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During my high school years in the Deep South, I attended two different churches. The first, a Baptist church with more than 1,000 members, took pride in its identity as a "Bible-loving church where the folks are friendly," and in its support of 105 foreign missionaries, whose prayer cards were pinned to a wall-sized map of the world at the rear of the sanctuary. That church was one of the main watering holes for famous evangelical speakers. I learned the Bible there.

In the sixties the deacon board mobilized lookout squads, and on Sundays these took turns patrolling the entrances to keep out all black "troublemakers." Lester Maddox himself sometimes attended there, approvingly. And when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, that church founded a private school and kindergarten as a haven for whites, expressly barring all black students.

The next church I attended was smaller, more fundamentalist, and more overtly racist. There I learned the theological basis to racism. The pastor taught that the Hebrew word "Ham" meant "burnt black," and that in his curse Noah consigned his son Ham to life as a lowly servant (Genesis 9). "That explains why black people make such good waiters and household servants," my pastor would say from the pulpit. "Watch a black waiter move through a crowded restaurant, swiveling his hips, balancing a tray of food above his head. He's good at that job because that's the job God destined him for in the curse of Ham." (No one bothered to point out that the curse was actually directed to Canaan, not Ham.)

That theology is still being taught today, in South Africa and in pockets of the American South. But far fewer people accept it now, and one of the main reasons, for me especially, is the prophetic role of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The word "prophet" is often applied to King, for, like those Old Testament figures, he endeavored to inspire change in an entire nation through moral appeal. The passion and intensity of the biblical prophets has long fascinated me. Most of them faced an audience every bit as stubborn, prejudiced, and cantankerous as I was during my teenage years. With what moral lever can one move a whole nation? I have concluded that virtually all the prophets followed a consistent two-pronged approach.

First, they gave a short-range view of what God requires immediately. This usually consisted of an exhortation to simple acts of faithfulness: Rebuild the temple. Purify your marriages. Destroy your idols.

But the prophets never stopped there. They also gave a long-range view to answer the people's deepest questions: How can we believe that God loves us in the face of so much suffering? How can we believe in a just God when the world seems ruled by a sovereignty of evil? The prophets answered such questions by reminding their audience of who God is, and by painting a picture of a future kingdom of righteousness.

In good prophetic tradition, Martin Luther King, Jr., used that same two-pronged approach. For him, the short-range view called for one thing above all else: nonviolence. Two decades later, we may lose sight of how hard it was for King to maintain his nonviolent stance. The biographies make that clear. After you've been hit on the head with a policeman's nightstick for the dozenth time, and received yet another jolt from a jailer's cattle prod, you begin to question the effectiveness of meek submission. Many blacks abandoned King over this issue. Students especially, the heroes of the Freedom Rides, drifted toward "black power" rhetoric after their colleagues were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

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January (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44