A few years ago, I conversed with a number of religious leaders in the Seattle area. I did the same several years earlier for a research project in the American South. These people helped me to see the various possibilities for the project I hope to take on, as well as some of the conceptual and logistical issues I need to think through. I look forward to the next stage in my project’s development.

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If we are a fractious nation, we are also one that is lit, in many places, by spirit, prayer, meditation, and faith. How do these forces affect the chasm in our political culture? And what untapped potential do they contain for bridging that chasm and healing the mutual alienation that both causes and is reinforced by it?

 

My planned project will at once be descriptive and normative, concerned with what is and what could perhaps become. I plan to spend time with and interview members of communities joined together by devotion to and communication with the Divine. Some of the communities I visit will be fundamentalist in orientation, while others will inhabit a more open-ended worldview. Some will be affiliated with the world’s major religions whereas others will be aligned with no established tradition at all, committed simply to meditation, yoga, prayer, and contemplation. I will connect with these communities across four geographic locations within the United States.

 

By establishing trust with my subjects, I will help them examine their own beliefs. My goal is to uncover their understanding of themselves as political partisans and civic actors shaped by faith or devotion, as well as spiritual beings informed by political orientation. My subjects, I hope, will reveal to me how these dynamics play out in their lives. Their testimony will help generate a thick, textured reading of our the spirit-politics animating our political culture. And they will provide possibilities for ameliorating America's searing political divide.

 

My analysis will be informed by existing works grappling with the spirit-civic connection. I hope, with my research, to expand and enrich that literature.

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Much of my project’s importance will lie in its most difficult work: the creating of cross-ideological conversations. I plan, with the help of community leaders, to assemble individuals of differing political and religious orientations into multi-session groups. Brief trust exercises will take place, based on the concepts of gracious space, compassionate listening, and 3Practices. Next, participants will be encouraged to speak honestly about their spiritual and/or faith orientation and how it connects them to politics. The group will then explore its capacity (or incapacity) for collectively reaching out to or listening for the sacred, in a manner that all members might find personally acceptable. Amid this spiritual communication, participants will imagine peaceful co-existence among people with strongly differing worldviews. When such a shared activity is not possible, group members will be offered the chance to express their own devotional process and to witness open-heartedly the spiritual expression of other members. My goal here is to explore the possibilities for and limitations of spiritual expression to cross entrenched political boundaries and diminish mutual mistrust between antagonistic sectors of society.