North American Unitarian Association hosts its first conference at Spokane church with focus on political division from keynote speaker John Wood Jr.

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The Unitarian Universalist Church in Spokane hosted a top voice in political and racial reconciliation as the keynote speaker at the first North American Unitarian Association conference this weekend.

John Wood Jr. is the national ambassador for Braver Angels, a bipartisan grassroots organization focused on bridging the political divide in the United States. He also works with other organizations with a similar focus, including the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism and the 1776 Unites Project.

The North American Unitarian Association was formed last year after a split within the Unitarian Universalist Association, the Rev. Todd Eklof said. In recent years UUA has been disfellowshipping ministers at a high rate, Eklof said. He was among those rejected by the UUA because he published the book, “The Gadfly Papers: Three Inconvenient Essays by One Pesky Minister.”

“The UUA has gone off the rails,” he said. “They’ve become entirely intolerant. It’s just not who we are. We at NAUA are here to help liberal religion thrive.”

Given the circumstances around the birth of the NAUA, it seemed fitting to invite Wood to their first annual conference, Eklof said.

“He really represents something we are about,” Eklof said.

Wood was welcomed enthusiastically by about 150 people in the church sanctuary and on Zoom during his Saturday talk. He said the United States is in a time of intense political passion, where too many people believe the country has to be rescued from their political opponents.

That, in turn, makes it easier for people to feel isolated and alienated, and that much hostility can’t continue indefinitely, he said.

“This is a posture that can’t be sustained in a constitutional republic,” Wood said.

Braver Angels got its start in 2016 as an effort to bridge that political divide and encourage understanding and patience. “Basically, it’s marriage counseling between Republicans and Democrats,” he said.

Having differences in political opinions does not mean we have to be enemies, Wood said. Too often people demonize their opponents instead of focusing on what they have in common. “You have to be willing to do more than talk, you have to be willing to listen,” he said. “Together we can be more perfect if we listen to each other.”

Wood said he has an “interesting” political background, growing up in a California home with a Black Democratic mother and a white Republican father. “I grew up explaining my mother to my father and my father to my mother,” he said.

He considered himself a liberal activist and worked to get Barack Obama elected president. He researched conservatives to learn how the campaign could reach out to them and then came to understand that he identified more as a moderate conservative himself. He would go on to run for the House of Representatives against Rep. Maxine Waters of California, then was selected as the second vice-chairman of the Republican Party of Los Angeles County.

People often have different views because they can experience events differently, Wood said. As an example, Wood talked about his experience during the Rodney King riots, which were not far from his childhood home. His experience of the events was vague because the riots didn’t directly impact him at the time, Wood said. He knew little of what was going on. However, his future wife was a child living in the area at the time of the riots. She smelled the smoke, heard the chaos and lay on her apartment floor in case bullets came in the windows, Wood said. While he and his wife lived through the same event, their different experiences with it would shape their future viewpoints.

Wood took questions from the crowd. One woman asked whether the polarization within the country is based on lies being spread on social media and beyond.

“You have people disagreeing not only about opinions, but on facts,” she said.

Wood said people tend to trust different authorities. Some might not trust Republicans while others might not trust the mainstream media, the federal government or public health officials. Social trust is a prerequisite to a functioning society, he said. “In the absence of trust it does not matter if what CNN is telling you is fact or fiction if you don’t believe CNN in the first place simply because they’re CNN.”

It can be difficult to bridge the partisan gap when people can’t agree on what the facts are, Wood said.

“We live in different empirical universes, really,” he said. “When you get the sense you’re not sharing the same reality, that can lead to not just disinformation, but erosion of trust between people and between people and the government.”

People have to trust each other, but that’s only possible if people talk to each other and try to find common ground, Wood said.

“There are things that are good in American values and American tradition that we need to hold on to,” he said. “We may be able to create social and cultural momentum to create change. I pray to God that we succeed.”

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