When did we start fearing our neighbors’ disapproval more than actual danger?

That’s the question sitting underneath a conversation Welcome.US just published with Braver Angels CEO Maury Giles. It’s worth your time, and not for the reasons you’d expect from a piece framed around immigration and welcome.

Maury makes a point early on that stands out: people fear social death more than physical death. That’s not a throwaway line. It explains a lot about why disagreement in this country has curdled into something meaner than it used to be — why a policy opinion becomes a referendum on whether you’re a good person or a bad one. When the stakes feel like exile from your own tribe, people stop arguing positions and start signaling loyalty. Maury calls it “social road rage,” and once you hear it named that way, you start seeing it everywhere.

Subscribe now

The piece also gets into something we talk about a lot internally but that outsiders don’t always register: the discipline behind our 50/50 structure. You can’t start a Braver Angels Alliance without both a conservative and a progressive co-leader. That’s not a symbolic gesture — it’s a design constraint that forces the organization to mean what it says about representation, at every level, every time.

What I liked most is where Maury takes it: courageous citizenship isn’t a slogan, it’s a decision to sit at the table anyway. To lean in with curiosity instead of contempt. And critically, he connects that directly to how we treat newcomers — the same instinct that lets us see a political opponent as fully human is the instinct that lets us see a new American as a neighbor instead of a threat.

This is exactly the kind of partnership we want more of. Welcome.US works from a different angle than we do, but we’re aiming at the same thing: a country where people build together instead of retreating into their corners.

Read the full conversation with Maury here: Becoming a Courageous Citizen

What’s your version of “social road rage” — a moment you caught yourself treating disagreement like a threat instead of an opening? W’d like to hear it.

Share

Imagine that we’re on a boat, and our goal is to get to an island. The island is the Island of the Peacemaker, and when we get to the island we become peacemakers made in God’s own image: able to restore broken relationships, to bring new levels of depth and heart to hard political conversations, and to build bridges between political enemies.

We know that, this side of Heaven, we’ll never actually reach the island. But the closer we get, the better peacemakers we become.

There are two ways to get our boat to the island.

The first is to pick up our oars and row. This is what it looks like when we try to bridge-build under our own power. It’s what happens when we treat Jesus as simply a role model who lived two thousand years ago, and whose life we can study for clues about how to live—but not as Richard Foster’s “ever-present Teacher and Friend.” Rowing is what we do when we look to the Bible as a moral guide, and then try to live out its tenets by virtue of our own strength and willpower.

From a moral standpoint, there’s nothing exactly wrong with rowing. It does move us (slowly) towards the island. But it’s hard, toilsome work and we can burn out pretty quickly.

Luckily, there’s another way that we can move towards the island. It turns out that there’s a strong wind gusting in the right direction, and if we hoist our sail and adjust it in the proper way, then that wind can carry us in the direction of the island quickly and with relatively little effort on our part.

The wind is the Holy Spirit. When we adjust our sails—that is, cultivate the right spiritual practices that enable us to surrender to God on a deeper level—we find that He can transform our hearts and minds and turn us into vectors of peace in our own lives and in the lives of those around us.

To be clear, the Christian leaders of Braver Faith whom I have been privileged to get to know do live with the Holy Spirit. None of us are actually trying to row our way to the island. As Mark Beckwith put it during an interfaith prayer at the last convention: “Spirit, please remind us that our only capacity is to be full of You.”

But even though we live by sailing, sometimes we talk as though the only way to get to the island is to row.

To be clear, I think there are good reasons for why Christians often feel reticent to talk about the Holy Spirit.

For one thing, we can accidentally “over-spiritualize” hard topics. As Christians, we believe that God can heal all relationships, but when we lead too hard with this kind of language we can give the impression that there’s no need for other solutions such as secular mediation strategies or deep communities. Worse, we can accidentally suggest that people mired in deep conflict are simply being bad Christians—just pray harder, and God will guide you on the steps to heal your broken relationship!

For another, talking too much about the Holy Spirit can sound profoundly arrogant if we’re not careful. “I pray, and God tells me what to do” might be an accurate description of how we make peace (John 15:5), but it can sound as though we’re claiming that our actions are divine and therefore beyond question.

Nonetheless, I think it’s important that we—carefully, humbly—bring the Holy Spirit into more of our conversations about bridge-building.

Subscribe now

For one thing, talking about the power of the Holy Spirit to guide us and transform us presents a more accurate account of how deep bridge-building is actually done. The best peacemaker I know is a theologian named Jamie Winship. Jamie’s worked with gang members, sex traffickers, and violent religious extremists; in each case, helping them to lay down their weapons and find (and spread) peace. In every lecture, he communicates that he’s not able to do this work just by dint of strong willpower or a desire to see Jesus as role model. Instead, it’s the Holy Spirit, guiding him and transforming him, that enables him to be a vector of peace wherever he goes.

The same is true of the great peacemakers throughout history, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Mother Teresa. None of them saw Jesus (only) as role model. Instead, they relied on the transformative power of the Holy Spirit to empower their efforts.

What if on panels and in speeches, we spoke more about how the Holy Spirit has transformed us into better bridge-builders—taking away our shame so that we feel less of an urge to yell at or insult people who don’t think like us, for instance; or taking away our fear so that we have the courage to take the first step to mend a broken relationship?

What if we were honest about our spiritual practices and how they’ve helped us to adjust our sail to better receive the Holy Spirit?

What if we spoke candidly about our prayers to see people from across the aisle with God’s eyes, and how and when those prayers have been answered?

It’s our job to train people to be better peacemakers. In the case of our fellow Christians, at least, maybe that looks like being more open about the nuts and bolts of how the original peacemaker is training us.

Contributor Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this essay are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, positions, or policies of Braver Angels, its staff, members, partners, or affiliated organizations. Publication by Braver Angels does not constitute endorsement of the author’s views, and those views should not be attributed to Braver Angels or any organization with which Braver Angels is affiliated.

Share

Braver Angels is adding two new members to its Board of Directors, and both have spent their careers modeling something we talk about a lot at Braver Angels but don’t always see practiced at this level: Courageous Citizenship. Not just the willingness to talk across differences, but the harder work of building something real alongside people who don’t see the world the way you do.

Barbara Thomas spent more than 20 years as a U.S. diplomat, serving in Latin America and Europe with senior posts in Ireland, Turkey, and Washington, D.C. That career wasn’t about dialogue for its own sake — it was about producing outcomes: advancing human rights, freedom of expression, and refugee resettlement, and overseeing a $1 billion humanitarian assistance portfolio, all of it requiring her to build working relationships across institutions and political perspectives that had every reason to stay apart. Barbara’s history with Braver Angels goes back further than her Board seat. She started as a volunteer, went on to co-chair our Office of Field Operations, and served two years as our Chief Operating Officer, helping guide this organization through real growth. Five years in, she knows this work from the inside — the people, the challenges, and what’s possible when we build together instead of past each other. A native Minnesotan, she holds degrees from the University of Minnesota and UCLA, and she and her husband have five children and three grandchildren.

Anne Ferrell Tata represents Virginia’s 99th District in the House of Delegates, where since 2021 she’s served on the Education and Counties, Cities and Towns Committees. Legislating is a team sport by necessity, and Anne Ferrell’s record shows it — she’s passed bills supporting foster care youth, education, and military families, and taken on human trafficking and antisemitism in the Commonwealth, work that requires finding partners on the other side of the aisle and staying at the table until something gets built. Before elected office, she spent over 13 years with the Educational Media Foundation’s K-LOVE and Air1 radio networks and serves on the National Board of iFoster. She’s a graduate of Florida State University and has trained through the University of Virginia’s Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership and the CIVIC Leadership Institute. She and her husband Bob, a former Naval officer, have been married 42 years, with four adult children and five grandchildren between them.

Two different careers — diplomacy and public office — and the same underlying instinct: don’t just talk across the divide, build across it. That’s Courageous Citizenship in practice, and it’s exactly what we need more of on this Board.

Welcome, Barbara and Anne Ferrell. Glad you’re here!

Subscribe now

Originally published on MarkBeckwith.net – Shared here for broader access.

There is much conversation, if not debate, about Christian nationalism. Some Christians are excited about the prospect of Christianity in the United States being officially designated as a Christian nation. Other Christians are appalled at the prospect, if not deeply concerned and afraid. Non-Christians for the most part are worried: where would they fit in? Would they fit in at all?

From what I see and hear, most of the conversation and debate on this issue is about nationalism. Can Christianity claim dominion over the whole country? Should it? Can Christianity become the state religion? What has been helpful to me, and I offer it here, is that the focus should move from the nationalism component of the term to the Christian dimension of the term. And then to ask, what Christianity are we talking about?

There is a growing chorus of people who say that America was founded as a Christian nation. Which Christianity are we talking about? At the time of the Revolution Congregationalists were the dominant — and official religion of the north. For decades in Massachusetts, a town could not be incorporated unless and until a Congregational church had been established. In the South, especially in Virginia, Anglicanism (the Church of ‘England, renamed the Episcopal Church after the Revolution) was the official state religion. While non-Anglicans could own property, they still had to pay taxes to the local Anglican church, and they were not allowed to establish their own non-Anglican churches. Christian nationalists may be hoping for a similar hegemony in the 21st century, but they are certainly not looking at Congregationalists or Episcopalians (which is my tradition) as examples, for two reasons: today, those two denominations are tiny slivers on the American Christian landscape, and Episcopalians and Congregationalists are regarded as too progressive for the current Christian nationalist diet.

Subscribe now

The church with the largest number of adherents today in the United States is the Roman Catholic Church, but only one Catholic — Charles Carroll, was allowed to join the other 55 signers of the Declaration of Independence. Carroll was from Maryland, which had been a colony set aside by the King of England to be a haven for Roman Catholics, although they faced severe legal discrimination elsewhere. The wealthiest denomination in America today is the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints, which literally did not yet exist during the period of America’s founding; the LDS did not appear until 1830.

John Leland (1754-1781),a Baptist minister who preached across Virginia at considerable risk because he was not Anglican, insisted on religious freedom, and is often credited with providing political and religious support for the creation of the Bill of Rights. He was a champion of religious liberty. A fledgling and largely unorganized group in colonial America then (they weren’t allowed to organize in Virgina), Baptists have grown to be the largest denomination in the country (next to Roman Catholics). Ironically, Baptists today, particularly Southern Baptists, now have the political and cultural sway that Congregationalists and Anglicans had 250 years ago.

As the country has grown, so have the number of religious expressions. There are 1.48 million non-profit organizations registered with the IRS today, many of them having distinct religious orientations. It is an incredibly diverse religious landscape, diverse having become a nasty, if not forbidden word, in the Trump Administration.

In the ongoing campaign to rid the country of DEI – diversity, equity, and inclusion – there is a growing push for a certain brand, expression and theology of Christianity to dominate: Christian nationalism. Many of these Christian Nationalist Christians refuse to acknowledge that members of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints (LDS) are Christians at all. Many of these same Christians do not accept me as a fellow Christian because of my expansive interpretation of scripture and openness to diverse expressions of human sexuality.

What gives me an odd sense of comfort in this turmoil is the turmoil I experienced when I visited the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem for the first time in 2005. An architectural behemoth, the church has been built and damaged (if not destroyed) and then rebuilt dozens of times since it was first built in 326 (1700 years ago). And it is managed by six different denominations: Roman Catholic (represented by the Franciscan Order), Greek Orthodox, Coptic (Egyptian), Ethiopian Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, and Syriac Orthodox. Protestant denominations were not included because the territory within the massive building, which was built over the part of the city where it is thought Jesus was crucified and buried, was divided up long before the Protestant Reformation. When Protestants eventually came on the scene, their historians determined that the site of Jesus’ tomb was elsewhere and they erected a competing structure to memorialize it.

I was at first deeply offended by this division and the tension that has been barely managed for nearly two thousand years (it seems that the police or an ambulance is summoned once a year or so to respond to a fight between the Franciscans and the Greek Orthodox, who between them claim most of the space), and the fact that since the early 12^th century the key to the building has been held by a Muslim family (so as not to give a sense of dominion by letting one of the six denominations be custodians of the key).

Subscribe now

At first I avoided going into the church. Too chaotic. Too fraught with tension and anger. But something then turned in me. I began to see that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is a microcosm of the world, particularly the religious world. Division and diversity exist. Chaos can sometime reign.

And God is in the midst of it all. And I could say thank God there is not a singular expression of Christianity, much as the clerics who protect their turf within the Church of the Holy Sepulcher may desire it, along with other Christian zealots who seek domination and certainty. The diversity of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher opened me to a deeper appreciation of difference, and a broader awareness of the nature and wonder of God. That diversity, that chaos, ironically if not paradoxically, invited me to rediscover the core of my faith – and have it strengthened.

Contributor Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this essay are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, positions, or policies of Braver Angels, its staff, members, partners, or affiliated organizations. Publication by Braver Angels does not constitute endorsement of the author’s views, and those views should not be attributed to Braver Angels or any organization with which Braver Angels is affiliated.

Share

_{Two Braver Angels members, one a Democrat with a blue lanyard, and the other, a Republican with a red lanyard, sit on a bench on Temple University’s campus during the Braver Angels Convention in Philadelphia held June 25–28, 2026. Jeffrey Sevier}

What 900 People in Philadelphia Tell Us About Depolarization

Deseret News ran a piece this week on the Braver Angels National Convention, held over the weekend at Temple University, and it’s worth your time. Reporter Lauren Irwin dug into research from BYU professor Eliza Hawkins, who has been surveying participants before and after Braver Angels events to measure something specific: does sitting across from someone you disagree with actually change how you feel about them?

Subscribe now

The data says yes, and the most striking part is who it works on. Using a “feeling thermometer” survey, Hawkins and her students found that the more strongly someone identifies with their party, the more likely they are to walk away from an event feeling better about the other side. That holds for committed conservatives and committed liberals alike. Moderates, by comparison, showed less change. The people often assumed to be the hardest to move are the ones moving the most.

The article also covers what format works best. One-on-one conversations outperformed even the structured Red and Blue debates, though both showed real effect. Online and in-person events were both effective, with online offering a path to reach more people. And the research found the strongest shifts among young Republicans and older Democrats specifically.

Braver Angels CEO Maury Giles ties it back to the organization’s founding premise, what he calls “courageous citizenship” — practiced personally, locally, and nationally. Ten years in, with almost 900 people showing up in person this year, the research suggests that premise is holding up.

Full piece is definitely worth reading in full at Deseret News — link below.

https://www.deseret.com/politics/2026/06/29/braver-angels-convention-democrats-republicans-divided-in-american-politics-nation-250-birthday-founding-philadelphia/

Were you with us in Philly? What stands out to you most?

Subscribe now

Click image to watch the video! 👆🏻👆🏻

Reps. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) join BA CEO Maury Giles to discuss their part in the Citizens Commission on Immigration as part of the Braver Angels National Convention held at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Subscribe now

Trygve Throntveit’s recent Time essay makes an argument that doesn’t get made often enough: the crisis in American democracy isn’t just about polarization or distrust. It’s about forgetting what democracy actually requires of us.

Throntveit is a Research Professor at Ball State, a Stanford Hoover Institution Civics Fellow, and a member of the Braver Angels Civic Scholars Council. His piece traces a tradition that ran alongside the rights-language most of us learned in school: the tradition of “commonwealth,” the ongoing work of diverse citizens building something together they couldn’t build alone.

The Civil Rights movement is his sharpest example, and he frames it in a way worth sitting with. In popular memory it’s a rights story. He argues it was primarily a power-building story. SNCC didn’t arrive with answers. They went into communities to understand local knowledge and aspiration, then helped people build their own capacity for collective action. Ella Baker insisted on group-centered leadership so communities could sustain themselves after any individual leader moved on. The legislative coalitions behind the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts required collaboration among liberal Democrats, moderate Republicans, labor unions, and religious bodies that had almost nothing else in common.

Subscribe now

None of that was comfortable. None of it required agreement. It required people to work together toward something larger than what they were separately angry about.

That tradition eroded. Throntveit traces it to the 1980s, when civic association membership cratered and both parties settled into framings that cast democracy as zero-sum. The result, in his phrase, is “vending machine” citizenship: insert preference, receive outcome, rage when the machine fails.

Braver Angels gets a direct mention in the piece, alongside the Industrial Areas Foundation and educators building civics curricula around actual democratic practice. What he says about these efforts matters: they embody the experimental willingness to try new approaches, the reflective willingness to face history honestly, and the empathic willingness to find public value in people who differ from us.

That’s a precise description of the work. Not a movement. A practice.

As we mark 250 years since the Declaration, Throntveit closes on the mutual pledge its signatories made: lives, fortunes, sacred honor. The pledge wasn’t just about rights. It was a founding act of courageous citizenship. The gesture that started the tradition we’ve spent decades forgetting.

Read it. Then tell me: what does recovering that tradition look like where you live?

Read “The Democratic Tradition We’ve Forgotten” in Time

Subscribe now

The Raincross Gazette just published something worth your time — not because it’s dramatic, but because it’s the opposite of that.

Two former Riverside mayors were asked the same question: As a former mayor, now a citizen voter, what are you looking for in a councilmember?

Dr. Ron Loveridge is a Democrat who led the city for nearly two decades. Rusty Bailey is the Republican who followed him. They wrote independently. Then they read each other’s answers and responded.

What came back wasn’t a debate. It was something closer to a conversation between two people who’ve actually done the job, and who, it turns out, largely agree on what it requires.

Loveridge leads with pragmatism over partisanship. Bailey with the art of compromise. Neither framed the other as an obstacle. Bailey’s closing image, a “garden for solutions” watered by multiple voices, landed differently than most political rhetoric does, because it came after an actual exchange, not before one.

The piece is the inaugural preview of a new monthly Braver Angels column, produced with the Braver Angels Riverside Alliance, launching in August. The column is built around a simple premise: that Riversiders can disagree about politics and still reason together toward a better city. This is what that looks like in practice.

There’s a line from the Fallows book Our Towns that Loveridge quotes: “People work together on practical local possibilities, rather than allowing bitter disagreements about national politics to keep them apart.” Loveridge applied it to Riverside. Bailey answered in kind.

That’s the whole model. Get two people who see things differently, ask them a real question, and let them actually talk. Not perform disagreement. Talk.

The full piece is at the Raincross Gazette. If you’re in Riverside, it’s directly relevant. If you’re not, it’s a template worth studying.

Read it here.

Subscribe now

Twenty-three leaders who disagree on many things said yes to the same thing this month.

They agreed to stand together, publicly, behind the idea that Americans can hold fast to their convictions while staying genuinely curious about the convictions of people on the other side. That’s it. That’s the commitment.

For more than nine years, Braver Angels has reached people in every state in the union. The ones who’ve engaged have experienced something that surprises them every time: the relief of disagreeing without contempt, and the discovery that the person across the table is not who the feed said they were.

We do this work because it is the right thing to do, and the more impactful way to live. It’s also the practice of governing self that’s required for self government.

Now we need to tell that story more widely. To shift culture, we have to expand the tent. We have to define courageous citizenship for the vast, exhausted majority looking for a healthier option than fear and partisan contempt. And we need influential voices, voices that reach audiences we don’t, to help carry the message.

Today we are announcing the initial members of the Braver Angels Advisory Council:

• Spencer Cox, Republican Governor of Utah

• Mónica Guzmán, Author / Founder and CEO of Reclaim Curiosity

• U.S. Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Co-Chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus

• U.S. Congressman Tom Suozzi (D-NY), Co-Chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus

• Former U.S. Congressman Dean Phillips (D-MN)

• Jonathan Haidt, Social Psychologist / Author / Professor, NYU Stern School of Business

• Paul Edwards, Executive Director, Wheatley Institute (BYU)

• Melody Barnes, Executive Director, Karsh Institute of Democracy (UVA)

• Cornel West, Author / Philosopher / Theologian / Professor, Union Theological Seminary

• Pete Peterson, Dean of the School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University

• Tim Shriver, Chairman of Special Olympics and Founder of UNITE

• Yuval Levin, Author / Political Analyst and Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at AEI

• Amanda Ripley, Journalist / Author and Co-Founder of Good Conflict

• David Blankenhorn, Co-Founder of Braver Angels and Founder of Civic Life

• Jonathan Rauch, Author and Senior Fellow in Governance Studies, Brookings Institution

• Alvin Wang Graylin, Entrepreneur / Global Technology Strategist / Author

• Keith Allred, Executive Director, National Institute for Civil Discourse

• Donna Hicks, Global Conflict Resolution Specialist / Author and Associate, Harvard Kennedy School

• Layla Zaidane, President and CEO, Future Caucus

• Vince Stango, President and CEO, National Constitution Center

• R. Scott Stephenson, President and CEO, Museum of the American Revolution

• Jim Ferrell, Author / Co-Founder of Arbinger Institute and Founder of Withii Leadership

• John A. Powell, Director of the Othering and Belonging Institute and Professor, University of California, Berkeley

Look at that list. Elected officials and philosophers. Republicans and Democrats. Academics, journalists, clergy, entrepreneurs, authors, executives. People who would not agree on many questions you could put in front of them.

That’s the point. That is by design.

A skeptic reading this will say a list of names doesn’t bridge a divided country. That’s true. Neither does a council. What matters is whether any of us (them, us, you) are willing to practice what this list represents. Twenty-three people standing in the same frame is the invitation to the work.

Every person on this list shares a firm commitment to the dignity, worth, and value of every perspective. They believe our social fabric depends on our willingness to engage across differences and build together. They are lending their names, their voices, and their reach to that conviction.

We are deeply grateful to them. We are honored to be in their company.

They, too, envision an America where courageous citizenship across differences is the honored norm. More leaders will be added as this work spreads.

Now the invitation comes to you. This week, have one conversation across partisan differences you’ve been avoiding. Identify one need in your community to act on with someone else. Bring curiosity instead of your case. See what happens.

That is how courageous citizenship becomes a norm. One person, one conversation, one act at a time.

With hope and resolve,
— Maury Giles, CEO of Braver Angels

Subscribe now

Three Colorado Springs City Council members — Council President Lynette Crow-Iverson, President Pro Tem Brian Risley, and Councilmember David Leinweber — brought Braver Angels in to moderate a town hall this week on polarization and homelessness. About 40 residents showed up to the downtown YMCA. Two hours. Small groups. A structured process.

That’s worth pausing on. These weren’t Braver Angels volunteers convening concerned citizens in a community center. These were elected officials who looked at the tools available to them and decided a moderated, structured dialogue was how they wanted to hear from constituents — and then asked us to run it.

Moderator Sandra Brownrigg named what was actually happening: “That is courageous leadership to step into a place that could be painful, awkward or problematic and say, ‘No, we need to come together.’” She’s right. There’s real exposure in that choice. Town halls that go sideways get filmed. Asking people to talk about homelessness in a structured format instead of just venting at a microphone is a gamble on process.

The event had friction. Dozens of residents who came to raise data-center concerns were turned away — the limited scope wasn’t communicated beforehand. One participant was cut off mid-comment to refocus on the broader question of polarization. These aren’t comfortable moments to navigate, and the piece doesn’t paper over them.

Subscribe now

But what came through in the room was something harder to engineer: residents actually sitting with disagreement. One resident, Zahria Rogers, named the thing that makes bridging genuinely difficult — not just that people disagree, but that some disagreements involve whether certain people deserve basic dignity. That’s an honest observation, and it belongs in the room.

That’s the work. Not always clean. Not always resolved. But present, in public, with elected officials at the table.

Read the full piece in the Colorado Springs Gazette.

If you’ve seen Braver Angels show up in your community — or you’re thinking about bringing this kind of work to your local government — We’d like to hear about it.

When Judy Woodruff and the PBS NewsHour crew came to South Lebanon, Ohio a few months ago, they weren’t covering a protest or a political rally. They were watching neighbors have a conversation.

Braver Angels hosted a Constituents Conversation on immigration — one of the most contentious issues in the country — and invited citizens from across the political spectrum to work through it together, alongside Congressman Greg Landsman. The result wasn’t a policy agreement. It was something harder to manufacture: a room full of people who actually listened to each other.

One participant shared his deepest values on immigration with someone on the opposite side of the political spectrum. The response: “There’s not one thing you said that I disagree with.”

That’s not a miracle. That’s what happens when you treat the person across from you as a neighbor instead of an opponent.

The full segment is worth your time — especially if you’ve started to wonder whether this kind of conversation is even possible anymore.

Watch it here.

Subscribe now

On May 11th, the Supreme Court cleared the road for increasingly unrestricted partisan gerrymandering in America, upholding the decision of the state of Alabama — with a voting-age population 26% African American and seven congressional districts — to reinstate a congressional map with only one predominantly Black district. There had been two previously, following a federal court’s strike-down of the Republican state legislature’s 2023 proposal relegating Black voter concentration to a single zone. Now the Alabama 7th stands as the only Alabama district likely to produce a Black member of Congress supported by Black Alabamians.

This unsigned order was made possible by the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais. That decision, led by the conservative majority on the court, makes it harder to use race as a factor in drawing congressional district lines. It also builds on previous decisions of the court which have weakened federal oversight of electoral reforms in southern states that, with the Voting Rights Act, were once subject to federal approval meant to ensure that such states were no longer engaging in racial discrimination.

Subscribe now

History is always with us. The past is never past. That is true for just about all of our politics — the way people see things is a reflection of memories lived and received that usually don’t announce themselves in conversation, or in how political battles are covered in the media. But given the history of the Civil Rights Movement, the Voting Rights Act, the fall of Jim Crow, and the rise of the “new South,” history is a little more visible than usual in the background of the controversy over race and redistricting in the state of Alabama. We should acknowledge that history — not to vindicate or condemn either side in the present debate, but to humanize both sides, and to make clear what needs to be worked through if America is to pull a deep thorn out of our politics without tearing a deeper wound between our people on the matter of race.

It is here that we come to a longer history, one that many people are rightfully making reference to in this moment. The Civil Rights Movement was fought, in large part, to secure the right to vote as a practical reality for African-Americans who, though having the right to vote through the 15th Amendment, were effectively barred from doing so in most southern states through poll taxes, ludicrous tests, and outright violence and intimidation by White Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klan. (Even non-southern states had more subtle means of ensuring Black politicians were not elected in places with substantial Black populations.)

The state of Alabama was ground zero for much of this brutality and disenfranchisement. On the evening of February 18th, 1965, in the city of Marion, some 500 nonviolent protestors marched in disciplined fashion from Zion United Methodist Church toward the Perry County jail, where SCLC field secretary James Orange was being held. They were met by a contingent of Alabama state troopers. The streetlights went dark — many later said they were shot out — and on-site reporters could only listen as billyclubs rained down on the protestors. NBC News correspondent Richard Valeriani was beaten so badly he was hospitalized. Twenty-six-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, a Baptist deacon and Army veteran, fled into Mack’s Café with his mother and 82-year-old grandfather. Troopers followed them in. When a trooper began beating his mother, Jackson moved to shield her — and was shot twice in the stomach. He died eight days later, on February 26th.

This incident precipitated the most impactful demonstrations in the history of the movement in Alabama, with Dr. King leading two of three marches from Selma to Montgomery to focus the eyes of the public on the injustice of George Wallace’s Jim Crow regime. The first march, however, led by John Lewis, resulted in the beating and tear-gassing of protestors on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in an event that would come to be known as Bloody Sunday.

It was events like these that would lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in August of 1965, completing a project of racial enfranchisement at the ballot box that spanned from Bloody Sunday to the end of the Civil War a full one hundred years before.

This history is well known to many of us. When the headlines appear noting that Alabama has been largely freed by the Supreme Court of accountability for the racial impact of its electoral reforms, the outcry against this — in the eyes of critics — is situated against a backdrop of experience that even now is not outside the memory of many who were alive to see it.

This reality demands our empathy. That empathy, however, does not in and of itself require agreement with the political indignity it yields. Republicans and conservatives insist that partisan redistricting is nothing like the poll taxes and direct voter disenfranchisement the Voting Rights Act was meant to prevent. After all, no Black voter has lost the right to vote at all. As Republican Scott Jennings and businessman Kevin O’Leary argued on CNN following the Supreme Court’s May 11th order, the principle of one person, one vote has been upheld for all races. As O’Leary put it, “the rest is just map wars.”

Across the panel from O’Leary, civil-rights veteran’s son and former South Carolina state legislator Bakari Sellers reminded the audience that “there are people in this country who fought, died, and bled for the right to vote.” The exchange went viral as a kind of microcosm of the impasse — and it is worth sitting with as such. From the vantage of many African-Americans, the Civil Rights Movement was an effort to ensure the collective voice of Black Americans just as surely as Jim Crow was meant to suppress the shared power of the Black vote. There is a deep pain at these historic injustices that resonates through our history right down to the present moment, expressing itself in the grievances of many Black people toward the Supreme Court, the GOP, and the Republican majority in the state of Alabama. This is a human experience we should be reckoning with.

This does not negate the fact that there are only human beings on each side of this equation. For most white southerners today, there is no felt fidelity to a Jim Crow history that did not, even at the time, represent the feelings of all white Alabamians. If Bloody Sunday darkened the conscience of the state in 1965, it is worth remembering what had happened in Birmingham the year before. On Easter Sunday, 1964 — just six months after the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing killed four young Black girls — Reverend Billy Graham held an evangelistic rally at Legion Field. The Jefferson County Citizens’ Council and the United Americans for Conservative Government formally protested the event. The Klan removed and vandalized signs publicizing the rally. And 35,000 Alabamians came anyway — white and Black roughly evenly split, in what was reported as the largest integrated audience in the state’s history.

Social change was a grueling process in the deep South. But the movement toward Dr. King’s beloved community was so profound in the hearts of even some of the most bitter opponents of civil rights that the long arc of the years that followed bent in a direction many would not have predicted. In 1972, after George Wallace had been shot and paralyzed on the presidential campaign trail, Shirley Chisholm — the first Black woman elected to Congress, and the first Black major-party presidential candidate — visited him in his hospital room. “I wouldn’t want what happened to you to happen to anyone,” she told him. He cried, and took her hand, and did not want to let go. His own daughter would later say that Chisholm planted in him the seed of a transformation. By 1979, Wallace — in a wheelchair — came to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Dr. King’s old pulpit, and from before that congregation he begged forgiveness for the harm he had done. As he left the sanctuary, the congregation stood and sang “Amazing Grace.”

For many white people in America today, certainly in recent years, there is a sense that to be white is to be seen as prejudiced until proven otherwise — regardless of one’s friendships, one’s kindness, or the sympathies of one’s politics. For white southerners, there is the added sense that the racial past of the South condemns the racial present of the South in terms of how southerners are perceived. After all, gerrymandering is a partisan practice engaged in by both parties, including in states where there are few Black voters at all. Most Black voters happen to be Democrats, and so redistricting along party lines marginalizes Black voters only by marginalizing Democrats. The GOP, many white Republicans would say, would welcome Black voters into the Republican Party with open arms if only they would come aboard. The very fact that Alabama and other southern states had to continually check their voting reforms with the federal government under the Voting Rights Act for so many decades — until recently — was a subtle and ongoing humiliation to a state whose white citizens saw themselves as having changed enormously on race since the days of Jim Crow.

For many white Republicans in Alabama, Jim Crow was a long time ago, and much has changed. For many Black Democrats in America, Jim Crow was almost yesterday, and far too little is truly different. The way each side reads the events of the moment is colored greatly by this lens.

Yet while we are all individuals with the capacity to reason beyond our circumstances, as groups none of us fully choose those lenses. History inevitably shaped our outlooks on current events.

But the promise of Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent movement, and the promise of Billy Graham’s evangelical movement, was that we could find community and fellowship across the bounds of race — despite the histories none of us chose. There is no need to denigrate any of us for being a product of a history none of us chose. What is left to us is the responsibility to frame a conversation over race, gerrymandering, and voting rights that allows for progress and compromise to emerge as the fruit of goodwill — as our ancestors found the moral courage to do years before.

We will only be repeating the tragedies of history if we do otherwise.

– John Wood Jr. - Braver Angels National Ambassador

A recent article from Halston Media highlighted a conversation between local members of Braver Angels and Congressman Mike Lawler regarding immigration policy.

While immigration remains one of America’s most polarizing issues, the discussion demonstrated something often missing from national conversations: the ability to disagree honestly while still searching for practical areas of agreement.

As the article notes:

“My job is to serve all the interests of the district, and there are lots of disagreements within the district,” Lawler said.

That kind of engagement matters.

At Braver Angels, we believe productive civic disagreement requires:

• curiosity over caricature

• listening over assumption

• and the willingness to remain in conversation even when consensus is incomplete.

We encourage readers to read the full original reporting here:

https://news.halstonmedia.com/somers-record/stories/braver-angels-and-congressman-lawler-reach-common-agreement-on-immigration,80720

Subscribe now