Finding Belonging and Restoring Unity in a Divided America

Andrew Hanauer, President and CEO of the One America Movement, on restoring unity to a divided America

Our world seems to become more divided by the day. We are ending relationships over differences in opinion on political matters. How can we restore unity to our families and communities? In this episode, Angela talks with Andrew Hanauer, the President and CEO of the One America Movement, an organization founded by faith leaders to fight toxic polarization, about how faith communities and leaders can work to model unity during increasingly divisive times. In Andrew’s words: “politics will not fill the Spiritual holes in our lives,” but he believes that Scripture holds the answers we seek. Many of us feel that we can have little or no impact on culture or politics, but we have a lot of impact within our communities. Can we work together in the places where we can make an impact and effect meaningful change? How can our faith communities meet our needs so that we do not need to turn to political groups to find our identity?

Finding your identity in politics doesn’t work

“I think first of all, the types of division we have in our country, to your point, they speak to this idea that we have become people who are looking for their belonging and their identity in politics. And the thing is that politics, it can excite us. You go to a rally, you hear an inspirational candidate, maybe you believe that it's really, really important who wins and who loses. But at the end of the day, politics is not going to fill the spiritual holes in our lives. It's not going to give us a vision for human flourishing and for understanding the nature of the universe and our purpose on earth. And so it's an incomplete identity in that way.

And what we're finding out, of course, is that it's also really, really negative in many ways. It pits us against each other. It convinces us that we're right all the time. It tells us that our neighbors are actually our enemies. Our faith tells us that actually even if our neighbors are our enemies, we're still supposed to love them. And so we really see the teachings of our faiths as the response to division. I go to a lot of conferences. I hear a lot of explanations of how we can solve polarization. And I think the things that are in scripture to me, they give us the answers to those questions, we just have to live them out.”

Finding belonging

“The problem doesn't start with us arguing on Twitter or our politicians doing X or Y. At our core as human beings, we are wired, I believe, by our creator. But for anyone out there who isn't religious, still by evolution, by the way that we're designed, we're wired to want to belong. We want to be in a group. A group gives us protection, it gives us a sense of stability. It gives us meaning. It gives us a way to understand the rules of life and of living.

And the scariest thing for a human being is the idea of being kicked out of their group, of being left behind in a way that then maybe that I don't to this group but I still can't belong to that other group and so where am I, right? So human beings are going to search for belonging. And if they're not finding it in a healthy religious community, they're not finding it in a local community group of some kind, they're going to look for it online. They're going to look for it wherever they can find it. And one of the easiest ways to find it is to say, who hates the same people I hate, right? … But if faith communities are healthy, then at their core, they give you all of those aspects of belonging and a language and a set of values that teaches us how to then be in the world with other people who don't agree with us. And that's what our country needs so badly.”

How do I find belonging?

“If we start off with a framework of I could be wrong, I could be wrong about some of the things that I believe, and not saying to question all of your core beliefs and values, but just simply to have a posture of humility enough to hear other perspectives.

It makes an enormous difference in how you read the news, how you talk to your friends and family and neighbors, how you consume the statements of politicians and others. That's such an easy first step because it's not about doing 3000 different things. It's about doing one thing repeatedly, which is just having that kind of humility.”

Next Steps

Sign up for our eNews and be the first to hear about our new podcast episodes, partnerships, and resources.

Follow us on social media: Facebook  Instagram  Twitter/X  YouTube

Sign up for our cohort interest list.