What were Martin Luther King's Christian beliefs?

Answer 1

Throughout his life Martin Luther King was confronted by violence. His home was bombed, he was stabbed, his family received death threats. None of this made him respond with violence. His Christian beliefs told him that violence and hatred could only be conquered by love and forgiveness.
Martin Luther King was a liberal Protestant minister, who devoutly believed that true Christianity was tolerant, humane, egalitarian and unprejudiced. This was very different to the way the Christian message was distorted and manipulated by the far-right elements of the American South, who deliberately misinterpreted the Gospels and the teachings of Jesus to fit in with their racist, neo-Nazi beliefs. King's essential message was that your race, colour, creed or nationality was irrelevant- what mattered was the sort of person you were inside. In addition to his fame as a civil rights leader, he was also one of America's foremost Christian theologians and thinkers, whose beliefs and understandings were far closer to the true Christian message than the tub-thumping bigotry practiced at the time (and indeed, even nowadays to a certain extent) by the Southern Bible belt. His overriding passion was that black and white races should join together as one beneath a progressive, all-embracing Christian love for God and one another.