Martin Luther King Jr.
1929-1968 · Liberation · Household name
King was an American Baptist minister and the central leader of the civil rights movement, and he built a Christian doctrine of nonviolent resistance out of Gandhi, Thoreau and the Black church. Nonviolence is active love, agape, that refuses to cooperate with evil and refuses to answer it in kind. He preached it in the trust that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.
Signature
The position King is most identified with in the Profiler:
- War
- leans Pacifism
- Ethics Basis
- Natural Law / Divine Command
Positions on the 5 axes the sources answer
- Society
- leans Collectivism (25 on a 0–100 scale from Collectivism to Individualism)
- Polity
- mildly leans Illiberalism (37 on a 0–100 scale from Illiberalism to Liberalism)
- Ethics
- leans Means (75 on a 0–100 scale from Ends to Means)
- War
- leans Pacifism (25 on a 0–100 scale from Pacifism to Militarism)
- Allegiance
- leans Global (83 on a 0–100 scale from Local to Global)
15 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or King refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Trinitarian Monotheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Government
- Representative Democracy
What is your ideal form of government? - Highest Good
- Love
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Good Real, Evil Privative
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Knowledge
- Grounded in God
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Natural Law / Divine Command
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Synergism
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Time
- Linear Progressive
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Economy
- Welfare Capitalism
What is the ideal organization of economic life? - Authority
- Divine Revelation / Benevolence
What is the legitimate source of authority? - Language
- Expression
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Law
- Natural Law
What is the ultimate source of legitimate law? - Death
- Judgement
What happens at death? - Role of Emotion
- Path to the Divine
What is the proper role of emotion? - Human Nature
- Imago Dei
What is human nature? - Primary Bond
- Humanity
What is your primary bond and loyalty?