Chapter 9: Finding Common Ground in Uncertainty

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This episode is about coalition—and I want to be honest, right at the start, about something difficult. The people whose manufactured certainty has been weaponized against my son are not, on the whole, people I find easy to approach with generosity. I am not writing this from a sense of serene magnanimity. I’m writing it with the practical awareness that we won’t find a solution unless we find common ground.

A faith coalition is essential to finding that common ground. I’m not asking religious people to leave their convictions at the door. I’m asking them to do what the best thinkers in every tradition have understood is required: to offer their neighbors public reasons their neighbors can actually assess. I draw on John Courtney Murray and Reinhold Niebuhr, and on the prophetic tradition—the Black churches, the affirming congregations, the synagogues—that manufactured certainty tends to erase.

I tell the story of difficult community conversations in Saline, Michigan, and of what worked and what didn’t. Leading with the argument doesn’t work—it triggers a threat response. Leading with the relationship does, because when someone already cares about you, the evidence of your humanity doesn’t have to argue its way past the amygdala. It’s already in.

And I get concrete. In 2017, my hometown’s school district found language that could hold more of the community than the language of culture war could—two principles almost no parent could reject: the safety of every child, and the dignity of every student. That is what common ground looks like. Not agreement—coexistence under shared principles.