One America Movement

Faith Leaders and Communities Building a United America

Model and Strategy

One America Movement (OAM) supports faith leaders and faith communities to build a united American society by eliminating toxic polarization. Founded by faith and community leaders after the 2016 election, OAM brings people together across religious, racial, political and cultural divides to build a national, transpartisan movement of Americans who are frustrated with divisive narratives and believe we can do better.

OAM’s work is grounded in the conviction that at the core of our faith traditions lies the answer to toxic polarization – that our religious teachings hold the values and practices that help people and communities transcend division. OAM works to foster a sense of shared identity while still maintaining unique sacred values, and to set positive norms for collaboration within and between divided communities. It does this through two core program areas:

Supporting Faith Leaders

OAM equips evangelical and mainline Christian pastors, rabbis, imams, and other faith and lay leaders to navigate polarization, lead through division, and to speak both to congregations that are politically divided and to those that are politically homogeneous. OAM coordinates two faith-based networks – the Matthew 5:9 Fellowship and the Eilu v’Eilu Fellowship for Leading in Polarized Times – that support Christian and Jewish clergy, respectively, with written resources and self-paced training on the dynamics of division, training events, retreats, conferences, personal support, and connection with other clergy within and across faiths. In 2024 OAM is building out similar fellowships for Muslim leaders and LDS (Mormon) leaders. OAM also makes its tools and resources available more broadly through its Faith Over Division Initiative, which provides content, holds public events and more.

Localized Bridge Building

OAM has geographic hubs in five, mostly small-to-medium sized U.S. cities in places like rural Virginia, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Illinois and Mississippi, where current or historical events make the pressures of polarization especially potent. Led by a dedicated team member who lives in each hub, OAM builds multi-faith and cross-partisan networks of local leaders to work together toward solutions for their community’s pressing challenges. Grassroots, trust-based and relational, these initiatives are intended as a model for what’s possible. OAM brings hub leaders together virtually to learn from each other, and shares lessons from the geographic hubs more broadly via its networks and at The One America Movement National Summit, which will have approximately 200 faith leaders attending in 2024.

A priority for 2024 is to build out both online and in-person “third spaces”. The former includes expanding OAM’s Substack, where people can be exposed to positive news and forward-thinking, values-based commentary. The latter includes the Faith Over Division tour, which will offer a series of events around the country, including events with the Jerusalem Youth Chorus, a choir of is half Israeli and half Palestinian teenagers.

Impact

A key learning from One America Movement’s engagement with neuroscientists is the importance of creating in-group moderates: people who are willing to speak out against their own communities’ – or congregations – worst impulses and to counter what congregants are seeing on social media and cable news. OAM’s work with clergy grew from this insight. Since 2016, several thousand diverse religious leaders and institutions have engaged with OAM in some way. The congregations they lead range from 75 members to mega-churches that have 40,000 congregants on any given Sunday. A second learning was the importance of cross-cutting bridge building, which is the foundation of the Geographic Hub work. Feedback from the initial wave of OAM programs showed that 75% of participants heard views that they do not normally hear; 91% committed to long-term connections with people they met through programming; and 76% reexamined their beliefs and opinions. OAM stands out with its multi-faith approach and the credibility and trust it has gained from right-of-center leaders. These qualities enable OAM to forge meaningful, if sometimes unlikely, connections. Two recent examples among many: OAM connected a group of Jewish lay leaders to a conservative Christian pastor based in Nebraska; and they have built a long-standing relationship between a conservative, Southern Baptist church in West Virginia and a synagogue in Washington DC.
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Leadership

  • Andrew

    Andrew Hanauer

    CEO

  • Chandra D.

    Chandra D. Whetstine

    COO

  • Jazzalyn

    Jazzalyn Livingston

    National Program Director

  • Rev. Brandon

    Rev. Brandon Cleaver

    Matthew 5:9 Program Director

  • Rabbi Frederick

    Rabbi Frederick Reeves

    Director of Jewish Programs