Abstract

This dissertation compares two competing theologically informed projects of social reconstruction. I argue that a critical examination of their projects in social reconstructionism reveals the crucial differences and similarities between John Locke and Martin Luther King Jr's relation to modern liberalism. Though John Locke developed a covenant-based social contract theory for seventeenth century Britain, much of its theological content was lost as others adopted it that came under its influence. This was certainly the case in British North America and subsequently, what came to be known as the United States of America, where a non-theological version of Locke's view of civil society became the foundation for a contractual understanding of the Constitution. This dissertation explores not only the epistemological foundations of Locke's primary vision , but it moves beyond this to investigate the historical expression of this social contract in terms of British colonial policy; trace the socio-economistic and racial-ethnic encumbrances of the social contract as it was delocalized and brought to the North America context; examine how the theological project of Martin Luther King, Jr. serves to resituate civil society on theological foundations and by so doing correct the racialization inherent in the Americanized version of the social contract