A study from Pew Research Center showed that 86% of Americans think that “Republicans and Democrats are more focused on fighting each other than on solving problems,” with 63% expressing “not too much or no confidence at all in the future of the U.S. political system.”
However, in another study by Pew, an almost identical percentage of Americans, 62%, “said that when someone disagrees with them about religion, it’s best to try and understand the person’s belief and agree to disagree.”
The tensions expressed in the first study are not to be ignored — we all feel them. But too often we look to the false promise of political policies for social salvation and solution, and we forget that we are indivisible not when we focus on politics, but when we transcend them — when we are “one nation under God.”
Faith in a higher power — in God — is perhaps the most transcendent unifier for diverse groups of people that we know today, even (and perhaps especially) among differing religious groups and traditions.
The beauty of interfaith unity is that you achieve it by first recognizing differences, before then rising above those differences in a broader unity of faith. Interfaith harmony teaches us that there is no social diversity without some kind of unity (nor unity without diversity); and, ultimately, that there is no unity without transcendence.
I have seen the unifying reality of faith firsthand, and never have, nor ever will, see anything more perfectly bind and unite a group of people with infinitely different lives and perspectives.
I saw it while living in Detroit. My wife and I were interns there for a summer and joined the downtown meetings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The congregation spent half the month conducting Sundays in English, and the other half in Spanish. Never once did I hear a single complaint.
At the end of our stay, the branch (congregation) held a baby shower for my sister-in-law on a Saturday afternoon. I sat there, marveling at the many people from different walks of life: an African American man who spent many years in prison and bore a strong testimony of Jesus Christ (with a 2-year-old daughter in his arms); a Mexican woman with a beautiful toothless smile; a handful of refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo serving in leadership roles; a well-off Uruguayan man who led the congregation and wore the most beautiful two-tone shoes I had ever seen; and me, an average BYU student trying to figure out what to do with his life.
Ultimately, we were all there together not because we loved my sister-in-law necessarily, but because we loved Jesus Christ. Our faith unified our diversity and made us one. And in that unity, there was great joy.
A second experience came some years later while living in Spain. It was at another church-related event (a birthday for a Colombian girl in our branch) that I met Muhammad. He came to the event with his girlfriend (a member of our church). She introduced us and he told me of his home in Mali, his Ph.D. in engineering and his research. We spoke some about academia, but when the subject of God came up, we formed an immediate bond, proving that we were not mere acquaintances, but brothers. He explained how his faith in Islam brought him closer to God, as my own faith in Jesus Christ did for me.
We resonated on many more points than I thought would be the case, creating a harmony and a song that seemed to reach up into heaven and glorify the same Father we both knew and loved together. Every time I saw him thereafter he would hug me in the bonds of fraternal love.
A third experience occurred in Kansas. A young man, 16 years old, was frantically examining a car in the middle of our parking lot with his mother. I went to help. We put the car in neutral and pushed it off into a stall and began to search for the problem together. I learned that the mother was from India, and the father was away on a trucking route. As we charged the battery from my car, the subject of religion came up.
“Yeah, my mom prays every day, all day,” the young man said, smiling. She looked at me, knowing I was not Hindu, and said, “Yes. One God, I pray to one Father God. Shiva, many gods below God, but one Father God.”
In this small exchange I recognized some of my faith in her faith, as she recognized hers in mine. That faith unified us as neighbors, and as Americans in this nation of the free, and of the faithful.
These moments of unity through faith are not simple vignettes of good times, but illustrations of the role (and necessity) that both faith and interfaith respect play in achieving unity amid our increasing political tensions and differences. In this interfaith respect, our diversity doesn’t dissolve into tribal-political chaos and contention, but into a civil identity as a people who respect and honor the freedoms, rights, and privileges of our neighbors. It is in this respect that we become Americans, one out of many (e pluribus unum).
In many ways, it is the unity of faith that actually makes America great. In fact, there is no America without it. In modern America, all who believe in God civically set aside their modes of worship (a collective sacrifice) in order to flourish in the unity that we even worship at all. In that unity, under God, we become indivisible; in that unity, we are not merely Republicans or Democrats, but Americans.
While religious and political infighting will inevitably continue on, those who seek truth and God will find Him as they also seek for unity with their neighborly brothers and sisters. It seems to me that God would have it no other way. That unity, the unity of faith, is the strongest chord that will ever bind a wide bushel of foreign branches. In that unity comes the harmony and the song of American glory which we sing: one nation, under God, a beacon to the world for freedom, sacrifice and the pursuit of happiness.