Historian and professor Harvey (The Color of Christ) plumbs the background and writings of Martin Luther King Jr. to provocatively build a religious frame around the civil rights leader’s beliefs and tactics. Delving into the formative intellectual and theological influences on King’s writings and activities, Harvey’s approach is not primarily as a biographer but rather a close reader of the evolution of King’s thought; as Harvey notes, “King’s radicalism had deep roots. The black religious tradition informed him through its history of protest and proclamation.” King’s ways of thinking are considered across his accomplishments and failures in civil rights campaigns including in Montgomery, Selma, and Chicago. Throughout, Harvey stresses King’s unwavering commitment to nonviolence; his political realism, derived in part from his study of Reinhold Niebuhr; and his fundamental economic radicalism. (King first read Karl Marx in 1949 while in seminary.) Harvey also acknowledges King’s “anxiety reduction” practices of drinking and sexual dalliance (which the FBI surveilled obsessively). Importantly, Harvey takes on in an epilogue the “distortions” (or “symbolism [over] substance”) of King’s message in the decades following his 1968 assassination. This careful and of-the-moment examination of King’s fundamentally religious worldview should take a prominent place on the shelf of literature about the man who changed 20th century America.

Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Paul Harvey’s Martin Luther King: A Religious Life provides a succinct and refreshing perspective on King’s intellectual influences, his development as a thinker and activist during his own time, and the varied ways he has been remembered since his death. Harvey demonstrates that King should not be remembered solely as a moderate advocate of nonviolence but rather as a radical thinker who called for a complete restructuring of American society, politics, and economics. Martin Luther King Jr., Harvey argues, was the most important religious thinker of the 1900s. This book provides an essential window into that religious thought and will be of great benefit to both scholars and the general public alike.

Christopher Cameron, Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Author, Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism

Harvey tells us that King is the most important figure in modern American religious history, and then he shows us why he’s right. This engaging and accessible book synthesizes a generation of cutting-edge King and civil rights scholarship. Here, general readers will meet the King scholars know well: not the comfortable, bland, and conservative token of reconciliation but a preacher committed to a radical message of racial and economic equality, and to moral accountability for systemic injustices.

Alison Collis Greene, PhD, Associate Professor of American Religious History; Director of the Master of Theological Studies Program, Emory University