Religion in the Classroom As Modeled by King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail": We Don't have to Believe It to Get It (Martin Luther King Jr.) (Report‪)‬

Motivating our students to learn has always been one of our greatest challenges as teachers. How many times have we found ourselves scouring our bookshelves, forever on the lookout for that one short story, that one essay that just might penetrate beyond our students' lunchtime text messages? Obviously, we want them to think critically (maybe even to respond deeply), but "the times, they are a changin,'" and our progress often seems slower than Internet dial-up. Strangely enough, what I've discovered in my decade and a half of teaching English at the college level is that students have yet to lose their desire to connect with the past. They want to ruminate. They want to engage. Their world may be a faster world, but it certainly doesn't have to be a smaller one. And one of the ways of engaging students is to introduce them to the religious beliefs of their forebears. Religion has its own language, we might say, its own way of looking at the world, and those of the past have often reached for its lenses to gain perspective. A mountain becomes more interesting when it is inhabited by the gods. Whether these gods are real is of far less importance than the messages they bring. Unfortunately, many among us today walk about like little Hamlets, focusing more on what our eyes have seen than on what our ears have heard. Religion does not belong in our classrooms, we say, because religion is a ghost, and we don't believe in ghosts. But our forefathers believed in them and frequently turned to them for instruction. To deny our students access to such instruction is to deny our students the skills requisite to interpreting much of humanity's past, a past largely communicated by and through biblical allusion. Allusions, like metaphors, are designed to expand ideas that might otherwise appear vague to a given audience. The author is "laying down the track," so to speak, and we as readers are locating the switches. In his highly regarded Letter From Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. shows us just how effective allusion can be in the hands of a skilled writer. Having boarded a train marked by hatred and social injustice, King patently redirects his readers to a biblical landscape. King's Letter is of course a response to a published appeal urging the Christian Leadership Conference (of which King is founder and spokesperson) to discontinue public demonstrations in the city of Birmingham. "We ... strongly urge our own Negro community to withdraw support from these demonstrations," advise the ad hoc committee members, "[for] such actions as incite to hatred and violence, however technically peaceful those actions may be, have not contributed to the resolution of our local problems." (1) Beginning his rebuttal on the margins of the newspaper from which the appeal is published, Dr. King addresses each of the group's concerns.