In a 2023 essay in the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, Christian ethicist Marcus Mescher pointed out, "In growing scholarship dedicated to moral injury, its effects on moral conscience have largely been ignored or avoided. This is significant because conscience is an innate capacity and activity, a warrant for equal and inherent human dignity and rights as well as a locus for reasoning and agency...Moral injury impairs the life-long process of ordering, interpreting, and judging what is right, true, good, and just" (Vol 43, no 1 [2023]: 80-81).
In light of Mescher's observation, as well as the fact that the scholarship dedicated to "moral injury" has not widely engaged with sources from the U.S. Black Intellectual Tradition in general, and with King in particular, this paper seeks to begin to address that lacuna. This paper argues that King's oeuvre is imbued with a latent yet robust theology of "moral injury" that can inform theologies of social healing in the 21st century. This paper will show that King's work in this area is essential for 21st century praxes of racial justice focused on the "moral injury" caused by whiteness to those racialized as white in the U.S. I will pursue my argument in three steps.
First, I will offer a working definition of the term "moral injury" through the work of Rita Nakashima Brock and Marcus Mescher. After providing a working definition, I will follow the lead of Kevin Considine (Analogy of the Wound: A Local Theology of Communication for Healing and Social Transformation, Lexington 2025) , who builds upon the work of Robert J. Schreiter and Andrew Sung Park, to further define "moral injury" vis a vis the term "trauma". I will suggest that, whereas "trauma" may be understood as the residue in the wounds inflicted from being violently "sinned-against", "moral injury" can refer to the residue from a parallel, second wound that violent wrongdoers self-inflict and that also needs recognition, attention, and treatment. I will utilize insights from Considine, Schreiter, and Park to offer a theological understanding of sinning and being sinned-against as connected to the experiences of moral injury and trauma.
Second, I will show how a latent and robust theology of "moral injury" resides within the voluminous writings and speeches of King. Although flourishes of a theological articulation of moral injury can be found as early as King's 1955 "Address to the First Montgomery Improvement Association Mass Meeting" and this then becomes more focused and robust in his famous "Letter from Birmingham City Jail" (1963) as well as his less-famous "“Address at the Freedom Rally in Cobo Hall” (1963), it is King's later work that I will analyze here. I will focus on King's reflections on whiteness and white supremacy as "sicknesses" through analyzing what I think are representative selections from this theological trajectory: "Address at the Conclusion of the March from Selma to Montgomery" (1965), "Where Do We Go from Here?"(1967), and the posthumously published, "A Testament of Hope" (1968). Ever mindful of a proper hermeneutical positioning in approaching King's work that was made clear by David Garrrow and James Cone in the 1980s and that still holds true today, I will show how King's descriptions of his "sick white brothers" ("I've Been to the Mountaintop", 1968) whose consciences have been deformed by whiteness and white supremacy resonate with the understanding of "moral injury" offered in part one. I suggest that, although the psychological category of "moral injury" was not yet available to King in his lifetime, he already had identified, diagnosed, and offered a remedy to this phenomena connected to whiteness and white supremacy through the practice of Christian nonviolence.
Third, I will argue that King's latent theology of the moral injury imbued in whiteness should be utilized as a locus theologicus for contemporary Christian ministers and theologians engaging with social healing from the scourges of racism and white supremacy. In other words, theologians engaging with "moral injury" need to consult King's work as essential to their endeavor and ministers and theologians engaging with dismantling white supremacy need to adopt the category of "moral injury" to more accurately offer a way forward for many whites to realize Beloved Community. In this way, Christian ministers and theologians will be following the praxis of King as well as the larger nonviolent movement for Black Liberation that supported him and to whom he was accountable.
This paper argues that King's later theological work is imbued with a latent yet robust theology of "moral injury" that can inform theologies of social healing in the 21st century. King distinctly and seamlessly linked the personal, the social, and the political in a radical praxis of liberation: he clearly characterizes the racist social sinning of peoples racialized as white--who are formed by an insidious ideology of white supremacy--as a kind of moral injury that must be addressed in order to realize Beloved Community. King strikes a delicate theological balance of prioritizing the imminent liberation of Black peoples with diagnosing a cause of this oppression in the morally injured conscience of whites. So, for Black peoples to be fully liberated there must be a concomitant repentance, repair, and healing among those racialized as white, a claim with far-reaching implications for theology and ministry.