In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it. King’s Beloved Community is a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. 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.ĭr. 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. Martin Luther King, Jr., also a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, who popularized the term and invested it with a deeper meaning which has captured the imagination of people of goodwill all over the world.įor Dr. “The Beloved Community” is a term that was first coined in the early days of the 20th Century by the philosopher-theologian Josiah Royce, who founded the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Source: “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” by Dr. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” “A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war- ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ This way of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. Militarism – war, imperialism, domestic violence, rape, terrorism, human trafficking, media violence, drugs, child abuse, violent crime… Inevitably it descends to inflicting spiritual and physical homicide upon the out-group.” It separates not only bodies, but minds and spirits. It is the absurd dogma that one race is responsible for all the progress of history and alone can assure the progress of the future. It is the arrogant assertion that one race is the center of value and object of devotion, before which other races must kneel in submission. “Racism is a philosophy based on a contempt for life. Racism – prejudice, apartheid, ethnic conflict, anti-Semitism, sexism, colonialism, homophobia, ageism, discrimination against disabled groups, stereotypes… No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for ‘the least of these.” Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. The time has come for an all-out world war against poverty … The well off and the secure have too often become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and deprivation in their midst. What is new, however, is that we now have the resources to get rid of it. Poverty – unemployment, homelessness, hunger, malnutrition, illiteracy, infant mortality, slums… Some contemporary examples of the Triple Evils are listed next to each item:
To work against the Triple Evils, you must develop a nonviolent frame of mind as described in the “Six Principles of Nonviolence” and use the Kingian model for social action outlined in the “Six Steps for Nonviolent Social Change.” When we work to remedy one evil, we affect all evils. They are interrelated, all-inclusive, and stand as barriers to our living in the Beloved Community. The Triple Evils of POVERTY, RACISM and MILITARISM are forms of violence that exist in a vicious cycle.
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