As the tenor of U.S. political discourse has continued to devolve and fracture, more and more leaders in academic, civic and religious circles have spoken out. Together, they have raised their voices to underscore the urgency of this moment socially and culturally and to caution what continuing these patterns of acrimony could mean.
Yet they’ve each also highlighted reasons for hope and confidence in what could still be possible if Americans reach deep to their national and spiritual foundations.
None of this matters, of course, if these voices are disregarded. Like the sound of a tree that falls in the forest without anyone hearing it, the impact of these voices will be unclear if they are drowned out by an engrossing media environment capturing American attention with distraction and discord.
Yet many agree with David Brooks that “it’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising,” as the columnist wrote this week in the New York Times.
This Easter weekend’s celebration of the Prince of Peace is a good moment to draw renewed attention to some of the many leaders standing on the wall calling for peace. Even amid the seriousness of concern, New Testament scholar N.T. Wright highlights: “New creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world.”
2016 - 2025: David Blankenhorn on not giving up on each other
“Rancor has become the dominant feature of our public life,” David Blankenhorn said during his speech opening the 2023 Braver Angels convention. “There’s a heart-sickness in the country, and we don’t really have to tell people there’s a problem, they all know it.”
Nearly a decade ago, Blankenhorn helped found America’s largest political peacemaking group, Better Angels (now Braver Angels), which lives by the radical creed “There is no one not worth talking to.”
Since then, Blankenhorn published “In Search of Braver Angels: Getting Along Together in Troubled Times,” where he called Lincoln a “constant companion” in the writing process — with Lincoln’s life offering “inexhaustible opportunities for learning,” navigating as he did through the “most horrible moments of mistrust and rancor in American history.”
November 2021: President Dallin Oaks on the ‘moral imperative’ of reconciliation
“In November 2021, an elderly man, thin and with a dignified demeanor leavened by an impish smile, traveled from Salt Lake City to the University of Virginia with an urgent message,” wrote renowned scholar Jonathan Rauch — reporting on this seminal speech by President Dallin Oaks of the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“Wasting little time on pleasantries, he launched straight into his theme. ‘I love this country, which I believe was established with the blessings of God. I love its Constitution, whose principles I believe were divinely inspired. I am, therefore, distressed at the way we are handling the national issues that divide us.’”
“I advocate the moral and political imperative of reconciling existing conflicts and avoiding new ones,” continued President Oaks. “Reconciling adverse positions through respectful negotiations is a virtue.”
“Seeking harmony by finding practical solutions to our differences with love and respect to all people, does not require any compromise of core principles,” he emphasized.
March 2022: Monica Guzmán on the magic of curiosity
“Nothing busts through the walls we’ve built between us like a question so genuine and perceptive it cannot be denied,” Guzmán wrote, admitting that this is “a bit of a rebellious act these days.”
“The barriers between us are lower than we think,” she said — describing her aim as helping people become “one level more curious” about those who disagree with them.
Her 2022 book, “I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times,” went deep on these themes.
Guzmán shared in a 2024 interview that “to have an effective democratic republic, enough people need to be able to hear and be heard” — adding “this is not actually rocket science. There are people selling books about it, but it’s not rocket science.”
Deseret News partnered with Guzman’s Braver Way podcast prior to the 2024 election on a 10-part series exploring common challenges in this work.
March 2023: Eboo Patel on not giving up hope in America’s potential
Few have written and shared more about the peacemaking potential of faith and higher education than Eboo Patel.
About the American struggle more broadly, Patel has said, “Political philosophers for centuries believed that diverse democracies were simply not possible. If you wanted ethnic, racial and especially religious diversity, you better have [had] a dictator to keep things in line.”
“You know who didn’t believe those political philosophers? The Founding Founders of the 1776 generation. These were men who, as David French points out in his wonderful book “Divided We Fall,” were descendants of combatants in the European wars of religion. And yet they came to these shores and believed they could build something truly new in human history: a nation where people arriving from the four corners of the Earth, praying to God in different ways (some, not at all), could come to a single patch of land and build out of it a nation."
April 2023: President Russell Nelson on rejecting confrontation and choosing to be a ‘peacemaker’
“How we treat each other really matters! How we speak to and about others at home, at church, at work, and online really matters,” taught President Nelson, leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the faith’s semiannual conference.
“If a friend on social media has strong political or social views that violate everything you believe in, an angry, cutting retort by you will not help,” he said. “Contention reinforces the false notion that confrontation is the way to resolve differences; but it never is.”
“We can literally change the world — one person and one interaction at a time.... Now is the time to lay aside bitterness. Now is the time to cease insisting that it is your way or no way. Now is the time to stop doing things that make others walk on eggshells for fear of upsetting you. Now is the time to bury your weapons of war. If your verbal arsenal is filled with insults and accusations, now is the time to put them away."
June 2024: Gov. Spencer Cox on the importance of ‘disagreeing better’
When discussing his “Disagree Better” initiative for the National Governors Association, Governor Spencer Cox said on “Good Morning America” the effort was “really is about disagreeing and staying true to what we believe in, but doing it in a way that doesn’t tear other people apart.
There really are things that we can do to alter the trajectory of the United States,” Cox said in a TedX speech that same year. “The best news of all is that there are very practical things that every one of us can do every day to help heal the divides in our nations and our neighborhoods.”
Cox referenced the viral video he had done with Chris Peterson, Democratic nominee for governor.
He also encouraged attendees to “spend less time with polarizing headlines that pit one side of the country against the other” and to “spend more time with people who think differently than you because it is “harder to hate up close.”
November 2024: Liz Joyner
Liz Joyner is the national leader of the Village Square, which describes itself as “a nervy bunch of liberals and conservatives who believe that disagreement and dialogue make for a good conversation, a good country, and a good time.”
Joyner wrote in Deseret Magazine last year, “Nearly 250 years ago, America kicked its king to the curb, as this new nation began a great experiment with the most ambitious idea that has ever existed on planet Earth: that a diverse people can self-govern.”
“Fast-forward a couple of centuries and the mutual tolerance required to self-govern is rare,” she added. “From the groups we join to the things we like on Facebook, we design our lives to surround ourselves with like-minded people.”
Her diagnosis: “With too much time spent in homogenous digital silos and not enough encountering people we disagree with in the real world, we’re losing the ability to see each other clearly or to learn something new, much less solve the complex challenges we face. This problem is big and it is dangerous.”
But the solution may not be what we think, she said: “Americans can be forgiven for looking to our national elected leaders to address this fracture in the body politic. But in America, it was never about the king; it has always been about the people.”
Then Joyner continued a similar theme as other leaders above: “As much as we might wish otherwise, healing our civic rupture has to start in the hometowns we share and in the space between us as we lead our everyday lives. I know this because we’ve seen it in our community.”
November 2024: Rev. Theresa Dear
“Do we want to be a country, a people, a society that is comfortable with confrontation and conflict — you know just offending people,” asked Rev. Theresa Dear, a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church — “throw stones and rocks and tomatoes at other people behind the screen?”
“At what point do we put the screen, down turn off the device and say, ‘let’s have a conversation’ or ‘help me understand what you mean by this’ or ‘what is the experience in your life that has influenced this perspective?’”
“I believe that’s when walls begin to break down, that’s when barriers are broken down and that’s when there is a sense of reconciliation.”
January 2025: Jonathan Rauch on the importance of civic theology
“I believe that the discipleship that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has embarked on has national civic implications,” shared Jonathan Rauch, from Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. “I believe that it deserves an audience outside of the church, not just inside the church.”
“We have this concept of spiritual formation, but it hasn’t been extended by Christians in today’s America to the public realm. It’s spiritual formation in your own life, but it hasn’t developed a civic theology,” Rauch said. “A civic theology is a doctrine, a fully articulated doctrine, of how Jesus would want us to behave — not just in our community, not just rebuilding the homes when the hurricane strikes — but how we behave, for example, on social media, how we comport ourselves in politics.”
“In politics, there has been an immense gaping hole in Christianity for lack of a fully articulated civic theology, and in the absence of a civic theology of how Christians should address our common culture and politics, there has been the inrush of all these other forces we’ve seen, such as toxic polarization and partisanship,” he said.
Rauch previously told the Deseret News then that the Latter-day Saints were “the first major, right-of-center religious organization in the United States to break with the culture-war strategy and to do so publicly.”
February 2025: Yuval Levin on regaining our capacity for coalition-building as encouraged by the Constitution
“The Constitution has proven itself to be much more alert to the dangers that a Democratic Republic faces than its critics ever have,” shared Yuval Levin, director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and editor of the magazine National Affairs. “It’s especially alert to the most significant danger we face: how can a diverse society govern itself.”
“The Constitution is an extraordinarily sophisticated answer to that question,” he said. “There have always been critics who want to say ‘well we should move fast; this slows us down too much.’ The Constitution says if you want to move you need to build a broader coalition.”
Levin cautioned those who refuse to “reach out beyond the narrow circle of people they agree with and build a broader Coalition” — saying: “I think the Constitution is smarter than they are about what it takes to hold our society together.”
Whereas some still wish for a unity of “everybody agreeing with them,” Levin said, “The Constitution starts from the premise that that’s not going to happen and works toward an understanding of unity that means not thinking alike but acting together ....that’s where the Constitution wants to drive us: toward a politics of coalition building where we don’t all have to agree about everything in order to address the big problems that we have in common
“We’ve lost some of the knack for building coalitions and for finding agreement across lines of difference,” he said. “I think the way to recover from that place is to restore our understanding of what the Constitution can offer for us and of how it might be possible for us to work through its institutions to help us address our problems.”