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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

If secular liberals had saints, he'd be one. And well-deserved, at that. I think that much of the dissatisfaction with King in some quarters is because activists have strayed from what was his baseline: The fundamental dignity of all human persons. It explains literally everything he said or did as a public figure.

Commentators are right to say that we cannot divorce him from his Christian conviction, but it's more than that. We should say that the dignity of all persons only emerges from the Christian doctrine of creation, and reaches its fullest flower in the redemptive intent of the Incarnation. It's not enough to say he was shaped by the Christian worldview; we must stop and reflect on how it has shaped us through him.

He's always been a hero of mine, along with William Jennings Bryan and others, because he understood that the spiritual and the temporal really have one end: God. That scares some people; they need to be scared.
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