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The New Breed of MLK Detractors Part 2
Civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. became a global hero after his assassination in 1968, and President Ronald Reagan cemented his legacy in 1983 by declaring his birthday a national holiday.
MLK still had detractors.
Most of them were academics who disagreed with his political views, but these arguments were mostly found in publications that few people read. For the most part, MLK was widely accepted, from the religious right to secular humanists, and for decades, no one questioned his civil rights legacy or his Christian faith.
This has changed in recent years.
There’s a new breed of MLK detractors. Specifically, there is a hardline faction of Trinitarian Christians who are so convinced that “Jesus is God” that they condemn anyone who questions “the divinity of Christ.” For these hardliners, the statements “Jesus is God” and “the divinity of Christ” mean the same thing.
However, some Christians do not consider the two statements to be synonymous.
Some Christians believe Jesus was God’s divine son, but Christ is not coequal with God. Other Christians believe Jesus’ moral teachings were divinely inspired; nonetheless, the historical Jesus never claimed to be God. This group of…