My brother and I shared a bedroom during our youth, and our mornings typically began with my mother’s voice signaling the start of a new day. Except for one morning in April 1968, when she sat at the edge of my bed and gently shook me out of my slumber.

“I have some really bad news,” she whispered. “Martin Luther King Jr. has been murdered.”

The jarring word of Dr. King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, is one of those rare life-changing moments that is chiseled in stone for millions of Americans. Yet the memory I have of this great man diverges from how Dr. King is often presented today. Most Americans typically think of words such as “civil rights,” “justice,” “freedom” and “love” — all accurate, but incomplete.

The title “reverend” — and Dr. King’s prominent vocation as a Baptist preacher — is too often assigned as a footnote of history rather than a preamble to all that he was and is. As the nation prepares to mark the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination that day in Memphis, it is my hope that we can recognize and celebrate the religious underpinnings of his work. To do so, it’s imperative that Christians, in particular, divorce themselves from party purity and find new ways to bring Dr. King’s moral vision and his eloquent intonations of faith to bear on current issues.

The civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s was derived from religion, after all. Dr. King invoked Scripture, God and divine power to make theological arguments for equality and freedom. So many of his words reverberate today and are as relevant now as at the height of the civil rights movement. In Dr. King’s 1963 book, “Strength to Love,” which is a collection of his sermons and thinking on racial segregation, the reverend’s insights and wisdom delivered from America’s pulpits can be both prescient and haunting.