Today is a national holiday. Government employees will get paid for not going to work. There are at least two good things about “No Government Work Days”: Traffic is light and no laws will be passed.

You may not know that today is Martin Luther King Day. What you may also not know is that the Reverend Martin Luther King mixed religion and politics. A no-no for conservatives but the life blood of the Democrat Party because it’s tied to the Black Vote.

Here are a few statements by King. Try putting his words in the mouth of a conservative and visualize who how he or she would be excoriated by the media for “mixing religion and politics”:

• “I still believe that standing up for the truth of God is the greatest thing in the world. This is the end of life. The end of life is not to be happy. The end of life is not to achieve pleasure and avoid pain. The end of life is to do the will of God, come what may.”1

• “We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.”2

• “Seems that I can hear God saying that it’s time to rise up now and make it clear that the evils of the universe must be removed. And that God isn’t going to do all of it by himself. The church that overlooks this is a dangerously irrelevant church.”3

• “If one is truly devoted to the religion of Jesus he will seek to rid the earth of social evils. The gospel is social as well as personal.”4

• “As Christians we owe our ultimate allegiance to God and His will, rather than to man and his folkways.”5

• “Any religion which professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the social and economic conditions that scar the soul, is a spiritually moribund religion only waiting for the day to be buried.”6

• “The church must also become increasingly active in social action outside its doors. . . . It must exert its influence in the area of economic justice. As guardian of the moral and spiritual life of a community the church cannot look with indifference upon these glaring evils.”7

1. From a sermon preached in November 1956. Quoted by William J. Bennett, from the Foreword to Ralph Reed’s Politically Incorrect: The Emerging “Faith Factor” in American Politics (Dallas, TX: Word, 1994), xiii. [↩]
2. Quoted in Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 743. [↩]
3. Quoted in Branch, Parting the Waters, 696. [↩]
4. Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), 117. [↩]
5. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 117. [↩]
6. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 91. [↩]
7. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 208. [↩]