This bloody week, like too many bloody weeks before it, we face the dread that Americans are descending into a state of deepening, unresolved conflict, and wonder how we can pull back from it.  It is entirely appropriate to line the streets in condemnation of presidential hate speech.  But we can do more.  We can cut our consumption of fear and ditch the word “they”.

The focus on Trump as one driver of our polarized society is readily understandable.  The president has positioned himself as a cyclone at the center of our politics, spinning off epithets and labeling opponents with heedless force, in an obvious – and highly successful – electoral strategy of divide and conquer.  We know from social science that fear makes people more conservative, so Trump sells fear.

But we should also acknowledge that progressives sell fear too, because for both sides, fear sells so well.  And progressives also sell division, both for honest reasons and for cynical ones.  As to the former, by ideology and by custom, progressives have practiced the politics of difference, as a way of honoring and making space for the diversity of human experience.  But now that Trump is successfully portraying this as the politics of division, and using it as a point of leverage to unify his own base, progressives have defended themselves by ramping up efforts to stereotype Trump’s cultural center and identifying religious conservatives with their racist fringe, in order to magnify the threat from the right.

How can this dynamic be de-escalated?  How can a broad array of Americans reclaim the discourse of democracy?

First, we have to start taking the belief systems of Trump’s base seriously, to understand what unites them.  According to Pew, fully half of Trump’s supporters call themselves “highly religious.” The Biblical worldview that God created Man in His image, that Woman was created from Man, and that Earth is God’s creation for Man’s bounty, is deeply and honestly held by millions of Americans.  It also has profound political ramifications.  One is that men and women are intrinsically different creatures.  Another is that the planet does not have an existence independent from the connection between God and Man.  From these precepts flow other, essentially political, conclusions.  One is that men are intrinsically prone to sinful behavior, for which they must be periodically punished, and more often forgiven, but it is utterly unrealistic to think that men can ever be fundamentally changed.  Another is that the planet’s degraded condition is fundamentally God’s will, and if the planet is to be consumed in fire, then that is a sign that the Apocalypse is at hand.  Polls indicate most evangelicals hold such “End Times” beliefs.

Opposed to this is the strictly scientific worldview, sometimes identified as atheism, which accounts for up to 25% of Americans, according to Gallup. It holds that humans are a biological species of animals on a planet that came into being by the evolutionary process of natural selection, that our genders are one of our many traits, and that we inhabit a planet which is alive insofar as it is a vast interconnected web of living things of which we are one small, but increasingly troublesome, part.  Among the political implications of these beliefs are that gender is not subject to political fiat, and that the moral claims of the other life forms on the planet, both now and in future generations, vastly outweigh any human claim  to short-term enjoyment of planetary resources.

In between these two is the ecumenical worldview, informed by both scientific knowledge and religious belief, and characterized by humility in the face of the mysteries of that which we do not understand; by the experience of a divine presence that science cannot explain, but the broadminded intelligence that accepts and engages with scientific inquiry and discovery.  This view swallows the biological pill that we’re animals, but chases it down with the moral liquor that we also possess souls.  It speaks from various demoninations, various faiths.  The political implications of these beliefs can be all over the map, depending on how that mixture goes down for each of us.

This spectrum of belief, and its corresponding political hues, have populated our country since at least the Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925, which tested the teaching of evolution in schools.  We will not ever dismantle it, any more than the Sunni will eradicate the Shia or the Bosnians will exterminate the Serbs. We should stop trying.  For better or worse, this is the American political family, the “pluribus” from which we must make an “unum” if our democracy is to survive.

What is new about our current political moment is that our president has encouraged – and many of the rest of us have succumbed to – an addictive cycle of fear, igniting dark impulses and awakening latent tendencies that cut across the spectrum described above, tearing old scars of race, gender and national origin into open wounds, and increasingly, open violence.  This confounding overlay turns fear into terror, and risks pushing polarization into war.

The antidote is to remember bravely who we are.   George Washington wrote that the first principle of democracy is “that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately.”   In every one of our spiritual traditions described above is a common belief in the equal worth, dignity, divinity, or salvation – depending on the vocabulary each group might choose – of the individual person.  Rising from that bedrock of belief is the edifice of personal independence which differentiates America from other nations and attracts immigrants to our shores.  When conservatives call for the rights of religious freedom, and progressives champion the rights of gender diversity, aren’t they both proclaiming the basic rights of individuals to exercise liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

FDR, famous for the phrase “the only thing to fear is fear itself,” confronted a racist threat far more powerful than anything we face today.  His last public speech, undelivered because he died before he could speak it, contained the following:

“Today we are faced with the pre-eminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships – the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together, in the same world, at peace.  The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.  Let us move forward with a strong and active faith.”

A monumental task — far greater than anything we would conceive today — which he knew would require both the “science of human relationships” and “strong and active faith.”  What FDR had no use for is the word “they.”