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Feature Story

Shining Light in A Culture of Darkness

One of AU’s newest professors, Dr. Matt Daniels, has created a new program that seeks to unify, not divide.

By: Rachel Morgan, Class of 2025

You’re walking outside of your apartment building. There’s a pool of blood, shiny on the icy sidewalk. You remember the sound of gunshots, the screams from last night. The superintendent’s wife has a pot of steaming water and a bristle, toiling away to remove the evidence. Her back turned to you, so you call out to her with 
desperate voice. “Who died here? Whose blood is this?” She continues working mutely. You approach her, your voice a plea: “Who died here?” She turns around. “It’s yours!”

And that’s when you wake.

Dr. Matt Daniels has dreamt this dream since he was a kid. It’s one of many experiences of violence—even death—he witnessed growing up on New York’s Upper West Side. He never shook it, even after moving away to Dartmouth College. It was a neighborhood full of crime. It helped him understand that the Lord wanted him to see the suffering of others as his own. This epiphany—and his growing interest in the power of the law to impact society—prompted him to act.

“Because of my history and where I grew up, I had absolutely no problem understanding the notion of the blood of Christ being shed for me,” Dr. Daniels said. “It actually made perfect sense, because I had grown up around so much bloodshed in my neighborhood. The Lord was using the dream to call me towards him when I first heard the Gospel at Redeemer Church, because I kept thinking about the blood on the sidewalk of the guy who was killed in my building.”

Dr. Daniels is a distinguished University Professor of Law, Political Science and Human Rights at Anderson University. After undergraduate studies at Dartmouth, he earned a law degree and a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Then, he was awarded a doctoral fellowship in American politics to study judicial policymaking and the rule of law at Brandeis University.    

His work in promoting universal human rights began on the international scale with the foundation of Good of All, a public education movement promoting human rights in the digital age. Each person, whether Christian or not, often realizes what Dr. Daniels terms “the Great Problem of Human Rights.” By merely looking at the world around us, we can see that immorality and inequity are abundantly evident. Throughout history, people have understood their individual rights through the lens of their culture, their race, their gender and other factors. However, the universality of human rights can be realized through common grace or natural law. Those are transcendent truths, the human dignity freely given to all from God.

Through his work with Good of All and his book Human Liberty 2.0, Dr. Daniels demonstrated the secular applicability of the values and rights asserted in the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His international work with Good of All also posits that the promotion of human rights is not solely a Western notion. It is an intrinsic truth of humanity. Upon seeing the rising disunity and divisiveness in public discourse and in American society, Dr. Daniels felt the Lord was prompting him to promote his educational techniques and content to a domestic audience.

Thus, he and Anthony Jones—chair of the 2024 HBCU Conference National Advisory Committee —wrote the Civil Rights: A Global Perspective curriculum based on the unifying and timeless principles of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Last year it was adopted by the South Carolina Department of Education and promoted by State Superintendent Ellen Weaver.  An explicitly Christian perspective on the promotion of universal human rights is what characterizes Dr. Daniels’ next project.  “There is only one cure, from now until the end of human history: to assert the dignity of the human person and their fundamental rights as a child of God,” Dr. Daniels says. “And that was Dr. King’s message.”

This summer, Anderson University hopes to host a program whereby students from Historically Black
Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Council of Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) institutions will study and apply his curriculum. It’s an investment in future leaders who will embody the unifying ideals of justice and compassion that were the driving forces of the Civil Rights Movement. The state of South Carolina, the targeting of the curriculum to a young generation and the location of a Christian university are invaluable aspects of this program for Dr. Daniels.

This is because he believes that we serve a God of jujitsu. Jujitsu is a martial arts discipline of hand-to-hand combat developed by those defending themselves against heavily trained and armored samurai in medieval Japan. The martial art involves taking advantage of the overconfidence of the opponent to conquer them.  

As Dr. Daniels sees it, the resurrection of Christ was the greatest act of jujitsu. So, he finds it not at all surprising that the Lord would use the state through which the majority of enslaved people entered its ports, the state that first seceded from the nation, and the state where the Civil War started as the hub of education and healing of inequality and injustice in America.

Targeting the curriculum toward a younger generation is significant also. Dr. Daniels’s work in South Korea and London with Good of All was based on the premise that the current generation of digital natives, those who have always lived in a world with technology, are best suited to actualize the universality of human rights. Young people, he argues, are best equipped to be leaders for human rights because they have always seen the world and its issues from a global perspective.   

Yet, the wealth of information available to this generation can be detrimental to their sense of hope. They constantly witness a hostile political and global climate and are told of the multitude of issues in the world without being offered a solution. Dr. Daniels explains that education is the antidote to the rising aggression, incivility and hatred in American society and around the world. A substantive education that taps
into the spirit of humanity and allows for the application of the ideals of leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is desperately needed. Therefore, the education of future generations is where our hope for the fruition of universal human rights lies. Most importantly, although universal human rights are valued by believers and nonbelievers alike, the Civil Rights Movement in America originated from the Church.  

Upon meeting Ambassador Andrew Young for the first time, Dr. Daniels heard a powerful story that inspired him to develop the HarperCollins Christian curricula that is used in the Share the Dream project. Ambassador Young is among the founding fathers of the Civil Rights Movement and worked closely with Dr. King. Young recalled the night enacting their efforts, explaining that the leaders and supporters would be meeting at a specific church in the morning. Dr. King told Young and the other leaders that he had a dream wherein God told him they must meet at another church in the morning instead, though he was not sure as to the reason.

The next morning, the leaders then saw that the church at which they originally agreed to convene was bombed. Their decision to meet elsewhere saved the lives of an entire generation of civil rights leaders, all of whom fundamentally changed American society. Dr. Daniels was incredulous at the fact that this incredible origin of the Civil Rights Movement was not emphasized in the education system.

“This is the most important part of the story, and it got left out,” Dr. Daniels says. “They were the early church, the first century church—they were powerless, marginalized people who turned the world upside down and that can only be explained by the power of God.”

So, from the beginning, the Lord’s hand was on the work of these civil rights leaders. Furthermore, Dr. Daniels explains that many believers can become discouraged in the face of inequality and divisiveness or may resort to adopting unbiblical practices such as creating subculture institutions and hiding away from the larger dilemma. This only digs the grave in which we will be buried, Dr. Daniels says.  

Alternatively, we must be active agents of redemption in this world, he asserts. And although the principles and methods of Dr. King are not exclusive to him, they are best embodied and expressed in his work. To fully appreciate our progress thus far and to ensure that it continues, we must look back and consider how we arrived at this point, Dr. Daniels says.

Bishop Eric Freeman works with Dr. Daniels as the chair of the South Carolina Share the Dream Project, and he echoed Dr. Daniels’ sentiments. “We must intervene in these conversations that are hiding in the dark,” Bishop Freeman says. “And I think that’s what made King’s example such a threat because he confronted these conversations with light.”

This is precisely what the summer program at AU will seek to accomplish. By teaching the principles of civility, hope, nonviolence and dignity of all human beings—and by providing students with activities and acts of service to put these ideals into action—fostering a new generation of champions for human rights will begin.  

“Anderson University can be the place where young people who feel the calling to be to their generation what Dr. King was to his generation can come and be trained and become a part of a network and a movement,” Dr. Daniels says. “Because this is a collective work; it can’t be done by lone actors. We need to see a multi-generational movement of redemption.”

Dr. Daniels gives credit and gratefully acknowledges President Whitaker and Anderson University for giving a home and value to the upcoming summer program and their long-term efforts. Initiatives such as this one are the most effective antidote to a culture of incivility.  

“Ideas and freedom, in the long run, are the greatest weapons against injustice,” Dr. Daniels says. And although it is a well-known adage, the powerful words of Dr. King still ring true today, that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. “It really is true,” Dr. Daniels says. “If we don’t defend justice on behalf of the weakest, we’ve essentially undermined our own selves.” 

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