Heidi Burgess talks to Terry Kyllo about Paths to Understanding Between all People

Heidi Burgess:  Hi, this is Heidi Burgess, and I'm here today with Terry Kyllo, who is the Executive Director of a nonprofit called Paths to Understanding, which is located in Washington State. Terry himself tells me he lives on an island called Anacortes, which is about 60 miles, I think you said, north of Seattle. Sounds lovely.

But he works across all of Washington State, and to some extent across the United States, trying to bring people together. I met Terry at the Intermovement Impact Project, where we were among a large group of people who are disturbed with the hyperpolarization and the divisions that are racking this country. And Terry is trying to — and is quite successful — in doing things to minimize that in Washington State.

I should also say he's a Lutheran pastor, which gives him entry into the faith community that many of us secular folks don't have. So I really appreciate it, Terry, that you're spending time to talk with us. And I'd like to ask you to tell us more about your background and what you're doing with Paths to Understanding. 

Terry: Hey, Heidi, thank you so much. And thank you all for all your work to help all of us gather all the thought leaders and all the different strands of work that's happening in the country. So I want to thank you all for the work that you do. So yeah, I'm Terry Kylo. I grew up in eastern Washington state in a town of 300 people, south of Spokane quite a ways, in a wheat farming community. 

One of the most important things that happened in my life was that my mother was diagnosed with MS when I was a little kid — when I was about three and a half. And I watched how that community responded to my mother's illness and also to my family's loss of a farm because mechanization was having a huge impact on farming communities and still is, just like it has had in the manufacturing communities across the country. And I watched kind of the status-keeping of our family and kind of change and how people were sort of afraid to hang out with us because they weren't sure if multiple sclerosis was contagious or not. And the loss of the farming family was hard too. My father ended up serving, really wonderfully, as the custodian of the high school, which, of course, is like a surrogate parent to many of the kids in a school. So he had a really wonderful kind of leadership there. 

But that sort of set me off when I left Anacortes, being a little bit attuned to the way status-keeping systems work. But being from a small town, I really had a lot to learn about the larger world. And I just began to notice, more and more, how our nation sort of has two visions about how we believe that all people are created equal. And the way I talk about it today is that we believe that some people aren't people. 

I went to Pacific Lutheran University, to Lutheran Seminary in Chicago in Hyde Park, where I got to meet a ton of interesting people. That was the most ethnically and culturally diverse neighborhood in the country at the time. And so going to the grocery store was this beautiful, wonderful experience. You'd run into all kinds of people.  And then I did parish ministry for many years in the Lutheran Church, and I've also served in the Episcopal Church. 

But then about 12 years ago, the treasurer of my congregation, about 40 miles away from here, invited me to lunch because he liked the chicken-fried steak at a restaurant that was owned and run by Muslims. And I struck up a wonderful relationship with these Muslims and got to know them more. We started to do some interfaith conversations about the environment and about the economy with some other Muslim leaders and a Buddhist. 

And then one day I got a call from Oak Harbor, Washington, which is where there's a Navy base. Some of the people there had been hearing about my work with this interfaith conversation, and they were constantly aware how folk who had experienced the conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq felt about American Muslims and how kind of dehumanizing that language was. And so they invited myself and a Muslim to go to Oak Harbor.

About 90 people showed up at the event. I didn't really know what I was doing, but my Muslim friend was very good at it. But what I saw from that stage really scared me, Heidi. And this is like in 2014, starting 2015. I saw about 40% of that crowd really angry and scared of my Muslim friend, without knowing anything about him personally.

I remember as I was watching that, I was sitting up on the stage and I had this really odd memory because back in seminary in Chicago, in our history of Lutheranism course,  we learned about the role that Lutheranism played in anti-Semitism in Germany. The Lutheran clergy did not know their Jewish neighbors, didn't hang out with them, didn't mix the communities together, and often were in denial about what was happening to our Jewish neighbors. And while some resisted and were killed immediately by the Nazis, many just did nothing. And that was really powerful for me.

So, as we went downstairs to the cafeteria that day, after the class in seminary in Chicago, I remember saying to my classmates that if I saw something like that happen in my day, I don't want to be one of the quiet ones. And there I was sitting on a little stage in a library with about 90 people and seeing that exact thing happening. And of course, it was happening. It's been happening since our country was founded, right?

Our indigenous neighbors and African-Americans and many other groups have experienced this kind of dehumanization. But what I learned was that American Muslims were the target of about a $40 million-a-year hate industry.  Systematically dehumanizing them. 

So we did more events. And then finally, in 2015, after about five of these events, we did a bit of a larger one in a town called Linwood, north of Seattle. And in between announcing it and it happening, two things happened. The San Bernardino attack happened, a terrorist event. And then a candidate for president, Donald Trump, held up a piece of paper from the Center for Security Policy, which is an anti-Muslim hate group, claiming that most Muslims were in favor of violence when exactly the opposite is true. And so, instead of having 100 nice Lutherans and Methodists and Presbyterians and Unitarians and a few other folks show up to our event, we had 450 people come. We had police there to help provide security, and we had news media.

The next morning, I got about five or six emails from clergy, from Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopalian, and other traditions saying, "Would you hold an event like that at our church because we want to do our part?" And I got so busy doing that work, I couldn't keep up with my health, my family, and the church anymore.

So in 2016, after leading about 10 events around Western Washington to give Muslim voices space in which to speak and to counter some of the dehumanization with some relationships and knowledge, I realized that I needed to quit full-time ministry in the church and do this work.

So I left parish ministry in the summer of 2016, before the election, and I didn't have much money to do it, but I felt like it was something that I had to do. And my family did too. And so did the bishops and the other clergy that I consulted. I consulted pretty widely. \During that period of time, Heidi, I did about 100 public events around the state.

I've spoken during that time to about 300 organizations around the state — all kinds of different organizations. I also did trainings for clergy with the Shoulder-to Shoulder Project. But all the time, doing this work, I was having conversations with all kinds of people: atheists to Zoroastrian, quite literally. I was having conversations with Antifa folks that were gravitating to that movement. Proud Boys and Three Percenters, and suburban, urban, and rural people.

I went home and told my congregation what I was doing. And they weren't so sure that I was doing the right thing, because all they hear about is negative news about American Muslims. But I kept thinking more and more, and reading from a lot of scholars about why is it that we are we so susceptible right now to dehumanizing narratives about each other, about different communities? What is it that turned that $40 million a year— which nationally is not that much money — into something that truly had impact in terms of generating violence toward our American Muslim neighbors? 

Because what I felt in my gut at that time, and I can say it better now, but I felt it very much at the time,  that our country was coming apart. And the purpose of that kind of dehumanization was to create violence against the community morally. And that kind of dehumanization doesn't just stay with one group, obviously. It continues to pick new targets, continues to pick up steam, and it creates a societal dynamic that can lead to a society's dissolution.

And I really felt like the church could play a role in preventing that. I wanted to lead within the faith communities to try to do something about that, to try to act early enough, unlike happened in Germany in the 1930s, to act early enough and comprehensively enough to shift the outcome and to see that we don't end up in that same place. 

And so that's kind of how I got started into this work.

Heidi: I can hear my Jewish friends in my mind saying, "Okay, fine, but what about Arab attacks on Jews, such as what we just saw with the Michigan attack?" [The week before our discussion, a Lebanese man drove a truck into a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, which caught on fire, causing massive damage, although only one person was injured, other than the many law enforcement officers who had to be treated for smoke inhalation.]

Terry: Sure, of course. Part of the way that dehumanization works is first, there's multiple groups are proposed as being threats to other groups. And then there's a kind of collective blame that gets applied to the whole group for the actions of a few. And then as we think about it, it depends on your scale, different scholars kind of do it differently. But then next comes dehumanizing language after the collective blame that compares individuals to animals or bugs or diseases or cancers. And then eventually comes the logic that we have to act now, even outside of our normal moral boundaries, to protect our community, to have a brighter future.

And so what we always want to be clear about, is that even though at that time, a lot of the money was going into anti-Muslim bigotry and dehumanization, that that was amplifying a dynamic that would then later impact other communities. And we know that dynamic was going to impact the Jewish community. In fact, rabbis who we widely consulted with and worked with would walk up to me afterward and say, "You're countering anti-Semitism too, aren't you?" Well, of course, because not only are they part of a similar human dynamic, a societal dynamic, they're also a part of each other historically. Anti-Semitism is kind of the initial dehumanization within the Christian tradition. And later on, we saw that same kind of logic, those same kinds of narratives, about Muslims as well.

The example I like to use, Heidi, is that about 10 years ago, we saw Dylan Roof go into the Mother Emmanuel Church and kill nine people. And I have spoken to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of groups, and I often ask this question, "What religion was Dylan Roof?" And most of the time, nobody knows. And so they're shocked to find out that Dylan Roof, for a while, attended a Lutheran Sunday school.  I point out that if Dylan Roof had been Jewish or Muslim or Sikh or Hindu or some other tradition, we would know his religion. But we discount it, because we kind of know Christians. And yes, if a Christian does something bad, we don't typically blame the whole group for their behavior.

I tell people that, " Hey, I've never been called a radical Lutheranist because of Dylan Roof." His was a terrible, terrible behavior and a heinous act of violence. And we never excuse violence. But we also want to avoid collective blame. And the same thing could be said today with conflict in the Middle East taking place. We don't want to blame our Jewish neighbors for the actions of the Jewish nation-state, for instance, for the state of Israel. And the same thing — we don't want to blame all Shia Muslims for the actions of Iran. 

We try to help people understand that there are 49 majority Muslim countries which have at least four or five major traditions among them and have probably hundreds of subcultures of Muslims. And we like to point out that we wouldn't like it if we're part of a group and some member of our group does some terrible thing. We wouldn't want collective blame for ourselves. And so let's not apply that to each other. However, it is true that this dynamic of dehumanization,  is not just toward Muslims and Jews. I would say today that we have a 360-degree dehumanization taking place.

It impacts different communities differently depending on the ancientness of that bigotry, but also depending on the power of the different communities. It impacts them differently. But what I've realized is that nearly every group that we could name that I named earlier, but we could go on for many minutes talking about different groups.

When I talk to people, what I hear is that every single group feels alone, feels slandered and dehumanized, and feels vulnerable. And that's the terrible situation that we're in at this moment. And so how we're going to respond to that is a really important question.  I think what people are experiencing, Heidi, is the feeling  that everybody else is abandoning the social contract of love and respect for your neighbor.

And of course, we experience that not only because of historical differences between different communities, but we also experience it because we don't know each other. Because groups are isolated and in the space between groups, leaders, public messages, sometimes the media, and almost always, social media are trying to tell us that the other groups are a threat to us. And so we all back up another step to protect ourselves. And then we see other people backing up a step to protect themselves. And that terrible cycle continues.

We always condemn violence. We always try to remember not to apply collective blame to an entire group.

Heidi:  I want to follow up in a minute about the fact that everyone — and I find this very much consistent with my experience and knowledge ——that everyone's feeling threatened. Everyone's feeling alone. I do want to go there. But first,  I'd like to hear more details about what you do, or have done, in all of these meetings where you bring Muslims into an initially hostile crowd or worried crowd, at least. 

Terry: Yeah. About 20% of the time, we had to have security. And today, we have to have security every time we do anything like this — at great cost, really. 

But what we really try to do is to create an event where there'd be myself and another Muslim speaker. We would choose which one of us goes first, and we do Q&A with the hard questions. And the narrative we would use is that we're divided, we're lonely, we're isolated, but we are better together. My Muslim partner and I were very, very conscious of the kind of public narrative that we're speaking about, kind of trying to draw a choice between several different futures. One is where we're more suspicious of each other and where the dynamic of suspicion and dehumanization lead to more violence between communities. The other is the kind of future where we get to know each other, where we respect each other's human rights, we stand up for each other, and in which we build a future in which we build a stronger union together.

I would tell a story about my own journey and my continuing journey through anti-Muslim bigotry and other bigotries. And I would talk about how much it has helped to heal and to shape my life that I've been able to be in conversation with people in so many different communities. And that each of them have offered me gifts for my own life. And I talked about some of the challenges within United States history and Christian history, but then draw lessons from that about how we can live together. 

But over time, we began to realize that as helpful as those speeches were, and as carefully constructed as they were to offer a positive vision together, we needed more.  We did see people change during those speeches. You could see the crowd — like one time in the tri-cities in Washington State, the security people said, "There's going to be a problem here." But halfway through our speeches, like they were looking around and just giving me thumbs up, because we would see the tension go down. Because what the people expected, especially those that were more prone to fear or hatred or anger at American Muslims, is they expected us to call them racists. They expected us to talk badly about Christians or other people. And we would see them walk out kind of confused, because we only really drew a vision of a positive future where everyone gets to be who they are and gets to express their tradition as part of a larger community and that we don't have to live this way. But what we realized over time was that we needed something more, that there was another methodology besides the big speech that was really needed. So we began to lean in more toward conversation around tables. 

And then COVID happened. For all of us, right? And so I sat here on Zoom and spoke to people in person as well. And I began to ask three questions. What's happening to our society? Why does that happen to people? What's the human nature underneath it? And then what do we do? What's your tradition offer as a response when societies get to this place?  Do you have a treasure that you can offer the rest of society? And what I heard there really began to shape the work that Paths to Understanding is now doing. 

People said that we're alone. We're isolated. We're dehumanizing each other. There's power imbalances. We've got the history of the United States. But to a large degree, our sense of in-group loyalty and the part of us that understands that our in-group, whatever that is, is key to our survival. There's this notion that our in-groups are under threat. And then focusing on the question, well, what do we do about that then?

It was a Zen Buddhist from Seattle, Genjio Marinello, who said it best, as Buddhists often do. They're so precise in their tradition and so efficient in the way that they say things. And poetic. He said, "Terry, I think we need to sit around tables, maybe eat some food, look into each other's eyes, and recognize the human being there. Number two, we need to do something positive for the community together." So we can see that the other groups actually are willing to spend a day and spend their energy for the larger community. And then third, we need to build events where we can honor each other in public.

So during COVID, we began to develop a program called Let's Go Together, where we bring people of different cultures, traditions, life circumstances, economic situations, identities, ages, and locations like suburban, urban, rural, together to do these three events, to eat and share stories, do a service project, and then to do a public event where participants share why from their tradition or their experience, they're committed to our common humanity.

We're doing that program here in Skagit County, and we've had about 220 people come together over three years from 40-plus communities. And so we've kind of moved from being more of an interfaith organization to a group-to-group organization. We don't care what the group is. So we go to the organization that works with, say, for instance, formerly incarcerated people, or folk that are Spanish-speaking, or Mexican-speaking, or we go to those organizations, and we ask them to send people to these events. We go to churches, mosques, and temples as well. And we end up with a really interesting group of people who normally would not come together. And then what begins to happen is they start hanging out with each other because, of course, they get to know each other over these three events, and they've shared phone numbers, and they go out to coffee and tea. And so we've seen a Muslim and a Lutheran female pastor having coffee or having food at the local McDonald's.

This last weekend, we saw the first interfaith Iftar in Skagit County's history. [Iftar is the evening meal eaten by Muslims to break their daily fast at sunset during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.] And who showed up at that event? We had indigenous elders show up. We had Christians show up. We even had some conservative Christians show up. We had formerly incarcerated people show up. We had people from the Spanish-speaking community show up. We had Catholics and Mormons. It was incredible. The people that came to that thing because the Muslims got to know a ton of people in this process. And in fact, the Muslim leader, a young man named Laith, who is an incredible human being, he went across the street to an evangelical church that had told us "no, they don't want to participate." And he went to pray with them on a Sunday morning. And they were so impressed by his courage to come across the street and pray with them, that they are now sending a few people tentatively to Let's Go Together. So we're doing that process, and it's really powerful, but that also takes a ton of work. Three events is a lot of work. 

So we came up with another thing called the Potluck Project, which is a toolkit with seven different sets of questions that helps people just gather neighbors together over human questions. And our methodology, we've really thought this through as best we can, to avoid the problem that, when random people come together to do bridge-building work, when they go back to their in-group, it actually creates a problem. I've experienced this myself. I got scolded by my home church for hanging out with Muslims, right? I've been scolded many times. I've been told I'm a traitor to God, Jesus, and the country, a ton of times.

What happens is an individual goes out, has a meeting with some group that's not trusted, they come back to their in-group, and they get told, "Hey, you've got to stop doing that." And actually, the in-group/out-group barriers get bigger. They rise. To avoid this, we only work with groups that have agreed to come together. So when the individuals go back, they can tell the story because their community has authorized it. And then in-group, out-group boundaries tend to come down. And then these random things happen, where people reach out to folk, and you create this dynamic where people are starting to come in who initially didn't want to. 

And when we get them together, we don't ask them to be third-level theological or intercultural diplomats. And that's the biggest problem with, I think, some interfaith conversations, is that we get focused on our differences. We get focused on our traditions. I'll show you my Christmas if you show me your Ramadan. It's just too much. And it tends to emphasize the differences, even though we don't mean it to. And so we only ask people human questions like, "What was your favorite food growing up? Who made it? And why is that important to you?" And we have seen people go from not liking each other around the table or being very hesitant to that food question, among others, it just opens people up and they get to see into the family. They get to see that little grin on someone's face when they talk about their grandma making whatever their grandma made. And we've seen people like make these deep connections and then start actually living that out in the broader community. 

And we encourage the groups then to say, "Hey, if you're doing something cool, if you're giving backpacks away to the middle school kids, well, go show up at their event. Don't put your name badge on. Just show up and help break down boxes or guide traffic or whatever it is that's needed to happen. And so we've seen communities starting to cooperate with each other. And then those stories become contagious because what Steve Bannon wants to do and what some of these folk want to do in our country right now is they want to tell us that cultural difference means that we have to either become a pecking order society or we have to send people with cultural differences out. That's what they're doing. And the reality is, that human beings, since we've been human, have thrived and survived because of cooperation within groups. But we've also thrived and survived because of cooperation between groups.

We've been doing this since we've been human. And so we have to generate this sort of dynamic in a community that's been totally segregated from each other. We had one of our formerly incarcerated gentlemen, from a  Spanish-speaking family, he said, "Hey, we're totally segregated in this county. We drive by each other, but we don't know each other." And so these kind of events create a kind of a dynamic where people begin to tell the story, that we can thrive together, that we can be in community with each other, and that the other folk in our area haven't given up on the social contract. They just haven't given up on it. And it's such a relief for people when they begin to see that that it generates a lot of emotion, but it also generates a lot of energy.

Heidi: So this all sounds really good. But the question I have for you, and I ask this of a lot of people, is how do you scale this up? Because it's all based on interpersonal connections, making relationships with people and that only goes so far. And I think you and I agree that this country is in heap load trouble right now.

Terry: Yes. Absolutely. 

Heidi: And we've got to do something fast to try to turn this around. How can we scale this? 

Terry: So part of what's been an amazing thing for me to be a part of the Intermovement Impact Project that Walt Roberts has put together, bringing a whole bunch of nationwide organizations together. In that you begin to see that there are people working at it all over the country, but there is also a tremendous amount of untapped potential. There are, in my estimation, about 400,000 meeting spaces in the country. About 280,000 of those are churches, mosques, temples, philosophy clubs, that sort of thing. 

And within all those traditions, there are teachings about knowing and loving your neighbors. And so, what we're trying to do right now at Paths to Understanding with a lot of national partners, and there's just a ton of them out there, but Braver Faith, Interfaith America, the Interfaith Alliance, there's just so many organizations out there, the Parliament of the World's Religions. Also with the local bishops in the Pacific Northwest, I just met with them a month ago and shared with them some of this vision that we all share with each other at the Intermovement Impact Project forums, the Thriving Together forums across the nation.

Part of what we're trying to do is to help them see that churches, mosques and temples, nonprofits, service clubs, that we have actually the infrastructure we need to bring Americans together. And we also have the know-how that we need. We have visions, we have frameworks, we have toolkits, and we have learning communities nationally that can help local and regional leaders to begin to find the tools that they need to do their part of the work.

That's why we made the Potluck Project into a toolkit that is free. Just download it. Part of that toolkit are links to other tools. 

Heidi: Let me stop you right there for a minute.  How do people get it? What's the URL? 

Terry: If you go to  pathstounderstanding.org and you go under Get Involved, you'll see the Potluck project as one of the tabs underneath that. And all you got to do is click on a link to register. We do ask for your email. We won't spam you. But what we will do is give you updates when we update the toolkit, and we'll give you updates for webinars, like for instance, to train people how to do table facilitation. We have a group in Washington, D.C. right now of about 20 people that are planning potlucks all across Washington, D.C. area. We've had about 400 downloads of the Potluck Project Toolkit.

We have a group we met with this morning that wants to create the largest potluck in the world ever in the Seattle area sometime this fall. Just yesterday morning, I was speaking at a conference of the Inovia Foundation in Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho. And we gave them the toolkit. We showed them an example of how to do it during breakfast. They had 400 people in the room for the counties in very eastern Washington and northern Idaho. And they had people in communities across those counties, towns of 300 people, even just like my hometown. I played basketball in some of those hometowns, when I was a kid. And they are gathering neighbors together to help them get to know each other.

They're working on what they love about their community. They're working on what needs to be better. They're working with their local elected leaders to address those issues. So what I would say is one of the biggest problems that we have right now, Heidi, is not only scaling, because I think we need scaling. We need the churches, mosques, temples, nonprofits, and service clubs to do the things that they can do, whatever that happens to be, to bring their neighbors together.

But I think the other scaling problem is that we're failing to see the scale of what's already happening. 

Heidi: I totally agree. 

And when I was in that room yesterday, talking about the Potluck Project and how important it was for us to come together and get to know each other as human beings, not along the skirmish lines of red and blue, but just human beings that love our community, love our neighbors, and want to make things better. I could feel up there behind the microphone, I could feel that they all felt the same way that you and I do, that there is something desperately wrong about the way we're living together. That we've spent 60 years isolating as individuals. We've spent 60 years becoming more separate as in-groups, whatever those groups are, and that it's gone too far.

What I asked them at the end is I said, do we want to live like this? Do you all want to live like this? Anxious about each other, untrusting, not knowing what neighboring groups are around, and with a constitution that's been hacked and an economy that's not working for everyone, do we want to live like this? And the crowd just came out and said, "No!" 

And then last night, I was at an interfaith meeting — I spoke at an interfaith gathering in Olympia. So I had to travel across the state. And they've been doing great work for years, bringing their neighbors together. And they were so excited to hear about the work that's happening across the state. 

So one of the challenges we have, and this is part of the reason why your podcast and all your other work is so important, is because we're just not seeing all the energy that's out there.

And the last thing I'll say about that is I think Americans and maybe human beings in general, but especially American culture, we're pretty good at ignoring problems until it's almost right too late. But once we get our head wrapped around the fact that we got a problem, we will get busy. And I am feeling, Heidi, more and more, that people are getting busy. When we talk to the bishops about this bridge-block-build model that we talk about all the time, we have got to bring people together. We've got to stand up for each other's rights. We've got to block. We also need to build a participatory democracy for the future. When I shared that with the bishops, they were excited. And one of them said, "If we're not about this, then why are we here?" And they promised to get us connected to other bishops, to other leaders, and to national leaders within the faith communities. Because everybody wants to do their part.

And I think that this movement that you all are part of and have been for a long time, the movement that Walt's been part of, the movement of all these nationwide organizations, that there is a vision. There are frameworks, there are tools, there are learning communities. And what we have got to keep doing is sewing all of these different sectors together to help us see that, together, we can really change the base conditions that have made our current situation in the United States possible.

Heidi: I've heard from a number of people I've talked to lately, and I'm getting a slight undercurrent from you that maybe you think this too, but I'm not sure — which is why I'm asking — that all of this works pretty well if you're dealing with local people and local issues and keeping red-blue out of it. And the problem that I see with that is that red-blue is tearing us apart. So, unless we can do this on the red-blue divide, I wonder whether the rest of this is going to save us. And I'm really distressed by the number of people, including some who have been bridge builders for years, who are saying, "It's too late for bridge building. "We can't work with the other side. We just have to beat them," which translates into destroy them. And over that dimension, I see people getting so afraid they're turning away. 

Terry: Yeah, I totally hear you. And I've thought about this a lot, Heidi. And this is just my thought, right? First of all, red and blue is an affiliation, maybe an orientation to a certain type of governance or a certain type of policy proposal, a certain culture of policy proposal, maybe. It's a terrible identity. And because we've had 60 years of individuals leaving groups and bowling alone, it has become the primary identity for many Americans. And so part of our approach is not to cast bridge-building in a, "Let's get the reds and the blues together" way. We want to get people together on the basis of other identities that they hold and actually help them to see that those identities are actually better identities for them as human beings. And then as we begin to see each other as humans with multiple identities, then we can begin to work on the political issues that we have, the policy issues that we have. And what I think will happen is that as people see each other as human in these local levels, that there will begin to be, from the ground up, a kind of a transpartisan movement that will let some of those red-blue identities go. And so, I think too often in the bridge-building space, people are thinking of bridge-building as trying to solve a problem of red and blue. That is not going to work, I don't think. Now, there are people that do that really well. I bless them, and let's encourage them to do that. But I think we have to lift up another type of bridge building, which is group-to-group bridge building. And as people begin, and we have seen it happen with people, that as they're invited in, as they see each other as people, their capacity to have non-defensive policy conversation begins to go up.

But here's the place where bridge building can't solve everything. Bridge building between groups of people, between different identities and cultures and economic situations is really vital. But then fairly quickly, you have to move to something else, which is, how are we going to solve our local problems here? And how are we going to slowly scale that up to the county and to the state and so on? And so that's where I think the building part of our 3B model, bridging, blocking, and building is so important.

The work of Braver Angels with the Citizen-led Solutions, the work of Better Together America, with their civic hubs, the work of Paul Zeitz and many other people around the community assembly or the citizen assembly model that we need to scale up from group to group bridge building into those other kind of issues because we have real policy problems, tons of policy problems. So I think, in a way, that some people have become discouraged in the bridge-building movement because they have conceived of it too narrowly. They're amplifying the red and blue as an identity. Because we know from sociology, we know from our own experience as human beings, we know from the scripture too, actually, that all it takes to create two groups is to name two groups.That's all it takes. So if you're starting on that basis, then you already have a skirmish line set up. And I'm not sure that that's the best way to approach this. I think we have to help people find other identities and then begin to rebuild a kind of more of a transpartisan sense of citizenship. And that's why, like Braver Angels says, we need citizen-led solutions. We want to emphasize this kind of common activity of citizenship in collaborating together to build the future we want.

So I get the discouragement, but I also think, Heidi, that everyone that I talk to, when I talk about the idea that people have the sense that other groups are giving up on the social contract of respecting and loving neighbors, the despair around that is so palpable in people. And I feel it myself. But when they get a sense that their neighbor actually cares about them, that their neighbors haven't given up on that, that that has a transformative effect to help us begin to love our neighbors again. 

And that love, like we've seen in Minneapolis, St. Paul, [in response to the ICE crackdown] is not some nice little feeling. It is a powerful, deep, cellular commitment to the well-being of our neighbors. And I believe that what's happened in Minneapolis, St. Paul. The kind of neighborly love that has been so tenacious there is having the effect of helping us fall in love with each other again. I think that some people thought that they could go in there and break the neighborliness of Minneapolis, St.Paul. And they thought they could break it and discredit it. And those folk are tired. They are so tired. But I listened to some pastors there talking about the diverse networks that they're a part of. They're only playing a small part, but they're playing their part. We need everybody to play their part. But they said that the only motivation that kept them going, that kept other people going was love of neighbor. And I believe that that love of neighbor then allows us to do the harder work of the policy conversations down the road. 

We saw it here in Skagit County. People began to know each other. And I told the staff, I said, "Listen for the moment." When they say, "Well, now that we love each other, how can we make things better for each other?" And that's actually when I began to reach out to the InterMovement Impact Project, to you, to all the other folk across the country because PTU doesn't know how to do a civic hub. We have no idea, right? But there's other folks that are working on that. And that's where I think bridge building is underappreciated. Because once we start to love and respect each other again, human beings are freaking fierce. And we will stand up for each other, and we will be there for each other, even when we don't agree about a lot of things. And it's that fundamental love, that deep social contract that's been torn.

And that's why we should not give up on bridge-building. Let's just don't conceive of it as solving one divide. Let's think about it in terms of helping people with different identities seeing each other as human beings. 

Heidi: Do you see —I'm not phrasing this as you, Terry, but more generally than that —the one downside, and it doesn't mean I don't think this should have happened. But I look at the cohesiveness, the nonviolence, the love in Minnesota, Minneapolis. And they're not including in their neighborliness the ICE officers. Should they?

Terry: I want to make a distinction here between roles. And the ICE officers are acting as agents of the federal government. And so I think we need to maintain a distinction between those people as people and those people as agents. And I think that's probably one of the most difficult things to do when we are approaching agents of a particular governmental body. If those ICE agents walked down the road and went into a restaurant as a human being, they wouldn't be ill-received. They might be surprised at how warmly they'd be welcomed. But we're in a media environment where it's very important for those residents of St. Paul and Minneapolis to push back very, very clearly about the bullying, the level of oppression that was and still is happening in Minneapolis, St. Paul. And that may mean responding to those agents of the government in that kind of forceful, nonviolent, but still verbally forceful way. But let's also remember who is placing those ICE agents in that position. It is not the residents of St. Paul and Minneapolis who are doing that. It is a federal government that has a distinct policy saying that those ICE agents have to achieve so many arrests per day in order to meet a quota. And the poor training they've received, the permission that they received from the secretary of that department, from the Vice President and the President that tells them that there are no rules for them. And so let's remember to distinguish between those individuals and the policy that is making those individuals behave in ways that are incredibly detrimental to young kids, to the whole community, and to our nation.

So the ultimate responsibility for ICE belongs with this administration, not with the ICE agents themselves. And partly, the negative response comes because they're not being held to any standard. And so, I think it's a sad thing, and I think we will have to, as a society, do some work with those ICE agents in the future to help them, because they're being traumatized as well. But that's the result of that policy that the Trump administration has put in place. And it's a difficult issue, Heidi. 

Heidi: Yep. And there's a lot of fear on both sides about even talking about it because bridge builders don't want to alienate. Some bridge builders anyway, like us, don't want to alienate 50% of the population that supports Trump. But still, humans have rights, and those rights are clearly being violated. We're in conversation right now with David Eisner, and he's going to be coming up with several newsletter posts for BI. We're going to do one jointly that's looking at the tensions within the bridge-building community. And one of the tensions that he's identified is inclusivity versus protection. And there are many people who are saying that we should include everybody, and that, conceivably, would include ICE agents and those who are saying, "No, we have to protect the vulnerable." And David pulled out a whole bunch of dilemmas that we're going to be exploring. But it's a hard one.

Terry: Well, but let's make some distinctions here that I think are important within the bridge-building movement. And so what I would say is that there are overlapping bridge-building movements in the country. There's not just one. And I think that if we were to have a conversation where we bring people from across the ideological spectrum to talk about the policies that are guiding the actions of ICE agents, we would want to frame that conversation in as neutral a way as possible so that we can get a wide variety of ideological spectrum into a room to talk about it. I think that is one section of the bridge-building movement. And I think that section of the bridge building movement overlaps with several other sections of the bridge-building movement. And I think we can cooperate and we can partner, but we're not all doing the same thing. 

Heidi: You are echoing what David said exactly. 

Terry: Is that right? 

Heidi: His metaphor in the first version of the paper, now he's on to the third and I don't know whether this metaphor is going to continue or not. But he says that we are all driving different vehicles, but each vehicle has a role to play. And they are crashing into each other. 

Terry: Well, sure. That's exactly right. And so like I think the danger that they experience in that work of doing, not just Braver Angels, but anybody doing any kind of work to try to bring people across the ideological spectrum to talk about specific topics, the danger is there is underselling the impact of ICE's behavior and the impact of those policies on communities. Like it would be easy to undersell the impact on communities that have less power than some other communities. It would be easy to undersell that in order to get some folk in the room. I think you may have to do some really careful navigating of that to make that conversation happen.  I think that conversation is important, and we need to honor the work, that kind of a bridge-building work. But there's also blocking work that needs to happen that's going to help to stand up for the rights of people in this country, whether they're citizens or not, and to uphold the basic constitutional rights of all people and also of citizens. And so I think we want to make sure that we are being affirming of folk that are doing blocking work.

We need to also affirm people that are doing other forms of bridge building that may not have to be so careful about some of those things, or may not even bring them up. We tend to say we want to gather people without politics or policy at first. We want to get them to see each other as human beings first. And then as that love begins to grow, then they can begin to do more local or even national policy work. But it's all very tricky.

And we've come apart pretty profoundly in this country. We're very polarized. We're very anxious. We're all kind of coming in hot. And it's really difficult work. But the thing I try to say, including in conversation with David Eisner, is we need to be more appreciative of the different kinds of work that there is to do, and of the people that are doing that work. And I said this to the bishops. Let's teach people in the Christian church, in this instance, that if someone's doing bridge-building work, let's support that. If someone's doing blocking work, let's support that. If someone's starting a transpartisan civic hub, let's support that— because we need a whole-of-society response to a whole-of-society problem right now. And none of us can do all that work, and none of us should try. We should trust each other to do the work that we've each been given to do.

Heidi:  Well, I think that's a beautiful way to put it. David certainly agrees with you. Folks will find out when we finally get these papers out. Not sure when that's going to be. But  I really appreciate your point of view. And I think what you're doing in Washington is really impressive. And I'm delighted to hear that folks can take that and use it other places because that helps with the scale problem. 

Terry: Yes, it does. 

Heidi: And just thank you very much.

Terry: Thank you so much, Heidi, for all your work. 

Heidi: Well, it's fun and it's important. And we got to all keep each other going. 

Terry: Yes, we do. 

Heidi: All right. Thanks very much for being here. 

Terry: Thank you, Heidi.