personal journey gave him the conviction that “religion can be a bunker of isolation, it can be a barrier of division, it can be a bludgeon of domination, or it can be a bridge of cooperation.”
That led him in the late 1990s to form the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) to promote conversation, relationships, and cooperation among college students from different religious backgrounds. Today, the nonprofit provides training, organizes volunteer outings, and offers curricula on interfaith issues. By April 2020, IFYC had established a presence on more than 600 campuses throughout the country with about 100,000 student participants.25
Patel has advocated for higher-education leaders to allay marginalization and sniping among evangelical Christians, atheists, and Muslims by integrating “conversations about religious diversity” into “first-year orientation, required courses, and policies that affect campus climate.”26
Since Patel often finds himself attempting to bridge gaps between students from completely different worlds, I asked him whether he felt like his work was countercultural. I certainly think it is. But he disagreed – and his response was reflective of the way bridge builders tend to see the world differently. “If America is defined by cable news, then what we’re doing is countercultural,” he said. “But if America is defined by what we do on a regular basis in hospitals, in little leagues, in pickup basketball, in hip-hop ciphers, then it’s actually very much part of the American way.”
Patel said we can learn lessons from the apolitical nature of everyday life, which functions smoothly in spite of the things that divide us. “In our civil society, we naturally come together with people who are quite different from us politically, racially, religiously, to do cooperative things,” he said. “When’s the last time you heard about doctors in a hospital refusing to perform a heart surgery because they voted differently or because they were a different race? So the fiber of American life in a civic sense promotes cooperation. I think this is a big, big deal.”
Building bridges between people from different walks of life demands a different perspective on the same circumstances that cause others to feel divided. It requires a commitment to the development of authentic relationships, the use of dynamic communication techniques, and a realization that service opportunities break down social, cultural, and political barriers. It calls for a recognition that an attitude of inclusion is a hallmark of successful bridge building – and that exclusion, insults, and shame corrode the paths to social justice.
“The people who have made the most social change have been the ones who tell an inspiring story that draws a larger circle, that draws people in,” Patel said. “Building a diverse democracy is about three things. It’s really about engaging with the deep problem of marginalization, it’s about bridging polarization, and it’s about being able to handle deep disagreements.” Some of those disagreements are “rooted in deep and fundamental identities,” he said. And those identities must be honored, reimagined, or even confronted, depending on the circumstances.
Latasha Morrison is doing just that. In 2015, Morrison founded Be the Bridge, a nonprofit devoted to pursuing racial reconciliation through small groups, education, and spiritual talks. As a Christian minister and an African American, she works from within the church to foster connections. She travels throughout the country speaking to churches – in many cases majority-White, evangelical congregations – about the need for her fellow Christians to confront the racism, biases, and insensitivities that they have wielded for centuries against people of color, especially Black people. Morrison wrote a powerful book, Be the Bridge, on the same topic in 2019 and runs a Facebook group of the same name, using her platform to call Americans into robust conversations about racism and into relationships with people who aren’t like them.27
When Morrison talks about our nation’s history of systemic racism – and how White Christians, in particular, have fueled social injustice – she is showing them how someone who reads the same Bible and prays to the same God has been afflicted by White privilege and White supremacy. What she asks of them is to “lament” the past, to learn about it, and to apply lessons from it to their lives. “The type of bridge we’re building is one that uplifts marginalized voices,” she said. “We’re truth-tellers – that’s one of our values.”
As a result, Morrison chooses to engage with people of difference who haven’t yet figured it out. They can be rough around the edges, but if they’ve signaled a willingness to engage, she’s in. “We give each other grace because there’s going to be times when I need grace,” she said. “Sometimes people are going to need grace to be ignorant and to ask a stupid question. I feel like no one gets this by yelling or demeaning them. So I think it’s important that we do this with grace, we do this with love and truth. We want to see justice.”
Morrison draws a careful distinction between lamenting and shaming – “to me, lament elevates God,” while “shame elevates you” – but she is also careful to note that it’s still important to stand up to people who exude exclusion and ignorance, even when it makes them shift in their seats. Having difficult conversations about racism often causes White people to react defensively, as author Robin DiAngelo noted in her 2018 book, White Fragility. Which is why White people, in particular, need to cast aside their discomfort with conversations about their own racism.
“Am I doing something to tear you down? Or am I just saying some things that make you uncomfortable?” Morrison asked. “There’s a difference. Am I attacking you as an individual, or am I telling the truth about a system of brokenness that we’ve ingested? It just really takes some discernment, and we can’t go off of feelings. Sometimes we need time to process this.” Calling people out for the sake of embarrassing them is often counterproductive, she said, because it’s “about demeaning and not bringing solutions.” It often brings about the opposite reaction that is desired. Yet it’s critical to ensure that people aren’t being silenced for the sake of creating an edifice of civility, which simply triggers identity corrosion underneath the surface. “It causes trauma when we isolate and oppress people, when they can’t use their voice,” Morrison said. “For centuries here in this country, that has happened where, if you spoke out or complained or if you called out, you would die. . . . I want to challenge people to have a different perspective, to learn from someone’s different experience.”
When I spoke with Morrison, she had just recently returned from speaking to a White evangelical church in Longview, Texas, a town on the eastern side of the state that political observers might label as blood-red for its conservative credentials. In Gregg County, where Longview is located, 69 percent of voters supported Donald Trump for president in 2016, while only 28 percent voted for Hillary Clinton.28 “I went in there, and I spoke some hard truth, but this was not rocky ground. This soil was ready for this message,” she said. “It may have been uncomfortable for some people, but they were ready to recognize some truth. If that’s happening in east Texas, that’s happening in other places.”
This book is not about literal bridge builders – as in the architects, engineers, and contractors who design and construct physical structures to bring two sides together. But their real-life processes provide lessons for metaphorical bridge building.
Using the “segmental” process, crews build small sections at a time as the span gradually widens across the ground below. In metaphorical bridge building, progress is often incremental and organic and hard-won – but the sum adds up to revolutionary change in the long run. Braver Angels is taking this approach by helping Americans gradually stitch back together the bonds of social trust.29
Using the “cantilever” process, the span takes shape from the top of pre-built support pillars, gradually extending outward until each section attaches to the next section and ultimately forms a bridge connecting both sides of the gap. In metaphorical bridge building, people span gaps by leveraging existing connections or forming brand new relationships
