In his short life (he was assassinated nine months shy of his 40th birthday), Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered and/or issued thousands of messages. The most widely cited include the August 28, 1963 "I Have A Dream" speech delivered at the March on Washington; the "Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break The Silence" speech delivered at Riverside Baptist Church on April 4, 1967; and the "Letter From Birmingham Jail" issued on April 16, 1963. Beyond Vietnam and the Letter From Birmingham Jail feature powerful appeals to conscience that have inspired and mobilized generations of peace and social justice activists. The I Have A Dream speech is equally compelling, but like all "viral" messages it often gets willfully misinterpreted by bad faith actors who do not share the vision and are, at best, addicted to what in that speech King lamented as the "tranquilizing drug of gradualism."
The speech of King's that does not get enough attention, perhaps because it places too many demands on our contemporary troll culture to look in the mirror before judging and condemning others, is "Loving Your Enemies." I am quite sure that the late civil rights icon John Lewis was familiar with this speech. In Lewis' New York Times op-ed released shortly after his recent passing, he writes:
Like so many young people today, I was searching for a way out, or some might say a way in, and then I heard the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on an old radio. He was talking about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. He 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 called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.
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| The young John Lewis would have almost certainly been aware of Martin Luther King's "Loving Your Enemies" sermon. Until his dying day, Representative Lewis tried to uphold King's philosophy of nonviolent resistance as a means of provoking social change. |
Those are all themes endorsed in "Loving Your Enemies." The speech was a sermon spoken by the young King many times in the 1950s when the young Lewis probably became aware of it. Deeply touched by progressive Christian theology, the speech methodically and boldly instructs listeners on how Jesus' pronouncement in Matthew 5:43-45 ("Ye have heard that it has been said,
‘Thou shall love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.’ But I say unto you, love
your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray
for them that despitefully use you, that ye may be the children of your Father
which is in heaven.”) is the key for personal, national, and international salvation. (The version of the sermon I am working from was delivered on November 17, 1957 at the Dexter Ave. Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL. King was pastor of the church.)
In a time like the present, when the public performance of rage and bitterness is chic on all sides of the activist spectrum and in the White House, it might seem naive to trot out a message of love and nonviolence. But it only seems naive because most of us have internalized the distorted interpretations of what King said; we've made love and nonviolence into something passive that cannot even get the attention of power, let alone speak truth to and transform it. Let's revisit what Dr. King actually said about HOW we go about loving our enemies, and WHY we should do it. A proper understanding of "Loving Your Enemies" will reveal that we need its inspiration NOW as much we did in 1957; probably even more.
How do we love our enemies? According to Dr. King, in three ways. First, we have to analyze the SELF. While he does not minimize the fact that some will hate other people just on the basis of race and other characteristics out of control of the target, still he argues we must all reflect on what we do to trigger the "tragic hate response." Failure to do so often leads to hypocrisy and double standards, or as Jesus said, "how is it that you see the splinter in your brother's eye and fail to see the plank in your own?" Quite profoundly for a speech delivered in the 1950s, King applied the same principle to the United States: if we as a nation want to understand why we are hated around the world, we should try and figure out what we might be doing to provoke such a response.
Self-analysis is sorely lacking in today's world. What we get instead are non-stop analyses of the other, analyses that are often self-serving, misinformed, and close off the possibility of dialogue. Social media appears to reinforce this sad state of affairs in ugly ways.
The second way we love our enemies is to discover the good in them. King argues that the most hateful, spiteful person has something good in him. The contemporary tendency to divide the world into "good" and "evil" camps with no gray area makes King's admonition seem quaint. But if you think about it, the failure of most of us to see the good in others does little more than produce never ending strife, a condition that benefits only the ruling class that can avoid accountability while the masses metaphorically (and sometimes literally) stab each other in the back.
The third way we can love our enemies is the most difficult, yet also the most powerful: when the opportunity presents itself to defeat our enemy, that is when we should NOT do it. All of us have opportunities to "get back at" those from whom we have suffered real or imagined harms. For King, real love is to resist the great temptation to strike back. Social media once again makes something like this all the more difficult, as it is rooted in the pathological desire to crush or "own" one's enemies. Perhaps we could get good practice at resisting the temptation to strike back at enemies simply by hitting the delete key more often or counting to ten before we hit send.
At the national/global level, what would the United States be like today if we had taken King's advice after the attacks of September 11, 2001? We have now lived through almost two decades of foreign policy rooted in striking back at the "official" evil, with no end in sight for the so-called "war on terror." Earlier in July, the House Armed Services Committee, in a bipartisan vote, approved a $740 billion military budget while also trying to impede attempts to withdraw from Afghanistan. We have spent trillions of dollars, lost and otherwise traumatized many thousands of lives here and abroad, and perhaps forever lost the ability to claim a moral high ground as we normalized drone strikes, sacrificed Constitutional freedoms in the name of security, and kept people incarcerated in Guantanamo for years without charges. I suspect that if King were alive during all of this, he would have urged us to consider not just what our actions did to the Taliban, al Qaeda, and Isis, but what they did (and continue to do) to US.
Why should we love our enemies? After answering the practical question of how to love our enemies, King then shifts to the more theoretical question of why we should do so. There are three reasons. First, "hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe." King give the example of driving on the highway and being blinded by a driver in the opposite lane flashing the high beams. The tendency is to want to respond by flashing our own, but that only escalates and makes the situation more dangerous. As King puts it, at some point we need to learn how to "dim the lights" in order to ramp down instead of build up hate and evil.
Second, hate distorts the personality of the hater. As King argued, "We usually think of what hate does for
the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even
more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates.
You just begin hating somebody, and you will begin to do irrational things. You
can’t see straight when you hate. You can’t walk straight when you hate. You can’t
stand upright. Your vision is distorted. There is nothing more tragic than to see
an individual whose heart is filled with hate." One of the great tragedies of the pandemic is that people have politicized basic health advice and used it to divide us further; I watched an Oshkosh City Council meeting in which some people opposed to masking requirements spoke with a rage that seemed to make it impossible for them to understand how their own behavior impacts other people. Conversely, I've heard some pro-mask advocates openly wish that mask opponents get coronavirus and die.
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| The young Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered many sermons at the Dexter Ave. Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1955 he worked with Rosa Parks and others to organize the Montgomery bus boycott, a critical event that put civil rights issues on the national agenda. |
Finally, King argues that we should love our enemies because doing so has a redemptive power to it. He argues that the only way to transform people is to love them even when they display outward hate. No one, not even Dr. King, was or is under the illusion that haters can be transformed overnight. But if I hear Dr. King correctly, he's saying that nothing else has ever produced any kind of long term change in the character of individuals or even nations.
Aware that an argument for loving enemies could be interpreted as giving in meekly to oppression, the final part of King's sermon addressed what kind of civic behavior flows from people operating out of love. Speaking specifically to the experience of African-Americans, he argues that there are three major choices available: violence, acquiescing or giving in, or organizing mass nonviolent resistance.
King opposed physical violence not just on moral grounds, but as a practical matter. He saw it as futile, and not capable of building the alliances necessary to transform society. My guess is that if he were around today, he would be inspired by how support for #BlackLivesMatter cuts across racial lines. He would also argue that the movement makes its greatest strides when it remains peaceful, builds coalitions, and produces clear sets of demands for change in municipalities, states, and the national level.
I think that young activists often reject King's approach to producing change because they view it as a form of acquiescing to power. That's why speeches like "Loving Your Enemies" really need to be put back in wider circulation, because King EXPLICITLY rejected acquiesence as a response to oppression.
What King supported was the organization of mass nonviolent resistance based on the principle of Love. He anticipated all of the current talk about systemic oppression: "When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system you love, but you seek to defeat the system."
What King struggled for was and is not easy. Love is beautiful, but difficult. It's not clear that we as an American society in the 21st century are up to the challenge of love. Too many of us would rather shout, float conspiracy theories, pander, enable each other's worst tendencies, wait for someone else to do the activist heavy lifting, and be content with short term fixes to systemic problems. In other places I have referred to this as our addiction to bullshit, bluster, and bullying. But if we really want change--meaningful and long lasting change--we can all start by practicing three acts of love articulated by King in Loving Your Enemies:
*Engage in constant self-analysis.
*Work hard to discover the good in ALL people. When communicating with them, always focus on that good.
*Resist the temptation to defeat other people, even when a "golden opportunity" to do so presents itself. On social media, stop being fixated on "owning" or humiliating other people. The short term adrenaline buzz of doing so is not worth losing even the possibility of enlisting that person to support just and fair policies.
"Loving Your Enemies" will probably never be Dr. Martin Luther King's most widely recognized speech. But it is the one we most need to hear right now. Read it. Share it with your friends, especially if they consider themselves to be activists.
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