January brings a familiar ritual in America. We pause to remember the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to quote a line or two from a speech we only half remember, to affirm once again that he mattered, that he represents something noble about who we want to believe we are.
Increasingly it feels that this ritual is met with resistance. Not always openly. Sometimes as suspicion about the man. Sometimes as a re-narration of history that reframes progress in civil rights as overreach, remembrance as indulgence, and moral clarity as naivete.
Public recognition of people of color has been met with pushback wrapped in new language. The history of slavery and the Civil War is softened or redirected while Confederate memorials are defended as heritage rather than intimidation.
Jim Crow is framed as distant rather than still shaping our present. Names on buildings and institutions are protected as neutral rather than political. Affirmative action is undermined. Diversity, equity and inclusion are recast as threats rather than efforts at repair.
Against this backdrop, King is remembered not solely as someone who carried the weight of a movement and the expectations of a nation, but as a contested symbol. This tension is complicated by an uncomfortable truth — he was a flawed man. He was human in ways that are not flattering, including credible accounts of infidelity. Naming this does not require us to excuse it.
The discomfort some Americans feel here reveals something deeper than concern for ethics, reflecting little patience for personal shortcomings in some individuals while tolerating more deeply problematic behavior with broad consequences in others. We are uneasy, in part, because King’s shortcomings interrupt the kind of hero we prefer.
America loves heroes, but we don’t love the kind of heroes Scripture gives us. We have traditionally preferred our heroes to be clean, coherent and uncomplicated. We want history to read like fiction, with clear protagonists and clear antagonists, because complexity asks something of us that we would rather not give.
The Bible does not cooperate with this preference. The Old Testament, in particular, is populated by figures who are courageous and compromised, faithful and fragile, called by God and capable of harm.
David is anointed and abusive. Moses is faithful and violent. Jacob is chosen and deceptive. These are not cautionary footnotes. They are central characters. Scripture refuses to sanitize them because Scripture is interested in grace at work, not mythmaking.
We want our heroes to be better than us. But King was, in many ways, like us. And that may be precisely why he still matters.
It is worth naming a cultural contradiction here. Americans are deeply obsessed with sex. We market, monetize and weaponize it. We consume sexualized content constantly but are shocked when our heroes turn out to be shaped by the same longings that mark the rest of us. We want our heroes to live above the mess we privately inhabit.
But if our heroes are not like us, then their courage offers us no hope. If their moral lives are effortless, then their public witness is unreachable. If they are more fiction than flesh, then their legacy becomes ornamental rather than formative.
King was not holy because he was flawless. He was significant because he was willing to stand where standing was costly. He lived under extraordinary pressure, enduring surveillance, slander and eventual death for the sake of justice rooted in love. That does not erase his failures. But neither do his failures erase the moral seriousness of his witness.
