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In this week’s SojoMail, Adam Russell Taylor describes the realizations he had after writing a book about faith and democracy:
This isn’t what I thought I’d be writing in 2025. Four years ago, after the horror of Jan. 6, I believed our nation had reached a turning point. I thought we would see the floodwaters of the “Make America Great Again” movement start to recede, making way for anew reconstruction of our nation in which the promise of “liberty and justice for all” could finally be made real for all Americans. I hoped we would finally be able to forge long overdue bipartisan solutions to fix our broken immigration system and push through reforms to heal our democracy, including ending gerrymandering, limiting the corrupting influence of money in politics, and restoring the Voting Rights Act. And yet here we are four years later: Despite many good faith efforts to foster dialogue, build bridges, and combat division, our nation seems to have fallen even deeper into the quicksand of toxic polarization and a politics driven by an often-racialized, zero sum, us-versus-them mentality. Real economic stress tied to rising inflation and inequality, anger over immigration, and backlash to protests pushing for racial justice served as powerful wedges in our body politic. But there is one thing I recognized then — and that remains true now — that the majority of Americans still believe in.
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