100 years prior, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
The final tool King offers to equip his people in the resolve to be maladjusted and a determined nonconformist is toward the end of the sermon. Ultimately, why would one choose to live this way? Because human salvation, he writes, he preaches, “Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” What more is there to say? As exhausting and awake-to-pain as this way of being asks those who would transform the world to be, nothing less than human salvation lies in the balance. And so we choose, we agree, we grow accustomed to living at odds, in fundamental ways, with the world as it is; Because we love it and this is what is required to save it.
King’s call to being the “Transformed Nonconformist” is as perennial a frame around the moral life — the one that seeks to make the world in the image of Beloved Community — as there is. So, is this sermon still relevant? Sadly, gorgeously, yes. It is also, however, harder to sell 60 years later in a post-colonial world that is ever more about person-as-consumer, and consumer as someone whose work and right is to secure their comfort. It is a harder sell, too, in a world that markets and legitimizes more and more ways to anesthetize the human heart and mind and spirit.
Perhaps, what strikes me most, though, in a city and a nation that is growing increasingly secular and where places of connection and community-building spaces are harder to find, is the power importance of places like houses of worship and universities who understand the role that they are uniquely suited to play in human lives and societal transformation. People hungering for the spiritual feeding they find in real community are too often fed by the simulacra found in things like new-age-mantra-infused gym classes and other commercial junk-food equivalents of community — including universities that sell education as a way to position a career, rather than mold a character or a life of inquiry and agency. The loss of these spaces, the imitations people find, leave a lot of folks starving for real connection and community. However, what King’s essay/sermon “Transformed Nonconformist” reminds me more so how this dearth of authentic religious and other community-gathering spaces is that people lose the places that would reinforce the counter-cultural identity required do heal the world, but also they places where those people can find belonging as members of the intentionally, exhaustingly divinely maladjusted, justice-seeking nonconformists. We need one another to be this way King is calling us to be in the world. We need places to recharge our batteries so we can stay alive to the work, share wisdom for what exactly that work is asking of us in each moment of time, but also and especially the joy of not being in it alone. There is healing in the chance to be immersed regularly in the Beloved Community you are seeking to realize outside your walls — it is inoculation and transfusion and it is the work that houses of worship, particular university settings and a few other rare third spaces can offer. And we won’t make it where we need to go without them. So, I am reminded of one of the sacred duties of our communities by his essay.
