Blessed Are the Peacemakers

A new book offers practical solutions for aspiring agents of reconciliation.

Image credit: Beck Seamons

Peacemaking is in. 

In his April 2023 General Conference address, President Russell M. Nelson told members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that “true disciples of Jesus Christ are peacemakers,” adding that by “modeling how to manage honest differences of opinion with mutual respect and dignified dialogue,” church members can “literally change the world.” 

Likewise, Utah governor Spencer Cox, chair of the National Governors Association, has recently taken the lead on a Disagree Better campaign, which aims to cure partisan gridlock and interpersonal animus by teaching Americans “a more positive and optimistic way of working through our problems.” 

And Thomas B. Griffith, a retired federal judge who previously served as BYU’s general counsel, has recently insisted in a variety of venues, LDS and otherwise, that “to compromise for the sake of unity is the animating spirit of the Constitution, and it is every bit as vital to its preservation in this moment of toxic political polarization as it was in the summer of 1787.”

All of this to say that David Ostler’s new book, Healing Our Divides: Answering the Savior’s Call to be Peacemakers, which came out in April, is rather timely. Within its pages, Ostler attempts to offer a guide to how we, as members of the church and as American citizens, might begin to operationalize the calls of Nelson, Cox, and Griffith. And he largely succeeds. 

The book is organized around four major themes: the nature of today’s divisions, skills to reduce contention, peacemaking as part of religious discipleship and moral integrity, and skills for having deep and meaningful discussions. 

Ostler notes that our disposition toward disagreement is hardwired into us by way of cognitive biases that sometimes keep us from fully acknowledging the complexity of a given topic. For example, confirmation bias, our tendency to consider only that data which confirms what we already believe, can prevent us from constructing a coherent and persuasive version of counterarguments to our current way of thinking. This in turn might allow us to believe, erroneously, that valid counterarguments simply do not exist. 

Ostler’s discussion of accommodation and assimilation offers further explanation regarding the roots of confirmation bias. Because it takes relatively little mental energy to accept new data that sits comfortably alongside what we already believe, we are predisposed to favor that sort of data (assimilation). On the flip side, we are less likely to accept data that runs counter to what we currently believe because doing so is comparatively laborious (accommodation). Frequently, we simply disregard such data altogether. 

Ostler also draws repeatedly on the metaphor of the elephant and its rider, which the psychologist Jonathan Haidt uses to illustrate the relationship between our conscious and unconscious cognition. The rider, or our conscious cognition, is the ultimate authority, but sometimes the elephant, our subconscious cognition, reacts immediately and forcefully. One route to peacemaking, then, is learning to slow our thinking so that what comes out of our mouth is intentional rather than reflexive.

One critique of Ostler’s book—and it is admittedly a small one—is that his dismissal of identity politics is too sweeping. He defines the term as a process by which “a political group builds cohesiveness by targeting out-groups through vilification,” and goes on to add that identity politics works to “destroy any sympathy for other political groups.” I would argue that at its most basic, identity politics is simply a method of sorting whereby a key aspect of one’s identity, whether it be race, gender, class, or religious affiliation, becomes integral to one’s political engagement.

It need not be predicated on the vilification of those outside the identity group, and can in fact accommodate cooperation with other political groups. Perhaps the example par excellence of identity politics is the American civil rights movement, where Black Americans used boycotts, sit-ins, and marches to successfully challenge centuries of racial discrimination and violence. 

Ultimately, many of Ostler’s prescriptions for peacemaking fall into the category of things that are more or less intuitive but devilishly hard to actually accomplish. The list is long, and includes such basics as asking thoughtful questions of someone with whom you disagree, allowing yourself to acknowledge that you might be wrong, pursuing solutions rather than ideological purity, and understanding conversation as a chance to understand rather than convince.

This is not to say that Ostler’s book is unnecessary; on the contrary, I agree with him wholeheartedly that now more than ever our communities are in need of voices of wisdom, humility, and reconciliation. What I am saying is that simply reading through Ostler’s book, or any of the many other books on conflict resolution that he references, will be insufficient to the task of sustaining our severely weakened social bonds. The practices that he recommends can be absorbed intellectually after one reading, but in order for them to transform our behavior, they have to be practiced repeatedly, mostly unsuccessfully, for something like the span of a life. 

In other words, peacemaking, like any other element of devoted Christian discipleship, is the project of a lifetime—but also one that, given our current polarized state, we would be well advised to start working on immediately.