What Is Unity?
Tradition often trumps reason and experience in a search for unity.
That’s why America is so messed up right now. People stick with what they know.
America is 350 million people sticking to what they know, and what they know comes from a thousand different places.
Even if they outwardly appear to extend olive branches, people are what they are. And transcending that is hard work.
Not to get corny, though, it’s also why America has so much potential, even with all the fighting.
The answer is finding a unity of Creed.
What Is Creedal Unity?
Nations are bound by regulations that stem from creeds. If there’s any disparity in creed, the regulation must account for that.
Today, America appears a disparate cluster of creeds that regulates itself based on those differences. This constitutes a sort of tip-toeing around items that various cultures identify as “sacred”, which often differs between cultures.
In social life, when we meet someone who looks or thinks differently than we do, we do our best to avoid speaking of those differences. Our laws do this as well — or, they once did, e.g. “colorblindness”, “anti-discrimination laws”.
Unfortunately, regulation around creeds cannot sustain itself. We need regulation upon a creed. As the Judeo-Christians would have it, you don’t want to build your house on the sand.
Even those who oppose historic creeds are innately aware of their need for one. Without creed, you might pursue a secular, generic peace, which is also a creed.
The difference in a secular creed, though, is that it does not make a positive claim for unity; the claim is negative. It says, “You stay there, I’ll stay here.”
What Modern American considers “peace” is the space between. Thus, a negative creed is no creed at all, but an “anti-creed.”
Problems of the Anti-Creed
America has managed to create a culture out of its disparities, which has culminated in today’s celebration of diversity, race and gender quotas, the march toward a perfectly tan, mixed-race human population.
The culture could be summed up as “Hollywood”. We have a canon of saints lining Hollywood Boulevard. We have iconic songs and films forming the “worship” of this creed that celebrates deviance.
The problem with this creed, however, is its novelty.
Hollywood is fueled by novelty. Novelty is the rock on which the anti-creed is built. And it seems the only thing holding America together: we can all be distracted from our differences.
We are individuals united in distraction rather than love.
We imagine the only other option is unity by skin color or geography. But I believe humans have more in common than that.
And here we get to why the American culture is so ripe for becoming unified in love.
A Prayer for Spiritual Unity
There would be hope of overcoming discrepancies if America could agree it was founded on a creedal basis.
The Founding Fathers were different types of Christians — some of them not. Despite these differences, they were able to unveil “certain inalienable rights” that humans had and label them “self-evident.”
If we pride ourselves on being a nation of sovereign individuals, we might pursue truth and unity in our hearts, not in appearances, in books, or on social media.
As far as I know, Christianity is the only creed sounding the phrase, “neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free” in promotion of “oneness”. This idea is already built into the ethos of America, but something has not quite crystalized.
It’s possible that many today still assume that America is a set of propositions, the Bill of Rights and not the people they represent. But a set of propositions is as sandy as a set of disparate cultures.
To be knit together by our hearts, positively in love with each other — not indifferent, stale — we need a tangible rock.
We need to find the church.