A year before his untimely assassination, from the pulpit of the Riverside Church in New York, African-American civil-rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King entitled his address, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. Troubled over the US involvement in Viet Nam, King wrote:
Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.
King is well known for his doctrine of direct action, non-violent resistance.1 Using this principle, King and his followers advocated for racial desegregation, voting and civil rights for African Americans in the United States. Yet, non-violent resistance was just one strategy. Fewer are familiar with the King doctrine of the violence of silence. King, realizing that African-Americans alone could not achieve desegregation, invited others of good will to join the cause while also condemning those, who through their silence, helped to perpetuate the system of racial discrimination. Thus, is born the King doctrine, which I call, the violence of silence.
While imprisoned for protesting segregation, King, from his cell, chided his white ministerial colleagues. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, King wrote,” We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.2 The Violence of Silence.
While it is easy to see the violent hate speech, it is more challenging to see the violence of silence. The violence of silence occurs:
a) when one should speak, but does not,
b) when one is silent in the face of evil and injustice,
c) when one hides out of convenience or expediency,
It is then that the passivity of silence can be as deadly as the commission of a violent act.
Examples of this violence of silence, may be found both in the Bible and in Seventh-day Adventist history, proving its universality and its continued relevance.
The Silence of Peter
It was a night that would forever live in infamy. As, Jesus prayed for the sins of His enemies, they came to arrest Him. The contrast between love and hate could not have been more stark. It was an act of religious and political terror. The growing crowds had gathered around Jesus in the temple court for the past few days. Fear of losing political power and disagreement over religious doctrine spawned a hatred that would lead to death. Caiaphas used hate speech to rally his threatened base to commit the unspeakable crime of crucifying our Lord.
The Bible records the trial transcript:
If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation. And one of them, named Caiaphas, being the high priest that same year, said unto them, Ye know nothing at all, Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not (John 11:47-50).
There is no doubt that words do matter. The words of Christ were always inspiring toward life but the words of Caiaphas incited violence and death. Inspired by hate speech, armed agents of death came to arrest Jesus, the Prince of Life. Words do matter.
But, on the night of Christ’ arrest, there was not only the violent hate speech of Caiaphas, but also the violence of silence committed by Peter. When he should have stood with Christ, Peter denied Him. Peter could have given testimony about the One who had healed his mother-in law, walked on water, raised the dead, and opened the eyes of the blind. But, instead there is only a deafening silence. At the time of the greatest moral crisis of the universe, Peter fell silent, was missing in action, hiding, and believing that if he is not the one slapping Christ, then he is absolved from guilt.
King remarked, “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”3 King called this the silence of betrayal.4
The Silence of the Church
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, President Roosevelt declared that persons of Japanese descent posed a security threat. Between 100,000-120,000 persons, including hundreds of Seventh-day Adventists were placed in concentration camps throughout the United States. An Adventist internee, Richard Iwata, appealing to the denomination’s President J. L. McElhany, to make a statement about the injustice done to Japanese-Americans wrote, “One principle stands out boldly midst the turmoil of evacuation…The rightful privileges as American citizens [were] suppressed by racial discrimination.”5
Officers’ Meeting minutes from six weeks later6 record this lamentable response:
“Agreed, That the chairman be asked to inform Richard Iwata that we do not feel that as a religious organization we can interfere in the matter referred to in his correspondence, since it is essentially of a political or government nature.”
M.L. King would have questioned this Violence of Silence:
“History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”7
During the rise of the National Socialist in Germany, many in the church supported Hitler’s regime as ordained by God. Because of “his personal dedication and his abstinence from tea, coffee, alcohol and meat, practices shared by the Adventists, [therefore] he was welcomed as a savior.”8 The president of the East German Conference argued that it was bad for the image of the Church when some member refused to salute the swastika flag or use the Hitler salute. Soon the Adventist Church would lead Germany’s welfare program, support forced sterilization and exclude persons of Jewish background from fellowship.9 Thus, during the one of the greatest periods of hatred, out of expediency, many were silent.
Whether the position was born out expediency, cowardice or politics, the silence of any church speaks loudly. King’s words offer a stinging rebuke: “He who passively accepts evil, is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it, is really cooperating with it.”10
The Relevance for Today
Nearly 60 years later after the death of Dr. King, this nation finds itself at socio-political and moral crossroad. The predicament of prejudice has placed us on the precarious precipice of annihilation. The old, familiar head of Jim Crow has risen like an ugly specter from a shallow grave beckoning ahistorical sycophants to make America great again. For some, this means a retrenchment to a time when the social order was clear. Blacks knew their place, immigrants stayed home, and women were barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. The ghoulish specter of open bigotry comes wielding a new, but familiar, sword.
• Black History is called Critical Race Theory and is being outlawed in classrooms.
• The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, which protects civil liberties and prosecutes hate crimes has been gutted.
• The FBI, the agency which investigates hate crimes is being eviscerated.
• Diversity Equity and Inclusion initiatives have been replaced by the propagation of myth of the meritocracy.
• Attempts have been made to undo birthright citizenship guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution.
• Mass deportation of immigrants is threatened as new concentration camps are opened.
During this pivotal moment in the history of our nation, we are challenged to vociferously repudiate the demons of violence and hatred. We must not be silent, run for cover, and pretend that if we choose to ignore the obvious, then it does not exist. Neither can we retreat into apocalyptic passivism which posits that all these things are just signs of the end and Jesus will fix it all when He returns. If we choose to be silent now, then our silence is consent to evil.
The Example of Christ
We may learn from greatest our example, Christ. When sin entered the world, God could have remained silent and allowed sin and death to run its course until humanity was self-obliterated.
But God intervened and declared “Lo, I come: in the volume of the book it is written of me, I delight to do thy will, O my God: yea, thy law is within my heart. I have preached righteousness in the great congregation: lo, I have not refrained my lips” (Psalms 40: 7-9).
Into the crisis came the Christ, declaring love in a world of hate, peace in a world of war, hope in a world of despair, life in the face of death, truth in the face of lies.
Two thousand years after His ascension, the life of Christ still speaks above the vitriol of small-minded men, and the language of love booms louder than the megaphone of bigotry and hatred.
Why Your Voice Matters
Every generation must face its moral moment and decide if price of liberty is worth the cost of sacrifice.
• King faced the moral moment on a balcony in Memphis.
• Rosa Parks faced the moral moment on the back of a bus.
• Heather Heyer faced the moral moment on a back street in Charlottesville.
This now is our moral moment. Pray, we must! But calling upon our God to act, while refusing to act when God calls upon us, is spiritual schizophrenia at best, and downright hypocrisy at worst. The God we serve not only is moved by injustice but also moves against injustice. We also learn from Scripture that in the time of moral and spiritual crisis, God not only moves into action, also He moves people into action.
• God called upon Moses to demand of the most powerful ruler in the world the release of the Hebrew captives.
• God called upon Esther to foil the genocide plot to destroy the Jews perpetrated by the racist Haman.
Each had to decide to accept the call of God to speak. Silence would have been violence. Your voice matters. Words matter. Lives matter. Truth matters.
Dr. Martin Luther King remarked:
“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must take it because his conscience tells him it is right.”11
1 Articulated in, Letter from the Birmingham Jail
2 Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963. Retrieved from kinginstitute.standford.edu/king-papers/documents/letter-birmingham-jail.
3 Martin Luther King Jr., On Being a Good Neighbor, The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr. Volume VI. (King Institute, 2007).
4 Martin Luther King Jr., Beyond Vietnam, sermon delivered April 4,1967 at the Riverside Church
5 Richard Iwata to J.L. McElhany, May 1, 1943, GC Archives
6 Bill Knott, Prisoners of Hope: They were deprived of their liberty in the land of the free, Adventist Review. September 28, 2000, p8-13 (1584-15890. Retrieved from archives.adventistreview.org/200-1544/story1.html
7 Martin Luther King Jr. Address at the Fourth Annual Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change at Bethel Baptist Church, December 3,1959. Retrieved kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/document/address-fourth-annual-institute.
8 Christine E. King, The Nazi State and the New Religions: Five Case Studies in Non- Conformity, (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1982), 92.
9 Zdravko Plantak, The Silent Church: Human Rights and Adventist Social Ethics,(New York: Macmillan Press and St. Martins Press Scholarly Division, 1998) pp.17-18.
10 King, Beyond Vietnam
11 Martin Luther King Jr., Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, sermon delivered March 31, 1968
