The Beloved Community

The term “The Beloved Community” was introduced in the early days of the last century by Josiah Royce (philosopher and theologian) who founded the Fellowship of Reconciliation.  Founded in 1915, the  Fellowship of Reconciliation is the largest, oldest interfaith peace organization in the U.S. and has affiliates in 40 countries around the world.  Martin Luther King, Jr was a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. While Royce coined the phrase “The Beloved Community,” Martin Luther King popularized it and invested it with deeper meaning.

In King’s mind, this “beloved community” was not some lofty utopian goal, or some religious Peaceable Kingdom, where lions and lambs coexist in harmony.   King saw the beloved community as a realistic, achievable goal that could be attained, here and now.  It was global—a community in which all people could share in the wealth of the earth.  Poverty, hunger, and homelessness would not be tolerated in that community because human decency would not permit it.  Racism and all other forms of discrimination, bigotry, prejudice, hate and violence would be replaced by the spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood.  Love and trust would triumph over fear and hatred.  Peace with justice would prevail over war and military conflict.  It was about love—a love for brothers and sisters—all of them—everywhere.

Congressman John Lewis, an instrumental part of the non-violent campaign for civil rights in the 1960’s, believed in King’s vision of The Beloved Community.  He not only believed in the vision, but he has lived his life as if the ‘beloved community’ were already our reality.  “I discovered,” he wrote, “that you have to have this sense of faith that what you’re moving toward is already done.  It’s already happened.”  “You live,” he said in an interview, “as if you’re already there, that you’re already in that community, part of that sense of one family, one house.  If you can visualize it, if you can even have faith that it’s there, for you it is already there.”

Lewis says, “It’s just not something that is natural.  You have to be taught the way of peace, the way of love, the way of nonviolence.  In the religious sense, in the moral sense, you can say that in the bosom of every human being, there is a spark of the divine.  So you don’t have a right as a human to abuse that spark of the divine in your fellow human being…If you have someone attacking you, beating on you, spitting on you, you have to think of that person—years ago that person was an innocent child, an innocent little baby.  What happened?  Did something go wrong?  Did someone teach that person to hate, to abuse others?  So you try to appeal to the goodness of every human being and you don’t give up.  You never give up on anyone.”  You live with faith that the beloved community is already present, as if it were already reality.