(RNS) — Something has gone wrong in how Americans see each other. It’s not that we disagree. It’s that we’ve stopped seeing each other as neighbors in the first place.
Americans’ trust in the federal government is at one of the lowest levels recorded in nearly seven decades. Sadly, trust in media, schools and the medical system has also noticeably declined over the last few years.
But the issue isn’t just distrust in institutions. The issue is what’s happening between Americans as individuals. In a Pew Research Center survey tracking the same people over a five-year period, roughly a quarter changed their minds about whether others can be trusted and slightly more lost trust than gained it. All told, only 34% of Americans — barely a third — say most people can be trusted.
Amid this cynicism, approximately half of Americans are lonely, so much so that loneliness has been designated an epidemic. In other words, we aren’t merely divided. We are strangers.
While a divided country can still argue its way toward resolution, it’s extremely difficult to negotiate with others when you don’t know them, or worse, when you see them as caricatures rather than genuine beings.
Increasingly, that’s what we have of one another: impressions formed at a distance, through headlines and feeds, rather than knowledge developed through genuine human contact.
To truly see another person — to recognize their dignity, their complexity, their fears and hopes — is one of the sacred obligations of being human. When we reduce one another to caricatures, we don’t just weaken our civic life; we give up something essential and unique about being people.
All of this is the backdrop for a speech delivered last month at Washington National Cathedral on the eve of Constitution Day by Dallin H. Oaks, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
President Oaks argued for a revived civic virtue of “peacemaking.” The virtue he was describing — extending goodwill to others, even when we disagree — was long understood as a lynchpin of the American system. It was a social discipline the founders assumed citizens would practice.
We write together, two people of different faiths from one another and President Oaks, because we believe in that discipline and recognize it does not belong to any one tradition. It shows up in a Latter-day Saint congregation’s emphasis on reconciliation before judgment. It shows up in the Sikh concept of “sarbatt da bhalla,” a commitment to uplifting all of humanity. It shows up in the Unitarian Universalist commitment to the inherent worth and dignity of all people. It shows up in the interfaith conviction that pluralism is not something we tolerate but something we build. These ideas draw from different traditions, yet we can draw on them to build trust and goodwill and fortify our commitment to what it takes to build a diverse democracy.
We do not believe a single speech can repair America’s trust deficit, but we do believe there is a path to a more neighborly America.
It looks something like this: Seek out direct contact with people you have only encountered as abstractions. Distinguish between conviction and contempt, recognizing you can feel conviction with passion and vigor without succumbing to contempt. And treat persuasion, not virality, as the standard for whether an argument has succeeded.
None of that requires agreement. It requires something rarer: a willingness to be in relationship with people we have not convinced and who we may never convince.
Faith communities do not have a monopoly on this practice, and indeed, it will take religious and non-religious communities to address our nation’s crisis of division. But faith communities have something unique to offer to this challenge, being among the few institutions left in American life explicitly organized around it — spaces where people are formed, week after week, in habits, humility, patience, service to others and the presumption of good faith. Governments can’t legislate those traits. But democracy depends on them and faith communities can cultivate them.
Two hundred and thirty-nine years ago, the founders built a constitution for a country with immense internal diversity. They did not design it to end disagreement. They designed it to survive disagreement. That only works if enough citizens are willing to practice the thing President Oaks named this week: not imagining we’ll end conflict but committing ourselves to the discipline of peacemaking within it.
The work of peacemaking begins not in agreeing with one another but in refusing to remain strangers.
(Simran Jeet Singh is Assistant Professor of Interreligious Histories at Union Theological Seminary. Mary Ellen Giess is Managing Director at Interfaith America. The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
