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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
How “We the People” can reclaim our democracy—updated with a discussion guide, author videos, and a new chapter-length Introduction
In this updated edition of his prophetic book, renowned author and activist Parker J. Palmer celebrates the power of “We the People” to resist the politics of divide and conquer. With the U.S. now on a global list of “backsliding democracies,” Palmer writes about what we can do to restore civil discourse, reach for understanding across lines of difference, focus on our shared values, and hold elected officials accountable. He explores ways we can reweave the communal fabric on which democracy depends in everyday settings such as families, neighborhoods, classrooms, congregations, workplaces, and various public spaces—including five “habits of the heart” we can cultivate as we work to fulfill America's promise of human equality.
In the same honest, vulnerable, compelling and inspiring prose that has won Palmer millions of readers, Healing the Heart of Democracy awakens our instinct to seek the common good and gives us the tools to pursue it. With a text enhanced by a Discussion Guide and forty online author videos on key issues, you'll be able to…
- Reflect on the personal implications of the claim that “the human heart is the first home of democracy”
- Consider everyday actions you can take to restore the infrastructure that supports our democracy
- Transcend the “us vs. them” mentality and find ways to expand and enrich your life by appreciating the value of “otherness”
- Reignite your sense of personal voice and agency to resist authoritarian appeals and restore a politics of freedom and responsibility
Healing the Heart of Democracy is for anyone who values the gift of citizenship and wants to make a difference for themselves, their families and communities, and our collective wellbeing. As the late Congressman John Lewis said, “We have been trying to bridge the great divides in this great country for a long time. In this book, Parker J. Palmer urges us to ‘keep on walking, keep on talking’—just as we did in the civil rights movement—until we cross those bridges together.”
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Seitenzahl: 493
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Note
Introduction to the 2024 Edition
Not All Divides Are Created Equal
On Taproots and Trust
Restoring Democratic Habits of the Heart
Race in America
People Can Change
Notes
Prelude: The Politics of the Brokenhearted
Notes
Chapter I: Democracy's Ecosystem
Diversity, Tension, and Democracy
Truth, Suffering, and Hope
The John Woolman Story
What Lies Ahead
Notes
Chapter II: Confessions of an Accidental Citizen
Citizenship and the Common Good
Faith and Doubt in Politics
Hearts Broken Open to Hope
The Story Behind the Story
Tocqueville in America
Five Habits of the Heart
Holding Hands and Climbing
Notes
Chapter III: The Heart of Politics
The Heart and Realpolitik
A Farmer's Heart
The Power of Heartbreak
Two Kinds of Heartbreak Examined
Diagnosing Our “Heart Disease”
The Self a Democracy Needs
Notes
Chapter IV: The Loom of Democracy
Learning to Hold Tension Creatively
The Endless Argument
The Endless Challenge
Beyond Fight or Flight
Democracy and Self-Transcendence
Notes
Chapter V: Life in the Company of Strangers
No Strangers Allowed
The Meaning of Public Life
The Places and Purposes of Public Life
Public Power in a Democracy
The Decline of Public Life
Reclaiming Space for Public Life
The Promise of Neighborhoods
Imagining the Public Life
Notes
Chapter VI: Classrooms and Congregations
Where Classrooms and Congregations Converge
Public Education and the Inner Search
Doing Democracy in School
The Hidden Curriculum
Congregations and Habits of the Heart
Who's in Charge Here?
Power and Potluck Suppers
Decision Making and Counseling
A Theology of Hospitality
Notes
Chapter VII: Safe Space for Deep Democracy
When the Media Define Reality
Getting the News from Within
From Solitude to Circles of Trust
The Power of the Circle
From Trust to Political Power
The Public Narrative Process
Cyberspace and Deep Democracy
Notes
Chapter VIII: The Unwritten History of the Heart
Myth and the Story of the Heart
America's National Myths
When Image and Reality Collide
Movements and the History of the Heart
From Inner Liberation to Outer Transformation
Standing and Acting with Hope in the Tragic Gap
Notes
Gratitudes
Author Bio
Index
Healing
the
Heart
of Democracy Discussion Guide
Introduction to The Discussion Guide
Discussion Questions with Quotations and Video links
The Discussion guide Authors
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Introduction to The 2024 Edition
Begin Reading
Gratitudes
Author Bio
Index
Healing the Heart of Democracy Discussion Guide
Introduction to The Discussion Guide
Discussion Questions with Quotations and Video links
The Discussion Guide Authors
End User License Agreement
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More Praise for Healing the Heart of Democracy
“In Selma, Alabama, on ‘Bloody Sunday’ in 1965, we were beaten at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. A few days later, we marched all the way to Montgomery. A few months after that, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. When we set out to cross that bridge, we wanted to bridge the divide of racial discrimination. We Americans have been trying to bridge the great divides in this great country for a long time. In this book, Parker J. Palmer urges us to ‘keep on walking, keep on talking’—just as we did in the civil rights movement—until we cross those bridges together.”—Congressman John Lewis, recipient of the Martin Luther King Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom
“Parker J. Palmer bravely takes on the current political climate, and this book provides therapy for the American body politic. His insights are heart-deep: America gains by living with tension and differences; we can help reclaim public life by actions as simple as walking down the street instead of driving. Hope's hardly cheap, but history is made up of what Palmer calls ’a million invisible acts of courage and the incremental gains that came with them.’ This beautifully written book deserves a wide audience that will benefit from discussing it.”—Starred Review from Publishers Weekly, August 8, 2011
“In this book, Parker J. Palmer brings together the wisdom of a lifetime. There is no one better suited than Palmer to illuminate that place where ‘all of the ways of our knowing’ converge, and to bring it to our common attention at this exquisitely heartbreaking and promising moment. This is the manual we need for refashioning our life together—for recovering the heart, the very core, of our selves and our democracy.”—Krista Tippett, President, Executive Producer + Host, On Being, 2013 National Humanities Medalist
“In Healing the Heart of Democracy, Parker J. Palmer brings his extraordinary vision and experience to bear on the widening divisions in our culture. Regardless of your political persuasion, this book is a sorely needed medicine in how we meet each other, listen to each other, and care for each other. This is a master work by a master: a clear and uplifting resource that keeps shining light in all the dark places. Chapter IV alone would help anyone rebuild a city. Like Socrates and Thoreau, Palmer is that rare, deep seer who is at home in the streets; an inner everyman who keeps speaking from a mind descended into the heart; a teacher by example who has the courage to stand openly and honestly in the public square.”—Mark Nepo, author of The Book of Awakening and As Far as the Heart Can See
“Healing the Heart of Democracy by Parker J. Palmer is a book born for this moment. Wise, evocative, and pragmatic at its core, this dream for a new politics is grounded in dignity and liberty for all. In this time of civic rupture and discord, I wish this book could be placed in the hands of every member of Congress, every governor, mayor, and state legislator in America. May these words spark a new conversation within our communities, focusing on what binds us together rather than what tears us apart. And may we see this challenge to engage fully within public life not only as a calling, but as a personal commitment to our own ethical stance toward life. This is a book that calls forth our highest selves in the name of a spiritual democracy.”—Terry Tempest Williams, author of The Open Space of Democracy
“This book is a gracefully written anthem to democracy. Not just the democracy of the vote, but a larger conception of the democracy of how we live together across all that divides us. Healing the Heart of Democracy breaks new ground in marrying the individual capacity of the human heart, broken though it must become, with the irresolvable tensions inherent in the institutions, politics, and aspirations of a nation. Democracy here is as much the will to welcome a stranger across the tracks as it is to reconcile very different ideas about what is good for a people. It makes democracy personal as well as political. Palmer also breathes new life into what it means to be a citizen—accountable, compassionate, fiercely realistic. The book is a political and personal imperative, reminding us of our covenant with the larger community of souls. The author has been the prophet to many for decades and Healing the Heart of Democracy will only deepen that gift and bring it out into new corners of this troubled world.”—Peter Block and John McKnight, coauthors of The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods
“Reflecting on the words of Parker J. Palmer in Healing the Heart of Democracy, I am convinced that all of us—as citizens and as elected officials—can learn to bridge the divides that keep us from genuinely respecting one another. In my own reflections on the meaning of democracy, I find encouragement in this inspirational book. Becoming good stewards of our democracy means having a commitment to our collective well-being, rather than each struggling to get his or her own. We must care about the common good, which means working for the many, not just the privileged few. Parker, through sharing his own life's struggles, reveals the common struggles we all endure in life. He also provides us with a way forward—a way forward with hope.”—Senator Tammy Baldwin
“This book could not be more timely and needed in our country today. Parker J. Palmer gives voice to the yearning for democracy and a politics that honors the human spirit. As one who has been guided through a time of personal reflection with Parker, I invite you to join in a journey through these chapters. He examines the courage required to hold life's tensions consciously and faithfully—and perhaps, as our hearts break open, find ourselves standing and acting creatively ‘in the gap.’”—Congresswoman Lois Capps, grandmother, mother, nurse, and seeker after democracy
“Healing the Heart of Democracy is a courageous work that is honest and true, human and humble, glitteringly intelligent and unabashedly hopeful. Parker J. Palmer has beautifully articulated our collective longing for constructive political conversation that holds the tensions of the democratic process creatively and respectfully. Here is a clear-eyed assessment of the pressing needs we face in our country and our world, framed by a conviction that we have the means within us and within our communities to meet the challenge. Palmer gives us constructive language, historical context, and a practical vision for how we as individuals and communities can get to the real heart of the matter.”—Carrie Newcomer, activist and singer-songwriter, The Geography of Light and Before and After
“Parker J. Palmer writes, ‘The heart of the world itself has an unwritten history.’ That was true until now. In this brave and visionary book, Palmer re-imagines our political lives, not as partisan shouting matches among a homogenous and disconnected elite, but as a deeply personal process within which all Americans—especially those of us inheriting this broken polity—have a chance to be heard, heal, and get on with the eternal work of perfecting this nation. As he recasts ‘the political,’ even the most frustrated and cynical among us are moved to ‘stand in the tragic gap’ with a renewed sense of our own quiet power.”—Courtney E. Martin, author of Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists
“Parker J. Palmer has been our mentor as we’ve weathered the rough and tumble of political life. His work guides us again and again to seek grounding in the courage to embrace our own deepest questions. Now, in this compelling new book, he turns his unsparing insights to our wounded democracy. Palmer reminds us that democracy depends on citizens who not only engage with the political process but also engage with each other. He challenges us to recognize that a more vital democracy begins within each of us, as we learn to hold the tensions inherent in community life and no longer fear to tread that most difficult terrain—the broken places in our own hearts.”—Kathy Gille served for twenty years as a senior congressional aide. Doug Tanner, her husband, is a founder and former president of The Faith and Politics Institute.
“This is an inspiring book, one that should be read and talked about in every family, book club, classroom, boardroom, congregation, and hall of government in our country. Parker J. Palmer writes with clarity, good sense, balance, honesty, humor, and humility, focusing on the essence of what is needed from each of us for the survival of our democracy.”—Thomas F. Beech, president emeritus, The Fetzer Institute
“It is hard to imagine a single moment in American history when this book's wisdom would not have been invaluable, but it is even harder to imagine a time when such wisdom is more desperately needed than right now. Parker J. Palmer's unblinking gaze into the habits of the human heart, beginning with his own deeply personal introspection, yields the most important manifesto in generations for breaking through the divisiveness that has paralyzed our democracy to the point of making it almost unrecognizable. Palmer manages to share the most profound insights about our history, culture, and current developments, yet in the refreshingly readable tone of a caring neighbor who has kept a watchful eye on your house when you were away longer than expected. In its compassion, tolerance, prescription, and urgency, this book stands alone as a beacon showing what may well be the only tenable path forward for our nation in a perilous time.”—Bill Shore, founder of Share Our Strength and author of The Cathedral Within and The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men
“Parker J. Palmer's newest book is his most ambitious. Personal and prophetic, it blends heartache and hope, encouraging us to bring ‘chutzpah and humility’ to our public lives. The book awakens the open mind and open heart Palmer sees as essential to a flourishing democracy. No matter what our political leanings, all who harbor concerns about the quality of public discourse and decision making in twenty-first-century America will find here a wise and kindred spirit who reminds us of choices we can be making now to help ‘reweave the tattered fabric of our civic life.’ At stake is our common future and the vitality of the fragile democracy we inherited and neglect at our peril. If you find yourself feeling at times that nothing you do will matter, you will close this book appreciating how much you can do, and how much depends on you.”—Diana Chapman Walsh, President Emerita of Wellesley College
Other Books by Parker J. Palmer
A Hidden Wholeness
Let Your Life Speak
The Courage to Teach
The Active Life
To Know as We Are Known
The Company of Strangers
The Promise of Paradox
The Heart of Higher Education
(with Arthur Zajonc and Megan Scribner)
Healing THE Heart OF Democracy
THE COURAGE TO CREATE A POLITICS WORTHY OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT
Parker J. PALMER
UPDATED EDITION
WITH STUDY GUIDE & AUTHOR VIDEOS
Copyright © 2024 Parker J. Palmer. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 750-4470, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011,(201) 748-6011, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
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ISBN: 9781394234868 (Cloth)
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Cover Design: Paul McCarthyCover Art: © Getty Images | Five-Birds Photography
In memory of
Christina Taylor Green (2001–2011)
Addie Mae Collins (1949–1963)
Denise McNair (1951–1963)
Carole Robertson (1949–1963)
Cynthia Wesley (1949–1963)
Christina died when an assassin in Tucson, Arizona, opened fire at a public event hosted by Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was seriously wounded. Addie Mae, Denise, Carole, and Cynthia died when violent racists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
When we forget that politics is about weaving a fabric of compassion and justice on which everyone can depend, the first to suffer are the most vulnerable among us—our children, our elders, our poor, homeless, and mentally ill brothers and sisters. As they suffer, so does the integrity of our democracy.
May the heartbreaking deaths of these children—and the hope and promise that was in their young lives—help us find the courage to create a politics worthy of the human spirit.
“The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions. Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions? And do we have enough resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up—ever—trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living democracy?”
—Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement”1
Note
1
. Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,”
Orion
, July-Aug. 2004,
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/143/
. See also Williams,
The Open Space of Democracy
(Eugene, Ore.: Wip and Stock, 2004), pp. 83–84.
INTRODUCTION TO THE 2024 EDITION
Parker J. Palmer
When Healing the Heart of Democracy was published in 2011, the Prelude included this reminder: “Government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’ is a nonstop experiment in the strength and weakness of our political institutions, our local communities and associations, and the human heart. Its outcome can never be taken for granted.”
Today, no reminder is needed. A June 2023 poll found that seven out of ten Americans “agree with the statement that [our] democracy is ‘imperiled,’” and with good reason:1
In 2018, U.S. intelligence agencies began warning us that the most serious threat to our national security no longer comes from abroad but from terrorists born and bred in the U.S.A. who are driven by white supremacist or anti-government ideologies.
2
On January 6, 2021, over 2,000 citizens invaded the U.S. Capitol in an effort to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election, threatening the peaceful transfer of power that is one of democracy's hallmarks. More than 1,100 insurrectionists have now been charged, many of them convicted.
3
In November 2021, the United States made its first appearance on an international list of “backsliding democracies” alongside Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia. The report detailed various ways in which the United States had fallen victim “to authoritarian tendencies.”
4
In particular, it called the former President's “factually baseless questioning of the legitimacy of the 2020 election results an ‘historic turning point’ that ‘undermined fundamental trust in the electoral process’. ”
5
On August 14, 2023, the former President of the United States and 18 others were indicted “under Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations or RICO law of coordinating an effort to thwart proper certification of the state's 2020 presidential election.”
6
This is the former President's fourth arraignment since March on allegations related to his conduct before, during, and after his presidency. He is the first former or current president in American history to face felony charges, which now number 91. As I write, he is also the front-runner for the Republican Party's 2024 nomination for President.
Small wonder that people sometimes ask if I’ve changed my mind about what ails our body politic and what “We the People” can do about it. The answer is “yes” and “no.” I stand by my diagnosis of our democracy's “heart disease” and the broad outlines of the treatment plan laid out in this book. But given the patient's emergent condition, that plan needs to be amended.
Not All Divides Are Created Equal
When the first edition of this book came out, American democracy had spent a decade struggling with the consequences of September 11, 2001. As I wrote at the time, “The terrorist attacks deepened [our] appreciation of democracy and activated demons that threaten it.” Prominent among those threats were racism, xenophobia, and weaponized fear; two-thirds of Americans favored suspending all civil liberties in the fight against terrorism.7
Thoughtful Americans knew we were in trouble. But in 2011, few were predicting that within half a dozen years, domestic terrorists would target their fellow citizens in ways that reveal the dangerous depths of our divides. I could not imagine that by March 2016, eight months before the general election, I would feel the need to post an article titled “Will Fascism Trump Democracy?” on the widely read On Being site.8 And Nostradamus himself could not have prophesied the violent January 6, 2021, invasion of the U.S. Capitol.
Egged on by the losing candidate, the insurrectionists were convinced that the election had been stolen from him via “massive fraud.” Between 2021 and 2023, all such claims were tested and found baseless by more than sixty U.S. courts and numerous state-by-state forensic exams of election machines and procedures. Nonetheless, as I write, about a third of American citizens still cling to the “massive fraud” fiction, one that will haunt us well into the future, undermining public confidence in the legitimacy of our elections.9
In the face of all of this, I still subscribe to the treatment plan proposed in this book, not in spite of the pathology at work in our democracy but because of it:
I still believe that citizens using the tools of democracy hold the key to our political future. How could it be otherwise in a representative democracy embedded in a constitutional republic where the government derives its power from “We the People”?
I still believe that democracy depends on certain “habits of the heart,” habits that can and must be cultivated in the local venues of our lives. Democracy cannot thrive without a viable personal and communal root system that is actively nurtured in the settings of everyday life.
I still believe that only by learning how to hold a creative tension around our divides can we generate the shared vision and rally the people-power necessary to hold our leaders and institutions accountable to democratic norms.
At the same time, I now see the need to qualify what I said about holding the tension of our divides: some divides are not worth holding because they lack creative potential.
Tension-holding can be creative only when the opposing views have a reasonable chance to meet on common ground or generate a synthesis that transcends the polarity. For example, when we disagree about policy issues on which the right and left have always differed— such as federal taxation or regulation—we have a chance to come together via negotiation and bargaining.
But some disagreements involve contradictions that force an either- or choice and cannot open into creative directions. For example:
There can be no give and take in a debate between violent and non-violent approaches to problem-solving. Where is the middle ground between “Let's talk” and “I’ll let my AR-15 talk for me”?
The same is true when demonstrable facts are “countered” with claims that there are no facts, or with fictions generated by conspiracy theorists who refuse to reveal their alleged “evidence.” Where is the middle ground between “Here's what science and/or the law says” and “Here's what a mystery man called ‘Q’ says”?
Nor can there be negotiation and bargaining when one side embraces the inherently evil premise that there is such a thing as a “superior” race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion.
Just as Eli Wiesel—Nobel Prize winner and survivor of two Nazi death camps—refused to dignify Holocaust deniers by debating them, those of us who love democracy cannot give oxygen to anarchists whose only goal is to undermine all forms of authority or nihilists who insist that arguments spun out of thin air are as valid as those grounded in logic and facts.10 We cannot give standing to convictions that are inherently anti-democratic and would, if implemented, bring down democracy.
I can already hear cries of “political bias” in response to the case I just made: “It's obvious that you are not an objective observer of American politics. You have clear positions on some of our major points of contention. Why should I trust what you say about reaching across our divides?”
With all due respect, I urge you to save your distrust for anyone who pretends to stand above the fray, free of all political convictions, and poses as a neutral arbiter of our differences. Such a person does not exist.
Yes, I’m a citizen with political views. I’m part of the fray, and I’m looking for ways to play a more creative role in it. Every word I’ve written on this subject is a challenge to myself and others to engage in the kind of dialogue across negotiable lines of difference that can move us toward the mutuality that democracy depends on.
Free and open dialogue threatens authoritarian movements, which work relentlessly to shut it down. So hosting conversations of that sort requires the “safe spaces” explored in this book—spaces that allow us to be vulnerable to each other while holding the voices of fear and intimidation at bay. In such spaces we have a chance to release what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature,” those powers within us that resist the politics of divide and conquer while reaching for the common good.
On Taproots and Trust
The epigraph I chose for this book comes from writer, educator, and activist Terry Tempest Williams. It begins with this claim: “The human heart is the first home of democracy.” For me, those words are timeless. They continue to point a way through the fog of disinformation and divisiveness that threatens to bring down our system of government.
Asked to name democracy's taproot, most of us would name a place, time, event, or document. But Williams understands that democracy does not begin “out there” somewhere. It begins within us, in the impulses of the human heart. As we act on those impulses, for better and for worse, we help give shape to the world: that is the essence of politics. Behind all the raving and flag-waving, the money, machinations, and backroom deals, politics is the net result of what citizens say “yes” or “no” or “maybe” to, whether they say it by speaking out or remaining silent.
Hold that thought for a while and it opens a new way of thinking about politics and our role in it. Now we can go beyond the world of realpolitik11 where paid political operatives use manipulative strategies for gaining and holding power, an approach that involves what Molly Ivins called the “triangulation, calculation and equivocation” that makes citizens into cynics.12 Now we can take seriously Lincoln's appeal to our “better angels” and ask how we might evoke them in the cause of creating a politics worthy of the human spirit.
When we remember that politics has its root source in our lives, we have a chance to shut down our endless and fruitless grousing about them—those power-holders in Washington, D.C., or in our state capitols on whom we like to blame everything—and start talking with each other about us, about the ways we use or misuse our own power as citizens. Now we can begin to reckon with the simple fact that we are political beings whether we like it or not. As long as we speak and act in ways that involve others, the choices we make as we live our lives have political implications.
Of course, if democracy begins within us, it can end there as well. As I wrote in the first edition of this book:
The democratic experiment is endless, unless we blow up the lab, and the explosives to do the job are found within us. But so also is the heart's alchemy that can turn suffering into community, conflict into the energy of creativity, and tension into an opening toward the common good.
The heart has myriad impulses, and not all of them favor democracy. As Lincoln knew, our better angels fly alongside our lesser angels, including those animated by anger, greed, entitlement, resentment, fear of “otherness,” and the yearning for an authoritarian leader who will “save” us from the tensions that bedevil a free people.13 To quote myself again, “If the end of tension is what you want, fascism is the thing for you.”14
Terry Tempest Williams understands the vagaries of the human heart, so she portrays its political function with precision and without romance. She pictures the heart as a forum where “we embrace our questions,” leaving us to consider whether we answer those questions in ways that support a democracy:
Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions? And do we have enough resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up—ever—trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living democracy?
The answer to the first three questions is, “It depends on whom you talk to.” That's been the case from our earliest days, as “We the People” try to weave diverse interests and needs into a fabric of common life. But today, the general answer to the fourth question is a definitive and discouraging “No.”
By all accounts, Americans’ trust in each other and in our institutions is at an historic low, creating a political vacuum that antidemocratic ideologies are eager to fill.15 Today, three and a half years after the presidential election of 2020, millions of Americans continue to claim, without evidence, that our electoral system is thoroughly corrupt—except, it would appear, when that system declares their preferred candidate a winner.
Can we restore relational trust among “We the People”? I believe we can, not with everyone but with a majority of our fellow citizens—a majority that may grow larger as some become disillusioned with leaders in whom they had placed trust. But laying the grounds for restoring trust is a demanding task. It requires the courage to face into the depths of our divisions, and the honesty to acknowledge that not all of them can be bridged.
Restoring Democratic Habits of the Heart
So how shall we relate to that one-third of Americans who continue to insist that the 2020 election was subverted by massive fraud, a falsehood that threatens the very foundations of American democracy? As I argued in the first edition of this book, the answer comes from our own history.
In a section where I made an educated guess that 30 or 40 percent of Americans will never be able to participate in the kind of civic conversations we need to help heal our divides, I wrote this:
I am not chasing the fantasy that some day we will “all get along.” Given human nature and the nature of politics, there will always be people with whom dialogue is impossible—and on some days I am one of them. [But if 30 or 40 percent are unable or unwilling to talk,] that leaves 60 to 70 percent of us who can learn to talk across our differences, and in a democracy that is more than enough to save the day.
Of the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, only thirty-nine signed the final document. The remaining 30 percent disagreed so deeply with one part or another of the Constitution that they took a pass on posterity.
That 30 or 40 percent has always been with us, from the earliest days of the American experiment through two and a half centuries of American life. We’ve lived to tell the tale because a majority of Americans—not always but often enough—have seen the light and helped the country keep moving toward it in our unending quest for a “more perfect Union.”
For those of us who value democracy and believe that people-power is key to preserving it, the question is not how to build trust with those who embrace anti-democratic views. It's how to strengthen the bonds of civic community among the remaining 60 to 70 percent, that majority of “We the People” who disagree on many details of the common good but share a simple conviction that I spelled out in 2011:
It is in the common good to hold our political differences and the conflicts they create in a way that does not unravel the civic community on which democracy depends.
The best approach I know to strengthening our civic bonds is rooted in Alexis de Tocqueville's classic Democracy in America, published in 1835 and still regarded by some scholars as the best book on the topic. This French aristocrat and political scientist argued that American democracy is rooted in certain habits of the heart, which I define as “deeply ingrained patterns of receiving, interpreting, and responding to experience that involve our intellects, emotions, self-images, and concepts of meaning and purpose.”
As Tocqueville argued, these habits are—or are not—cultivated in an array of local venues that include family, neighborhood, educational institutions, voluntary associations (secular and religious), coffee shops, sidewalk cafes, farmers’ markets, and parks and other spaces of public life.
So the health of American democracy depends on the two levels of political infrastructure that underlie it: (1) the inward and invisible infrastructure found in our habits of the heart; (2) the outward and visible infrastructure found in the daily venues of life where those habits are formed and practiced. Just as we must restore our physical infrastructure lest more bridges collapse or power grids go down, so we must restore our political infrastructure lest we collapse into authoritarianism.
What does that mean for you and me as citizens of a democracy? It means attending to the cultivation of five democratic habits of the heart in ourselves and others, habits that are weak or absent in too many American lives:
An understanding that we are all in this together.
An appreciation of the value of “otherness.”
The ability to hold tension in life-giving ways.
A sense of personal voice and agency.
A greater capacity to create community.
When these five habits become the focus of private conversations and public programs that reach growing numbers of people, they move beyond exhortation and start making a practical contribution to restoring democracy's infrastructure. Change begins when we put time, skill, and energy into the mobilization of the powers of the human heart, just as every movement for social change has done in pursuit of its goals.
That's exactly what numerous teachers, clergy, community organizers, workshop/retreat leaders and ordinary citizens have been doing since this book came out. Using the built-in Study Guide, they’ve gathered people around the five habits, explored their meaning, invited personal stories related to them, and helped people reflect on their applications in everyday life.
Here are a few examples of large- and small-scale efforts:
In the buildup to the 2016 election, the Wisconsin Council of Churches created a discussion program called “Seasons of Civility” that reached across the state and across religious lines. A detailed, downloadable action plan is available online.
16
“My Neighbor's Voice” is a project based in South Carolina. Inspired by the principles the underlie this book, two teachers “started gathering folks together. . .to just listen to their thoughts, stories, and opinions, while creating. . .a deep space for democracy to work.” Further information and tools are available online.
17
In an article published in an academic journal, the author describes a course taught at Regis University in which the five habits were used to explore the question, “What does ‘Justice and the Common Good’ mean in the context of the situation in the land we call Israel/ Palestine? Who are the people who live there? What are their stories? What is our responsibility?”
18
To assist in the study of the five habits and other themes in this book, the Center for Courage & Renewal,19 a nonprofit I founded, produced a series of brief videos that have been widely used in courses, workshops, and public programs. All of them are available free at the URL cited in this footnote.20
I am not suggesting that the inner work explored in this book is the only way to reclaim American democracy. As a representative democracy embedded in a constitutional republic, we need renewal on both levels. This includes systemic reform of the structures of our Republic, some of which are clearly dysfunctional at the moment.
But for those of us whose citizenship is expressed in the venues of everyday life, approaching our political problems via habits of the heart commends itself on several fronts:
This is work that can be taken up by people in every walk of life who have access to other people via the family or the neighborhood or voluntary associations.
This is work that can be led by ordinary citizens who lack the skill, knowledge, and access necessary to engage directly in institutional politics.
This is non-partisan work since the habits involved are, at bottom, capacities that human beings need to lead lives of meaning and purpose.
Since the structural reform of our Republic depends on the will of the people, our dominant habits of the heart will help determine whether systemic change will happen and what it will look like.
In my experience, the primary pushback to this proposal comes from people who feel “the fierce urgency of now.” “We must act quickly,” they say, “before our backsliding democracy becomes a failing democracy. Approaching the problem via inner work takes too long.”
My first response to that objection is the obvious one: “Too long compared to what?” Systemic change—as in reforming the Electoral College or the process of gerrymandering, both worthy goals—is not exactly a quick fix. And since systemic change depends on the will of the people, why not see the two approaches as complementary, not competitive?
But a deeper response comes from understanding that the movement that gave us the phrase “the fierce urgency of now” also gives us a multi-generational model of patience, the kind of patience it takes to commit ourselves to processes of change that, in all likelihood, will never end. I’m referring, of course, to the movement for black liberation that began when the first ship carrying enslaved human beings from Africa landed on these shores—a movement aimed at rooting out the white supremacy that has been part of America's DNA from the moment of its conception.
Healing of the heart of democracy depends on more and more of us opening our eyes, minds and hearts to the self-evident fact that the United State has never lived up to its self-proclaimed belief that all men [sic] are created equal.
Race in America
If we who are white are willing to enter the force-field called race in America, we will find both the challenge of confronting white supremacy and the hope required to keep moving toward healing. But it's a daunting force-field that many of us would rather avoid. It includes white campaigns of genocide against indigenous people, the institution of slavery that secured the American economy, the Civil War, Emancipation, Jim Crow, the New Jim Crow, redlining and all that flowed from it, and the racial bias laced through our criminal justice system. Where to begin?
Here's a small, human-scale story to get us started. A week after the 2016 general election, I was the guest lecturer at a local university in a graduate seminar on democracy. I opened with a prompt to get the class thinking about our subject: “Let's talk about the outcome of the presidential election. What did you learn from it?”
A white woman was the first to speak. She said she was still in shock that a man whom she saw as openly racist had been elected to the presidency by the American people:
How could people vote for him when he promoted the birther conspiracy against Obama, called Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists, and proposed a ban on all Muslims entering the United States? To say nothing of his misogyny.
She was followed in quick order by two more white students who shared her outrage that Americans had seen fit to elevate such a man to the White House. Then a black woman spoke:
I was not at all surprised. Nor was any black person I know. Why should we be? We’ve suffered from white supremacy for ten or twelve generations. For us, the outcome of this election is the same old, same old. None of us believed the white liberal myth that Obama's presidency marked the beginning of a “‘post-racial” America. We all know that the white supremacy is part of the American DNA and probably a permanent part of American culture.
After she spoke, two more black women spoke, confirming what she had said. One of them added a story about what she had said to her teenage son that very morning before he left for school:
Remember, pull your hoodie down, your pants up, walk like white boys walk, and if the police stop you for any reason, raise your hands, obey their commands, keep your mouth shut unless they ask you a question, and if they take you in, use the one call they will allow you to get in touch with me.
She paused for a moment to recover from the anger and grief she was clearly feeling, then she added: “For a black parent, this is what passes for ‘Have a good day at school.’ Then we spend the rest of the day hoping that our kids make it home in one piece. I live in a different country than some folks in this class.”
As their black classmates spoke, the white students in that class were given a chance to develop a capacity essential to full citizenship in American democracy. I call it “compassionate imagination.”
Step 1 is to remember the simple fact that Americans who have different backstories, especially regarding powerful identifiers like race, will see the same event from very different angles.
Step 2 is to listen with care when you find yourself surprised by another person's interpretation of a situation, questioning your own reaction, doing your best to take in a point of view that's foreign to you.
Step 3 is to put yourself in the other's shoes for at least a minute or two, trying to see and feel at least a little of what that person sees and feels.
The white students in my class who were able to take those three steps while listening to their black classmates could no longer imagine that the white way of experiencing the world was normative or even accurate. Now their sense of the common good would have to expand to include those who have been excluded from full membership in the American body politic.
Shutting down the human capacity for a compassionate imagination is among the goals of the white supremacist movement that is once again front and center in American politics. As an example, this June 2023 report from the newspaper Education Week:
Since January 2021, 44 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism. . . . Eighteen states have imposed these bans and restrictions either through legislation or other avenues.21
Apart from age-appropriate considerations, why limit what children are taught about racism? Proponents advance various reasons. Some make the easily disproven claim that white supremacy disappeared with the Emancipation Proclamation.22 Others argue that a deep look at racism's manifestations will make white children feel guilty for being white. Still others claim that lessons focused on systemic forms of racism in the United States (the focus of critical race theory) will make children lose faith in their country.
I’ve worked with thousands of educators, but I’ve never known one who aims to make children feel guilty about their race or lose faith in their country. The reason is simple: good education is incompatible with emotional manipulation. Its goal is simply to teach the facts as we know them about a given subject, and give students the tools to become critical consumers of such information.
Sometimes the facts are hard, even shocking, and learning them evokes feelings. So good teachers (and good parents) create safe spaces where children can deal creatively with those feelings as part of the normal formation of a healthy human being.
I want students to know and feel the weight of the facts about the enslavement of human beings, and how the ideology behind that form of cruelty keeps playing out in both personal and systemic terms. I want them to understand all of that well enough to ask themselves a simple but humanizing question: “If I were not white, how would X, Y, and Z look and feel to me?” I want them to develop empathetic imaginations that allow them to respond, not react, to American realities in the way thoughtful citizens should.
Responsibility, after all, means the ability to respond to reality. It does not mean saying to our students, as we survey the triumphs and the tragedies of American history, “Move along. Nothing to see here. . .” when we encounter realities that contradict our professed norms. As William Sloane Coffin said, “There are three kinds of patriots, two bad, one good. The bad are the uncritical lovers and the loveless critics. Good patriots carry on a lover's quarrel with their country.”23
At this moment in American history, the stakes involved in restoring democratic habits of the heart and cultivating compassionate imaginations are high. In a couple of decades, the American population will be predominantly people of color. Many in the historic white majority are fearful and angry about what they see as their “displacement” and “replacement,” a primary source of American democracy's heart disease.24
People Can Change
In March 2011, shortly after I sent the final draft of this book to the publisher, I had an experience that brought to life much of what I had written about. I went on the annual three-day Congressional Civil Rights Pilgrimage sponsored by the Faith & Politics Institute in Washington, D.C., led by the late Congressman John Lewis.25 We began in Birmingham, Alabama, moved on to Montgomery, and ended in Selma, where we marked the forty-sixth anniversary of Bloody Sunday, a pivotal event in American political history.
On Sunday, March 7, 1965, six hundred nonviolent protesters, many of them young, gathered at the foot of Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge to begin a fifty-mile march to the Alabama State Capital in Montgomery, a protest against the ongoing exclusion of African Americans from the electoral process. When they reached the other side of the bridge, the marchers were brutalized by state and local police, mounted and on foot, wielding billy clubs and tear gas. This atrocity, witnessed on television by millions of Americans, scandalized the nation. It also generated enough political momentum that President Lyndon Johnson was able to sign a Voting Rights Act into law five months after the march.
The 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge was led by John Lewis, then twenty-five, who served as chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He was one of the first to be beaten by the police, who fractured his skull and left marks he bore until his death in 2020.
In March 2011, I was marked in a different way as I followed the seventy-one year-old John Lewis—U.S. Representative from Georgia's 5th Congressional District since 1987, and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom—across the bridge where forty-six years earlier he had led others in a courageous exercise of deep citizenship.
During the three days of the Civil Rights Pilgrimage, I was reminded time and again of themes that are key to this book: the centrality of the “habits of the heart” that we develop in the local venues of our lives; the patience it takes to stay engaged in small, often invisible ways with the American experiment in democracy; the importance of faithfully holding the tension between what is and what might be, and creating the kind of tension that might arouse “the better angels of our nature.”
John Lewis and his age-mates in the Civil Rights movement had descended from generations of people who had suffered from the worst America has to offer, but had not given up on the vision of freedom, justice and equality that represents this county at its best. Those people nurtured that vision in their children and grandchildren at home, in the neighborhood, in classrooms and in churches, creating a steady multi-generational stream of “underground” activity that was largely invisible to white Americans until it rose up to claim our attention in the 1950s and 1960s.
Most of the stops we made on the Civil Rights Pilgrimage were at churches—the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in Selma—where we heard sermons, sang songs, and felt history. Civil rights activists had prepared for action in places like these via study, practice and prayer. And when those actions brought the wrath of the police down upon their heads, the activists returned to these places to heal, regroup, and act again.
The few white Americans who were aware of the black church prior to the Civil Rights movement generally discounted its political relevance. As a boy growing up in an affluent white suburb of Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s, I remember being told that African American religion was all about “pie in the sky when you die by-and-by,” a phrase used by capitalists who were unwittingly and ironically parroting Marx's notion of “religion as the opiate of the people.”
“Pie in the sky” was a racist, dismissive and profoundly ignorant characterization of the role of the black churches in the United States. In fact, these churches birthed a form of social activism that eventually transformed the lay and the law of the land. Like the tiny church I wrote about in Chapter II, they had long been helping oppressed people develop habits of the heart that empowered them to become participants in the democratic process.
At the end of the pilgrimage, after we had marched across the bridge, we boarded a bus to take us to the Montgomery Airport for the flight home. By happenstance, I sat just behind John Lewis and one of his staffers where I overheard a story Lewis was telling.
In 1961, Lewis and a friend were at a bus station in Rock Hill, South Carolina, when several young white men attacked and beat them bloody with baseball bats. Lewis and his friend “did not fight back, and they declined to press charges.” They simply treated their wounds and went on with their Civil Rights work.
In 2009, forty-eight years after this event, a white man about John Lewis's age walked into his office on Capitol Hill, accompanied by his middle-aged son. “Mr. Lewis,” he said, “my name is Elwin Wilson. I’m one of the men who beat you in that bus station back in 1961. I want to atone for the terrible thing I did, so I’ve come to seek your forgiveness. Will you forgive me?” Lewis said, “I forgave him, we embraced, he and his son and I wept, and then we talked.”26
As Lewis came to the end of this remarkable and moving story, he leaned back in his seat on the bus. He gazed out the window for a while as we passed through a countryside that was once a killing ground for the Ku Klux Klan, of which Elwin Wilson had been a member. Then, in a very soft voice—as if speaking to himself about the story he had just told and all of the memories that must have been moving in him— Lewis said, “People can change. People can change.”
At that moment, I felt as if I had seen deep into the soul of a true healer of the heart of democracy. I saw the faith in our shared humanity that kept John Lewis on the march for all those years, despite the abundant evidence that we are capable of being unloving, untruthful and unjust. I thought of this good man again on June 25, 2013, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that Lewis had helped make possible with his own blood, sweat and tears.27
When I heard John Lewis say, “People can change. People can change.”, I felt a sense of hope, not simply for “them” but for me. The belief that change is possible—personal as well as social change—can help us stay engaged for the long haul with this endless experiment called democracy, doing whatever we can to help it not only survive but thrive.
Notes
1
.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/06/27/democracy-in-america-voter-july-4-poll/70337592007/
2
. Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Report on “The Rising Threat of Domestic Terrorism,” November 2022.
http://tiny.cc/v4n9vz
3
.
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/30/1190970499/over-1-100-rioters-have-been-charged-for-jan-6-many-name-trump-in-their-statemen
4
. Miriam Berger, “U.S. Listed as a ‘Backsliding’ Democracy for First Time in Report by European Think Tank.”
Washington Post
, November 22, 2021.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/22/united-states-backsliding-democracies-list-first-time/
5
. Ibid.
6
.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-indictments-details-guide-charges-trial-dates-people-case/
7
. AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, “Civil Liberties and Security: 20 Years after 9/11,” September 2021.
http://www.apnorc.org/civil-liberties-and-security-20-years-after-9-11
8
.
https://onbeing.org/blog/will-fascism-trump-democracy/
9
. Ben Kamisar, “Almost a Third of Americans Still Believe the 2020 Election Result Was Fraudulent.” Meet the Press Blog, June 20, 2023.
https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meetthepressblog/almost-third-americans-still-believe-2020-election-result-was-fraudule-rcna90145
10
.
https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/elie-wiesel.html
11
. See
realpolitik
in Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik
12
. Molly Ivins, “Not. Backing. Hillary.”
CNN.com
, January 20, 2006.
https://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/01/20/ivins.hillary/
13
. Eric Fromm,
Escape from Freedom
(1941) in Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_Freedom
14
. Parker J. Palmer,
Healing the Heart of Democracy
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011, p. 76.
15
. Pew Research Center, “Americans’ Views of Government: Decades of Distrust,” June 6, 2022.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/06/06/americans-views-of-government-decades-of-distrust-enduring-support-for-its-role/
16
. See
https://wichurches.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/SeasonsofCivility.pdf
17
. See
https://www.myneighborsvoice.org
18
. Russel C.D. Arnold, “Cultivating Parker Palmer’s Habits of the Heart in an Integrative Course on Israel/Palestine.”
The Journal of Interreligious Studies
, Issue 20, March 2017, pp. 54–70.
19
. See
https://couragerenewal.org
20
.
www.couragerenewal.org/healing-heart-democracy-hub/
21
. Sarah Schwartz, “Map: Where Critical Race Theory Is Under Attack.”
Education Week
, June 11, 2021 (updated June 13, 2023).
https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/map-where-critical-race-theory-is-under-attack/2021/06
22
. For remedial history lessons, see Michelle Alexander,
The New Jim Crow
(2010).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Jim_Crow
; and Elizabeth Wilkerson,
Caste
(2020).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste:_The_Origins_of_Our_Discontents
23
. William Sloane Coffin,
Credo
(Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2005), p. 84.
24
.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-is-great-replacement-theory-and-how-does-it-fuel-racist-violence
25
. For information on the Faith & Politics Institute and its pilgrimages, see
http://faithandpolitics.org
26
. For an account of these events, see
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/us/elwin-wilson-who-apologized-for-racist-acts-dies-at-76.html?_r=0
27
. For details of the U.S. Supreme Court’s
Shelby County vs. Holder
decision, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelby_County_v._Holder
