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It happened around the time President Donald Trump announced that the nation would observe its 250th birthday by, among other things, holding an Ultimate Fighting Championship match on the White House lawn.
"I was not a huge fan of that idea," Michael Holzman, spiritual leader at Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation in Reston, told me. "I was really concerned that we were going to have a year of very, very partisan events" to celebrate the semiquincentennial of the United States. His fears seemed confirmed when Trump sidelined the bipartisan, congressionally authorized America250 committee and stood up a competitor, Freedom 250.
So Holzman decided to attempt some counterprogramming. He launched Faith250, an interfaith movement of churches, synagogues and mosques across the country that would celebrate America's birthday by gathering believers to discuss and honor the Declaration of Independence and other examples of "America's sacred texts."
"In a time of rising political violence and threats to the institutions of American democracy, this moment is urgent," he wrote when he launched the group. "The moral thread holding our democracy together is wearing thin. We are losing sight of our shared values. What if, through our multi-faith networks of local congregations, we spark a movement to counter the division, contempt, and toxicity that threaten to tear the country apart, and instead make this year something unifying . . . a massive community celebration, a conversation about the values that sustain this country?"
Now there are 25 clusters coast to coast representing more than 150 congregations, each gathering in four nightly sessions to share their reverence for the words and people who made this country.
When I attended a cluster meeting in Fairfax, Virginia, this month for a study of the Declaration of Independence, there were Catholics, Latter-day Saints, Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, Baptists, Presbyterians, Conservative Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Baha'is. I saw skullcaps and headdresses, men and women, Black, White and Brown. Muslims broke their Ramadan fast with an iftar - which honored the host synagogue's kosher requirements. A Muslim leader wished Christians a blessed Lenten season. And when it was over, we all stood and sang "America the Beautiful."
And all this was done under the roof of Congregation Olam Tikvah, or "World of Hope."
"This evening, we have truly witnessed what the psalmists beautifully described in Psalm 133," Rabbi George Billinson said in a benediction. "Hinei mah tov umah-na'im, sheves achim gam yachad. How good and how pleasant it is for brothers and sisters to come together."
And how rare.
It feels as though we are perpetually and permanently divided these days, by partisanship, by class, by race, by religion. A new war in the Middle East is beginning to echo here at home. In Lebanon, Israel killed two children along with an alleged Hezbollah leader. In Michigan, the brother of the dead man drove his truck into a synagogue - where preschool children had been playing.
The troubles - political violence, tribal hatreds, democratic backsliding - seem overwhelming in the aggregate. This is why I look for people such as Holzman. They are not the norm. They may be a small minority, in fact. But there are enough of them that I know we still have it in us to do better, that hope is not lost. I'm convinced that most of us yearn to rise above this moment, and eventually, we will.
I'm inspired by my old friend David Gray, pastor at Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, Maryland, which has members from across the political spectrum. The church also houses a synagogue and a mosque, and the three congregations jointly run the place, working together to feed the hungry, to care for refugees, to play youth basketball and to share in interfaith worship. From above, from "G od's point of view," Gray likes to say, you would "see a sanctuary in the shape of a cross, a hall in the shape of a Star of David, and an overall building in the shape of a crescent" - evidence of "the beauty and the strength of what God can do for unity in our world."
I'm inspired, too, by Halle Stanford and Dorien Davies, who produced a new children's program called "Wowsabout" that debuts May 1 on PBS Kids. Featuring a guitar-playing hedgehog and a tree-loving pig, it aims to teach children to experience feelings of awe, in libraries, looking at the sky, practicing small acts of kindness or visiting Sequoia National Park, the setting for the premiere. "How can we give kids today, who are tied to their devices, the glimmer of a possibility that there's something beyond?" Davies asks.
And I'm inspired by Llewellyn van Zyl, a Dutch-South African psychologist who is developing tools that help us embrace the awesome potential of artificial intelligence without losing our humanity. He will chair a virtual summit next week, called AI and the Future of Wellbeing, put on by the International Positive Psychology Association. "We've gotten to the point where we can outsource critical thinking and critical reasoning," he says. "We need to make sure that we are sitting on the right side of history" and "building the products in a psychologically safe way."
They remind me that there are many reasons for hope - as does Faith250, which continues to add clusters and congregations, including a few evangelical churches. (Pastors and individuals looking to get involved can check the organization's website or subscribe to its free Substack updates.)
"I can see how easy it is to radicalize people in a negative direction....especially online, where you can find people who are lonely and you can tell them things that scare them half to death," Holzman tells me. But he thinks people are exhausted from this. "My belief is that you just find some opposite interventions, and you reach people and you teach them that they're not alone, and that they can find trust in their neighbors. Now maybe it takes a little longer, maybe you need more persistence. ... But I think we can de-radicalize the country, and I think we can bring people out of cynicism."
In addition to the Declaration of Independence, Faith250 has discussion questions for three other documents: Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus," Katharine Lee Bates's "America the Beautiful" and Frederick Douglass's "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" (Texts for potential future gatherings include writings by Ronald Reagan, Sojourner Truth, John F. Kennedy and a passage from the Constitution.) Clergy-led prayers kick off and close the discussions, which are governed by a "covenant for conversation." ("Avoid promotion of political parties, figures, candidates, or agendas. ... Embrace curiosity and humility rather than certainty and knowledge.")
On Presidents' Day, Holzman and other clergy held a webinar to provide a model discussion of the Gettysburg Address. They spoke about the meaning of hallowed and consecrated ground and a "new birth of freedom," drawing from personal anecdotes about the Sea of Galilee, a former slave market in Richmond, the Turkish earthquakes of 1999, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and a mother's funeral.
Becca Messman, senior pastor at Burke Presbyterian Church in Virginia, got choked up reading the text of the address. She saw in Abraham Lincoln's mid-war words a way to rise above our divisions. "You will be rewarded by a subset for saying ‘charge' and really continuing the vengeance," she said. "And what strikes me is you can continue the vengeance or you can tell a better story. ... In my tradition, we would probably lean hard on some of the beloved images of scripture, Romans 12, render to no one evil for evil, weep with those who weep, rejoice with those who rejoice."
Messman speaks from experience. In her politically diverse church, "preaching has been like dancing on eggshells" in recent years, she told me.
Messman also participated in the meeting I attended of the Burke-Springfield Cluster in Fairfax, where more than 200 of us discussed the Declaration in small groups. Ben Sigal, a rabbi from the Conservative host synagogue, started off by noting that "in all likelihood, our politics are not the same" but "that we want to be at a table together with each other just brings me a lot of hope."
Don Rooney, the pastor at St. Bernadette Catholic Church in Springfield, Virginia, added his hope that "the nation can come together through its diversity of religions."
At my table, we took up the question: "Which idea in the Declaration of Independence is the most important to your identity as an American?"
Barbara Gayhart, who is Catholic, answered that "here in America, we're able to vote for our leaders, and I think that that is so crucial to my identity as an American because I've lived in other places where people do not have that right."
Regan Brough, who is Mormon, said he identified with the "consent of the governed" clause, which to him means a responsibility to hold leaders accountable to the people. "I think that's a heavy burden, but that's also what makes our country as awesome as it is."
Ibrahim Anli, who is Muslim, recalled that, growing up in Turkey, schools were "about raising obedient subjects." He also said that all 120,000 mosques in the country "read the same Friday sermon that has been emailed to them from a government office in Ankara." But, he said, he was lucky to have several American teachers "who would remind us of our individuality and our agency."
We tackled a second discussion question: "To what extent has America succeeded in upholding the vision of the Declaration?"
Rajiv Sharma, who is Hindu, said he was struck by how "polite" the founders were in enumerating their grievances. "Today, if you look at what America does," he said, "the tone is not polite at all. It's very authoritative, we know it all."
Brough agreed. "Right now, we live in a culture where we're just shouting at each other," he said, lamenting that we've forgotten "how to have a conversation and figure it out instead of just talking to your tribe via social media."
Susan Kristol, who is Jewish, said she worried about the weakening rule of law and called the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol "the scariest thing that ever happened in my life."
I held my breath, waiting for that to ignite an argument. But the moment passed. "For some reason, our political leaders are never willing to admit they're wrong, on both sides," Brough said. "No one wants to concede that we've ever messed up, and that's part of the thing that's really wrong."
We waded into other discussion questions, about contradictions between the "created equal" line and the fact that Thomas Jefferson was an enslaver. We discussed the sins of the Founding Fathers, but there was no move to cancel them. "We are all a product of our time," Gayhart said.
"Tocqueville," contributed Anli, "says the greatest strength of America is being able to look at its flaws."
Brough concurred. "So as much as there are contradictions or paradoxes within the document, there's incredible hope found within it," he said. "And that is something that's worth celebrating and not forgetting."
We spent more than an hour in discussion, talking about the founders, about what it means to be American - and about why we love our country despite its many flaws. Not once was there a mention of party or politician. We came as representatives of different faiths and races, as immigrants and native-born, as liberals and conservatives. We left as compatriots. I wish every American could experience that.
Together, the 200 of us stood and sang the provided lyrics to "America the Beautiful," without accompaniment, from the first verse to the last:
O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years,
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
G od shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
From a vantage point above the social hall, Rabbi Sigal tried to take a video of the singing. But there were tears in his eyes.
Dana Milbank writes a column about reclaiming our humanity and restoring our connections at a time when politics and technology are alienating us from each other.
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