Martin Luther King's Civil Disobedience and the American Covenant Tradition

Abstract

Daniel J. Elazar introduced the covenant idea to political science in his four-volume work, Covenant Tradition in Politics. As he showed, American government and society are indebted to the covenant ways of New England Puritans and their doctrine, 'federal theology. Puritan covenants fostered polities whose frames of government and patterns of civil order established a federal matrix antecedent to modern American federalism. moral orientation of covenant has also influenced modern American political thought, as evidenced by the public philosophy articulated by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968). In such works as The Letter from the Birmingham CityJail, King challenged his contemporaries' ideas about law and justice, providing Americans with an opportunity to examine modern covenant practice.