My Unitarian Universalist congregation voted to accept the UU Eighth Principle … now what?

Since we voted to work toward the Beloved Community, I thought I should try to understand what the Beloved Community might look like. Here is one description extracted from a blog titled “Pluralism, Pragmatism, Progressivism. Carl Gregg wrote…..

“In progressive religious circles, you will often hear calls to “build the Beloved Community,” but I’m not sure we always appreciate the full historic resonance of that phrase. The term “Beloved Community” was coined by the early twentieth-century American philosopher Josiah Royce (1855-1916). But most of us learned it not from Royce but from The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who often spoke of the “Beloved Community” as his ultimate goal.”

As an early example, after the Montgomery Bus Boycotts in speaking about the larger movement toward which they were building, Dr. King said:

Notice as well what King is not saying. He is not saying what we are often accustomed to hearing in our highly competitive society: that the end goal is a decisive — or even crushing — victory over our opponents. For King, building Beloved Community requires the even harder work of reconciliation, redemption, and being in right relationship, of “transforming opponents into friends.”

As Dr. King said in his 1967 “A Christmas Sermon on Peace,” “We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.” That’s what he meant by “a love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men”: practices like nonviolent activism that break open the hearts of your opponents, confronting them with the inherent worth and dignity of peoples and groups they falsely believed to be less than fully human.

According to The King Center: 

For Dr. King, The Beloved Community was not a lofty utopian goal to be confused with the rapturous image of the Peaceable Kingdom, in which lions and lambs coexist in idyllic harmony. Rather, The Beloved Community was for him a realistic, achievable goal that could be attained by a critical mass of people committed to and trained in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence. 

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. In the Beloved Community, international disputes will be resolved by peaceful conflict-resolution and reconciliation of adversaries, instead of military power. Love and trust will triumph over fear and hatred. Peace with justice will prevail over war and military conflict.

Recall that for Dr. King, the Beloved Community was a “realistic, achievable goal that could be attained by a critical mass of people committed to and trained in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence.” Given the effectiveness we have seen of the practice of nonviolence in the movements led by King, Gandhi, and others, what would it mean to work toward having “a critical mass of people committed to and trained in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence?” What might it look like if we reallocated even 1% of our nation’s significant military budget for teaching nonviolent activism? And then 2% the next year? Then 3% and so on? How might such a paradigm shift help us move away from what Dr. King called the three greatest threats to building the Beloved Community: racism, materialism, and militarism. 

Dr. King’s friend, the Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh extended the Beloved Community to all sentient beings, but he called it his sangha. In 2014, forty-six years after King’s assassination, Nhat Hanh wrote: “I was in New York when I heard the news of his assassination; I was devastated. I could not eat; I could not sleep. I made a deep vow to continue building what he called ‘the beloved community,’ not only for myself but for him also. I have done what I promised to Martin Luther King Jr. And I think that I have always felt his support.”

As Thich Nhat Hanh says, “The next Buddha may take the form of a community practicing understanding and loving kindness, a community practicing mindful living.

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Many of us are trying to see the characteristics of white European culture at work in ourselves and our institutions. We might also ask “so what are the characteristics of the Beloved Community?” The following from Religion & Race outlines 25 characteristics of the Beloved Community.

Additional Resources:

Creating the Beloved Community: A Handbook for Spiritual Leadership by Jim Lockard

BEING THE BELOVED COMMUNITY: Spiritual Leadership to Master Change by Jim Lockard

A More Perfect Union by Adam Russel Taylor