America Has Never Been One. But It Has Been United.

Before we talk about making America “one” again, we should clarify what we mean by one.

We’ve never been a country of one opinion, one way of life, or one religion. And that’s been our strength in many ways — we value diversity as a blessing, even though it provides us with our greatest challenge as a society.

We chose to embrace diversity — in theory, anyway — because we’ve seen what happens when it goes the other way. Many of our original immigrants (the Puritans and Pilgrims, for instance) were fleeing a place where diversity wasn’t accepted.

In addition to being a diverse society, we’ve also been a divided society, right from the start. America has always had many fault lines because of its rich diversity. What’s held us together, ultimately, is a recognition that we’re stronger together than separately.

We’re like the stripes that form the flag — each separate and distinct, yet overlapping and woven together to form something bigger and grander. In our country, the threads of justice, tolerance, cooperation, compromise, and respect have held us together. That’s what makes us one country.

In times like this, we forget that reality. We fight it. We advance our own agenda at the expense of others. We unravel. We start to pull apart. And it’s nothing new. It’s been going on long before we had a constitution that recognized our interdependence and limited individuals’ rights within the framework of a common good.

There’s been a creative and often ugly tension within our society since its inception. We’ve been divided along so many lines: black and white, free and slave, North and South, national and local, farmer and city, Protestant and Catholic, educated and unschooled, gay and straight, and on and on. There’s been divisions within various groups as well.

That tension is an unavoidable part of what comes with great diversity. Our human nature gets in the way. We feel afraid and threatened by our differences. We want our way of living, our way of thinking to become the norm. Not so long ago, our tension reached the point of a civil war over the inalienable rights that should be guaranteed to all people in our society.

And the struggle continues: African-Americans continue to press for equality. Women still struggle to be taken seriously in leadership. Non-Christians face those who refuse to fully respect their religious beliefs. Gay and transgender people struggle against daily discrimination. And on and on. That struggle is part of the American story, and it ebbs and flows.

We’ve slid into another season in which we've stopped recognizing our diversity as a great gift and have started feeling threatened by it. We’re having yet another tug of war, and the threads are unraveling again. It reminds me of the tumult in the 1960s, when loud and angry voices insisted that segregation must remain the law of the land, women should be kept at home, and war is the solution to our problems.

We got through it, though, and made progress as a nation in many ways. That’s just how it works. Now we’re back in another one of those times, fighting an uncivil war over which values should guide us.

At times like this, it’s good to remember that our founders valued our vast differences and set up a big government of checks and balances that would force us to compromise and cooperate. Government fails — and we fail as a nation — when people go to Washington and statehouses insistant on getting their way, without compromise.

That attitude is an un-American attitude. It goes against the heart of what makes us who we are. It makes us unravel.

How do we sew it all back together? By ignoring the voices that insist on more walls, more stalemate, more divisiveness. Instead, we need to hear the voices of the prophets, the ones in every society who remind us of a better way.

An once we’ve heard their voices, we must share their message and become prophets, too — ones who heal and mend and sew society back together with the threads of justice and tolerance and cooperation and compromise and respect.

“Let us be those creative dissenters,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “who will call our beloved nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humaneness."

We’re all very different, yet part of the same society. It’s on us to find ways to get along and sew it back together.