Democracy's Documents: Martin Luther King, Jr's "Loving Your Enemies"
Political polarization is taking a terrible toll on the trust and civility essential to American self-government. Within the past year, its virulence has led to an attempt on the life of a presidential candidate, the murder of a state legislator, her husband and a well-known conservative commentator. Most Americans are horrified yet despair of a solution. Too often, the reaction is to blame and attack political opponents thus priming the pump for future violence.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was no stranger to political violence. His family had suffered racial hatred before he was born and he encountered it as a child and certainly as a pastor leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-1956. His home was bombed and vicious verbal threats followed him wherever he spoke and campaigned for voting rights for African Americans and an end to segregation. As a man of faith, he sought a moral way to respond to racism, hatred and violence.
In this sermon, delivered at his Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama on November 17, 1957, King offered his congregation – and offers us today – a message and a challenge on how to respond to our “enemies.”
His starting point is Jesus’ invocation to “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you” at the same time acknowledging that “many persons have argued that this is an extremely difficult command.” Yet Jesus, he reminds us, was not an “impractical idealist” but instead a “practical realist.” He understood how hard his admonition was.
King in his doctoral studies at Boston University had gained a deep understanding of the human personality. It’s not surprising then that he began his argument by saying that “the first thing is: in order to love your enemies, you must begin by analyzing self.” “Some people aren’t going to like you,” and we must face that this may be “because of something that we’ve done.” King asks that we look at our own behavior and beliefs before focusing on the tendency just to strike out by hating others. He recalls Jesus’ saying that “How is it that you can see the mote in your brother’s eye and not see the beam in your own eye?”
Once a person has taken a hard look inward, a “second thing . . . is to discover the element of good in his enemy, and every time you begin to hate that person . . . realize that there is some good there and look at those good points”
“That within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good. When we come to see this, we take a different attitude toward individuals. . . . Discover the element of good in your enemy. And as you seek to hate him, find the center of goodness and place your attention there and you will take a new attitude.”
If all people have some good in them, King then - no doubt with racism in mind - distinguishes between the individual and the system in which the individual is immersed. “When the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy,” he says, “that is the time you must not do it.” “When you rise to the level of love . . . you seek only to defeat evil systems.”
What do we mean by “love” is the question King tackles next. Relying on the Greek language, there are three answers. King notes that he is not speaking about eros, which we know as romantic love, nor philia, which is the affection we feel for a friend, but agape, the love of all people “not because they are likeable, but because God loves them,” even if they “might be the worst person you’ve ever seen.”
This is asking a great deal, King knows so he focuses on why loving the evil doer is essential. He presents three arguments. The first is what he notes as at the center of Jesus’ thinking: “hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe.” “The strong person is the person who can cut off the chain of hate, the chain of evil.” “Man must see that force begets force, hate begets hate, toughness begets toughness.”
King’s second argument is that “hate distorts the personality of the hater.” “You can’t see straight when you hate . . . you begin to do irrational things . . . The symbol of objectivity is lost.”
King’s third argument is that love for another person increases the chances that he will redeem himself and turn away from hate and evil:
“if you hate your enemies you have no way to redeem and to transform your enemies . . . Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long.” They might react with bitterness or guilt because you say you love them, but “by the power of your love they will break down under the load.”
King moves to close with very practical advice for the oppressed. There are three ways, he says, to respond. “One of them is to rise up against their oppressors with physical violence,” but he reminds us that that just generates a violent response which for a racial minority will harm not just them but future generations. The second way is to just give in, yet “non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.” The third and essential way is “to organize mass non-violence resistance based on the principle of love.”
It would take King until the Birmingham civil rights protest in 1963 to fully turn the power of love along with mass, non-violent resistance into both a guiding philosophy and a practical method to lead nationwide efforts to tear down the walls of segregation. Translated to our polarized and angry society today, King would remind us to eschew hate and violence - they simply aren’t working.
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