Martin Luther King, Jr., gazes serenely, almost expressionless, in a somber suit and tie before a backdrop of prison bars. Around his neck hangs a booking number, “7089.” Around his head is a brilliant golden halo. The picture is not a mug shot but an icon in the Byzantine tradition. It is, as its Greek inscription says, “Holy Martin.” St. Martin Luther King.

This icon is a popular piece of merchandise for a mail-order Company in Vermont. Each January, just before King's birthday they receive a flood of Orders. This phenomenon is an enigma, the fountainhead for a flood of questions. How can a black Baptist minister become the subject of a popular icon? What in American society and culture fostered its creation? Who invokes this great civil rights leader as a saint? But the most basic question is, how can Martin Luther King be considered a saint in the first place? Was it simply because he was slain for the cause of civil rights? Others died for the cause, and there are no icons of them.

The study of nineteenth-century U.S. biblical exegesis on the slavery question illumines a fundamental paradox in American religious culture. The relationship between the moral imperative of anti-slavery and the evolution of biblical criticism resulted in a major paradigm shift away from literalism. This moral imperative fostered an interpretive approach that found conscience to be a more reliable guide to Christian morality than biblical authority. Yet, the political imperative of proslavery nourished a biblicism that long antedated the proslavery argumentation and remains prevalent in American moral preaching. The nineteenth-century desire to resolve this paradox led to important innovations in American interpretations of the Bible.

In 1872, a young novice, Sister Marie, appeared at the door of the private study of Napoleon Perche, archbishop of New Orleans. This was not Sister Marie's first visit to the archbishop's residence. As a member of the religious order “last in rank” in the city, she was regularly called on to perform housekeeping duties for the archbishop and had worked for him in this capacity first as a postulant and later as a novice. Today, the reason for her visit was different: she appeared before him for the first time in a religious habit, which her order's mother superior, Josephine Charles, had designed and made. Mother Josephine was one of three founders of the Soeurs de Sainte-Famille or Sisters of the Holy Family (SSF), the order lowest in rank in New Orleans because its members were women of African descent.