Religion & Law

Years ago, David Luban wrote an article about Martin Luther King, the legal system, and King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail.  (87 Mich. L. Rev. 2152)  This part really grabbed my attention:

[T]here is an important sense in which Socrates, like Paul and Amos and Shadrach and Luther and Bunyan, does not belong in the same political narrative as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  The defining relationship of Socrates's public stance, like the figures in the biblical narratives, was a relationship with a divine voice.  This relationship, to be sure, manifested itself in a politically significant action, but in the case of Socrates that was happenstance. . . . [U]nless we take Paul and Luther to be lying at the core of their being, their political acumen accrued to them (to speak scholastically) per accidens . . . [T]he theological narratives contained in King's Letter may actually suppress or displace an explicitly political self-understanding of political action by substituting relationships with the divinity for political relationships.

Luban here is expanding on Hannah Arendt's point that "conscience is unpolitical."  Thoughts?