How we can better master the culture war

Harwood is president and founder of The Harwood InstituteThis is the latest entry in his series, which is based on the “Enough. Time to build.” Campaign calling on community leaders and active citizens to step forward and build something together.

Earlier this year, Escambia County, Florida, national attention for the banning of over 1,600 booksthe most of any single county in the entire country. If you’ve been following book banning efforts, many of the titles on the list won’t surprise you. But these might surprise you: multiple editions of the dictionary, various encyclopedias, and the Guinness Book of World Records.

In the meantime, less than half of third-graders in Escambia County can read well and several primary schools in the area are under threat of nationalisation due to persistent poor performance. Let me be clear: I believe that the success of young people is not just a matter for schools, but is the responsibility of a whole community.

Saying we want our youth to succeed is easy, but making sure we focus on what’s important to help them succeed is becoming increasingly difficult. And it’s not just in Escambia County. Culture wars over education are spreading throughout California and other states, too.

There are legitimate discussions to be had about the content we present to children. Churches must grapple with these issues. But there is a growing trend in our country today that too many churches are becoming distracted by a series of culture war issues – usually fueled by a small minority – that divide people, diminish hope, and hinder further progress.

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So many community leaders tell me they don’t know how to respond effectively to these culture wars. I often see groups and organizations respond to the loudest voices by trying to match them. They create their own groups to combat existing ones; they raise money to mobilize people; they even weaponize their own agendas. As if you can somehow put out the flames by turning up the heat. The other tendency is for people to withdraw completely, leaving public space to growing divisive forces. The result is that the community is held hostage and unable to move forward.

When I started my citizen election campaign – Enough. Time to build — to Pensacola, the county seat of Escambia County, people there, as across the country, told me they were exhausted by the culture wars. They were frustrated by the lack of progress in education and other important societal issues. They felt stuck and saw no alternative way forward.

My 30+ years of experience in community change proves that there is a better way to immunize communities against culture war. The way forward is for communities to temporarily set culture war issues aside and commit to revisiting them once their community has embarked on a new societal path.

What does that civic journey look like? It starts with agreeing on issues that really matter to people. That means focusing not on “problems” or utopian visions, but on people’s shared aspirations. Then – and this is where I think too many civic initiatives fail today – we need to get moving to do something together on those issues. Action is key. We need to build something together. More talk won’t get us there. Only by building something together can we restore our faith in getting things done and move on to a more hopeful path.

To be clear, building something together doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything. It doesn’t mean we have to like each other, either. But it does mean that – despite our real differences – we have to find things we agree on and can set things in motion that make a real difference in people’s lives. Starting small is key. Starting too big is a recipe for failure. The trick is to scale and spread our efforts over time, provide evidence that positive change is possible, and build increasing momentum.

When we take this civic path, I’ve found that a community has more energy to move forward, avoid distractions, and even recognize that the issues we so often get hung up on are no longer as important. But beware: We can’t just brush aside people’s persistent concerns about the “culture war.” Our job is to put them in a larger context and address them when there is more civic confidence and trust.

When I presented this alternative to a panel of leaders in Pensacola, they felt a new sense of possibility. I didn’t tell them this approach would solve their education problems overnight. But I told them that real, tangible progress could be made. By taking a new path, they could break free from the culture wars and begin to address the real problems that were holding them back.

In this way we can put the future of our communities back on the agenda.