President Abraham Lincoln officially made  in 1863, during the Civil War that threatened the very existence of the United States.

He wanted to unify the nation by encouraging Americans to count their blessings, give thanks and reflect on our shared national purpose.

A century and a half later, America is once again tearing apart from within. Political polarization is deepening, exacerbated by both parties framing each election as an existential fight for the country’s future.

Civil discourse — the ability to engage in respectful conversations with people we disagree with — seems like a thing of the past. The uptick in violence has left many of us increasingly and rightfully unsettled.

We know we’re treading on dangerous ground when becomes an acceptable way to achieve political goals.

Lincoln’s belief in gratitude as a way to mend internal divisions is as relevant today as it was 162 years ago. As we step away from our daily routines to celebrate Thanksgiving, we would do well to heed his call — and recognize that gratitude remains an important tool for national healing.

The Roman philosopher was the greatest of all virtues — one that makes all others possible. He believed gratitude creates humility, which makes you aware of your strengths, your limits, and how much you depend on others.

When you appreciate the good in your life, you recognize that it comes not just from yourself, but from other people.

That is the key: gratitude reorients our attention outward. It pulls us away from ourselves and helps us realize just how much others enrich and shape our lives.

When we pause to give thanks, our first thoughts drift toward our immediate family and friends, but it naturally emanates from there, to the people in our neighborhoods — the teachers, coaches, cashiers, librarians, nurses, and countless others that keep our communities running.

Giving thanks for these neighbors forces us to see their humanity. Their politics is a distant and largely irrelevant trait. We see them first as human beings, as mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, aunts, uncles, friends — people who love, hope, and struggle just like us.

During the shutdown crisis, people came together to help each other

That recognition strengthens the relationships that are key to holding our communities together. It’s this strong social fabric at the local level that Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed sets America apart from other countries — and is key to why our nation has endured for more than two centuries.

That strength was on full display in recent weeks during the . When Washington’s dysfunction led to confusion and uncertainty over whether 42 million Americans would receive food assistance in November, people didn’t wait on Republicans and Democrats in DC to resolve the impasse.

Americans came together in their cities and neighborhoods to ensure vulnerable families would not go hungry. Churches, charities, and neighbors organized food drives, donated food, and stepped up to help their neighbors in need. Elizabeth Baptist Church in Atlanta of people during its Operation Uplift food drive, just one example of communities coming together to respond to needs at the local level.

Gratitude for the people in our communities helps us focus our energy here, at the local level, where it can actually make a difference. A healthy society is built on strong local relationships — bonds not formed by ideological alignment, but through daily interactions and the shared work it takes to improve our communities.

This Thanksgiving, cultivating a sense of gratitude for those outside our immediate circle will go a long way toward planting seeds of respect and neighborliness that have the power to heal our country. Appreciating our local librarian, the cashier at the grocery store, one of the parents at our child’s school, the neighbor who sits behind us in church makes it much more difficult to define them by their political preferences or as the “other side.” It builds trust and fosters cooperation — qualities that we desperately need in today’s political moment.

In a world overwhelmed by , suspicion, and anger, this is how we can make our communities good places to live. This is how we can reconnect with one of the best sources of hope and joy — each other.

How fitting that Thanksgiving — a truly American holiday — is dedicated to a virtue that helps hold us together as a nation.

Gratitude strengthens our communities and makes them work. As President Lincoln understood so many years ago, it’s essential for shaping not only good people, but good citizens.

Rebecca Primis is Vice President of Communications at the Ģ����Ƶ Center for Opportunity.

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I recently attended a conference that included a number of participants who have thought deeply about religious freedom and have acted effectively in its defense. Naturally, everyone was talking about the high-profile legislative battle in Indiana. That got me thinking about what might and should happen in Ģ����Ƶ, during next year’s legislative session, when protecting religious freedom will once again be on the table.

In the unlikely event that you’ve forgotten, here’s what a typical religious freedom bill—modeled on the 1993 federal legislation that Congress passed virtually unanimously—purports to do. In the first instance, it reestablishes a standard the Supreme Court employed to deal with a number of cases under the First Amendment: if a plaintiff can show that his or her religious freedom is substantially burdened by a generally applicable law, then the government has to demonstrate that the law is intended to carry out a compelling state interest and show that it is the least restrictive means to achieve that interest. Contrary to what its opponents claimed, the law does not give anyone a license to discriminate on the basis of religion; rather, it reinstates a time-honored judicial balancing test. Judges decide whether religious freedom—our “first freedom”—or the state interest prevails. No responsible advocate of religious freedom thinks that it ought to prevail against every possible countervailing claim, that every state interest ought to give way before it. We simply insist that religious freedom is an important consideration that ought to be taken into account.

The substance of the law

In the light of what happened in Indiana, Arkansas, and here in Ģ����Ƶ, it seems highly unlikely that any state legislature will pass a simple and straightforward version of the 1993 federal legislation. Opponents were all too effective in tying religious freedom to discrimination, even in the absence of any evidence that the federal law or its many state counterparts had ever effectively been used to license or justify discrimination. Unfortunately, the “fix” that lawmakers adopted to respond to these objections tends to sweep much too widely, making state and local anti-discrimination rules in effect trumps against any religious freedom claim. While certainly a permissible (if, I would argue, inadvisable) declaration of a compelling state interest, it appears to leave no room for certain sorts of religious freedom claims. Thus, for example, a church or other faith-based organization might wish to engage in mission-based hiring, employing only those willing to live up to certain creedal or behavioral standards. These religious hiring rights have long been acknowledged or accommodated in law, but could be described as “discrimination” by those unsympathetic to the standards or practices at issue. Without explicit provision for them in the law, these traditional religious hiring rights could be deprived any any sort of religious freedom defense.

Then there is, of course, the wedding industry, where some practitioners have absolutely no objection to serving gays in ordinary circumstances, but cannot in good conscience provide their services to a same-sex wedding ceremony. Their critics treat their services as public accommodations, akin to restaurants and hotels, and insist that there is absolutely no difference between the photographer who is happy to do a portrait of any individual or family, but not of any wedding ceremony, and the racist hotelier or restaurateur who refuses to serve African-Americans under any circumstances. In the first instance, this argument stretches the notion of public accommodation far beyond its traditional bounds. Furthermore, while the experience of African-Americans in the Jim Crow South certainly made it clear that the traditional right of a businessperson to serve whomever he or she pleases (an aspect of freedom of association) has to give way to the norm of non-discrimination in matters of race, it is far from clear that gays who seek wedding services are similarly seriously discommoded by the few bakers, photographers, or wedding planners who have religious scruples about same-sex marriage. Common sense tells you that there is a difference between being unable to find a place to stay or eat, or having to go around the corner or to the next town to find a wedding photographer. What’s more, many wedding-related businesses are, to say the least, “closely-held.” That means that exempting them from anti-discrimination laws in this limited instance—not, to repeat, in ordinary circumstances—rests on the solid constitutional ground of the recent Supreme Court decision in the Hobby Lobby case; the Court there held that family businesses, at least, enjoyed the protection of the First Amendment and the federal RFRA. Finally, at the very least both baking and photography can be treated as arts, hence as forms of expression. It has long been the understanding that the First Amendment prohibits government (or individuals using governmental authority) from compelling people to say what is not on their minds.

There is, in other words, a reasonably strong argument that the “fix” proposed in Ģ����Ƶ trenches on traditional freedoms of religion, association, and expression. While no one would argue that these freedoms are or should be absolute, they should not be casually or thoughtlessly trampled in an effort to conciliate the demands of one intense constituency. I leave it to the legislative drafters to find language that affirms both compelling norms—religious freedom and non-discrimination—and finds a way to combine them coherently. Surely we are not so unreasonable and inept that we cannot come up with language that accommodates religious liberty and assures gays and lesbians that they will neither be denied service in ordinary circumstances nor be too inconvenienced In their search for wedding services. (Indeed, there are “conscience clauses” from the medical field that may offer a good model here: those who have conscientious objections to, say, abortion, can be excused from participating in a medically necessary abortion, so long as someone else stands ready to help with the procedure.)

Making the case for a reasonable religious freedom law

This year, I think advocates of religious freedom legislation were taken somewhat by surprise by the scope and character of the opposition to them. Since religious freedom had almost always been an “apple pie” issue, they may have thought that, especially in a state that is generally both conservative and religious, opposition would be either nominal or relatively easily overcome. They didn’t reckon on the vociferousness of those who frequently misrepresented the proposal, on the almost complicitous supineness (or was it alacrity?) with which the media gave them a megaphone, and on the unwillingness of the business community to protect religious liberty, not to mention the enterprises and livelihoods of their much smaller brethren. Next year promises to be worse, not only because opponents of religious freedom legislation will be emboldened by their success this year, but because it is very likely that a narrowly-divided Supreme Court will hand down a decision finding a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, raising passions even higher.

Proponents of religious freedom can’t afford merely to be reactive. We have to start right away to lay the groundwork for success in next year’s legislative session. That means making a winsome case in public for the necessity of such legislation, not simply to protect those who conscientiously dissent from same-sex marriage, but also all those—especially members of minority religions—who in carrying out their religious duties find themselves on the wrong side of an otherwise neutral law. Those in the media who cover this issue must also be educated, again in a setting where the stakes are not high and they can feel free to ask questions and engage in the give-and-take of a conversation. That also means sitting down with legislators when things are relatively calm and patiently explaining the importance of religious freedom and the nuts and bolts of protecting it. Finally, that means putting business leaders on notice that if they criticize religious freedom legislation as unwelcoming in our state, they will be pointedly asked about the business they do in countries all over the world that do not respect human rights, let alone the rights of gays and lesbians.

Once the session begins, proponents of religious freedom legislation have to be prepared immediately to answer distortions of the bill’s provisions and purpose. They also have to be prepared to call out zealots on their side, demanding the same responsible behavior of their opponents.

I remain confident that a bill can and will pass, but it is unlikely to be a cakewalk. The arguments are on our side, but critics of the legislation command the high ground in the media.

The future of religious freedom

Abraham Lincoln once said, “In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.” Laws can be enacted, and then repealed. Even constitutional provisions can be repealed or reinterpreted. We cannot rest content that by the enactment of a law, we have genuinely and for the long term protected religious freedom.

More important than any law is “the culture,” by which I mean not only the arts, media, and education, but also the complex web of organizations and relationship that constitute “civil society” and the deeper sources in history and principle for public opinion. If these institutions, understandings, and “habits of the heart” do not support religious freedom, then no law purporting to protect it will stand for long.

Our long-term task is thus one of cultural restoration and reconstruction, in which politics plays only a small part. To be sure, laws and political controversies can offer so-called “teachable moments,” when lots of people are paying attention, but most of the teaching will be done in other, often more intimate and less fraught settings, like schools, churches, families, neighborhoods, and workplace relationships. And most of the teaching will not, strictly speaking, be about religious liberty.

Some have suggested that cultural and religious conservatives should be prepared for a “Benedict option,” a time of withdrawal from “the world” in order insularly to protect themselves, their families and communities, and their understanding from an inveterately hostile culture. I’m not yet prepared to urge my fellows down that path. I have more confidence that truth and nature will assert or reassert themselves. (I could make such an argument using the language of Christian theology, but would prefer in this venue not to talk about creation, evil, and God’s sovereignty.)

What we have to do is be attentive to building healthy families and communities, to be vigilant about telling the truth about ourselves and our relationships, to be open to respectful engagement with those who disagree with us, and to tell and promote stories in art, film, music, and literature that teach moral truths without being overtly “preachy.” Great art and great literature command the attention of those who encounter them. They nourish our minds and our souls. They provide the bases for fruitful conversations and friendships, even among those who happen at the moment to disagree.

This isn’t a “quick fix,” but rather the work of many lifetimes. We didn’t lose our way overnight. We won’t find our way back tomorrow.

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I used to admire and respect Michael Bowers, Ģ����Ƶ’s Attorney General from 1981 to 1997, but his in the debate over the religious freedom bills ought to embarrass him.  To be sure, losing my respect won’t cost him any sleep and the will only celebrate his move from what it regards as the wrong side of history to the right side.  Still, he ought to be embarrassed because the letter he wrote against the and versions of the bill is a regrettable, albeit entirely predictable, combination of hysteria and inconsistency.

Let’s start with the hysteria.  The law, he says, will provide people with an excuse for practicing invidious discrimination and enable every person to justify on the basis of religion becoming a law unto himself or herself.  And as if this weren’t bad enough, Bowers invokes the spectre of the KKK returning fully garbed in hoods, a practice he alleges might well be protected by the proposed Ģ����Ƶ legislation.

Well, no, no, and a thousand times no.

In the first place, Bowers doesn’t actually argue that the law permits invidious discrimination; he merely asserts the following:

The proposed RFRA is nothing more than an effort to legalize discrimination against disfavored groups, requiring only the discriminating party’s assertion of a burden on his or her…purported religious belief.

I’ll explain shortly why this is an extremely misleading “explanation” of what the bill will do, but, for now, I’ll restrict myself to recounting how he reaches this conclusion.  It’s all, he says, in the timing.  If the Ģ����Ƶ legislature had taken seriously the threat to religious liberty that came from the Supreme Court’s decision in , why did it wait more than twenty years to do so?  The answer can only be “same sex marriage.”  Religious liberty is simply the fig leaf behind which those who want to deny gays and lesbians marriage equality (not to mention other sorts of equality) are going to try to hide.

I agree that timing is an issue, but not in the way Bowers insists.  There is a new sense of urgency, not about protecting people’s “right” to discriminate, but rather about protecting traditional religious belief and practice from aggressive attempts to use state and judicial power to force people to conform to the new order.  Some of these threats were, well, not quite unimaginable but barely on the horizon as recently as just a few years ago.  Remember pro-life Michigan Democratic Congressman Bart Stupak, who supported the Affordable Care Act in exchange for an executive order reaffirming that no federal funds would pay for abortions?  Just a few years later, the contraception mandate enforced by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services violated that promise, .  Student religious organizations have effectively been (not everywhere, to be sure) because they require that their officers actually share the principles of the organization.  And yes, businesspeople who in other instances have been quite happy to serve their gay and lesbian customers have sought to draw the line at providing services to same-sex wedding ceremonies they don’t and can’t conscientiously support.  Traditional religious believers can be excused for feeling more than a bit threatened by all these developments and thinking that more robust religious liberty protection is required.

Let me turn now to the “law unto himself or herself” canard.  Here’s Bowers’ best explanation of this claim (oddly in the section of the letter supposedly devoted to his contention about invidious discrimination):

Any time a person wished to refuse to act in response to a government requirement, he or she could assert the protection of the proposed RFRA.  Whether legitimate or not, a controversy would likely ensue involving law enforcement officials, school officials, hospital administrators, or other government officers, and possibly the courts.  The potential undermining of the rule of law is limitless.

It seems to me that this contention proves too much, as anyone could make the same claim about the First Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment due process clause.  Does Bowers want to throw those out too, as they certainly can serve as bases for an individual refusing “to act in response to a government requirement”?  The point that Bowers doesn’t ever really concede directly is that a RFRA claim isn’t an automatic trump against government action or regulation; it merely demands that government articulate a compelling state interest and that the measure proposed be the least restrictive means to achieve that interest.  These questions are for a judge to decide, and the individual resisting the law or regulation may not win.  The interest could indeed be compelling, as I assume prohibiting genuinely invidious discrimination might be, and the means chosen could be the least restrictive possible.  The RFRA merely offers religious believers a recourse in the event that the proverbial tyrannical majority (about which James Madison worried in Federalist #10) decides that the shortest route between two points is a straight line through religious freedom.  Indeed, by assuring that the law in the largest sense protects the rights government is “ordained and established” (the words of the Declaration of Independence) to protect, a RFRA actually serves to maintain public confidence in the rule of law.

And then there are the hooded knights of the KKK, which amounts to pure fear-mongering on Bowers’ behalf, something that ought to have been entirely unworthy of a former Attorney General.  Given Ģ����Ƶ’s history, if anything is a compelling state interest, it’s keeping the KKK from hiding behind hoods as it spews its hatred.

And again—it bears repeating, since Bowers so frequently encourages misunderstanding—whether a RFRA claim stands depends not upon the individual asserting it, but upon the judge hearing the case.  Of course, Bowers has to acknowledge this point, but he attempts to deprive it of its force by making what judges will do seem altogether unpredictable:

It is impossible to anticipate whether Ģ����Ƶ courts would follow the lead of the Eleventh Circuit and interpret the RFRA as co-extensive with First Amendment jurisprudence or whether the courts would treat RFRA as ushering in a new era of religious freedom jurisprudence that strikes down neutral laws of general applicability based on an alleged burden on the exercise of religion.

All he has is this uncertainty about what courts will do.  He has to concede that other courts—state and federal—have most emphatically not permitted the parade of horribles with which he has regaled us in the letter.  Indeed, one of the suggests that we have little or nothing to worry about and, indeed, much to which to look forward.

Let me conclude by offering one note of agreement with Bowers’ argument.  I also worry about what judges might do, especially where religious freedom is concerned.  I don’t want what some have called our first freedom to depend upon what might be the whim of a magistrate.  To be sure, I try to have as high an opinion as possible of our state and federal judges, but have to confess that I have been disappointed more than a few times by their decisions and the quality of the reasoning in support of them.  I wish it hadn’t come to this.  I wish that popular and legislative majorities were always respectful and solicitous of the rights of those who seem to stand in their way.  I wish that righteous and self-righteous indignation didn’t all too often get the better of us.  I wish that we were more frequently visited by “the better angels of our nature,” as Abraham Lincoln so eloquently put it in his First Inaugural.  I pray for all of this, but I’m also going to urge my representatives to vote for these pieces of legislation.

Dr. Joseph M. Knipperberg is a contributing scholar at the Ģ����Ƶ Center for Opportunity and Professor of Politics at Oglethorpe University.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Ģ����Ƶ Center for Opportunity.

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