E Pluribus Unum

America is in crisis over its identity. Again. It is not the first time, nor will it be the last. Principled citizen engagement, motivated by a desire to heal our communities, is necessary to resolve the crisis and sustain the nation over time.

One of the great struggles of a nation is to cohere around a set of principles that allows belonging for a diverse population without asking anyone to sacrifice too much of their core identity. Groups of people cohere around religion, language, region, customs, and race rather easily. Democratic nations have the difficult challenge of having to include within their borders a greater diversity than any one of those groups might want to recognize. As such, such nations depend on some concept of secularism, a separation of church and state, to provide sufficient room for all voices. Typically, citizens agitate to push the nation toward narratives that reflect their own lived experience, and the nation often gravitates toward whatever narratives, at the moment, are the most vociferous and politically acceptable for national coherence.

As a result, widespread national belonging is often compromised, even sacrificed, to the degree that the nation allows intolerance and violence toward differences to grow. This is a story as old as the nation state. I am currently on a study abroad in Spain. The Inquisition and the expulsion of Jews and Moors from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492 helped make Spain arguably the first modern nation state, one that sought to claim a singular Christian identity over all of its alternatives. However, Spain’s art, music, architecture, food, language and customs all evidence a national identity that is deeply indebted to its extraordinarily diverse history that includes Muslims and Jews as much as Christians. The image above is a medieval Jewish synagogue, design by Muslim architects, in a Christian city (Toledo), in a more peaceful moment known as the convivencia, the “living together.” Such moments are precarious and require vigilance and care to maintain if a nation is going to be successful in knowing and respecting its diverse heritage.

America is no different. We have failed again and again to live together, to truly acknowledge the debt the nation owes to its many contributors. Although we have made progress since our founding to make more room for greater diversity, we are in a moment of rapid retrenchment, where diversity has become a bad word and “true” American identity is explicitly argued by some to be white and Christian. The hullabaloo over the Super Bowl half-time show and the shocking post by our nation’s leader of a racist video featuring our former president and his wife are just the most recent examples of this retrenchment. Bad Bunny’s show, done entirely in Spanish, celebrated an America that is plural and connected to the Americas as a whole, while Turning Point USA’s alternative “All-American” show meant to suggest a preferred alternative. Critics mistakenly identified Bad Bunny as not American (he is Puerto Rican and thus has U.S. citizenship), even though many half-time performers have also not been American, including U2, Paul McCartney and many others and Spanish as a non-American language, a fact that belies our long history of multilingualism. Although I am a white Christian man, I am a Latter-day Saint whose ancestors were refugees and victims of violent exclusion in America (and whose present culture, I might add, continues to be subject to overt prejudice, if the many times this season alone BYU teams have been subject to “F*** the Mormons” chants is any indication). As such, claims to a singular American and Christian identity make me squirm.

To create belonging in a democracy and to build a nation from diverse origins are tasks that do not have a definitive stopping point. The project of America requires everyone to pitch in for the benefit of every person, and it requires constant vigilance on our part as citizens to avoid intolerance, prejudice, and exclusion. Caring about community and the emotional, social, and economic conditions of belonging for everyone shouldn’t be hard or controversial. Such work is, in fact, deeply American. We won’t always agree on the best policies to make that happen, but such a motivation for policy-making is fundamental not only to democracy, it is fundamental to human decency and certainly to every religion in the world, including my own. This is why a plural America needs religion and why religions need a plural America.

There is, however, a need for an important understanding. Individual groups with particular needs and interests have a right and a responsibility to speak up for themselves and promote and advocate for values and policies that they believe are important. They must do so, however, with the understanding that they live in a plural society that often must accommodate and compromise to make sufficient room for everyone. Sure sometimes there are hard losses, but such compromises should not be seen as a categorically negative thing. We cannot and should not operate within a democratic plurality with the idea that nothing short of total domination of our ideas is acceptable. We might even benefit from admitting that compromise, listening to others, and living with respect toward irreconcilable differences make us a better version of ourselves. In that regard, even if it risks descending into trough of the culture war to say it, America’s greatness depends on its ability to welcome its own diversity.

The nation, in other words, needs to remain secular, not sectarian, in order to sustain the tolerance necessary to forge a nation, and every American, no matter their unique story or particular claims on reality, should be willing to protect that neutrality. This comes with an important caveat. The secular nation cannot afford to become intolerant toward any one religion or any one group. When secularism loses its respect for religion and becomes its own kind of religious dogmatism, as it often has in recent history, it loses its value as a space of neutrality where differences can come together in a free marketplace of ideas. It becomes instead a new form of intolerance. Even worse, however, is when a form of religion or racial identity seeks to predominate over all others and lay direct claim to a “true” or “real” American identity. In this case, religious passion becomes conflated with politics, and we end up with an especially dangerous form of politics that is justified by and synonymous with religious zeal. History has shown, and is showing now, that Christian nationalism leads to virulent prejudice. This is a great disservice to Christianity, as it is to any religion when it is reduced to tribalism.

It certainly has not always been the case that a chief difference between liberals and conservatives was the different value placed on immigrants or on America’s diversity. It is a longer and important discussion to think through immigration policy, but perhaps we could start that discussion with the premise that it is never ok to denigrate entire groups of people based on their country of origin, their religion, their language, or their race, let alone enact policies that violate their dignity and rights and our Constitution in any way. Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, John McCain, and other Republicans have offered soaring rhetoric in the past about the value and importance of American diversity. The Democratic Party, of course, has its own long history of racial and religious prejudice. The question for us today is: can we learn to advocate and live with conviction without becoming intolerant and filled with contempt in the face of pluralism? Do we still believe in the unique American vision of unity that emerges from diversity? Are we able and willing to see and embrace differences and accept that we in fact might need them to be better versions of ourselves and to become a more perfect union as a nation? This is a crucible moment in American history: do we still remember who we are as a nation and what we stand for in the world? If you feel, as I do, that this moment of contempt and division and prejudice must not stand, consider what actions you can take to heal a broken nation and rebuild lasting community for all where you live, one relationship, one vote, and one institution at a time. America’s greatness depends on it.

George Handley, Executive Director, Engage: A Forum for Civic Renewal