Editor’s note: The centrality of religious freedom to the revelatory nature of America’s founding is why we’ve curated seminal selections on this first freedom in honor of America’s 250th anniversary. These essays highlight the critical role faith played and continues to play in living out the inherent truths of the Declaration of Independence.
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How we live together across differences is at the center of the American experiment. It’s what I call confident pluralism.
The idea became real for me not in theory but in my own family. I grew up in a large, civically engaged household that spanned the political spectrum. In 1992, my father and my aunt ran for office at the same time. My aunt was on the ballot in the Bay Area for the Peace and Freedom Party, on the far left. My father ran for U.S. Senate in Southern California as a Reagan Republican.
My dad was professorial and skinny; he liked to wear a beret and he was always smoking a pipe, the smoke curling around his head. My aunt was a big woman who had a huge belly laugh. They would go back and forth, my dad arguing for market liberties and civic virtues, my aunt arguing for public sector investments in every segment of society and experiments in living. And I was a young person just trying to figure it out. It wasn’t easy because I loved them both. How was I supposed to process these ideas and make sense of them?
Over time, two things became clear.
First, beneath their disagreements, they shared a common purpose: the conviction that empowerment — of individuals, families, communities — was the bedrock of human thriving. Their arguments were not about whether that goal mattered, but about how to achieve it.
Second, their disagreements never threatened their relationship. They argued about ideas, not about each other as human beings. They never broke the bonds of love. They held sacred the dignity of the human being in front of them.
The Declaration of Independence allowed people of differing beliefs, religious and nonreligious, to affirm a shared moral foundation.
Those two, my dad and my aunt, were the first confident pluralists that I truly got to know deeply. They were very clear about what mattered to them. They were ready to engage and advance the cause of their commitment. But in doing so, they always treated each other with respect.
That combination — clarity about one’s own commitments, paired with respect for the dignity of others — is the essence of confident pluralism.
A confident pluralist is somebody who is confident in their own values but also committed to the project of pluralism, meaning the project of self-government for free and equal citizens through constitutional democracy. So, how does one become a confident pluralist? I have a five-step program.
1. Reflection
The first step is to understand what you believe and why. This requires engagement with philosophy, literature, theology — the full range of human inquiry into the good life. What is the good life after all? The fundamental Socratic question, how should I live? Those questions need to be part of our lives.
2. Commitment to institutions
and Nonviolence
Pluralism demands that we resolve our differences through institutions, not force. A commitment to constitutional democracy is, at its core, a commitment to nonviolence — to the idea that outcomes are negotiated, not imposed. Across our country we are seeing increasing numbers of people who are forgetting that. They’re forgetting that the project of free self-government requires seeing institutions as the instruments that we use for negotiating our conflicts and our differences.
3. Commitment to compromise
Commitment to institutions and nonviolence requires recognizing the value of compromise. For many people today, compromise has become a bad word. People think that if you’re going to compromise on something, it means you’re giving something up. You’re giving up core principles. And this isn’t the case. There’s a deeper meaning to compromise.
The Declaration of Independence offers instructive examples. Its language around religion — invoking “nature’s God,” “divine providence” and a “creator” — was deliberately open-ended. It allowed people of differing beliefs, religious and nonreligious, to affirm a shared moral foundation.
When the declaration first lays out the moral foundations of its argument, it invokes the idea of nature’s laws and the laws of nature’s God. Let me pause on that for emphasis. The laws of nature and nature’s God. That phrase is something like a belt-and-suspenders phrase. It was a phrase that embraced those people who were working on independence at that time who were not themselves faithful, who weren’t themselves committed to a deity, but nonetheless, they could agree with the moral foundations on the basis of a commitment to nature’s law.
But those who were faithful had the chance to say that they saw the laws of nature as those of nature’s God. The combination of these two moments in the declaration give us a compromise where everybody then in the Colonies, whether they were faithful or not, regardless of which religion they adhered to, had a way of affirming and connecting to the moral foundations of the text. And working that way, they forged a compromise.
The second major compromise in writing that document was around the phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” In the 18th century, the more common formulation for rights that needed to be invoked was to protect the rights of life, liberty and property. But by the spring of 1776, the concept of property had been closely connected to a defense of enslavement. As a result, it couldn’t be used without signaling that the United States of America would in fact be committed to a defense of enslavement.
But people who were working on the declaration, like John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, were already against enslavement. They didn’t want such a commitment to be anchored in that document.
It was John Adams who led the case, making the argument for happiness as an alternative word. So the phrase life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is an anti-enslavement or an abolitionist moment in the declaration. And indeed, Adams built on that language to help end enslavement in Massachusetts before the end of the Revolutionary War.
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At the same time that moment of compromise emerged in the document, another took place, what we could call the pro-enslavement moment within the declaration.
The first draft had a passage in which the drafters criticized King George for violating the sacred rights of life and liberty of distant people in Africa. In other words, they used exactly the same vocabulary of sacred rights of life and liberty for Africans as they were using for themselves. But Congress edited that passage out.
It went too far for those who were slaveholders at the time. So the compromise in the declaration around enslavement was on the one hand to use life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as an open-ended statement of goals and values, but on the other hand to cut out a statement that positively affirmed the rights of people in Africa.
This was not a good compromise. And the contrast between the two — a good compromise and a bad compromise — is instructive. In that second compromise, it can’t be said that the rights and interests of all who were affected by it were taken into account. The voices of enslaved people played no part in that decision-making.
So the first compromise around religion captured the voices of all those then in the Colonies affected by the choices being made. The second compromise did not capture the voices of all those affected. And in that contrast, I think we can see a difference between good compromise and bad compromise.
A confident pluralist is somebody who, in the public forum of decision-making, is ready to compromise. But when making those compromises, a confident pluralist wants to make sure that everybody who might be affected by the decision has a voice in the process.
The purpose of bringing those voices together is for shared learning, to see whether there’s an alternative path to resolution that might not be visible if you don’t have everybody’s voices in the room together.
4. Listening before speaking
Effective disagreement requires understanding. Too often conflict escalates because people have not actually heard one another.
A simple but powerful practice is to repeat back what you think the other person has said and ask: Is that right? Only once both sides feel understood should the argument begin. By then, the space of disagreement is often narrower — and clearer — than it first appeared.
5. Protecting human dignity
Finally, confident pluralism requires refusing to let human dignity be degraded — either your own or someone else’s.
This is hardest when others act in bad faith or hostility. But responding in kind only deepens the problem. When people attack, they are often failing to live up to their own best selves. Meeting hostility with generosity can, surprisingly often, call those better selves back into view.
A confident pluralist is somebody who is ready to compromise. But when making those compromises, wants everybody who might be affected by the decision to have a voice in the process.
I learned this through experience. After receiving a harsh and accusatory email, I responded with courtesy and openness, inviting the sender to engage with my work. The exchange quickly transformed. The sender apologized. The tone shifted. What began as hostility ended as mutual respect.
This is not always the outcome. But it happens often enough to demonstrate a deeper truth: People are capable of returning to dignity when given the opportunity.
Confident pluralism is not easy. It requires self-knowledge, discipline and restraint. It asks us to hold firmly to our convictions while remaining open to others. It asks us to engage with institutions we may not fully trust, to compromise without surrendering principle, to listen when we would rather argue, and to respond to hostility with generosity.
We live in a world shaped by difference. That difference is not a failure; it is the product of freedom. The task is not to eliminate it but to live with it — to build bonds across it, to negotiate within it, and to preserve the dignity of every person.
The question is not whether this is difficult. It is. The question, as my ancestors understood, is whether it is necessary. It is necessary.
And if it is necessary, then the only question left is how.
This essay is adapted from a forum address at Brigham Young University in March 2024 and appears in the July/August 2026 issue of Deseret Magazine under the headline “E. Pluribus Pluralism.” Learn more about how to subscribe.
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