Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) was a famous American pastor and prominent civil rights era leader. King arguably had a larger role in promoting racial equality in the United States than anyone in the twentieth century. He was also well known for his nonviolent methods of political protest and his “I Have a Dream” speech which articulated a vision of racial equality that continues to evoke powerful emotional responses. King was, by all accounts, a deeply religious man. King’s writings demonstrate that his Christian commitments suffused his thoughts and drove his actions. More significantly for Rawls, King advocated racial equality on explicitly Christian grounds, though he sometimes spoke in terms of more “political values” embodied in the constitution.

King makes a brief appearance in TJ in a footnote on civil disobedience (TJ 320 n.19). But in PL, King becomes cause for concern. In PL, Rawls famously sought an overlapping consensus on a political conception of justice. Included in the political conception are “guidelines of public reason” that citizens of a well-ordered society will follow in order to maintain their society’s allegiance to its overlapping consensus. Initially Rawls thought that the guidelines included a principle that restricted the appeal to comprehensive values and reasons when constitutional essentials were at stake, the purely ethical duty of civility. He was inclined to what he called the “exclusive view” which holds that “on fundamental political matters, reasons given explicitly in terms of comprehensive doctrines are never to be introduced into public reason.