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By Jim Bass, Published in Decaturish

GREATER DECATUR, Ga — After spending the weekend together, 12 individuals with varying political backgrounds united in an ‘emotional’ performance on Feb. 23 at Oak Grove United Methodist Church.

An organization called Braver Angels, partnering with the New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW), organized the event called “Mind The Gap: Atlanta” to bring participants together, openly discuss their political views and to depolarize conversations between members of different parties. 

The performance in Decatur marked only the second workshop of its kind so far and the first to be conducted within two days.

The “Mind The Gap” theater workshop began a decade ago when the NYTW began hosting it to unite generational gaps between children and the elderly. In 2023, after NYTW teaching artist Andrew Garrett attended a Braver Angels play created by convention director and arts coordinator Mark Metzger, the two formed a partnership.

While working together over a year, Metzger and Garrett developed the inter-political version of Mind The Gap, which debuted with massive success in a convention in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2024.

“It was really impactful,” Metzger said. “We had 17 participants, and pretty much every single one of them left saying it was one of the top three most impactful things of their entire life. We were like, ‘Wow, how do we keep this going?’”

Participant Mary Beth Bryant was one of the Wisconsin participants. After having “the most meaningful week of her life,” she led the charge in bringing Mind The Gap to Decatur and participated alongside her husband John Bryant this time.

“It really helped me feel a little more safe to talk about things I normally would keep inside with people that I normally would never talk to,” Mary Beth Bryant said. “It really taught me how to listen and to self-reflect.”This weekend’s workshop participants met for the first time on Friday night and broke out of their shells by playing games and bonding over dinner. They then spent all day Saturday together to learn more about each other, have deeper conversations about their political views, and give their thoughts on current political topics in the United States.The group took elements of these challenging discussions to create a script and perform with them alongside one another for Sunday’s performance.Beforehand, attendees were invited to answer the same questions about topics including stereotypes, immigration, and depolarization. Guests wrote their thoughts onto post-it notes, chatted about each topic with their peers, and placed them on the board. 

With more than 60 attendees watching, the performers filed into the room, with participant John Bryant leading the way while playing the trumpet. Participants began the show by introducing who they were and, in some cases, their political beliefs.

The show consisted of a variety of one—to five-minute scenes that included heartfelt monologues about their struggles regarding polarization, acted-out prior political conversations, interpretive dances, and original musical performances, with the central idea of breaking through their political divisions.

Due to the quick turnaround of the two-day workshop, the performance was the first time the participants ran through the script fully, with each of them holding their script to ensure that they followed along smoothly.

Decatur resident Veronica McCullion was brought by her sister to attend the performance. While not having a strong political background, she, like many others, has lost friends over time due to political differences and found importance in the workshop’s goals.

“This was really emotional in so many ways,” McCullion said. “These people were very brave to do what they did… I’ve learned a lot just being here.”

After a finale song performed by all the participants, the performers and organizers sat in front of the crowd for a talkback session to answer questions and discuss their takeaways from the workshop.

Participant Cait Cortelyou entered the Mind The Gap workshop to further develop her interest in the intersection of arts and activism. Although nervous about talking to opposing perspectives, Cortelyou quickly bonded with a participant who had different views by writing a collaborative poem.

“It was interesting getting to talk with other people and hear their viewpoints in this setting where we’re really just listening and not pushing any agenda,” Cortelyou said. “We are not trying to teach necessarily, but just listening to one another and finding all the common ground that we share.”

Braver Angels member Deanna Ross traveled from Monterey, California, to learn more about the depolarization effort through art. Ross thinks these types of workshops can work as ways to exercise the ability to communicate across different perspectives.

“It’s kind of like building the muscles that our country is not modeling right now, which is, stay in the conversation, ”Ross said. “Stay in it respectfully. Stay in it to find common ground if possible and, if nothing else, to understand each other better.”

Braver Angels aims to grow the program with NYTW nationwide and continue their mission of bringing Americans together against partisan divides.

“I think depolarizing is one of the most important things we can do for our country right now,” Cortelyou said. “I think the reason that we’re in such a mess is because we’ve been so divided… work like this bridges that gap and I think that is of the utmost importance.”

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I have my own thoughts about what went wrong, or at least some of it, for the Democrats. Too many years doubling down on pushing the identity politics narratives of victimhood  for the various minority groups, racial and otherwise, that make up the party’s left, which led to what some feel as muzzling of free speech and freedom of thought, especially on college campuses and the failed ‘equity and inclusion’ programs practiced by many companies. A reputation, deserved or not, as the party of elites (despite the record spending by the billionaire Elon Musk on Trump’s campaign.) There’s the public distrust in government and institutions, bred by the gross missteps and overreach of the pandemic response. There’s what some, like Senator Bernie Sanders, describe as the party’s walking away from the working class, and there’s bread-and-butter issues like gas and grocery prices. While the economy has been doing well and the U.S. has brought down inflation faster than other nations, many Americans seem not to be feeling it this election season, and were in no mood to listen to anyone telling them things were otherwise.

There’s the handling or as some saw it ‘mishandling’ of the immigration issue by the current administration. There’s the toxically polarizing issue of abortion, used by both the left and right to energize their base to the point some pundits have speculated that neither party can afford to give the issue up. Perhaps Vice-President Harris’s gender and race factored in as well, no doubt for some voters, despite other countries’ having had some of their best leaders be women. And, of course, there’s the fact we Americans, red and blue, are watching different media, operating in our silos and listening to pundits who make their living keeping us angry and divided—and that is happening on both sides of the political spectrum.

I’m not talking about the minority on the right who were very likely motivated by the racial animus of Trump’s rhetoric. I’m talking about the everyday people who looked at the choices and said “I don’t like Trump but I’m voting for him anyway.”

America in 2024 is a complicated place. Even while we elected Donald Trump to the White House, according to the Guttmacher Institute, abortion rights measures that were on the ballot this November passed in seven states, including in Arizona and Montana. Kansas has a female governor, while California never has had one. Many farmers believe in climate change, utilize technology to manage their crops, and go to college to study ‘ag(riculture)’. 

Take a look at the demographic breakdown of Trump’s voters, and it becomes even clearer that America is a complicated place. According to an NBC News demographic, 54 % of Hispanic men voted for Trump as did 20% of Black men. Following the election, I heard interviews of Hispanic immigrants who said they don’t like that they themselves followed the immigration rules to gain legal citizenship, while other immigrants cheated the system.  They seemed not to have been put off by Trump’s campaign promise to deport some 11 million illegal immigrants.

If the only lesson the political left or any of us takes away from this election, is the simplistic assumptions of yore—for example, that anyone voting for Trump must be a racist—then we will have missed the point. We’ve been sinking into a morass of division for years. What if we took this opportunity instead to throw out the old assumptions, upend them, and change the game?  Could that be our way out? What would be the appeal of any would-be autocrat if everyday people didn’t feel disenfranchised, like no one was listening to their concerns, and instead of feeling that the old presumptions about anyone’s identity based on some immutable characteristics were no longer being used against them?

Change is inevitable but also difficult. America has experienced rapid change in the last few decades, not only technological change but massive cultural change. We seem not to be very good at helping people adjust, giving them a safe means to grieve some of our culture which is passing away. If things were better for some, at least imagined to be so, in times past, who is anyone to say their experience of their own lives is invalid?  Life no doubt was better for some and much worse for others at different times in history.  Both can be true at once. Would it be terrible if we helped them grieve it? Difficult emotions like grief and anger don’t magically disappear or resolve themselves. To deny them is to invite them to manifest in ways most of us wouldn’t choose, like in political violence.

When Benjamin Franklin famously said “a Republic, if you can keep it,” I don’t think he was referring to outside forces posing a danger. If we can’t figure out how to get along with people we strongly disagree with, who may not share our religious beliefs, look like us or live the way we do, whose values may be different than our own based on where we choose to live or the cultural in which we grew up, we will prove the old maxim, that democracies never have a lifespan of more than three hundred years. By that measure, we are on the way out.

If we don’t manage to keep our democratic republic, we will have done it to ourselves; and if we figure out how to keep it, we will have accomplished something no other nation ever has – kept together one nation knitting together peoples of many faiths and backgrounds. What a feat.

In the words of Winston Churchill “Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.” Let us begin.

Monica Rockwell is a member of Braver Angels and a routine contributor to BA’s community essays.

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If we start with agreement that “patriotism” means love of country, then there are almost no Patriots among us. Neither the Left nor the Right loves the country they live in. They love the idea of the country they want to live in.

But, of course, we can’t start with agreement on that definition of “patriotism”. The Left and the Right, almost by definition, disagree on everything. The only thing we seem to agree on is that there is now existential threat. However, we can’t agree upon whether that threat is to our way of living, our environment, our democracy, or our liberties. We do, however, agree that the cause of the threat is the other side.

I’m hearing a chorus from the Right singing that they love their country. It’s the best in the world. Yet they want to drastically change it. They want to start mass deportations. They want to weaken the separation of church and state. They want to take away a woman’s right to decide on her own health issues. They want to dramatically change the way we educate our children, and fund that education.

At least in my lifetime, the Right has usually been more vocal about their patriotism than the Left. They wear it like a tribal symbol. The Left finds that a bit uncool. But we cheer for our team at the Olympics. We get pissed at Putin for challenging us. We want the Chinese to stop stealing our tech. We secretly gloat about winning 2 world wars. And still, we want to fundamentally change things. We want to revamp the way we deliver health care; we want to restructure the supreme court, the US Senate and our elections; we want to re-write our history books; we want to trim even more of capitalism’s rough edges.   

So, who loves the country we live in? Who loves this stew of races, of religions, of sexual identities, of political beliefs, of varying faith in science, of worldviews, of ethnic backgrounds, of languages, of political beliefs? Who loves our anger and hatred with each other? Who is an American Patriot?

Almost none of us. We don’t love our country; we love our Tribe: our Red Tribe, or our Blue Tribe. We’re not American Patriots, we’re Red Patriots or Blue Patriots.

It’s easy to blame Fox News and MSNBC for this tribalism, but they are only giving their audience what the audience wants. When Laura Ingraham reports on “the Biden Crime Family”, or when Nicolle Wallace repeats her mantric Trump introduction (“Once-indicted, twice-impeached, forever disgraced”), they are feeding a fire that already exists.

Roger Ailes understood that news was entertainment, and that the better entertained his audience is, the better his ratings and revenues. For decades prior to the 1996 birth of Ailes and Murdock’s Fair and Balanced Fox News, the Right had been complaining about the liberal bias of the media. Ailes and Murdoch shared conservative values, but they also shared a long honed professional skill at managing media profitably. Had they not believed that they could make money catering the news to the politically conservative segment of the country, Fox News would not be what Fox News is. Profits, not ideology was the primary driver.

Ailes also famously understood that an angry audience watched his shows longer and more frequently, so he fueled their anger. And the ratings exploded. The rest of the media world had to react, and they did. MSNBC emerged to capture the left segment of the media market, and also focused their coverage on issues that would anger their viewers.

We enjoy being angry. We like having an enemy. We want to feel self-righteous. We want our adrenaline to flow and our emotions to peak. We want the dopamine release that happens when we get angry. We want to have secret conversations with other Tribe members where we demonstrate and reenforce each other’s Tribal Patriotism. We like the daily episodes of the serial drama that the news has become. 

We are polarized because we enjoy being polarized. 

Is there anything wrong with that? What does all this fun cost us? Is patriotism more than the fondness of an ass for his stall?

Well, historically it has been. It’s arguably why our two-party governing system used to be able to compromise and function. It’s an important reason why we accept being governed.  It’s why our grandfathers, fathers and some of us fought in wars to defend our freedoms. It creates the national unity that allows us to pull together rather than pull apart.

Do you believe in democracy? If so, you believe in compromise. If not, I guess you want an autocracy, a monarchy, a dictatorship, an oligarchy, a theocracy, or one-party rule. You don’t need to compromise in any of those systems; plus, your opinion would never be asked, and has no importance.

Now, if you are always right, please don’t compromise. If God has told you what course to take, please don’t compromise (but you may want to check with him again, because he told some other folks something different). If the other side is evil, please don’t compromise (and unless you are always right, you may be wrong about that).

Maybe we just need to modify our democracy so that those who disagree with us have less significance. We’ll only let men vote. Or only land owners. Or maybe we’ll limit voting to an informed electorate, and I get to decide who’s properly informed.

But what about those existential issues, those issues that are so significant that if the other side gets its way, the world as we know it will end? What about climate change? What about national security? And what about those issues where justice is at stake: economic inequality, racial and social justice? And what about those issues that if the other side gets its way, our freedoms and quality of life will be seriously damaged: immigration, the 2^nd Amendment, cultural preservation, religious freedom? We can’t compromise on those issues, can we?

Well, if we don’t compromise, what do we do? Right now, we can’t get anything done, so we complain. Alternatives to complaining exist, but they involve guns, waiting a decade or two for a generation to die, or a miracle trifecta political win (house, senate, and presidency). The trifecta is an awesome win for our side, unless it’s an awesome loss for our side. Maybe compromise is a safer bet.

I am not suggesting in any way that you give up your political beliefs. The answer is not that we all become purple. Wanting change is not unpatriotic. Obstinate conviction that you are right, and refusal to compromise is unpatriotic, undemocratic, and unproductive.

The answer is that we take pride in the fact that we are probably the most successful large multi-cultural, multi-ethnic nation in the world. The answer is that we take pride that our economy is the strongest and most resilient in the world. We take pride in the fact that much of the rest of the world wants to immigrate here and enjoy our standard of living, opportunities and freedoms. We take pride in the beauty of our country. We take pride that for a century, we have been the world’s leader in research and innovation, and that today we stand poised to create and profit from innovations like AI and Quantum Computing that will catapult the world into the future.

The answer is that we accept the fact that with so many of us from so many diverse backgrounds, we can’t be expected to see the world the same way, and yet our democracy works.

The answer is we love our entire country, we appreciate the importance of our democracy, and we compromise.

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If you’re scared of the other side winning the 2024 national election, if you’re angry at the other side’s supporters and worried about your way of life, you’re not alone. A lot of us fall into that camp. 62% of Americans say that our democracy is in danger if the wrong team wins this fall.

But if you’re tired of feeling this way, there might be a novel solution: meditation. In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt notes that “Focusing your attention and meditating have been found to reduce depression and anxiety.” Meditation “helps to calm the monkey mind,” which can make us less irritable, scared, and stressed than we would otherwise be.

But what does it mean to meditate? I’ve been meditating more-or-less every day for 3 years now, and I don’t think meditation is just about sitting quietly and tuning out. Nor do I think it’s about sitting in a chair and just letting your mind wander.

Instead, I think the purpose of meditation is two-fold.

First, it can help us to observe our thoughts. Observing our thoughts is crucial because the act of observing shows us that we are not our thoughts—after all, if we were, than we wouldn’t be able to observe them. As the Indian mystic Sadhguru puts it in one of his guided meditations: “I am not my body. I am not even my mind.”

The benefit of observing our emotions is that it stops us from identifying with them. When we observe our emotions, we no longer are scared. Instead, we have fear. That’s a crucial distinction. If our fear is particularly irrational (for example, I used to have a strong fear of water slides), then we can even say that our fear is something external to us: a mind-virus that is separate and distinct from our core essence.

I think the second purpose of meditation is to help us connect with something bigger than ourselves. I call that thing God. But you might as easily call it Spirit, Source energy, Infinite Intelligence, or simply the Universe. As humans, we were made for connection; and feeling deeply connected to our world can powerfully buffer us against fear, anxiety, and adversity. Close friends are one way to achieve this connection. But God offers us a deeper and richer way. This deeper connection can provide us with strong roots; and when we feel like we’re caught in a gale of fear and anger, those roots can make all the difference.

There’s another benefit to connecting with God as well. God is not scared. He is not frightened of either Harris or Trump 2024. God may be angry, but He is never hateful. He is loving.

By connecting with God (or Infinite Intelligence, the Universe, etc) we can become those things too. When I go into the mountains and meditate, and feel the loving presence of the creator of the universe with me, it’s hard to be scared; because I am in soul-deep communion with a being who is not scared.

In my experience, these benefits are durable. Done once, a 15-minute meditation can change our whole day. Done every day, meditation can connect us to a level of peace, calm, and freedom-from-fear that I think can get us through just about anything—including the 2024 election.

But let’s not jump to daily meditation just yet. Instead, let’s start small. Let’s all, from across the length and breadth of this great country; from across rivers and lakes, mountains and valleys, cities and small towns; sit down right now and spend 15 minutes meditating. Together.

This guided meditation that we’ll go through is one of my favorites. It was recorded by my friend and spiritual mentor Mark Johnson, a men’s coach and co-founder of The Undaunted Man (disclosure: a client of mine). Here it is:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fnrqu_MvrWFy-cPyew0YClQICONKOECO/view?usp=sharing

And after you’ve finished this meditation, look inside and notice if you don’t feel just a little bit more at peace and a little bit less afraid.

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This past Thursday a jury of 12 rendered its verdict in the New York District Attorney’s case against the presumptive Republican nominee for president, Donald J. Trump. The court found Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a payment his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. That payment was made in an effort, the prosecution alleged, to mislead voters in the interests of winning the 2016 presidential election.

This is a troubling but historic moment: our leading candidate for president stands as a convicted felon. On this we can all agree.

What we disagree on is why this moment is so troubling.

For some of us, it is the “fact” of Trump’s obvious guilt and that a criminal may retake the White House; one whose multiple and flagrant abuses of the law may be rewarded by the votes of their fellow Americans to the detriment of the nation.

For others, it is the “truth” that Donald Trump was subjected to a political prosecution on flimsy grounds in order to derail his candidacy. The greater indictment, so many of us believe, is not of Donald Trump, but of a corrupt and politicized judicial system in the state of New York.

We can be angry with one another for failing to acknowledge facts and truth as we see them. But our warring convictions arise from compelling stories about this man who, for better or worse, has transformed politics in America.

On the one hand, the rage and frustration that spills out towards the former president from the vast majority of Democrats, many independents, and some disaffected Republicans, arises from a view of Trump as a consummate and corrupt liar going back years before his time in politics, but metastasizing in his performance as a politician and president.

From this point of view, this is a man who lied about Barack Obama’s place of birth to undermine his presidency, who obstructed an FBI investigation into his ties with Russia, who tried intimidating Ukrainian president Vladimir Zolensky to investigate the now current president Joe Biden just as he tried intimidating Georgia Secretary of State Ben Raffensperger to find more votes in the state, who lied about and attempted to steal the 2020 election, who provoked an insurrection, who was impeached twice, and who even today is unwilling to accept the outcome of a 2024 election if he should lose. This is a deep and bitter way to feel, full of pain and indignation, about the man who led and may again lead all of us at the helm of the US government and the free world.

Yet it is no less deep and bitter than the grievance felt by the vast majority of Republicans, many independents, and some disaffected Democrats towards the Biden administration, the justice department, and the media they see as accomplices to their corruption.

This is one in which a Washington outsider who dared expose the wrongs of the political establishment found his campaign spied upon at the behest of the Obama administration, found the legitimacy of his election denied over allegations of collusion with Russia that a special counsel investigation admitted it had little evidence to prove, subjected to the indignity of unjust impeachment, and who Joe Biden continues to link to white supremacy even as he declares his support for historically Black colleges and universities and has moved the American embassy back to Jerusalem. And now his political enemies have weaponized the justice system to make him look like a criminal for challenging their own corruption.

As Americans, we tend to live in one of these stories or the other. When you live in a story, that story is compelling. The stories that surround us become the eyes through which we see the world.

Yet the way we see Biden and Trump must not be the way we see each other.

Truth is often different than the stories we tell. But the most false story of all is the one that says the politics of our neighbors render them morally useless as human beings. We can search for truth together in defiance of the powers that profit from our divisions. We can dig for common ground and reform our politics and institutions along those lines. But we can only do this if we perceive enough humanity in one another to extend the hand of goodwill.

This moment marks one more step on the dangerous road that lies before the United States of America. We will cast our ballots as we will. But there is hope for a nation whose people are willing to challenge one another without abandoning the bonds of friendship.

In such a nation truth may gain the final say, the story we ultimately emerge with may be a shared one, and the union of the people may endure.

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To backtrack a bit, while my brother and I shared our growing up years, our adult lives looked very different from one another.  After completing college in a small town in the northeastern mountains of Pennsylvania, my brother settled down back in the small, rural community where my parents still lived.  The community in central Pennsylvania was once home to the steel industry and is easily as politically conservative as one thinks of when we think of politics in the southern United States in the 2020s where it so happens I currently live.  In contrast, I’d attended a large university in a metropolitan area and then moved to Washington, DC to begin my career and where I lived for several years before returning to the city where I’d attended college until I eventually moved south.  I’d also had a brief stint living in Philadelphia, PA attending another large university. 

Our parents were my dad on one hand, whose grandparents immigrated to the U.S. in the early 20^th century and whose own father and grandfather were blue collar industry workers, who was long a union supporter and always a “Made in America” champion, so he leaned politically more liberal.  My mom, who grew up on the Midwestern plains of Kansas, by contrast, came from a politically conservative family.  I figured we stood a 50/50 chance of adopting either leaning, circumstances depending.

Conversations with my brother, whom I mostly saw at the holidays, could be tense if he brought up politics.  One holiday stands out as he ranted at me for an extended period as other relatives looked on.  I couldn’t glean from his rant that it was any specific matter of policy or even ideology with which he strongly disagreed with me but more a generalized sense of anger over my supposed liberal leaning, what we in Braver Angels call affective polarization. 

In the aftermath of his suicide, I wondered whether his politics were behind his seeming need to stockpile guns in his home that had made them an easy reach when he experienced some major depression. 

Fast-forward to 2024, and I’m scrolling through my social media to see that someone I knew from childhood had died with a post from his sibling that reads “RIP (name). I hope you find more happiness in the next life than you did in this one.”  The deceased, whom I’ll call Greg, and I had many exchanges via social media sometime around the 2016 election.  Greg clearly leaned on the political left, and he was clearly very angered over its outcome but also over many of the same things we often read the left is concerned about.  As more of a pragmatic centrist who often sees multiple sides of any issue and as someone who had read several books trying to understand the right’s anger, I tried to offer him a different perspective or a way to see where “the other side” was coming from.  Suffice it to say, he wasn’t having it and eventually one or both of us decided to drop the conversation.  While we remained friends on social media, we’d had no interaction for several years. 

When I learned of his death, I was curious.  What had he been posting on social media in recent times?  His most recent post reads in part “Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous . . . And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that it’s nothing personal. Well, f*** them. Make it personal.”  Wow, just wow.

While I’m sure Greg had other factors at play operating in the background, had politics helped lead to his death? I wondered.

This week, scrolling through my social media feed, I see another man I know from childhood posting angry rants with memes and pictures which seemingly promote violence to take back what some in the U.S. see as their way of life going away.  Is he intending to promote civil war as an answer to our current culture and political problems? I wondered.  Where will it lead?

I currently serve as a state coordinator for Braver Angels in South Carolina.  I’ve been involved with Braver Angels (originally Better Angels) since its founding in 2017.  What drew me to this work was the dawning recognition that trouble had apparently been brewing for years while many of us were oblivious to it and a recognition that we needed some serious repair work if our democracy/republic is to continue standing. 

This past week, I learned of a friend of a friend’s friend, also 51, who took his own life.  And while I can have no idea whether politics played any role in his case and taking the poor state of our system for dealing with mental illness into account, I am beleaguered by the number of suicides, particularly among middle-aged men, which I continue to learn of. 

We need to figure this out.  Politics at its heart is how we organize ourselves to live in a civil society.  Our politics should not be killing us.  Consider this a wake-up call to lay down our arms, so to speak, and continue in this most important of work.

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To refer briefly to a foundational piece of wisdom literature, the first Epistle to the Corinthians states that “knowledge puffs up, but love edifies.” Though anti-intellectualism may seem to be on the rise it is perhaps fair to say that we live in a time where facts and information are seen by many to be the answer to problems of severe social and political division. The truth however is more nuanced. Affective polarization is not a phenomenon of misinformation (though this may be both a consequence and a contributing factor) but rather a collapse of trust between opposing groups, as well as between the public and its institutions. Braver Angels seeks to rebuild trust between Americans in the context of politics, and between the American people and their vital civic institutions. Yet even as this is true there can be no such trust in the realm of political life without intellectual engagement. The question for Braver Angels therefore becomes how do we advance the work of rebuilding trust in the context of intellectual and ideological debate and discussion? The virtue of intellectual humility is foundational to our capacity to accomplish this. How intellectual humility expresses itself across the tapestry of Braver Angels activities and grassroots infrastructure building is the focus of this essay.

Braver Angels is not just an organization, it is a mission driven community. It is generally bound by both a love of country and an essential goodwill towards the people of this country (whether they are people we agree with or not). As such, Braver Angels has a creed. That creed is illustrated in what we call the Braver Angels Way:

We state our views freely and fully, without fear.

We treat people who disagree with us with honesty, dignity and respect.

We welcome opportunities to engage those with whom we disagree.

We believe all of us have blind spots and none of us are not worth talking to.

We seek to disagree accurately, avoiding exaggeration and stereotypes.

We look for common ground where it exists and, if possible, find ways to work together.

We believe that, in disagreements, both sides share and learn.

In Braver Angels, neither side is teaching the other or giving feedback on how to think or say things differently.

Within the text of the Braver Angels Way one finds statements that are meaningless if they are not founded upon a commitment to intellectual humility.

“We believe all of us have blind spots and none of us are not worth talking to.” This statement is a reflection upon our inability to know, or be right about, everything that matters in both politics and life.

“We seek to disagree accurately, avoiding exaggeration and stereotypes.” In this we acknowledge that our own prejudices, the biases of our own emotions, are no fit substitutes for truth (whether these embellished opinions are about issues or people).

“We believe that, in disagreements, both sides share and learn.” This statement asserts that, not only do we know ourselves to be wrong however often merely by virtue of being human, but that those with whom we find ourselves at odds do in fact have things to teach us that we can learn from. It contains a faith in the value of other perspectives that de-centers one’s own opinion in a way that is only possible through an internalization of intellectual humility.

Upon these philosophical foundations Braver Angels community supports and implements a wide range of events, programs, and content creation that cultivates goodwill, trust and understanding across our political divides between individuals and within communities and institutions. While these offerings are dynamic and wide spreading, Braver Angels program work began with a single workshop design. Rooted in principles of family therapy, our “Red/Blue” workshop does not center argument or debate, but rather the elevation of each side’s life experiences in terms of why they see politics the way that they do.

Deference to the validity of “lived” experience is built into the character of Braver Angels workshops. Our workshop offerings have now expanded into a roster of seven group workshops and several other one-to-one scripted conversational offerings focused on differences as varying as race, geography, generation as well as political ideology.

Bill Doherty (noted family therapist, professor of psychology, Braver Angels co-founder and architect of Braver Angels workshops) describes the role of intellectual humility in workshop culture and design in this way:

“Humility about the weaknesses and limitations of one’s own political side is at the heart of Braver Angels workshops. For example, in our red/blue workshop, we pair the question ‘Why are your side’s values and policies good for the country’ with a follow up question, ‘What are your reservations or concerns about your own side?’”

Reflection upon our individual and group capacity for error and imperfection is a consistent feature of Braver Angels’ programmatic culture. This is impossible without a commitment to intellectual humility.

Braver Angels work links personal experiences to narrative, debate and direct civic engagement. In the messaging of Braver Angels there is a focus on challenging Americans to empathize with both sides of an argument (and the experiences that give rise to such arguments) that loudly implies a foundational commitment to intellectual humility.

Braver Angels Instagram page, for example, is replete with quotations from figures in history exhorting us to this effect:

“Unity, not uniformity, must be our aim. We attain unity only through variety. Differences must be integrated, not annihilated, not absorbed.” – Mary Parker Follett (philosopher).

“The test of a first-rate intellect is that ability to hold two opposing ideas in your head at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

In an essay published as part of a special issue of Deseret Magazine this author, in his role as Braver Angels National Ambassador, talks about his own background as a mixed-race American with an African-American mother from urban Los Angeles who is a democrat and a white father from the south who is a Republican, the challenge of polarization, and the lessons drawn from a life spent learning from the divisions of a polarized family:

“The antidote was in understanding. I carried this attitude with me throughout life right into politics. So in an age where Democrats and Republicans view each other as the enemy, I cannot help but see them as merely Mom and Dad.”

Intellectual humility may come more easily in contexts where there is affection between parties to a disagreement. It is for this reason that goodwill at least also stands as a foundational value of the work of Braver Angels. Yet one of the fruits of such goodwill is intellectual humility. When we have affection for one another it is easier to imagine that we each may have some valid perspective to contribute to a conversation.

That said, in the real world of politics stakes are high, competition is fierce, and material interests are often zero-sum. Politics is not necessarily a natural place to make friends. We must be able to advocate for and defend our points of view on living questions whose consequences matter. Yet even in this truth matters, and so too does our ultimate capacity to trust one another’s intentions across lines of political ideology and “tribal” affiliation. The constructive tension we at Braver Angels seek to restore to the American understanding of civic life is the tension between fierce advocacy on the one hand and winning the interpersonal trust and goodwill of the opposition on the other. Even in the throes of debate, democracy at its best rests on the presupposition that even in conflict we are engaged in a dialectic that moves us collectively towards a greater appreciation of truth. Even in debate then, bonds of civic trust and our collective pursuit of truth are strengthened through intellectual humility.

Braver Angels work extends deeply into the realms of both popular political debate on the one hand and professional political polemics as exist between candidates and elected officials on the other.

The Braver Angels Debates model is predicated upon a commitment to community building and the collective pursuit of truth that is only possible through a commitment to intellectual humility. Based upon the debate format of the Yale Student Union, Braver Angels Debates is a parliamentary process designed to minimize contests of personality while maximizing engagement with ideas and experience. All people in a given room have the opportunity to volunteer to give a speech in support or defense of a given resolution (be it ‘resolved: we should defund the police’ or ‘resolved: America should build a wall along its southern border’). This is itself a marker of intellectual humility in design because this ironclad commitment to inclusion rests in part upon the presupposition that there is something to be learned from everyone in a given discussion, whether we are hearing from a university professor or the janitor. Questioners, when responding to speeches given on the other side, are not allowed to address the speakers directly or by name but rather are required to address their question to the chairperson. (This again keeps the focus on ideas, not on personalities.) Most strikingly, perhaps, participants in these debates are encouraged not only to marshal logic and data in support of their arguments, but to also be candid with respect to doubts they may have about their own arguments, and to be honest about the ways in which they think they might be wrong. In fact participants who begin a debate on one side of a debate are allowed to switch sides during the course of it if they hear something from the opposition that sways their view.

April Lawson, the architect of the Braver Angels Debate format, describes the spirit of the program this way:

“What we think about when we think about Braver Angels Debates is the spirit of it, which is a collective search for truth. So what that means is that we invite everybody into the room to share what they particularly have to say about a topic. They don’t have to be the best spoken person in the world, they don’t have to have lots of statistics. But we do ask that they say what they actually believe.”

Braver Politics, on the other hand, is an effort encompassing a suite of programs aimed at directly impacting the culture of political campaigning in American elections. It includes, among other items, its own debate model specified to candidates and electeds in a manners that focuses in on issues of genuine concern to constituents while discouraging the sort of ad hominem and personal attacks that too often corrupt the competition of ideas in electoral contests. There is a degree to which our overarching Braver Politics initiative can be understood as a direct effort at injecting intellectual humility into electoral politics.

Braver Politics director Elizabeth Doll analyzes the relationship between Braver Politics and intellectual humility in this way:

“One of the most important qualities a public official can have is intellectual humility. Whether supporting and pursuing the best policies or building relationships with constituents, effective work requires a consistent willingness to change your mind (even when you think you’re right), being sure that there are things you can still learn (even – maybe especially – when you already know a lot.)”

Intellectual humility is both a value and a disposition. It reflects an understanding those who have it possess about how we may best channel uncertainty into wisdom. In this it stands as an epistemological conviction. Yet even more so intellectual humility connotes a way of being in the world. Embodied as a virtue it animates the way in which we relate to one another in ways that open up possibilities previously closed to us.

Monica Guzman, Braver Angels senior fellow for public discourse and author of I Never Thought of it That Way: How to have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times, has established curiosity as a virtue within the culture of Braver Angels and indeed across the bridging space and beyond. Curiosity allows us to open up space for knowing others and in turn being known be them, diffusing the anxiety that may surround our differences in favor of a clarifying humanization. Yet curiosity as a virtue does not travel far outside the company of intellectual humility. About the relationship between the two Monica says the following:

“Curiosity is a craving for information, for what we don’t understand that we want to understand. Intellectual humility is the capacity to receive information, to hold a posture that lets us stay open to new ideas, even and especially if they challenge us. Curiosity is a very narrow thing without intellectual humility. IH is what turns the tunnels it travels through in search of information into vast landscapes. They strengthen each other, need each other, and work together.”

In the work of Braver Angels, and indeed a larger community of organizations, scholars and practitioners brought together by the work of the Greater Good Science Center and the John Templeton Foundation, we see evidence of a shift towards a renewed appreciation of intellectual humility as both virtue and subject matter in a dynamic landscape of innovators dedicated to constructive social change. This is a trend that must continue if the spirit of American pluralism is ever to overcome the polarization that undermines the foundation of America democracy.

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The 2024 Braver Angels National Convention will take place June 27 – 29 in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

We’ll be in touch soon with more information but for now, please save the date and sign up here to register your interest.

If you are fed up with our politics and want to do something about it, this convention is right for you. If you believe that America can — and must — be better and braver, this convention is right for you.  If you want to step up to address the toxic state of our politics in 2024, a critical election year, this convention is right for you.

We have a big year ahead of us. For now — enjoy your Sunday!

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We are seeing things in American political life today that are not normal. On Thursday, former President Donald Trump was arrested and booked in Fulton County, GA on charges that he sought to overturn the election results in that state. Trump has already been federally indicted on charges that he attempted to do so across the country (alongside a separate federal indictment and one in New York state).

At a gathering highlighted by the anti-Trump Republican group The Lincoln Project a crowd of hundreds erupted in furious celebration as CNN released the mugshot of the former president, glaring grimly into the camera. President Biden, when asked about the photo, remarked with dark humor that Trump was a “handsome” guy. Many will have read satisfaction in the president’s voice.

Yet even as enemies of Trump celebrated, the image inspired renewed devotion in the former president’s supporters. Memes highlighting the image of the president as a persecuted yet undaunted champion of the people are proliferating across the internet. Never before has a photograph proved so instantly iconic. In an era in which the popular credibility of our justice department and our mainstream press has never been lower Trump’s arrest stands to many as a badge of honor.

It is Trump, for many, who stands between us and an authoritarian state. “In the end, they’re not coming after me,” Donald Trump reminded his followers in a defiant speech after the arrest. “They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way.”

These events are not normal. And yet that is a relative statement. For young Americans, this turn in our politics is normal.

If you were born in 1997 (the beginning of generation “Z”) you may well remember a moment full of hope, for most Americans, in the election of President Barack Obama in 2008. You were 11 years old.

America’s first African-American president running on an inspiring platform of unity and reconciliation, Obama tapped into the desire of Americans to transcend the bitterness of our partisan and cultural divides with a message of “hope and change.”

By the time of his re-election campaign, when you were 15, you may well have felt that all such talk of hope and change had been a farce.

You may have blamed different parties, of course, or heard your parents and others doing so. Some said the Tea Party and congressional Republicans proved there was no making peace with the other side. Others claimed that Barack Obama showed himself to be a divisive radical who preyed on the idealism of the American people to gain power.

Either way the idea of hope and change, for most Americans, was already dead by 2012.

Your first opportunity to vote in a presidential election came when you were 19. In 2016 you were given a historically bitter contest between perhaps the two most unpopular presidential nominees in history: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Allegations of collusion with Russia to interfere with our election on his behalf surrounded Trump. Outrage over alleged falsifying of salacious stories about Trump and Russia joined with derision over Secretary of State Clinton’s alleged mishandling of classified emails.

Hillary Clinton lost that election while winning the popular vote. Protestors jammed highways in grievous indignation. The legitimacy of Trump’s election was immediately challenged, ultimately culminating in an impeachment that failed to remove him from office.

President Trump officially lost the 2020 election, but launched a massive effort to investigate, denounce and challenge its results. This effort ended with the storming of Capitol Hill (whether one blamed the president for this or not) by hundreds of Trump’s supporters and a final impeachment that also failed to see his removal.

You are now 26 years old. You have never had the opportunity to vote in a presidential election where the results and the candidates were overwhelmingly accepted as legitimate. You are not likely to get that chance in 2024.

Yet and still, I write you on the eve of the 60th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech, delivered at the March on Washington near the apex of the Civil Rights Movement.

In challenging injustices that had stood for hundreds of years, Dr. King and his followers beckoned Americans across the spectrum of race and politics to remember the better angels of their nature in the interests of saving justice and equality in American society.

In mighty ways they succeeded. And their challenge was not necessarily less daunting than our own.

“Our experience as a country reminds us that we are capable of overcoming the mightiest of obstacles.”

Our experience as a country reminds us that we are capable of overcoming the mightiest of obstacles. We can overcome these as well. But whatever your politics, we cannot do it by sinking ever further into the culture of dishonesty and demonization that got us here.

In the words of King: “In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.”

The Civic Renewal Movement is galvanizing the American people to restore trust in one another, and from this to challenge our leaders and institutions to serve their function and cease inflaming the tribal breakdown of our country.

This battle is a daunting one. But history reminds us that hope will not be denied. No challenge is too great for an American people that remembers her capacity for redemption and unity.

This is the work of Braver Angels. Let us commit to it together.

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Today, you are far more likely to find a lawyer in Congress than a laborer. While more than half of U.S. senators have a net worth exceeding a million dollars, less than 9% percent of the American public will ever reach that mark.

Politics is seen as the realm of lawyers and experts, not truckers and nurses. This has become so embedded in our thinking that an electrician friend of David’s was recently shocked when David told him that you didn’t need a college degree in order to be President of the United States; he had always assumed it was a requirement and that the position wasn’t meant for people like him.

When we gather in Gettysburg July 5-8 for the Braver Angels National Convention, it will mark 160 years since a president who himself had only a handful of years of formal schooling called for America to renew herself as a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

At the We The People’s Project of Braver Angels, we are taking up that call. It’s time those who are often spoken of but seldom spoken with get their turn to speak.

“Our project’s tagline is ‘where everyday Americans get time at the podium.'”

Our project’s tagline is “where everyday Americans get time at the podium.” This is why our core leadership team is made up of people whose bios include electrician, arborist, pipe welder, factory worker, and tool and die maker — people who see themselves as working-class, everyday Americans.

That’s why our expanding We The People’s Council — which comprises Braver Angels members who identify themselves as working class, convenes four times a year to serve as our extended leadership team. Its purpose is to provide advice to the Braver Angels community on how we can effectively accomplish our mission. We are now reaching out to our balanced group of Red and Blue members, asking them, “What are the issues where we can discover common ground and collaborate towards meaningful action?'”

When we organize our monthly We The People’s Forum events, we seek to find those everyday Americans whose voices are seldom heard even though they have knowledge and experience on the issue at hand.

It’s why one of our initiatives, “The Truth and Trust Project,” is co-led by a “deplorable” who voted for Trump and whose day job has nothing to do with public health (that’s Wilk) and an “elitist” who ran the National Institutes of Health and is a recognized public health expert (that’s Dr. Francis Collins). (Be sure to check out their conversation at the Convention in the session “An Elitist and a Deplorable Walk Into a Bar…”)  

We find time and again that cooler heads prevail as individuals approach discussions with curiosity, open minds, and a willingness to listen to differing perspectives; a culture where agitators find limited space to disrupt the discourse as people engage respectfully to find common ground. The prevailing goal is to seek unity, bridge divides, and reduce polarization.So, if you’re reading this and you see yourself as a working-class, everyday American, join us. Sign up for ourWe The People’s Council. If you’re a part of or know of an organization that works with working-class Americans, reach out to them and invite them to join the Braver Network.

For all of us: let’s build a political culture that truly honors and reflects “We the People.”

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They would seem to have nothing to do with each other. Yet in each of them I observe a legacy of conscience and independence that bears witness to a deeper understanding of what it is to be an American.

Tim Keller was a voice of conscience in evangelical America, and a man who paid a price for his independence of mind. I knew Tim, though not well. In my exposure to him, I noted the lament with which he looked upon an evangelical movement that he felt had forsaken true Christian charity for political ideology.

The author of The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, and literally dozens of other books, Keller in recent years came under fire by others in the evangelical movement for his criticisms of its embrace of President Trump and a politics he believed were out of step with Christian conscience.

I did not know Jim Brown personally, but I do know that he was an icon in American life. Not unlike his younger peer in national sports, Muhammad Ali, the three-time MVP award winner and Super Bowl champion put his name and voice forward in support of civil rights.

For decades, Brown’s leadership in the Black community has been recognized. But his stature as a civil rights activist and icon did not prevent him from being sharply criticized for public encouraging President Donald Trump.

“I should be criticizing Trump at every level because he does certain things that call for criticism,” Brown said. “But when I look at television I see all these announcers become experts and they’re pointing the fingers and they’re not doing a doggone thing but pointing their fingers, I find myself really pulling for the president.”

They were not afraid to sacrifice their reputations on their side of the political and cultural divide because they were also men of conviction and conscience.

Tim Keller and Jim Brown were men with starkly different politics and experiences. They were not afraid to sacrifice their reputations on their side of the political and cultural divide because they were also men of conviction and conscience. They showed an independence of thought that demonstrates something central to the American character – a willingness to defy the expectations of others in order to do what you feel is right.

I doubt Brown and Keller ever met, and it’s likely that no one has ever associated one with the other in print before the day that marked their passing. But it seems proper to me to note that between the two of them, they show us that courage and conscience are virtues that cross the divide.

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It was March 2018 and I was scrolling through Facebook. My feed had been carefully curated by the algorithm to only show me what I wanted to see; and it was full of journalists, economists, and experts in other fields who all agreed with me. All of them talked about the dangers of big government (I’m libertarian). All of them discussed how taxes and regulations kill jobs, how power corrupts, how thousands of data points showed clearly the inverse correlation between size of government and economic prosperity. All of them told me exactly what I wanted to hear.

And I was miserable.

We talk a lot about the societal dangers of political siloing, but one point isn’t brought up enough: being in a silo is psychologically bad for us. It’s like eating junk food: it gives us cheap dopamine hits, while crowding out our ability to live a better and healthier life. When I was living in my silo, I was furious. What was wrong with all those people who disagreed with me!? Couldn’t they see how self-evidently right my side was? Were they too stupid to read the data, or did they just not care about all the problems caused by big government?

“Each time politics came up, I was like a dog with a bone. I worried and harried my friends until I had pounded whatever anti-government point I was trying to make into their heads“

My conversations with other people also suffered. Each time politics came up, I was like a dog with a bone. I worried and harried my friends until I had pounded whatever anti-government point I was trying to make into their heads (or, perhaps, until they voiced polite agreement so we could take the conversation in a less obnoxious direction). Instead of using political conversations as a way to learn more about an infinitely complex world and to grow as a person, each took on a binary notation. Had I moved the other person towards libertarianism? If yes, good. If not, the conversation was a failure.

It was no way to live.

So what helped me break out of my silo? I started doing deep work on myself. I found a truly gifted men’s coach. Among many other things, we worked on understanding the root cause of my attachment to libertarianism. The goal wasn’t to talk me out of being libertarian; the goal was to let go of attachments in general in order to live a stronger and freer and more joyful life. I unearthed my fear and distrust of authority, which stemmed from a few unpleasant childhood experiences. I learned to separate past and present, and to stop seeing governmental authority through the lens of a scared child. 

My coach also helped me develop a stronger sense of identity beyond politics. In 2018, my identity was “Julian Adorney, Libertarian.” That was a problem because I interpreted every criticism of libertarianism as an attack on me. Now my sense of identity is deeper. I’ve made close friends, found a connection to God, and tapped into a sense of myself that’s fuller and wider and ultimately more mystical than a political label. 

This broader identity helped me to truly listen to people who disagreed with me, because my goal became to perceive the breathtaking complexity of the world rather than to protect my narrow political identity from any threats.

God knows I’m still not perfect, at political conversations or at anything else. I still have to work on myself every day. But that’s the point. Unhealthy political conflict is downstream from our psychology. We think we’re yelling at our political opponents, but we’re really yelling at our own demons — and I don’t think we can stop yelling until we address those demons head-on. 

We’ll always fight over how to fix the world. That’s both healthy and essential to a republic. But those fights can be a whole lot healthier if we first do the work to fix ourselves.

Disclosure: the men’s coach Julian mentioned is also a client of his.

(This essay first appeared in the Braver Angels newsletter. Subscribe to our newsletter to hear the latest Braver Angels commentary on how to knit our country back together)

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What will it take for us to embrace a culture of goodwill in American life and American politics? What will it take for us to heal the wounds of our society? 

There are many ideas and solutions on offer. Some say it will take electoral reform. Some say it will take a change in institutional incentives. Some argue that we need to abandon the left/right paradigm. And some will say we need the work of groups like Braver Angels.

But… maybe we need Jesus?

This is the message of the He Gets Us campaign, which has launched a massive, one-hundred-million-dollar ad campaign to “rebrand” Jesus in America. 

With beautifully-produced commercials that aired to an audience of nearly one-hundred-million viewers during the Super Bowl, the people behind He Gets Us presented a Jesus whose teachings and example, they stressed, are the answer to America’s deep-seated polarization. 

“Jesus loved the people we hate,” declared the ending text of one of the two Super Bowl advertisements, after a montage of images depicting bitter social conflict in the United States rolled. 

“He gets us. All of us.” The ad calls upon us, in the words of the Bible, to “Love your enemies.”

For many people, religious and non-religious, it was an uplifting message.

Yet there was serious backlash to the commercial, and the backlash itself came from remarkably far across the spectrum. 

Superstar progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took issue with the ad on Twitter, stating “Something tells me Jesus would not spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign.” 

AOC was preceded, however, by leading conservative activist and founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk, who declared “The marketing group behind ‘He Gets Us’ has done one of the worst services to Christianity in the modern era. The Green family are decent and wonderful people who have been taken for a ride by these woke tricksters!”

The Green family refers to the family of David Green, the founder of Hobby Lobby, the arts and crafts corporation known by many for their tremendous financial support of socially conservative causes, including pro-life activism and efforts opposing the redefinition of marriage.

For the many Americans who simply thought the commercials to be positive or well-meaning, both Kirk’s and AOC’s reactions were confusing. The financial connection to the Green Family and other conservative interests does, however, give context to Ocasio-Cortez’s reaction. 

Yet many conservative Christians such as Kirk were just as offended by a portrayal of Jesus that made no mention of Jesus as messiah, no mention of Jesus as the enemy of sin, no mention of Jesus as the only path to salvation, no mention of Jesus as “the way, and the truth, and the life.”

I can understand these views. But I wonder if our insistence on purity of political association and purity of theology alike both do not stand in the way of our building a trust between each other as Americans that can allow us to overcome the political bitterness that really is undoing the fabric of American life?

A cultural moment like the Super Bowl brings together the very broadest collection of Americans imaginable. As we watch the game (not to mention the halftime show and the commercials) we sit alongside each other, with all our political and religious differences, bound up together in this unofficial but very real American ritual. It is remarkable how popular culture affords a moment for us to tap, however perfectly or imperfectly, into the timeless teachings of a figure in Jesus of Nazareth, who speaks to us as if from beyond time.

To many, it is dangerous to mix popular culture with the realm of the holy, but maybe there is promise for healing in precisely this mix. 

(That is certainly the view of Chloe Valdary, innovator of the Theory of Enchantment and my most recent guest on Uniting America, whose invitational approach to diversity, equity and inclusion shines light on the human condition by recognizing the transcendent truths that connect pop-culture and ancient wisdom. For those interested in fixing DEI, the Kingdom of God, and the spiritual dimensions of our political and racial divides, it is not a conversation to miss.)

For myself, I am a Christian. I am a Christian who believes in the separation of church and state, one who believes that we ought to be able to hear a message from a person or organization even if we do not agree with all of their politics, and I am certainly a Christian who believes that Jesus cannot quite be captured by a 60-second commercial, no matter how much money is spent on it.

But if I want to see Jesus in the political conversation a bit more, it is only because I, like many Christians and many non-Christians, believe that loving one’s neighbor and loving one’s enemies is the way to a better world.

This belief that love can transcend our differences is a belief that yet binds many Christians and non-Christians alike. We need love if we are to heal America. And we need the teachings and exemplars of love to come forth from our heritage to show us the way to mend.

We do need love and forgiveness in America.

Is it wrong therefore to say that we need Jesus too?

-John Wood Jr., National Ambassador, Braver Angels

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That same week, I watched the show Our Universe, narrated by none other than Morgan Freeman. This documentary distinguishes itself by fusing the story of that universe with the story of life on Earth. And indeed how it all began was itself, fusion.

At its dawn, our universe was essentially a nothingness of uniform density. And it might have stayed that way if not for the tiniest variances caused by Herr Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle.

The reason, you might say, that there’s something instead of nothing, is that somewhere around one decillionth of a second after the start of the Big Bang, these minuscule variances of material density began to coalesce into a quark soup of elementary particles. Difference had made all the difference.

From there it was more of the same. The story of how our universe was formed is one of endless combination—taking two things and making them one. And this was only possible because of a fundamental force that had formed just a moment before, at one tredecillionth of a second in: gravity. Because of this force, which dictates that everything in the universe is attracted to everything else, after only 379 thousand more years, those subatomic particles combined to form atoms.

And here we get back to nuclear fusion, where these hydrogen atoms started joining forces within the stars, smashing together and forming bigger, ever more complex atoms. This chain of combination flows through the history of creation, with atoms forming molecules that finally started to resemble matter as we know it. “Stuff” was born. But this stuff wasn’t done combining. Dust particles started to coalesce into chunks, which gradually grew to the most incredible sizes, forming the planets that would give birth to life.

And of course, life itself is a continuation of this story. Organic chemical compounds of increasing complexity formed the primordial soup that gave rise to life. The most basic of organisms began to combine into cells, themselves joining forces and exploding into a tree of life through yet another example of the magic of combination: genetic variation.  

This idea reinforces one of the most important aspects of combination—that it’s often at its best when the things coming together are quite different.

Let’s take a moment to consider this. As they say, two heads are better than one, and when two of anything join forces, there’s a good chance one might bring something to the table the other doesn’t have.

These days it doesn’t feel like we value difference enough, instead preferring that others believe the same things we do. That would ultimately mean we all pretty much have the same experiences in life. If our neighbor thinks the same way about everything, we needn’t bother trying to see things from their distinct perspective.

I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather learn something from my interactions with others, leaning into curiosity to embrace those differences, rather than criticizing them. It would be nice if, instead of seeing how wrong someone’s conclusion is, we see one more data point to expand our understanding of the human condition.

The benefits of combination, in particular combinations of difference, are part of the philosophy that informs the work of Braver Angels and our recently launched Braver Partners program. 

Braver Partners acknowledges that the scale of the polarization problem in this country calls for a larger movement that pulls together as many organizations as possible of every type—civic, business, educational, religious, etc.— and calls upon them to contribute whatever it is they do best to the cause of holding our country together, combining our unique and different strengths and efforts for good.

In addition to calling on organizations large and small to help realize our shared mission, the Braver Partners program offers our partner organizations tools to help their internal cultures harness the power of ideological diversity and curiosity. 

And when they join us at our convention in Gettysburg, we’ll give them the chance to create new coalitions, unleashing the power of combination to transform our national culture and reunite us as people.

Want to contribute? Tell us about an organization that might be a good fit, or help us manage our partner relationships! We’ve gotten started with nonprofits like Move for America and the Listen First Project, local religious congregations and Rotary clubs, schools like Dakota Wesleyan University, and companies like Mejdi Tours. Click here to join the effort!

By combining the ideas of very different people—and organizations—to discover not only what each can contribute but what collectively we can create, we might finally accept that together, we’re greater than the sum of our parts. 

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So naturally I’ve turned to thinking about my New Year’s resolutions, and in addition to renewing last year’s, I resolve to treat my parents with more respect. It’s not that I’m often disrespectful, but I do need to work on my patience with them, especially in the realm of filial tech support, a common source of exasperation for many of us lucky enough to have healthy, but aging, parents.

While you can most certainly teach an old dog new tricks, it doesn’t get any easier for us to absorb new ideas as we age, and I was ruminating on how this works. Sure, our processing power and memory may decline somewhat, but there’s also something to be said for all the good data cramming up our heads. The older we get and the more we remember, the more old data the new stuff has to compete with—and be weighed against.

And this fact doesn’t even need to have a moral value; it just is. It can hold us back, and it can ground us to be able to move us forward more easily.

I consider myself progressive—even if I don’t call myself by that label due to differences with the current popular school—and I hope I retain that inclination for the long term. But at the same time I have—largely through Braver Angels—come to appreciate more the perspectives of those “who [stand] athwart history yelling Stop,” as William F. Buckley put it.

It’s actually less about preventing our impulses for forward movement, and moreso about the regard we hold for those who feel differently about which way actually is forward.

We would be wise to recognize that eventually we all play the role of fuddy-duddies stuck in our ways. It may be as a grandparent struggling to learn new tech tools to communicate with our grandkids. Or we may find ourselves disoriented as the moral universe shifts over time, bending towards a new conception of justice that seems extreme, even absolutist, with no room for our “problematic” selves.

As I move ahead into the new year, I resolve to keep this in mind, trying to judge less, learn more, and practice grace, knowing I eventually will be the one who needs it.

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For a look at the first chapter of Aziz’s book, Crossing Boundaries, click here!

The post Want to fight polarization? Take a vacation! | Aziz Abu Sarah with Randy Lioz appeared first on Braver Angels.

That day shocked our nation with its horror, perpetrated against innocent very young children. If, like me, you had a child that same age sitting in their elementary school classrooms, you likely felt the horror literally, in your body. You realized how easily it could have been your child, in their school, in your town where you drop your kid off daily on weekdays, never thinking it could be a place of mortal danger.

Six years after Sandy Hook, in 2018, a troubled 14-year old boy who had been expelled from his high school drove to an elementary school in Townville, South Carolina, just outside the town where my family lives, and armed with an AR-15, he gunned down a 6-year-old boy on the school’s playground. Shortly beforehand, he murdered his father. This event shook our community to its core as tributes were made, funds were raised for the family and symbols were everywhere, dedicated to this young boy who lost his life. Days later, he was buried wearing his beloved batman costume.

Events like these shake our sense of safety that we expect in our homes, in our communities going about our daily lives inhabiting the places we normally go. Sandy Hook and the events of that day stand in stark relief in our memories as they left us reeling in ways we haven’t since. Sadly, we’ve become largely numb and immune as we’ve witnessed shooting after shooting, in schools, in churches and synagogues, in stores and in workplaces. That is, pretty much anywhere humans congregate as they go about their daily lives has become a potential place of danger, to say nothing of the communities, often minority ones, that live with the threat of daily gun violence.

In the months and years since 2012, we’ve seen many efforts to address gun violence at the state and federal levels, some successful, some not but none that’s provided a universal fix to our seemingly intractable national scourge, a problem that doesn’t seem to plague other nations.

Shortly after the shooting in a nearby town and the bitterly divisive 2016 election, I joined Better (now Braver) Angels, driven by a need to understand how we had become so politically polarized, how our fellow Americans could see events in our communities and in our country in such divergent ways that were hard to understand and as we identified as blue or red, liberal or conservative. I also deeply felt the frustration with our seeming inability to solve some of our most intractable problems, from immigration to gun violence. Sometimes we’d seem close to agreeing on solutions to big problems only to be frustrated yet again when our elected leaders, existing in a highly charged partisan environment, couldn’t make it happen. I kept thinking there had to be a better way. 

In the years since, Braver Angels has inspired me to read widely across the political spectrum, reading and listening to a myriad of voices, liberal, conservative and in-between and to consider divergent views. I’ve attended BA workshops, listened deeply to BA and to other liberal, conservative and libertarian podcast interviews. They’ve made me realize that no one ‘side’ has the lock on morality or on good ideas. They’ve made me realize that few problems lend themselves to simplistic solutions and that includes solving gun violence.

In the years since, I have realized that the path to a solution to our particular problem of gun violence will look like all of us working together, listening deeply to each other, finding the areas where we can agree and working from there. Complex problems often require multi-pronged solutions, not one solution imposed by one group on another. For gun violence, this is likely to look like us agreeing on some restrictions on who should have access to guns and when there are some people who shouldn’t. It likely looks like figuring out scalable interventions in conflict de-escalation. It likely looks like understanding how our culture at times promotes solving our problems through violence. It likely looks like understanding and addressing why Americans and maybe young men in particular are feeling a sense of loneliness and missing identity that sometimes translates into violence.

For me, Braver Angels gives me hope that we can work toward finding these solutions. In this season of Christmas and Hannukah, we can feel hope. In 2023, we can get to work.

Monica L. Rockwell

Braver Angels South Carolina State Coordinator

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