To share a country together, Americans don’t need to agree with one another — in fact, working alongside those you disagree with is precisely what the Constitution requires of people, said President Dallin H. Oaks in a speech at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday.
Speaking beneath the cathedral’s vaulted ceiling to a capacity audience of 4,000 people, the leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints delivered the historic address on the Eve of Constitution Day, as the nation marks 250th anniversary since its founding.
“The Constitution requires us to deal constantly with people who disagree with us. It compels a divided people to build coalitions that allow them to act together for the common good,” said President Oaks. He described the Constitution as a “model for a diverse people to achieve self-government.”
President Oaks spoke as part of the cathedral’s “A Better Way” series, an effort to convene bipartisan leaders with the goal of deepening understanding and promoting civil discourse.
A constitutional scholar and former Utah Supreme Court justice, President Oaks has spoken over the years about the importance of listening to opposing views and balancing competing rights in a pluralistic democracy. In a 2021 address at the University of Virginia, he argued that differences should be solved through “mutual respect, shared understanding and good faith negotiations.”
In his National Cathedral address, President Oaks brought the focus to the Constitution’s essential charge to seek common ground.
“‘Compels’ is a strong word, but it is exactly what the Constitution does,” President Oaks said. “It puts what we now call ‘peacemaking’ at the heart of the Constitution’s process for achieving freedom and unity, and fairness for all.”
Peacemakers by necessity
President Oaks drew on the history of the Latter-day Saints to illustrate how a religious minority learned to live amid disagreement. He described the early church members as “refugees,” driven from Missouri in the 1830s and then pushed out westward to build a new community.
When Brigham Young became both president of the church and governor of the Utah Territory, Latter-day Saints lived under what President Oaks called “a theocracy and a democracy.” That changed after a non-Latter-day Saint became Utah’s new governor and people had to learn how to live within a new order.
“We gradually learned to live with dual authorities,” President Oaks said.
More recently, Latter-day Saints have faced rejection from those who don’t recognize them as Christian, he said.
“You might say, we have become peacemakers and advocates of freedom and unity by necessity,” President Oaks said. “At the same time, we have preserved the freedom required for us to continue with our most important doctrines and practices.”
The faith’s leader clarified that he wasn’t speaking on behalf of any political party or group. “I speak for the United States Constitution, which I have studied for 70 years,” said President Oaks.
He began the study of the document as a clerk for the U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren. He continued his study of the Constitution as a law professor and a justice on the Utah Supreme Court. In his role as an Apostle for four decades, he’d studied what the “the divinely inspired principles” of the Constitution meant for the work of the church.
The church holds a theological teaching that the Constitution is divinely inspired, but “this does not mean that every word is inspired, but that it is based on inspired principles,” President Oaks said.
He highlighted the principles at the heart of the founding document: that people are a source of government authority; the separation of power between federal and state governments and among three branches; protection of individual rights and that everyone is governed by law rather than a person.
“Our loyalty is based on the Constitution and its principles and processes, not to particular office-holders,” he said.
President Oaks acknowledged that he’s come to better understand why some people might think religious liberty infringes on their rights.
“More recently, I have come to understand better the distress of other minorities who feel that some of us are invoking constitutional rights like free exercise of religion and freedom of speech to deny or challenge their own core beliefs and their basic constitutional rights.”
Legislation over litigation
Unity is rooted in the understanding that “we are fellow citizens who need each other,” and that means that to live peacefully, all citizens will sometimes have to obey laws they don’t like, President Oaks said.
In these situations, he suggested making a genuine effort to understand the concerns of others, “especially when they differ from our own.”
He also cautioned against “total dominance” in one’s views and emphasized that in a pluralistic society, the rights to exercise religious beliefs should be balanced with the interests of others. “The government must sometimes limit the right of some to act upon some of their beliefs when it is necessary to protect the health, safety, and welfare of all,” he said.
Despite his work in the courts, President Oaks said he preferred resolving conflict through legislation — “the less contentious route” — rather than litigation. He cited Harvard Law School professor Martha Minow, who has defended the effectiveness of “accommodation and negotiation” in her work.
The Utah Compromise is an exemplary case of this kind of negotiation, according to the church’s leader. In 2015, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and LGBTQ nondiscrimination advocates came together to negotiate a Utah law that balanced protections against discrimination in housing and employment with safeguards for religious freedom.
Neither side got everything it wanted, but their willingness to come together resulted in meaningful protections for both. “This win-win outcome could not have been obtained without the balancing of interests made possible by the dynamics of a legislative process.”
A conflict is an opportunity to listen and find “common moral instincts” to then begin building coalitions, President Oaks said. One example of this kind of coalition building is the church’s Helping Hands volunteer program, which provides community service and disaster relief.
The “people-to-people” model allows for relationships across differences, something that institutions can’t replicate on their own.
Reflecting on President Oaks’s address
Following the address, a panel of legal and religious leaders reflected on ideas discussed by President Oaks.
The polarization is fueled partly by how Americans are conditioned to perceive each other, said Rt. Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.
“We have been encouraged to constantly see one another in the worst possible light,” she said. “Particularly those with whom we disagree.”
The change of posture requires curiosity and openness, she said. The religious teaching of treating everyone with inherent human dignity offers an antidote to the adversarial rhetoric, she said.
In 2025, Budde’s speech at the Inauguration Prayer Service, also held at the National Cathedral, went viral when she directly appealed to President Donald Trump in the audience to have mercy on people “who are scared now,” including immigrants and LGBTQ people.
Budde echoed President Oaks’s call to learn through conflict. Diversity is more than allowing people to co-exist, but it’s also about learning “how to be human together.”
Melody Barnes, the executive director of Karsh Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia, likened efforts to resolve conflict through legislative process to building a muscle. Historically, she said, there’s been a “push and pull” between the courts and legislature until a window opens up for legislative activity.
She offered another example of successful coalition-building, when in 1993, over 60 different faith traditions – from the National Evangelical Association to the ACLU — joined forces to pass The Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
She also noted the partnership between late senators Lindsey Graham and Senator Ted Kennedy, who partnered on bipartisan immigration reform.
Productive disagreement, she said, depends not only on laws, but on norms. “It is about a set of habits that we have to have as citizens, as legislators, as representatives in a constitutional republic,” Barnes said.
Barnes echoed President Oaks’s point about volunteerism — it’s “ a foundation that allows people to have more difficult conversations,” she said.
Amid debates about the role of government and religion, America remains the country of vibrant religious dialogue and partnerships, said Rabbi David Saperstein, former United States ambassador-at-large for religious freedom. The separation of church and state has helped religion to flourish, he went on, even while the religious affiliation rates have plummeted. “So we have both narratives out there, and the question is, which will prevail?,” said Saperstein.
At the end of his address, President Oaks drew attention to the elements at the heart of peacemaking.
“People of goodwill, compassion, and a desire to understand and help one another are at the core of peacemaking and fairness for all in the constitutional process of achieving freedom and unity, as difficult and slow as it is,” he said. “It is all about trying to understand the deep needs, the deep commitments, on both sides and then to forge solutions that yield peace and fairness for all.”
