Inauguration on MLK Day is ‘spiritual opportunity,’ says local pastor

It’s hard to imagine a more dissonant juxtaposition of events than to have the day we honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. overlap with the day we again inaugurate President-elect Donald Trump.

A similar accident of the calendar won’t happen again until 2053, but in a perverse way, the confluence of events offers us an opportunity to take more honest stock of where we are as a country and how far we have yet to go.

The Rev. Dr. Kelle Brown, senior pastor of Seattle’s Plymouth United Church of Christ and one of our region’s most powerful voices for justice, said of Monday, “I truly see this as a spiritual opportunity.”

Brown, who is one of the featured speakers at Monday’s MLK rally and march at Garfield High School, said we will now have a huge mirror in front of us, challenging us to ask ourselves, “Who will we be? What energy will we allow to be stronger?” 

Will it be King’s call for us to embrace light, love and justice? Or will it be a darker vision, one of a zero-sum game where if some of us are to have, we must ensure others have not? 

Brown said she is saddened by the way some have taken MLK Day as a time to embrace an anodyne version of King’s legacy, where people in an “intentional and strategic reversal” of King’s vision, “find a couple of quotes and put up a couple pictures, maybe even sell a couch or two in Martin Luther King’s name, and say that we celebrated the holiday.” 

“I’m very sad that we have missed the opportunity to be better people, rather than looking as if we’re better people,” she said.

“I think what we missed is that Dr. King was asking for us to be moral people and to have a common sense of what morality is, which is to care for humanity and for the earth and all within,” she said. “It seems like we’re at a place where protracted bullying and bigotry has become the order of the day, and so you don’t need to put out signs about which water fountain to drink out of. It’s implicit.”

Seattle’s Devin Burghart, who has written about the rise of right-wing movements for decades and is the president and executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, also said Monday’s events create a moment to reflect on the continuity of past and present struggles and the work ahead.

But he said part of what has changed is that right-wing movements are now “orders of magnitude larger than when I started doing this work three decades ago.”

Burghart, who is leading an MLK Day workshop at Garfield called “The Retribution: What to Expect from the Far Right in 2025,” said what might have begun as more of a fringe movement has moved from the margins to the mainstream.

Now, he said, you can see ideas travel from the darkest corners of the internet straight into the hands of state legislatures. That shift has had a dramatic impact, he said, amplifying voices promoting outlandish conspiracy theories and “driving an agenda that often pushes back against any kind of protection for civil and human rights.”

He saw that in attacks on critical race theory; then diversity, equity and inclusion; then on LGBTQ+ and trans issues; and now attacks on Black history and civil rights being taught in schools. 

While it’s clear that movements that oppose these attacks have been in somewhat of a lull since November due to fatigue and demoralization over the new administration’s “liberation whack-a-mole,” Brown said we can’t stay in a state of apathy or despair. 

“My breath is a present and a witness to the fact that we’ve been here before, and we’ll be here again, but we are not dead,” she said. “So we can’t get overcome and hopeless.”

Particularly for those who have privilege in our society, you can’t opt out of the work because it’s uncomfortable or difficult, she said.

“Our muscles are atrophied in terms of how to do justice,” Brown said, leaving us weakened when the challenges come.

And we need everyone. Too often, those who are the most targeted are also expected to do the heavy lifting for racial and social justice.

While Brown said she is honored when she is asked to speak out on social justice issues, it’s foolhardy to rely on charismatic leadership alone.

“I pray that folks can gather themselves enough to know that we are not without power,” she said. “When I speak, I am inviting every person under the sound of my voice to step up and step in because I can’t do it by myself, and neither can you.”