“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
These words of Rev. King are from a sermon entitled, “Love In Action,” in his book, Strength To Love. This sermon has for its text the words of Jesus from the cross: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” The quote above comes from King’s reflection on the last part of Jesus’ words: “They know not what they do.”
For King the reality of these words—“they know not what they do”—runs through all of human history. Wars, slavery, and Jim Crow were “perpetuated by sincere though spiritually ignorant persons.” Therefore, “sincerity and conscientiousness in themselves are not enough.” We can be sincere and conscientious about all the wrong things. King lifts up the Apostle Paul’s words concerning those who “have a zeal for God, but it is not enlightened.” So, it has been with a White nationalist Christianity.
King is pointing to the problem of spiritual blindness. He speaks of “head and heart—intelligence and goodness.” King calls us to an intelligence that is spiritual in nature. (I think of Jesus calling upon his followers to “be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”) King makes clear that what he means by intelligence does not come merely by formal education:
I know many people of limited formal training who have amazing intelligence and foresight. The call for intelligence is a call for openmindedness, sound judgment, and love for truth. It is a call for [people] to rise above the stagnation of closedmindedness and the paralysis of gullibility. One does not need to be a profound scholar to be openminded, nor a keen academician to engage in an assiduous pursuit for truth.
King reminds us of words from the Gospel of John:
“This is the condemnation,” says John, “that light is come into the world, and [people] loved darkness rather than light.”
The point is this: The “sincere” embrace of what amounts to false values, ideologies, and commitments keeps us from the truth and in the darkness. If we refuse to acknowledge the false thinking that we have used in order to secure us from addressing our fears and insecurities, and to secure us in our prejudices, we will remain closed. We must relinquish our false ways and false thinking—false to our true humanity, false to love toward others. We must let go of what we are guarding in order to be open to the truth. We must be committed to the truth no matter how uncomfortable it makes us. We must stay committed until the truth sets us free. We must let the truth break the bondage of our fabrications about ourselves, our nation, and its history.
This is a word for our time. King speaks of “gullibility.” We have massive gullibility. When politicians and corporations so easily hook into our passions, prejudices, fears, insecurities, and self-absorption, we end up directed away from our true needs and the needs of our life together as a nation. We devolve into ever deepening divisions. The way out is for individuals to become aware of why they make the decisions they make and contrive the rationalizations they give for their decisions. We must each turn from what is false and take actions directed to what is real. As we read in the Gospel of John, “Those who do what is true come to the light.”