Beloved Community
When I'm despairing of how our groups or wider culture fail to live up to our own values, I find it worthwhile to get back to: what is our vision for how we DO want to live?
(This is adapted from a talk I’ve given at several Ethical Societies. I’ve revised it somewhat for this edition, because I don’t think it just applies to Ethical Societies. But Ethical Societies have some unique history, and I left some of those references in this final version.)
“Dr. King’s Beloved Community is a global vision in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger, and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it. Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry, and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood.” - The King Center
“Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.” - bell hooks
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I’ve had lots of opportunities in our wider culture to be in touch with anger or despair in this last year. And lots of opportunities to be upset or despairing in our humanist, Ethical Culture, and UU communities. So rather than talk about “how awful things are” I realized I want to think more about “what is the vision” and “what can we do.”
And what is that vision, for me? A vision of a world of equity, inclusion, peace, diversity, love, justice. The opposite of a more and more polarized world.
And in pondering that vision, the phrase that kept coming back to me was “beloved community.”
It was a phrase I heard a lot in my early years, as part of a family that was involved in and followed closely the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It seems to me appropriate to revisit this, in the month of the 60th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington.
Dr. Martin Luther King said it this way in July of 1966:
“I do not think of political power as an end. Neither do I think of economic power as an end. They are ingredients in the objective that we seek in life. And I think that end or that objective is a truly brotherly society, the creation of the beloved community.”
We’ve learned since 1966 that “brotherly” is not as inclusive as we need to be. The vision of inclusiveness that is the vision of beloved community has continued to expand. And will continue to expand. In an earlier quote, King used “sisterly and brotherly.” The binary of that is no longer appropriate to a vision of inclusiveness. What are we now missing that we will include in fifty more years?
Eight years earlier, in 1958, when organizing to break through segregation enforced by law to disadvantage people of color, King said it this way – and I’ve slightly updated his language to include not just men:
“Desegregation is only a partial, though necessary, step toward the ultimate goal which we seek to realize. Desegregation will break down legal barriers, and bring [people] together physically. But something must happen so as to touch the hearts and souls of [people] that they will come together, not because the law says it, but because it is natural and right. In other words, our ultimate goal is integration [which he then defines this way:] which is genuine intergroup and interpersonal living. [He continues:] Only through nonviolence can this goal be attained, for the aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of the beloved community.”
Having lived through that era of legalized segregation where integration was a goal, I love the reminder in this quote of what “integration” originally meant to King. My own experience was and is that for many white people who supported civil rights, “integration” came to mean simply ending the legal ways that segregation is enforced. Or, even more pervasively, “letting” people of color choose to participate in the white world – jobs, housing, education, arts, religion, etc. But that version of integration keeps whiteness, white culture, the supreme goal and end. “Letting” people of color participate in what remains a world in which white people are the default and are largely those in charge.
Beloved community to King was the name for something different than integration of people of color into the white world. I’m going to borrow a description from the City Year project, a national service project that includes work in Dallas and San Antonio, as well as in 27 other cities. I’m not promoting that project itself (though it’s worth checking out), but I really love how they explain the idea of beloved community. It’s more like what I envision than any explanation that I tried to put together:
“Among Dr. King’s most compelling visions is that of a Beloved Community – a community in which people of different backgrounds recognize that we are all interconnected and that our individual well-being is inextricably linked to the well-being of others.”
Remember that phrase. It is central. A community in which people of different backgrounds recognize that we are all interconnected and that our individual well-being is inextricably linked to the well-being of others.
The description continues.
“Dr. King knew that the goal of social change is not tolerance alone, or even the recognition or enforcement of human or civil rights, or an improved economic condition. These are necessary but not sufficient steps in the path to human progress. We cannot rest until we have bridged the divides of prejudice and mistrust that lie within the human head and heart. Invariably, these final, resilient divisions are social and personal. Dr. King reminds us that reconciliation is both a process and a final destination. The road to the Beloved Community is the difficult road of reconciliation among people who have been in conflict and negotiation. The Beloved Community is reconciliation achieved – a profound human connectedness, a transcendent harmony and love among all people.”
That, to me, is the vision of Beloved Community – and the vision, I think also, of our progressive religious and humanist communities. I’ll give for an example the Ethical Culture movement.
Ethical Culture began in another time of massive social change and unrest. The first Society, a standalone at the start, was founded in New York City, at a time when there were very few public social programs and not much private charity, and at the same time massive numbers of poor and immigrant families coming to the city, including beginnings of the Great Migration from the American South. Black families were leaving the South as the hopes of Reconstruction transformed into the realities of Jim Crow segregation. And, many European immigrant families were fleeing xenophobia or violence, including anti-Jewish violence especially in Eastern Europe.
The original idea of Ethical Culture was as a place to move beyond divisions – even religious divisions. In the original call for the first Ethical Society, Felix Adler, then 24 years old, held out a vision of “diversity in the creed” – a place for the “believer and the infidel.” A place where individual freedom of thought would be respected and encouraged – but where, beyond that freedom and diversity of belief, there would be “unanimity in the deed” – unity around the need to make change in the world. A community where adults and children would learn and practice ethical living. A community in which people of different backgrounds recognize that we are all interconnected and that our individual well-being is inextricably linked to the well-being of others.
The idea of “beloved community” goes back to that very time of Felix Adler and the first Ethical Culture Societies. By the early 20th century, Ethical Culture had three Societies in New York City – two in Manhattan, though one of those would later die out, and one in Brooklyn. In the late 19th and early 20th century when our movement is rooted, Ethical Culture was one of many ways progressive religion was forming. Within Christianity, many preached what was called a “social gospel” – the idea that whatever kingdom was preached by Jesus, it was “at hand” – here and now. This “social gospel” influenced both Unitarians and Universalists as well (long before their 1960s merger).
When I was in graduate school, taking a course on the so-called New Testament, the professor was a very devoted and pietistic Christian who started every class with a prayer. He also scandalized a few of the Christian students by regularly saying, “Every time you see a homeless person on the street and decide whether to pass them by or do something else, the kingdom of heaven is right there at hand.” He also regularly said, “Whatever it was that Jesus was, so was Gandhi, and so was Martin Luther King.”
Ethical Culture, instead of living within the Judaism or Christianity of those days, chose to create a new form of religion based purely on ethics, not beliefs. Ethical Culture chose to build community with “the believer and the infidel,” and with people from many backgrounds, including many of those who were newcomers to the city. Unitarians and Universalists also moved to the edge or, in some cases, even outside of Christianity, spreading in both urban and rural areas, while building communities practicing freedom of belief and being involved in philanthropy and social change. A community in which people of different backgrounds recognize that we are all interconnected and that our individual well-being is inextricably linked to the well-being of others.
In some parts of the country, independent congregations and freethought groups arose – we might think of those as proto-humanist groups. They too practiced freedom of thought and involvement in the social issues of the day. A community in which people of different backgrounds recognize that we are all interconnected and that our individual well-being is inextricably linked to the well-being of others.
And so I will describe all those groups – Ethical Societies, Unitarian-Universalist congregations, freethought or humanist groups – as potentially being about beloved community.
Core ideas of beloved community, include the idea that in our differences every human being is unique. Our groups have usually stressed the related idea that each and every human being has worth and an inherent dignity. Social injustice is when those universal human qualities of worth and dignity and uniqueness are suppressed, to the detriment of the well-being of the individual. Our well-being depends on human worth and dignity and uniqueness being able to flourish.
But not only our individual well-being. Ethical Culture, for instance, has from the beginning asserted that we are not about simply “self-culture,” a phrase beloved by Transcendentalists: the ever-increasing flowering of our individual human dignity, worth, and uniqueness. Today, many of our groups, the ones I’d describe as beloved community, also recognize and assert that such flowering does not depend entirely on the individual, but on the social network of relationships. And that the well-being of the social network, and the well-being of every individual within the social network, also depends on the flourishing of the human dignity, worth, and uniqueness of each individual within it.
We are different individuals, with different group identities and influences. And where we meet together in a community to seek the highest – that is the creation of what some would call holy ground. Variations on the phrase “the place we meet to seek the highest is holy ground” appear in buildings of Ethical Culture Societies, Unitarians, and Universalists.
A community in which people of different backgrounds recognize that we are all interconnected and that our individual well-being is inextricably linked to the well-being of others.
I’d argue that the late 19th century activist progressive religion and freethought, as well as the “social gospel” and the vision called the Beloved Community including in King’s later vision, were all born as a resistance to the dominant culture that emphasized material wealth and greed for individuals.
The vision of these proto-humanist and progressive religious groups, and the vision of beloved community, resisted the pervasive unspoken and often unconscious assumption that certain people mattered more than others did.
Both visions resisted the national trend of that time towards empire-building, both expanding the borders of the USA and expanding control over territories beyond those borders. Groups with both visions were conceived as centers of resistance to the dominant culture – what more recently is summarized by the phrase “domination culture.”
But these groups didn’t conceive of themselves as JUST resistance centers. They were communities with a vision of how to live differently and thus were committed to trying to practice that vision in our own common life. You might think of these groups as something like laboratories or workshops to figure out and put into practice how to resist the pull of domination culture, yes, but also laboratories or workshops where people were learning together how to build something different and positive. An Ethical Culture. Heaven at the tip of our fingers, not in the sky. “Love is the spirit of this church.” A Beloved Community.
We need microcosms that try, now, to live out that larger vision, both as refuges from the larger, domination culture, and as laboratories figuring out how to both resist domination culture and build an ethical or love-centered community -- beloved community.
Or, as a more recent writer Margaret Wheatley put it, we need to build islands of sanity even in the surrounding sea of chaos and destruction. Communities themselves can live out the vision of what the world could be like if our values really matter to us.
So, yes, part of the vision is to take on social change. Social change means recognizing and enforcing human rights, means working for improved economic justice, and means becoming a more inclusive, fair, and just society. Social change also means recognizing humans as part of a larger natural network, and recognizing and practicing respect for that interconnected network of life. We know today that social change also means working to reverse human-caused climate change which threatens the poor and marginalized communities first and more.
A Unitarian-Universalist congregation, a humanist community, an Ethical Society, a beloved community – any of those can resist injustice and work for justice, in different ways. We can do some joint projects within a group. We can join broader coalitions. We can inspire and support members of our groups to do the work of justice as individuals. There are many ways to do social change, as a community.
But even beyond that – our values call on us to find ways to, in the words of the quote I used before, bridge “the divides of prejudice and mistrust that lie within the human head and heart.”
Social injustice doesn’t only operate on a material level, it operates on a deeply personal level. Social injustice often creates multi-generational psychological trauma. And trauma requires deeper healing than simply changing the material conditions going forward.
If those material conditions don’t change, the trauma continues, so it is definitely part of the agenda of beloved community to change the material conditions that oppress and suppress some people.
And it is not just those with disadvantages or who are oppressed who need healing. Ruby Sales, a longtime social justice activist and organizer, talks about the spiritual disease of whiteness, that strips people of empathy, that makes them feel entitled above others. When someone can laugh at a public meeting where the topic is the death by gun violence of schoolchildren, we know that there is a sickness. When someone can define as “harm” losing their priority, we know that there is a sickness. And sometimes the first reactions to participating in justice include a lot of guilt and grandiosity – those are also symptoms of the need to heal from a culture of white dominance.
“Whiteness” is about white dominance, not the simple fact of being a white person. We see that same dynamic in the more visible rise of white Christian nationalism, which is also usually patriarchal in assumptions. Those domination systems divide. Those systems put people in different groups in a hierarchy of value and entitlement – and do not allow anyone within the system to be their best self. Being part of beloved community with commitments to worth, relationship, and difference, can be part of healing for everyone.
Many of us with commitments to social justice are supporters of other organizations, and often work for them as volunteers or staff members. The many ways people in any of our groups work to change the world actually astounds me. From research to activism, from writing to organizing to protesting to raising conscious children to teaching to fund-raising to sustain activism to legally challenging unjust laws and practices to bringing compassion to the world through your professions – you are as individuals doing quite a bit to change the world. So we could all be doing the work of justice in our own ways.
Yet we come together in community. To resist the status quote, but also to figure out what comes after the status quo, and how to get there. To serve as a microcosm, a laboratory, of building what we want to replace the status quo: an ethical culture, the beloved community. And a microcosm, to practice some of that deep healing.
So the term “beloved community” can apply to any local community where people “meet to seek the highest” and learn and experiment how to reconcile even with our differences and difficult histories between individuals and groups.
The vision of our progressive ethical, humanist, and religious group, with the group internally living out a vision of equity, inclusion, peace, love, diversity, justice. That island of sanity.
And the term “beloved community” also describes our vision for the larger world that we are building towards.
The vision of the world: a world of equity, inclusion, peace, love, diversity, justice. In our groups, then, we work to transform the chaos and injustice that surround our island.
The Beloved Community is reconciliation achieved – a profound human connectedness, a transcendent harmony and love among all people.
In our connectness, we value differences between us as individuals, and differences between us as members of various identity groups with different experiences and histories. Differences can unite us.
We also know that differences can be used to separate. Specifically, we live in a world where differences are exploited in the interests of the few in order to polarize and separate us. Divide and conquer strategies are a tool of domination culture, when differences are used to judge who is better or smarter or more deserving.
I believe that the work of building a culture of transforming love, of more ethical culture, of building towards a beloved community, requires both thought and action. Another core concept of many of our groups is “deed beyond creed.” We can come together in deed, even if we differ in creed. And measure the value of our individual creeds (or credos) by what deed they inspire.
Some people are more anxious for action, some prefer to focus more on education and reflection. Our group meetings tend to be about reflection and education. Many long for more action. Action and reflection can feel like they’re in conflict.
Action without reflection is potentially a nightmare. If we have false assumptions or incorrect information, if we have no vision in mind, if we have not thought through what we do, and will not evaluate to learn from what works and what doesn’t – that can create a nightmare.
Reflection without action is potentially a daydream. Without action, whether individual or group, our reflection and education doesn’t mean much. We can critique the dominant culture without having any effect on it, if we don’t also act. And that action, in the context of beloved community, is about within our group as well as in the wider world. Reflection alone can be just daydreaming.
Action without reflection is potentially a nightmare. Reflection without action is potentially a daydream. We need, instead, active reflection and reflective action. Active reflection. Reflective action. We need to pair them as partners, not see them as enemies.
And beyond that – if we really do accept that the well-being of each depends on the well-being of others in our interconnected whole, and the value of difference makes the interconnected whole richer, then reflection done with others is more valuable than individual reflection, more productive of valuable information.
In times when we feel irritation, anger, disappointment, despair — about the world or about our own communities — isn’t it because we’re not living up to these values? Refocusing on the vision can help us find the answers to how to move forward, with energy and not just frustration.
What does it take to build Beloved Community? A willingness to be one’s self, and to honor the selfness of everyone else. A willingness to meet difference with curiosity and not to react simply in argument or denial of difference. A commitment to see the world including our group through a lens of vision. A community in which we each reflect on what it is that we can do to build a more resilient, stronger, more caring and compassionate community in our own group – and then practice the skills and behaviors we want to take into the wider world, to build Beloved Community there, too.
A community in which people of different backgrounds recognize that we are all interconnected and that our individual well-being is inextricably linked to the well-being of others.
A community living out a vision of equity, inclusion, diversity, peace, love, justice. And doing our part in building a world of equity, inclusion, diversity, peace, love, justice.