Harry Boyte: We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: Using the Braver Angels Library on Courageous Citizenship

by Harry Boyte, Co-Chair of the Braver Angels Civic Scholars Council

 with an Introduction by Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess

Newsletter # 484 - August 27, 2026

We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For
Using the Braver Angels Library on Courageous Citizenship 

Harry C. Boyte, Co-chair, Braver Angels Civic Scholars Council

Beyond Intractability, a highly regarded website, newsletter, and Substack in the field of conflict resolution, depolarization, and democracy, and the Braver Angels Civic Scholars Council (CSC) are partnering to publish thirty-three short and readable papers on Courageous Citizenship. The papers are free read and download on laptops and cellphones. They are inspiring and challenging, with different views about citizenship and what is to be done to meet the nation’s crisis of direction and division. They are full of ideas and practical tips to help readers advance the Braver Angels goal of making “courageous citizenship an honored norm.”

The CSC sponsoring these papers includes an initial twenty members, bringing together leading scholars and reflective practitioners. Those published today have different perspectives on active citizenship.

Overall, the collection greatly expands the meaning of “citizen,” beyond what the philosopher Sarah Stitzlein in her paper calls “civil” citizenship, a legal relationship to government, to “civic” citizenship, what citizens do together to build communities and the country. Civil citizenship, a singularly legalistic definition of the citizen, divides and polarizes. Civic citizenship does the opposite.

 We sorted the papers into three groups reflecting civic traditions in American history that show how we can be united: 

• Civic development, exploring methods and practices through which citizens grow in responsibility and maturity, as John Saunders puts it in his essay. Mature citizens become stewards, as described by Komal Razvi and her co-authors in “Courageous Stewards Rising.” Civic honor, invoked by the signers of the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago, needs different values and principles than local reputation in a tempestuous and challenging public world, described by Christy Provines. It draws deeply on religious traditions and humanities fields, as George Handley describes.
   
• Deliberative democracy, giving examples and ideas for citizens developing public judgment about wicked problems that involve value conflicts. In their papers, leaders in deliberation such as April Chatham-Carpenter, Randy Lioz, Jason Bornstein, Vinay Orekondy and others describe the deliberative movement from different vantages and possible ways ahead.
   
• Public work, in which citizens are co-creators of a democratic way of life. The public work framework sees work and workplaces as sites for courageous citizenship and a way to renew the civic identity of local institutions which are formative influences. Robert Ceresa gives the inspiring example of a network of Black women teachers, called Jeanes teachers, who organized communities to build 5,000 “Rosenwald” schools and thousands of libraries in the midst of segregation which were centers of hope, learning, and citizen action. Romy Hϋbler describes how Towson University is preparing “citizen professionals.” Michelle Linford and Matthew Watson recount their initiative to return a more “social” identity and practice to social work. Nancy Kranich, birthmother of the modern civic movement among libraries when she served as president of the American Library Association, tells the story of libraries as civic centers that began with Benjamin Franklin before the nation’s founding.

The papers include many stories from American history, including the essay by Council member Trygve Throntveit, “Civic Courage as an American Political Tradition,” which recounts movements of everyday citizens who worked together to tackle injustices, build communities and advance toward a more perfect union. A short version was published in TIME magazine. Beth Malow and Jim Wilson give an account which shows that moments in American history with a “scarcity” mindset have been polarizing, how an “abundance” mindset changed the public mood.

“We the people” began with the exhilarating sense of an extraordinary shift -- a society of “subjects” to a nation of free and equal self-governing “citizens.” In 2010, scientists at the Library of Congress, after painstaking hyperspectral analysis, discovered stunning evidence of the shift from "subject" to "citizen" in Thomas Jefferson’s thinking. His July 2nd working draft of the Declaration of Independence addressed fellow “subjects”; then Jefferson changed his mind, crossed out “subjects” and replaced it with “citizens.” The change signaled recognition that people of the emerging United States were no longer subjects of a king but “We the People,” creating an emerging democracy. 

The nation’s founding had deep exclusions and injustices as well as hope and promise. “We the People” was sharply limited in definition. Slaves were counted as only three fifths of a person in the Constitution and Blacks, free or enslaved, were denied elemental rights. Women were not full citizens. Poor, landless citizens initially lacked voting rights. But ideals of freedom and equality inspired those left out to create transformative movements for full dignity, equality, and recognition. Again and again these have revitalized our democracy, defined both by public institutions and practice like elections and also as a way of life. 

Will Friedman, a Council member and former president of Public Agenda, the nation’s leading citizen-oriented polling firm, tells the little-known story of an inclusive, pluralist civic populist tradition in America far different than the exclusive and belligerent “populism” cited today. With his co-author Rebecca Trout, Doug Linkhart, president of the National Civic League, describe the venerable “All American Cities Award” program, an award which honors strong civically oriented communities each year – more than 500 since its founding in 1949.

The pledge adapted at the BA Convention in Philadelphia on June 28 recalls the founding line from the Declaration when signers pledged “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.” The convention concluded with a new pledge: "I pledge to be a courageous citizen — to choose curious listening over contempt, to build alongside those with different politics, and to embrace our shared duty to renew America's civic culture."

For all the differences with the nation’s founding there are also similarities with today, when many feel powerless, divided, and worried about the future. A shift from “subject” to “citizen” will involve changes in identity akin to those in our country’s beginning. Recent works like Creating a Nation of Joiners and Democracy Schools by the historian Johann Neem, another member of the Civic Scholars Council, show how learning the identity of “citizen” required an enormous process of learning and citizenship education.  Leaders like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Benjamin Rush stressed such citizen education, and the movement was taken up in communities and largely led by local citizens. 

We have similar challenges today. The Courageous Citizenship papers are resources.

A civic learning movement of free spaces

One way to understand the challenge before us is to look at wellsprings of democratic movements and community building in the US and elsewhere. The historian Sara Evans and I named the concept, free spaces, out of our experiences in the American civil rights movement and found similar learning spaces in every broad, pluralist, future-oriented movement in our history, writing about them in our book, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America. Indeed such spaces were what made movements democratic and pluralist, not reactive and partisan. In the civil rights movement, churches, businesses, schools and many other settings functioned as free spaces, creating opportunities for uncoerced open discussion, civic learning, relationship and sometimes interaction across racial lines. 

These examples illustrate free spaces as settings with relatively equal power relationships. They bring together diverse people in public with opportunities for reciprocal learning, listening, and collective action. They are self-organized. Highlander Folk School, the civil rights organizing center animated by leaders like Septima Clark, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and Dorothy Cotton consciously developed what can be called free spaces, launching a movement of hundreds of citizenship schools across the South. Andy Young, then organizing such schools, later appointed US ambassador to the UN, called them “foundation of the movement.” Myles Horton, Highlander’s director recognized the power of the concept of free spaces and told me it applied to what they were doing. 

Horton and Clark drew inspiration from folk schools and popular libraries in Denmark, at the heart of Scandinavian popular education. Such education transformed poor Nordic societies into flourishing nations. Civic learning continues. In Sweden today, 20 percent of the adult population are involved in study circles every year, another striking example of free spaces. Participants take joint responsibility for determining and attaining their learning objectives. Study circles encourage participants to develop a citizenship orientation. 

Such collaborative, non-coercive learning spaces can play a key role in building democratic culture across societies. Marie Ström, active for twenty-five years as a democracy educator in South Africa and now a local leader in Braver Angels at St. Matthew’s Episcopal church in St. Paul, found the idea was an effective way to name civic learning sites across African countries.

Braver Angels created free spaces from the beginning. David Blankenhorn, founder of the Institute for American Values, had worried about polarization in the US. After the 2016 election, he enlisted David Lapp, a colleague in Ohio, to organize meetings between Trump and Clinton supporters to see whether common ground could be found. They brought in William Doherty, director of the Citizen Professional Center at the University of Minnesota. Doherty drew on experiences as a family therapist in planning the weekend workshop. It was designed to allow participants to “bring their best selves forward, listen to the other person and not just immediately get into an argument, and reflect on their contribution to the problem.” Doherty had developed “public work” approaches to family therapy which stress a different role for professionals– “catalyzing the efforts of lay citizens with experts on tap not on top.” 

Doherty’s workshop design asked people to become aware of themselves in a diverse public space and to recognize the positive dimensions in the other. Participants in the founding workshop —10 Trump supporters and 11 Clinton backers—wrote a closing statement that read, “A number of us on both sides began our meetings convinced that the other side could not be dealt with…We say unanimously that our experiences of talking with rather than at or about each other caused us to abandon our belief.” 

Out of these efforts came Braver Angels with the mission of spreading an ethos and practices of courageous citizenship. Braver Angels’ method of creating free spaces where “reds” and “blues” meet to reflect on themselves in public, listen to others, develop respect, and discover resources for change has many possibilities. For instance, the Braver Angels’ debates “are not defined as a contest in which one side will emerge the victor,” said April Lawson, a founding architect. All are invited to speak: “the janitor, the videographer, or the president of an institution, a polished orator or a shy wallflower.”

Recent work like the Citizen-Led Solutions Initiative has shown how the Braver Angels way can assist residents in local communities working across partisan and other divides to address local problems. Since 2024, the Braver Angels “Citizen Commission on Immigration” has shown how the Braver Angels way can be taken to scale. The Commission has convened more than 60 workshops and discussions across the country and several national policy sessions and roundtables. The initiative aims to host events in all 50 states to build local red/blue consensus before publishing a final Report to the Nation. 

The idea of multiple truths in public life about hot button issues on an issue as charged as immigration is hard for many to acknowledge, but the Commission showed it is possible. Indeed, Stitzlein in her piece on paradigms of citizenship, uses the Commission’s work as an example of developing a sense of “civic” citizenship.

Non-coercive, democratic learning experiences were once widespread in public life.  I used Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s autobiography with my students at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. His father (HHH the first) created a civic center in the town of Doland, South Dakota, in his drug store from 1915 to 1931. One of five Democrats in a town of 600 Republicans, the senior Humphrey was elected mayor, but he saw his most important achievement as building a vibrant civic culture. “In his store there was eager talk about politics, town affairs, and religion,” Humphrey wrote in his autobiography. “I’ve listened to some of the great debates of our time, but have seldom heard better discussions of basic issues than I did as a boy standing behind the soda fountain.” 

Braver Angels shows that it is possible to create free spaces today. I see potential for the organization and its partners catalyzing an extraordinary civic learning movement that significantly transforms today’s public culture of division and fear. 

The papers in the courageous citizenship library can be resources. I invite readers to think of ways they might be used, prompting study groups, discussions, forums, discovery of local civic history, celebrations of everyday courageous citizens, publicity for examples of citizen-led solutions. The possibilities go on and on. 

This publication marks a beginning.

Go to the Courageous Citizenship Papers

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