Draft:Beloved Community

Beloved Community

Beloved Community is a concept originally created by American Theologian Josiah Royce to describe the universal Christian community. Later, the idea of the Beloved Community was adapted and expanded by other ordained religious leaders and lay people. As a result, today the Beloved Community concept, no longer exclusively Christian, points to “loving bonds” or an accepting and cherished relationship between individuals and groups that center social justice, equitable systems, anti-racism and peace education.

“The Martin Luther King Jr. Center summarizes the basic idea of the Beloved Community as one in which people of different backgrounds recognize that our individual well-being is inextricably linked to the well-being of others – including those we consider ‘the other.’ It is a society based on justice, equal opportunity, empathy, and love.”

Reverend William J. Barber II called the Beloved Community a “multiethnic democracy”. American philosopher, bell hooks, called it an “anti-racist progressive vision.”

When referring to a relationship between individuals, Beloved Community focuses on dignity, opportunity, and mutual respect. In 2021 Episcopal bishop Marc Andrus defined it as “a community not only in which all are included and all are at peace with one another, but also one in which each being in the community is connected to every other being.”

Although the idea of the Beloved Community had already been conceptualized and modeled by abolitionist and Christian minister John G. Fee in founding the town of Berea, Kentucky (1855), Josiah Royce coined the term in the years preceding the First World War. Royce envisioned that the central belief of Christianity, the death and resurrection of Jesus, was the foundational act which created the Beloved Community. Consequently, he sometimes used the phrase to mean the Christian church universal. But he also believed that the Beloved Community included all people; both those who were already Christian and those who would be, one day. He said, “the ideal Christian community is to be the community of all mankind . . .” This aspirational and forward-looking view of the Beloved Community was a theme repeated in later years by other Christian leaders such as Georgia Congressman John Lewis.

Royce wrote extensively concerning the Beloved Community in his 1913 book titled The Problem of Christianity, which he addressed to Christian clergy. In it he expressed his highest hope for the Beloved Community this way:

“. . . since the office of religion is to aim towards the creation on earth of the Beloved Community, the future task of religion is the task of inventing and applying the arts which shall win men over to unity . . . Judge every social device, every proposed reform, every national and every local enterprise by the one test: Does this help toward the coming of the universal community.”

In 1915, alongside other Christian clergymen, Royce helped establish the Fellowship of Reconciliation as an international Christian organization dedicated to opposing war, and to promoting non-violence. The historical mission of the organization was to “establish a world-order based on Love.” They also affirmed that “as Christians, we are forbidden to wage war, and that our loyalty to our country, to humanity, to the Church Universal, and to Jesus Christ our Lord and Master, calls us instead to a life-service for the enthronement of Love in personal, commercial and national life.”

Two members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation who had tremendous influence on shaping the philosophy and methods that the Fellowship offered to the “Church Universal” were ministers A.J. Muste and Howard Thurman.  

Muste introduced the idea of nonviolent resistance to the Fellowship’s concept of pacifism. Thurman “turned the attention of the Fellowship to racial reconciliation.” Both of these innovations helped Martin Luther King Jr., who was also a member of the Fellowship, embrace, reshape, and empower the idea of the Beloved Community in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

King revolutionized the concept of Beloved Community by combining the moral commitment to seek just alternatives to violence, that he encountered at the Fellowship of Reconciliation, with “Ghandian concepts of non-violence.” He also defined the type of love that is operational in the Beloved Community as agape: “unconditional, sacrificial, overflowing love.”

He subsequently used his reworked concept of the Beloved Community as a central ethical goal and ultimate vision of his civil rights activism. According to this vision, the agape of the Beloved Community would fuel and sustain a racially integrated society built on justice and equality. This was a world King described, and presented as an achievable goal, in his Montgomery, Alabama speech of March 25, 1965, when he said, “We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.”

In another speech, King explicitly outlined how nonviolent resistance would help establish the Beloved Community:

“ . . . nonviolent resistance does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding. The nonviolent resister must often express his protest through noncooperation or boycotts, but he realizes that noncooperation and boycotts are not ends themselves; they are merely means to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent. The end is redemption and reconciliation. The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.”

Sometime in the early to mid-1960s the USA chapter of the Fellowship of Reconciliation moved from an ecumenical Christian model to an interfaith organization. Around this time the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hahn, joined the Fellowship.

Thich, a friend with King, expanded “the idea of the Beloved Community to include all of life, not just human life.” Thich also taught that people who have transitioned out of earthly life still work with the living to help achieve the Beloved Community. He grew the numbers of people who were aware of the Beloved Community by helping “lower the barriers between two of the great world religions, Buddhism and Christianity.” But his greatest achievement in promoting the Beloved Community was by “teaching the world mindfulness,” and through his Engaged Buddhism movement, which he began before he met King.

Magnolia Grove, a residential monastery in Thich Nhat Hahn’s Plum Village tradition, features a Beloved Community Garden. The central feature of the garden is a statue that bears an inscription which defines the Beloved Community. The “statue [depicts] Thay [Thich Nhat Hahn] and Dr. Martin Luther King holding an open scroll that . . . says, ‘The Beloved Community: To build a community that lives in harmony and awareness, that is the most noble task’.”

Prominent advocates for the Beloved Community in the laity have included Grace Lee Boggs, in her later years, and Congressman John Lewis of Georgia who was a life-long student of King’s and an advocate of the Beloved Community. Lewis said near the end of his life, “[Dr. King] said we are all complicit when we tolerate injustice. He said it is not enough to say it will get better by and by. He said each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up, and speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we call the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.”

Other ordained and lay leaders who support the Beloved Community in their work include James E. Wallis Jr., Shane Claiborne, Adam Russell Taylor, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, Anne Braden, Marshall Ganz, Vincent Harding, Bernard Lafayette, Virginia Durr, Marian Wright Edelman, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, William J. Barber II, and Bryan Stevenson.

The concept of the Beloved Community continues to be foundational in mindfulness organizations and Buddhist communities begun or influenced by Thich Nhat Hahn and for those inspired by the antiracist vision of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is actively in use in Episcopal and Lutheran churches as well as many other protestant Christian congregations in the United States and is an ongoing part of programming for non-profit organizations, including the YWCA and the Unitarian Universalist Association.