Loving the Real Enemy? | June 22, 2025 | Rev. Hassaun Ali Jones-Bey

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

— Pogo, 1971

According to a 1947 Fellowship Church newsletter:

Most of us and our neighbors are not completely free from thoughts of vengeance toward our erstwhile enemies. Most of us and our neighbors believe in force, in building more tanks, more planes, more rocket bombs—which will make other nations hurry to build more tanks, more planes, and more rocket bombs. Most of us and our neighbors believe in maintaining our nation’s “uncompromised sovereignty” (whatever that is), and securing far-flung bases so that we can protect ourselves and make other nations behave. Most of us and our neighbors want our nation to be the “greatest” and most powerful, and with the highest standard of living of any. Most of us and our neighbors want our particular kind of people (race or class or select group) to be the “leaders” in our society, directing affairs, and reaping the rewards of such direction.

Most of us and our neighbors need a great deal of interior overhauling and of spiritual redemption before the Kingdom of God has a chance where we are. Yes, world peace can begin at home with us.

            A little more than a decade later, Howard Thurman wrote in Footprints of a Dream: The Story of the Church for the Fellowship of  All Peoples, 1959:

The United States of America is in fact dedicated to the separation of the races. Wherever it does not appear, it is the exception rather than the rule. The will of the American people continues to resist all movements that would undermine the validity of segregation as indigenous to the American way of life. The Christian church reflects this fact, despite official pronouncements both of church and state. The resistance does not seem to be influenced by loyalty to Christ or devotion to His Kingdom on earth. It ignores the handwriting on the wall that the planet is a small neighborhood owing to the annihilation of space and time. It is unable to deal with the fact that the earth’s population is predominantly non-Caucasian and that any national feeling of separation based on race and color jeopardizes the future of the human race and destroys the possibility of peace for generations to come.

            Nothing less than a major revolution in the human spirit can hope to alter this crystallized pattern of behavior. Confronted with this stubborn fact, how may the local church share in bringing about a change? This is the crucial question.

            Such are the closing and opening quotes of the Introduction to a book-length history of the mid-twentieth century founding and early years of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. The book was written by Dr. Amanda Brown and published by Oxford University Press just four years ago, in 2021. Brown wrote that the quote about erstwhile enemies, which I opened the sermon with:

was, of course, originally referring to World War II and the impending Cold War, but it was also referring to the ongoing human problems of competition, violence, oppression, and destruction. Yes, the Fellowship Church was a distinctly American institution [as indicated in the second quote concerning racism] and a direct product of its time, but concerns about the human condition exceeded its specific historical moment.

            Brown continued,

The Fellowship Church was in many ways, “born out of a social issue” and got the chance to emerge because of World War II, but the problems it addressed were universal. Is it possible that the issues we confront today—racism, bigotry, violence, social injustice, religious intolerance—are the timeless human problems that mystics like Thurman sought to relieve? If so, is it also possible that mystical insights into the human mind and their potential to foster democratic feeling and yield social transformation still carry weight? Perhaps the abstract, intangible experiences of the personal consciousness actually can have practical implications today. Perhaps the Fellowship Church offers a promising example of how.

            The question for us today is, How to continue such a powerful legacy? It is tempting to write the church off, and Dr. Thurman as well, as promising initially but ultimately under-achieving. After all, as Brown points out, neither Thurman nor the church were on the front lines of people and institutions demonstrating for social change in the turbulent 1960s. The church also did not inspire other churches to restructure in ways that would follow its example. Brown points out, however:

Thurman cared about social activism, and he lent his support to social and political issues of the day, but his primary focus was cultivating the inner life so that people could come to the realization that they were equal and intricately connected to each other. To Thurman and to the Fellowship Church, the primary path to authentic democratic equality, to the realization of the “Kingdom of God” on earth, was through personal transformation. It was the idea that people had to abandon their ego and cultural baggage to reach a new place of understanding with each other—a place void of the human-made structures and social “norms” that divide and separate.

            It is true that Thurman and the Fellowship Church did not make measurable contributions to the movement’s legislative achievements, but the fact remains that the United States still suffers greatly from the wounds of slavery and Thurman’s program at the Fellowship Church is still relevant. Furthermore, the conditions in which the church was established are remarkably similar to our contemporary moment.

            That point is so clearly illustrated by the opening quote to this sermon that I repeat it here:

Most of us and our neighbors are not completely free from thoughts of vengeance toward our erstwhile enemies. Most of us and our neighbors believe in force, in building more tanks, more planes, more rocket bombs—which will make other nations hurry to build more tanks, more planes, and more rocket bombs. Most of us and our neighbors believe in maintaining our nation’s “uncompromised sovereignty” (whatever that is), and securing far-flung bases so that we can protect ourselves and make other nations behave. Most of us and our neighbors want our nation to be the “greatest” and most powerful, and with the highest standard of living of any. Most of us and our neighbors want our particular kind of people (race or class or select group) to be the “leaders” in our society, directing affairs, and reaping the rewards of such direction.

Most of us and our neighbors need a great deal of interior overhauling and of spiritual redemption before the Kingdom of God has a chance where we are. Yes, world peace can begin at home with us.

            The key seems to be one of recognizing and dealing lovingly with the enemy within rather than projecting the enemy outward into violent confrontations and conflicts.

            According to Brown:

As journalist Peter Beinert convincingly argued in his article “On the End of American Exceptionalism,” the tendency of many Americans, especially young Americans, to disaffiliate themselves from religious institutions is a political, not necessarily religious matter. While in the mid-twentieth century—in the Judeo-Christian moment that Thurman published Jesus and the Disinherited—both liberals and conservatives were likely to attend church, Beinert theorized that the rise of the religious Right and their antagonism toward social issues like abortion, feminism, and gay marriage pushed liberals to associate organized religion with conservative politics. In other words, rather than abandoning liberal religion, they have abandoned exclusive institutions. Commenting on the decline in religious affiliation we are witnessing in our contemporary moment, Beinert remarked, “Many young Americans have begun voting against the GOP on Sunday mornings by declining to attend church. Matthew Hedstrom echoed this theory, arguing “the religions ‘Nones’ aim to give religion an even wider berth—to liberate it from its political and exclusivist shackles.” This was the exact premise on which the Fellowship Church was founded.

            The Fellowship Church was and is the spiritually cosmopolitan response to divisive organized religion. The indication that the religious paradigm in the United States is moving away from the dichotomy of “Judeo Christian” religious liberals and religious conservatives to that of the “religious” and the “spiritual” only emphasizes the fact that the cosmopolitanism touted by the Christian Left throughout the twentieth century has matured. Liberal religion is now so deeply embedded in our culture that Americans increasingly find doctrinaire orthodoxy of organized religion to be incompatible with this emerging pluralistic spirituality. The liberal religious project of the long twentieth century—the task of cutting away the fat of organized faith in order to locate the core of religious experience and universal truth shared by the religious family—is ongoing.…

            Brown’s book is titled The Fellowship Church: Howard Thurman and the Twentieth-Century Religious Left. Her approach seems to capture a vital essence of Thurman’s dream and to suggest ways of thinking that are worth exploring—ways of thinking that might empower us to continue to live Thurman’s dream of divine love and grow it, well into future generations. But to be honest, the division of the title and table of contents into left and right, liberal and conservative initially kept me from reading the book.

            I come from a time and perhaps a social attitude where right and left were adjectives used to describe two hands or feet, or eyes or ears even, on opposite sides of the same body, that worked together to benefit that same body. Similarly, conservative perspectives considered a receding past, while liberal perspectives considered an evolving future. Both conservative and liberal were adjectives describing useful perspectives for evaluating options and making decisions, often in the same mind.

            So when right and left or conservative and liberal become the nouns, I may understand what is meant, but I want to protest the lack of clarity—the seeming invitation to confusion. That precisely, I believe, is why I am a member of Howard Thurman’s Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. I believe in a single “religious family,” or more appropriately human family.

            Ten years ago, in 2015, Basic Books published One Nation under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Dr. Kevin M. Kruse. To my mind, a lot of what Brown refers to as the religious right or the religious conservative are inventions in the sense presented by Kruse.

            The inventions are political and economic. So, “Christian America” in Kruse’s title would be stated more accurately as “capitalist religion.” Such inventions become a reality for future generations, but fundamentally violate the conservative or “right” sense of the actual words.

            That said, Brown’s approach still imparts valuable insights into Thurman’s dream and how the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples has continued it:

            While making church membership attractive to an increasingly unaffiliated society is a major challenge to the Fellowship Church, its ongoing attention to social activism reinforces the relevance of its character. A particularly successful event is its annual Howard Thurman Convocation—an occasion that often acknowledges the relation between secular activism and spirituality. Each year the Howard Thurman Award is presented to “an individual or individuals whose lives mirror the deep search for which Dr. Thurman worked and lived.” The convocation has awarded secular activists like Dr. Angela Davis for her work on the prison-industrial complex; Leslie Feinberg for her activism surrounding social oppression and gender and sexuality issues; and actor Danny Glover for his social activism and humanitarian work, to name just a few. Rev. Dorsey Blake emphasized that through the event, the Fellowship Church has been able to “help people understand the relationship between the spiritual of what we’re doing here and our search for common ground in the community and what so many people, who are not necessarily part of our congregation, are doing in the world.” In that regard, Thurman’s insistence that the spiritual translates to the social is still very much alive.

So in the current moment, when Dr. Blake has joined Dr. Thurman amongst the ancestors, it behooves us to pick up Thurman’s dream and carry it into the coming generations, as it was carried for us—until we, as a society, start to love the real enemy as described in the opening quote from a 1947 Fellowship newsletter.