June 7, 2026: Dr. King's Vision of the Beloved Community

Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray
It was Dr. King who popularized the idea of the Beloved Community. What did he mean by this vision and how is it still relevant today?

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Sermon Text

Dr. King's Vision of the Beloved Community

Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray

UU Church of Bloomington

June 7, 2026

PASTORAL PRAYER AND MEDITATION

This morning, my heart is with the many Unitarian Universalists who serve in our armed forces and as military chaplains. This weekend the Department of Defense officially dropped 180 faiths from the military's recognized religion list, including Humanists, Pagans, and Unitarian Universalists. While the list includes 20 different Christian denominations, it also eliminated some including the United Church of Christ and my husband's tradition - Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). It also eliminated different branches of traditions - for example Judaism, Islam, Buddhism all only have one option rather than distinguishing the reality that these faiths also have multiple branches among Orthodox, Reform, Sunni, Shia, Mahayana, Zen to name a few.

We recognize this reflects the Christian nationalist and Christian theocracy desires of the current Secretary of Defense and many in the current administration. We condemn this action and recognize the hurt and disrespect that many of those who serve our country that come from our own and so many other traditions are feeling at this time. It is disrespectful and will make it harder for these soldiers from these traditions to get the spiritual care that they want and need. With time, it may also undermine the religious diversity of the military chaplain corps - another way of limiting the diversity of spiritual care that service members can access.

Spirit of life, give us courage to overcome the many ways in which our current government is seeking to deny the humanity, dignity, respect, and safety of so many of our neighbors and fellow Americans. Give us courage to keep organizing and resisting this corrupt, inhumane, and authoritarian regime.

Give us strength to keep resisting; and also give us places and spaces and communities to celebrate our lives, our faith, our love - to be surrounded by community and care and beauty - to know joy and resilience. May we remember that this is the spirit of Pride - it is rooted in an affirmation of the beauty and wholeness of our creation - the divine spark of God, creation, in every human being, a reality rooted in a practice of liberation and freedom for all.

Let us welcome this Pride month! And be emboldened to be who we are and stand with all people whose lives are being denied.

SERMON Dr. King's Vision of the Beloved Community

All this year, we've been exploring what it means to nurture beloved

community. Each month, we've had a theme that captures something necessary for the beloved community. This included imagination and hope and the willingness to imagine conditions beyond what we experience today. It also included memory and history, as well as truth - recognizing that we cannot nurture justice in the beloved community without being honest and knowing our history and the struggles that came before us. It included interdependence and the reminder that we are caught in an “inescapable network of mutuality” (Dr. King's words). And it included joy and resilience for these remind us of the goodness in creation and humanity and inspire us to imagine a day where all people might live freely and be able to thrive.

So, as we begin our exploration of beloved community this month, let's start with the person who popularized the phrase and was the most powerful articulator for a vision of the beloved community. This was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Now, King did not invent the term beloved community. The term originated in the work of Josiah Royce, a Harvard philosophy professor. “In 1913, Royce wrote, ‘My life means nothing, either theoretically or practically, unless I am a member of a community.’ He observed that, besides the actual communities we experience in our daily lives, there was also an ideal ‘beloved community’ made up of all those who were dedicated to the cause of loyalty and truth. Royce did not see the community as a static object but as an all-embracing, radical idea of unity for the whole human race.”1

1 Susan M. Pollak MTS, Ed.D. "The Idea of Beloved Community." Psychology Today, 01/13/23. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-art-of-now/202301/the-idea-of-the-beloved-community

Rev. King developed this further, casting a vision of the beloved community as a way for humanity to live and thrive across borders and differences. For King, the 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 kinship.

The foundation of this beloved community is love. Here are Dr. King's words describing his vision:

“The end [goal] is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends. The type of love that I stress here is not eros, a sort of esthetic or romantic love; not philia, a sort of reciprocal love between personal friends; but it is agape which is understanding goodwill for all [people]. It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. It is the love of God operating in the human heart.”

King continues, “Agape [love] does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people...It begins by loving others for their sakes” and “makes no distinction between a friend and enemy; it is directed toward both...Agape is love seeking to preserve and create community.”

And he argues that, “This is the love that may well be the salvation of our civilization.”

You may hear echoes of our own Unitarian Universalist theology in King's vision - including that beloved community holds love at the center, and doesn't divide people between worthy and unworthy.

For King, a core principle of the beloved community was the desire to nurture the fullest unfolding of the personality of every person. Fundamental to his philosophy and theology was this commitment to the radical hospitality of the beloved community which seeks to build community and society in such a way that every person can develop into the fullest expression of themselves, where the spark of the divine, the spark of the sacred in everyone is recognized, celebrated, and nurtured.

Yet, King also understood that the beloved community is not without conflict and difference and he knew it required an understanding of power. King did not think that power in itself was negative or bad. No, like the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, whose work King drew from when he famously said, “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

King's vision of beloved community and the centrality of love that he preached were not sentimental. He knew that change required building power, being strategic in using it, and understanding the state's power as well. He also knew that conflict and agitation were necessary - and that even if we could arrive on that mountaintop of justice, that even in the beloved community there would always be difference and even conflict. He didn't see this as negatives but as creative opportunities.

One of the most compelling and nuanced perspectives on humanity and beloved community that King offered, is how he elevated the importance of difference, disagreement, and a synthesis of opposites. He articulated a both/and way of being in the world before we were using that language. He spoke of the need to be tough minded and tender hearted and drew on the biblical reference of being wise as serpents and gentle as doves. He once said, “life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony.” Beloved community at its best represents this creative synthesis of opposites. The beloved community is a community of strength and of vulnerability, of pride and humility, of embracing change and the conservation of what is good. A community of truth telling and deep listening, of courage and of tenderness, of boldness and of sacred quiet, of learning and of teaching, of prayer and of action, a community of joy and of sorrow, a community that can hold the fullness of human experience and know loss and set back without being overcome by it. It is a community that can lead and can follow, a community that celebrates diversity and difference, while also nurturing what we hold in common. The beloved community fosters the capacity to move through disagreement and difference creatively in a way that understands that, through creative conflict, better and stronger synthesis of understandings emerge.

Sixty years ago, King saw a choice before our nation. In his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, King reflects on the victories of the Civil Rights movement including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and also the need for further advances for Black Americans - better jobs, education, and wages. He also reflects on the unjust war in Vietnam and the thousands of poor Americans losing their lives in that war. And the suffering by poor whites and blacks in ghettos and slums in the U.S. and increasing riots born from the suffering and injustice.

He saw a choice before the United States. Would we choose a path that perpetuated inequality, that doubled down on militarism and greed? A path that would use fear as a weapon to divide people while a few ran off with the public wealth? A path that King said would lead to chaos? A path that we witness with our own eyes today has led to more war, poverty, and the undoing of hard fought wins for justice and equality.

Or, King asked, would we choose a path made by love - that chooses mutuality over selfishness, that honors the dignity of every person, that nurtures hospitality, relationships and trust, that shares the wealth of the earth so that everyone has enough. A path toward a beloved community.

We still have a choice before us. We always have a choice about which way we choose to go as a society, a country, as a people.

Fifty years before King's ministry, a Universalist minister from southern Michigan, Olympia Brown - the first woman ordained into the ministry with full clergy rights - said these words, “Every nation must learn that the people of all nations are children of God and must share the wealth of the world. You may say this is impracticable, far away, can never be accomplished, but it is the work we are appointed to do.”

When we consider how far we have to go to achieve anything close to this vision of the beloved community, may we remember that every action, every decision, every protest, every act of civil disobedience, every act of care, every community that seeks to embody this spirit moves us in the better direction. It is not about the destination but it is about the choices we make and which path we choose to move along.

May we remember that our choices matter. And may we commit ourselves to building the beloved community here in our own hearts and in this community that it may strengthen us to be a force for love and justice beyond our walls. That we might be one part of building a new way forward from the darkness of this present day to a day of light and hope and peace and liberty for all.