America has forgotten one of its great guides. This country has seen numerous periods of great contention. It has survived all of them. If America wants to survive the current division, it must look to this neglected thinker: Howard Thurman (1899-1981).

The grandson of slaves, Thurman was a giant in his own day. He wrote influential books on Jim Crow-era America, pastored a number of churches, became the dean of chapel at Howard University and later Boston University, and became a trusted ally of the 20th century’s most dedicated seekers of peace.

During a months-long trip through India, Burma and Sri Lanka in 1935 and 1936, he spoke on black history and segregation and met Gandhi. This encounter instilled in him the importance of non-violent resistance, an ethos he brought back to what was then a terrifyingly violent America.

When he returned to America, his work took on an increasingly contemplative tone. He began to look at our social and political divisions in a different way. He began to see faith, not politics, as the most important part the struggle for peace.

Thurman’s most famous work, “Jesus and the Disinherited,” draws a straight line between the violence faced by black Americans and the political oppression in first-century Palestine faced by Jesus of Nazareth. But rather than use that comparison to call for further legislation, Thurman saw a harder truth: Great evil cannot be overcome by laws, but only by great love.

As he writes in “Jesus and the Disinherited”:

“To revile because one has been reviled — this is the real evil because it is the evil of the soul itself. Jesus saw this with almighty clarity. Again and again he came back to the inner life of the individual. With increasing insight and startling accuracy, he placed his finger on the inward center as the crucial area where the issues would determine the destiny of his people.”

What animated the violence of the first century was no different than what animated the violence and division of segregation: fear.

For Thurman, it is fear of others that causes people to oppress others through law and order, and it is fear of this happening that causes people to strike back in counter-violence.

But the way forward is not simply to pass more legislation; Thurman wrote that laws were good teachers, but must give way to encounters with others. Without these meetings, others remain abstract categories who could be written off and ultimately, destroyed. 

What roots all of this patient approach is, for Thurman, the contemplative encounter with God. In prayer, silence and contemplative listening, we come to understand that we are people beloved of God, given inherent dignity and called to stand in solidarity with others as a result.

For Thurman, social organizing and protests were therefore second to something we certainly lack today: contemplation of God and relationships with others.

“I surrender myself to God without any conditions or reservations. I shall not bargain with him. I shall not make my surrender piecemeal … As this happens, I come into the meaning of true freedom and the burdens that I seemed unable to bear are floated in the current of the life and love of God.”

Thurman’s genius lay not in his social organizing, nor in his policies, but in his consistent refrain that the way forward for human division lay in the patient cultivation of souls who were unafraid to love.

We can see the effect of Thurman’s thinking most prominently in the writing of a student he crossed paths with while he directed the chapel at Boston University: Martin Luther King Jr. According to some reports, King carried Thurman’s “Jesus and the Disinherited” with him everywhere. Like Thurman, he spoke of the need for the courage to love and to resist evil with nonviolence, to not give into hate. Even in Thurman’s own day, naysayers criticized this approach as insufficient to the challenge of segregation.

The social divisions we face today are animated by different structures than those of Thurman’s day. But they are likewise designed to stoke anger, fear, and separation. And Thurman would say the way forward has not changed. As in the first and 20th centuries, we begin not with assassinations, hatred and lawsuits but by opening ourselves with head and heart toward both friends and enemies.

Myles Werntz is the director of Baptist studies at Abilene Christian University and the editor of “Nothing Can Separate Us: Healing for Souls and Nations, Howard Thurman.”