In 1957, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his sermon “Loving Your Enemies” at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. In it, King offers one of the hardest moral instructions imaginable. He tells us that we must love our enemies. He tells us why failure to do so destroys us. He gives us a set of practical steps for carrying out this task, grounding everything in the words of Jesus: “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.” For King, this was not soft piety. This was the foundation for his personal Swaraj, or self-rule.
So, how do we love our enemies? King gives us four clear steps.
The first step is to examine ourselves. Before we look outward, we must look inward. We must ask whether there is something in us that contributed to the conflict or shaped the hostility we face. King says plainly that we must begin with ourselves, stating, “There might be something within you that arouses the tragic hate response in the other individual.” This is not self-blame. It is self-honesty. It is the refusal to imagine that we are pure and others are the sole source of tension or harm.
The second step is to look for the good in your enemy. King quotes Goethe. “There is enough stuff in me to make both a gentleman and a rogue,” King says that we must learn to find the gentleman even in those who have hurt us. This is not a call to pretend their wrongs do not matter. It is a call to see their full humanity instead of reducing them to the worst thing they have done.
The third step is the most shocking. When the moment arrives to strike your enemy, you must not do it. King insists that retaliation—even justified retaliation—locks us into an endless cycle of destruction. Here he stands beside Liu Xiaobo, who wrote that he had no enemies. To refuse to strike back is not a weakness. It is a decision to create the possibility of something new. It is the refusal to let hate write the script of your life.
The fourth and final step is to use the power of love to transform your enemy and yourself. King teaches that hate is a self-replicating force. It destroys everything it touches. Love alone can break the cycle. Love is not sentiment. It is the disciplined choice to build when it would be easier to destroy.
This framework becomes difficult when we apply it to the present. It becomes almost impossible when we apply it to Jeffrey Epstein. Yet that is exactly where King’s teaching becomes most relevant. King did not intend for this principle to be used only on mild enemies. It was designed for the worst cases. For the ones who test whether we mean what we say about justice and dignity.
Epstein did monstrous things, but he was not a monster. Hundreds of people around him also acted in monstrous ways. They covered for him, enabled him or allowed him to operate in plain sight. Human beings built the networks that protected him. Human beings flew on his planes. They vouched for him, and they allowed a system of wealth, silence and connection to bury the truth for years. If we pretend Epstein was something other than human, we avoid the truth that other humans made his crimes possible. And if we refuse to confront that truth, we will never repair the systems that allowed it.
So, how do King’s four steps guide us here?
First, we examine ourselves. We ask what conditions, tolerances, silences and cultural values allowed people to look the other way. We ask whether we, too, have ever ignored wrongdoing because it was inconvenient to confront it. This is not about blaming the victims. It is about recognizing that a society creates the conditions for its harms.
Second, we look for the good in our enemies. This is the hardest part to accept. King is not asking us to erase Epstein’s crimes. He is asking us to remember that Epstein was loved by someone. He had the capacity to do good even if he failed to do so. If we refuse to acknowledge this, we turn him into a monster and free ourselves from the responsibility of understanding how human beings commit great harm.
Third, when the moment comes to strike, we refuse. When the list of names is released and the scale of the network becomes clear, we resist the temptation to burn homes, form mobs or destroy people without process. We demand investigations. We demand accountability. We demand reform. However, we do not destroy for destruction’s sake. Vengeance feels powerful, but it produces only more violence. King teaches that refusing to strike is the only way to create something new.
Fourth, we use the power of love to transform our enemy and ourselves. This does not mean allowing the powerful to escape justice. It means insisting that justice be rooted in humanity rather than rage. Love is what allows truth to surface without creating new cycles of corruption and retaliation. Love is what ensures that our fight for justice does not turn us into the very thing we oppose.
Epstein was a human being. Because he was human, his crimes were not unintentional. They were chosen. They were supported by a culture that values wealth more than dignity and silence more than truth. Calling him a monster may feel satisfying, but it excuses the rest of us from asking the harder questions.
Loving your enemies is not easy. It is not naive. It is the clearest form of political and moral discipline available. If we lose our humanity while fighting evil, then evil has already won. King preached this in a world that was ready to kill him. If he could hold to this ethic back then, we can at least attempt it now. To love your enemy is to refuse to become like them. It is to refuse the poison. And it is to insist that justice be real even when the guilty are powerful, protected or beloved.