Swearengin is an author, emotional & spiritual well-being coach, podcaster and content creator through his social media presence as Unconventional Pastor Paul. He talks religion and politics at times joined by his wife Ashley, a former elected official and community leader. Find him at Pastor-Paul.com.
Is it OK to say Trans and Queer people don't exist? Pastor Paul answers that question with help from Dr. Seuss and a little mouse.
Less than half of Americans expect this November’s midterm election to be free and fair. According to a survey from the University of California San Diego, confidence is falling among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike. The data is disconcerting, but it also points to an important opportunity. When trust is fraying, we have a chance to intentionally strengthen the relationships that make civic life possible. Elections provide a concentrated moment to practice pluralism, the work of respecting, relating, and cooperating across difference for the common good. Faith communities are uniquely situated to help us do that.
Elections ask us if people who vote differently can live together as neighbors. Faith communities have a vital role to play in helping us answer that question with a resounding "yes!” Faith communities teach us about trust and relationships. They help us build belonging, and they remind us that disagreement doesn’t have to mean contempt. When we engage in elections in that spirit, we aren’t just choosing leaders or voting for ballot initiatives. We are engaging in the very relationships that make democracy possible.
That’s why Interfaith America is proud to join Braver Angels, faith250, Paths to Understanding, Living Room Conversations, Listen First Project, and the National Institute for Civil Discourse in promoting the Faith in America initiative. The initiative is built on a simple and powerful idea: supporting free, fair, and safe elections is not a partisan cause. It is a shared civic responsibility, and faith communities can reduce fear and division that threaten our belief in a shared civic life.
Faith leaders and community members who want to get involved can visit the Faith in America website to find resources, sign up for events, and connect with other partners in their area. By signing up or reaching out, individuals and congregations can show their support and take practical steps to strengthen trust and participation in elections.
Faith in America is built on three pillars — national online prayer services, a social media campaign, and local community engagement efforts designed to strengthen trust and confidence in elections.
Interfaith America supports this work by sharing its Faith in Elections Playbook, which offers local faith and civic leaders practical, nonpartisan tools to lead their communities in engaging in elections with a spirit of pluralism. The playbook leans on the strengths and roles faith communities already play as trusted messengers, conveners, and relationship builders. Faith leaders can:
-Share reliable information about voting
-Host conversations across differences
-Encourage members to serve as poll workers or poll chaplains
-Organize meetings with election officials to express gratitude, support, and accountability
Our elections are run by our neighbors at the state and local level, not from Washington, D.C. We get lost in national narratives about division and miss opportunities to build relationships that can strengthen trust in elections in our own backyard.
Trust grows through relationships. When members of a congregation meet with a local election official, tour an election office, or join a community conversation, it builds connection and understanding. One example comes from Trinity Community Church in Ohio, where members organized a visit to their county election office last year. Initially, several participants expressed skepticism and uncertainty about how ballots are counted. After speaking with election staff, viewing the process firsthand, and asking questions in a respectful setting, the group left with renewed confidence in the local process and a commitment to share what they learned with their broader community. I’ve heard from participants who arrived for meetings with local election officials with deep concerns and then left confident, ready to share accurate information with friends, family, and fellow congregants. That change came from human connection.
Elections inevitably produce winners and losers. The deeper test is whether people who vote differently can keep living together as neighbors. I have faith they can. Every day, I see Americans choosing connection over contempt and relationship over suspicion. Those choices, made in communities across the country, are what make both pluralism and democracy possible.
Scott Rasmussen is the Director of Democracy Initiatives at Interfaith America.
Last month, New York City opened its first free 2-K classrooms. Roughly 2,000 two-year-olds got seats, the beginning of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s push for universal childcare.
More than 5,700 applied for those first 2,000 seats, which gives some sense of the demand. Childcare has become unaffordable for too many parents, and New York is doing something important by treating it less as a private family expense and more as a public responsibility.
But something else happened in that first week. Some of the people providing the care were still waiting to be paid.
Providers described dipping into savings, taking out loans and struggling to cover payroll - asking staff to work for free without any supplies - while city contracts were still being processed. In the worst case, programs delayed opening, leaving families scrambling for last-minute care.
The city has acknowledged the problem and is working to fix it, with a $43 million effort to improve early childhood contracting and offering interest-free bridge loans.
While the delays may be temporary, they exposed a blind spot that is all too familiar in childcare: we often design around making childcare work for families, and forget the realities of those providing the care itself.
Home-based childcare providers are a crucial part of 2-K, and are among the easiest to overlook. Richard Buery, who helped build New York City’s universal pre-K program a decade ago, has warned that 2-K’s heavy reliance on home-based providers makes payment delays particularly risky. A larger childcare organization may have reserves to keep operating while it waits for a city contract to clear. Many providers running programs out of their homes do not. For them, a delay can quickly become a question of whether they can pay staff, buy food or keep the doors open.
Andrea Pena has cared for children in the Bronx for nearly three decades. Her home-based program is licensed for 14 children and is usually full. After paying her employees and expenses, she estimates she earns about $9.50 an hour - less than New York’s minimum wage. The median wage for New York’s home-based childcare providers is just $6 an hour. Selling coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts is three-times more lucrative than caring for babies during their most critical stage of development.
“Going through my budget, it’s like my stomach aches,” she told Gothamist. “It hurts, because I’m not making any money.”
I have heard versions of that sentence for years, only usually 7,000 miles away.
In Nairobi’s informal settlements, some of the childcare providers I work with run their businesses from a single ten-foot-by-ten-foot corrugated metal shack. Their family sleeps there at night. By sunrise, it is full of babies and toddlers whose parents have gone to work.
I’ve spent much of my career in rooms like that. Of course the dollar amounts are nowhere near New York’s, but the experience of waiting for money is the same.
Most parents in Nairobi’s urban slums work as casual laborers - washing clothes, cleaning homes or selling fruits and vegetables door-to-door - which means there is no predictable paycheck, and often no guarantee that they will earn anything that day. If a mother does earn something, she may pay the childcare provider, or use that money to cover dinner for the night. If she doesn’t, the fee rolls over, often for weeks or months on end.
Turning a child away doesn’t necessarily solve the problem. Without childcare, the mother may lose that day’s work, along with the chance to earn the money she already owes. So the provider waits. She keeps caring for the child while waiting for money that may never come. She acts like a safety net, while struggling to make her own ends meet.
New York is trying to do something very different by putting public money behind childcare so families do not have to carry the cost alone. And while that is a major step forward, the next question is how to build that public financing in a way that works for the small providers the system depends on.
To be sure, some friction is inevitable when a city launches a program this large and ambitious, and the Mamdani administration has moved quickly to address it.
But if New York is going to rely on home-based providers to help deliver 2-K at scale, the payment system has to reflect the fact that many cannot front weeks or months of food, wages and other operating costs while waiting for government money. Funds need to arrive early enough, and predictably enough, that providers can run the business without becoming the city’s lender.
Families have rightly been at the center of New York’s push for universal childcare. As 2-K grows, the financial reality of the people caring for their children needs to be just as present in its design. If home-based providers are essential to universal childcare, the system has to work for them too, from the day the first child walks through the door.
Sabrina Habib is the Co-Founder of Kidogo, Kenya’s largest childcare network and leads the Zera Fund, spurring new investments into childcare globally as part of Melinda French Gates’ Global Leaders Initiative. She is also a Public Voices Fellow Tackling Poverty, a partnership between The Op-Ed Project and Acumen.
Chelsea, MA won a 2026 All-America City award. Learn how La Colaborativa and Chelsea Opportunity Academy build civic life from within.
Chelsea sits as a small but densely populated city just across the Mystic River from Boston; however, its story feels distinct. This year, it was one out of 20 winners of the All-America City award. Chosen for “bringing the ideal of a government of, by, and for the people to life.” It’s known for its deep working-class roots, diversity, and a strong network of community institutions.
Groups such as the Chelsea Opportunity Academy and La Colaborativa stand out in showing how the tree of local civic life is shaped by many seeds of education, mutual aid, and access to opportunity. Chelsea has built a network of institutions that do more than provide services; they create pathways for people to support one another and shape their own futures.
As Doug Linkhart, President of the National Civic League, puts it, “There’s a back-and-forth relationship in Chelsea, where the residents speak up, and the organizations respond, creating trust and a sense of being heard.” This dynamic is at the core of how and why Chelsea continues to evolve in such a leading way 402years after its founding.
Since the early 1990s, La Colaborativa has shown a steady progression of dedication to long-term advocacy, equity, and civic engagement within the greater community of Chelsea, MA. They continue to have a strong focus on the Latino/Latina community specifically but not exclusively.
Over the past thirty-five years, their achievements include organizing tenant councils, founding a youth employment program, and conducting environmental justice advocacy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they provided food pantries along with emergency support, including distributing diapers, fresh produce, meat, and milk. Cash assistance, unemployment assistance, legal aid, and rental assistance are among the many services it provided during the pandemic and continues to provide today.
At the same time, for eight years now, Chelsea Opportunity Academy (COA) has served as Chelsea Public Schools’ first new alternative high school in recent years, built for students who need a more flexible and supportive path to graduation.
It was founded with grant support from the Barr Foundation’s Engage New England initiative and opened with 50 students, growing to serve those who may be working, supporting families, or struggling in a traditional school setting. There has been a strong focus on creating real-life experiences outside the classroom where skills are fostered in environments such as the wilderness that cannot be taught as effectively well within four walls. There are currently more than 150 students enrolled; at least 570 students have experienced COA’s innovative alternative to traditional schooling.
Ultimately, Chelsea is still defined by the same qualities that have carried it this far: resilience, mutual support, and a strong sense of shared responsibility. “The people of Chelsea have a great community spirit,” Linkhart said. “There are so many people who have stepped up to be leaders and organizations that have made the city successful.” That same spirit continues to define the city, one where progress is driven not from the top down, but from within.
Its schools, nonprofits, and community leaders continue to work together in ways that reflect a deeper civic culture, one where residents are not only being served but are actively shaping the future of the city. As Chelsea looks ahead, its strength remains rooted in the community that has long made it a place where progress grows from the ground up.
Shon Eric Hernandez is a Fulcrum fellow and MDC contributor. He can be reached at shondesil06@gmail.com
Citizens’ Assembly on Democracy in Leipzig, Germany
Almost everything in our public life is organized as a contest — debates, elections, legislation, litigation. Contestation is so pervasive that we mistake it for the natural order. But operating from a competitive mindset is a choice, not a law of physics. A country where all can thrive together cannot be built by defeating one another; it has to be built by a movement that models a different way of governing, one that weaves our differences into social cohesion instead of deepening division.
The path to that renewal starts with an important distinction. Martin Carcasson, who directs Colorado State University’s Center for Public Deliberation, identifies three modes a free people can use to work through disagreement. Debate is built to produce a winner: two sides marshal arguments to defeat each other, and positions harden. Dialogue is built to produce understanding. It enables us to grasp how another person sees the world and to build the mutual trust that safe, healthy communities depend on.
We propose to use widespread public deliberation as the foundation for building and maintaining a new era of collaborative governance. Deliberation is an approach in which everyday citizens learn together about an issue, talk with rather than past each other, usually with the help of a facilitator, and weigh the tensions and trade-offs among diverse views. Using deliberation, those who disagree can reason together toward a consensus decision.1 Most of our hardest problems are conflicts between competing goods, where every path forward asks someone to give something up. Debate can inflame those conflicts; deliberation can resolve them.
None of this is theoretical. Since the 1980s, a tidal wave of public deliberation has been expanding around the world, with the sharpest rise in the last fifteen years – and it is still growing rapidly.2 Ireland is the pioneer: its citizens’ assemblies took up questions politicians feared most — about abortion, same-sex marriage, and other constitutional questions. Twice, the whole electorate confirmed the assemblies’ measured and nuanced recommendations by referendum. The deliberative wave is rising at home, too, with state-level civic assemblies in New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, and elsewhere taking up everyday concerns like housing, taxes, and energy. The next step is to turn this method toward the structures of our system of self-governance.
At the heart of the Great American Deliberation is a nationwide campaign — a nonpartisan collective effort to bring Americans, at unprecedented scale, into structured deliberation about our democracy’s future, synthesizing what emerges into a “People’s Proposal”: a common-ground agenda of structural reforms sourced directly from the American people. Deliberations would be conducted through four layers that winnow and refine citizens’ views:
The grassroots layer is where the campaign does its deepest work — and where the nationwide campaign brings value from the beginning. In many communities, asking people to deliberate on divisive questions before they trust one another is why such efforts fail. So the campaign begins earlier, with a sequence our partners call mutual aid, mutual understanding, mutual agreement.3 Neighbors first come together around their concrete needs — a food drive, mutual aid, a clean-up, or other shared project — discovering each other as people before they are asked to discuss anything contentious. From there, neighbors build the capacity to talk across differences and bring down the temperature when conflict becomes heated. Only then do deliberate together on the rules of our democracy.
Trust is built as neighbors spend time together, work together for the common good, and talk through their life experiences and hopes in search of common ground. This is the campaign’s quiet power. The process is not merely a way of gathering input around structural reforms to renew our system of self-governance. The process itself is healing. It turns political discourse from a zero-sum battle into shared problem-solving, and channels grievance into dialogue before it hardens into contempt. Even if it produced no proposal at all, a season of structured deliberation would leave the country less polarized and better equipped to govern itself.
America’s common ground is not hypothetical. Among the more than one hundred cross-partisan supermajority positions the University of Maryland’s public-consultation research has identified,4 a distinct cluster rises to structural reform — changes not to this or that policy but to the rules of the game: how we elect and hold Congress accountable, the role of money in politics, the balance between the branches of government, ethics in government, and election integrity. But research only shows what people think; it does confer a mandate. What emerges from the nationwide deliberation campaign will be closer to a jury’s verdict than a poll result5 — carrying the considered judgment of the people who reasoned together.
Renewing our system of self-governance turns on legitimacy — what makes people accept a decision as rightful because they trust the process that produced it. To earn that trust, the Great American Deliberation must pass a few hard tests. It must include everyone: conservatives, progressives, and everyone in between as genuine co-leaders, with participants in the most intensive deliberations selected by lot so the table looks like the country itself. It must reflect considered judgment, elevating the reforms that command broad, informed support across our divides rather than those pushed by whoever speaks loudest. Critically, the people must be able to see that the Proposal is theirs: every recommendation traceable to the deliberations it came from, minority views preserved rather than averaged away, and the whole process audited independently, the way observers audit an election.
Here it helps to be precise about what renewing a social contract actually requires, because, as I argued in the first essay of this series, a Founding has two halves. The first half is cultural: a change in how we treat one another and how we engage the institutions we share. The second is formal: writing our common ground into the Constitution and other foundational documents, beyond the reach of any single election to undo. A change in culture that is never entrenched gets reversed when power turns over; legal entrenchment without a genuine change of heart is a dead letter. A true Founding needs both.
This is why the deliberation is not merely preparation for the real work — it is already half of it. Every community that reasons together across differences, every citizen who discovers that the person across the divide is not the caricature they feared, is already renewing the social contract. The cultural half of a Fourth Founding is not something the campaign proposes for later; it is what the campaign does by design.
The second half consists of carrying the common ground we surface into our foundational documents so that it lasts. A proposal, however broadly supported, is not yet a political settlement. Translating what the people have said into how we govern ourselves requires champions — a broad coalition of conservatives, progressives, and independents, united not by a shared ideology but by shared ownership of what the people produced, and including the officeholders, candidates, and civic, faith, labor, and community organizations that helped convene the deliberations. Reform advanced by one faction invites reversal by the next; that is the toxic tug of war we are trying to end. Reform carried by a genuinely cross-partisan coalition, standing on a platform the people themselves authored, earns the legitimacy to endure. Building that coalition is a task in its own right — the subject of a future essay.
Crucially, renewal need not wait on Washington or the Constitution. Most of it can be won without a constitutional amendment at all — through ordinary legislation, ballot measures, and reform in the states where Americans are already rewriting the rules of the game. Citizens in Michigan created an independent redistricting commission by ballot initiative, taking the map-drawing pen out of legislators’ hands.6 Montanans, after long decades of copper barons buying their politics, made their state a determined laboratory for getting money out of elections. They enacted the bipartisan DISCLOSE Act, which forces the groups paying for political ads to reveal who funds them, and the Supreme Court let it stand.7 An all-volunteer campaign has since gathered nearly fifty thousand signatures, from all fifty-six counties without a single paid canvasser, to put “the Montana Plan” on the 2026 ballot. None of this required amending the Constitution.
Reforms drawn from the People’s Proposal can therefore be enacted at every level at once — by a city council, a state legislature, a ballot measure, and/or an act of Congress. Only the deepest and most fundamental of them — the changes most vulnerable to being undone the moment power changes hands — need to be entrenched in the Constitution and other foundational documents, where no single election can reverse them. That entrenchment is the keystone — the last stone set, the one that locks the arch in place.
As we conduct the campaign, we must keep in mind a grim possibility. If our political system were to melt down faster than the ordinary channels of reform can work, the patient work of deliberation would not be wasted — it would matter more, giving any future effort to renegotiate our public life a reservoir of common ground and cross-partisan trust to draw on rather than starting from nothing. How a divided society can deliberate its way through a democratic crisis and transition is the subject of a later essay.
We have a rare opportunity to do the work of democracy renewal deliberately, in good time, rather than in the aftermath of a rupture. The bonus: the work itself heals. A season of nationwide dialogue and deliberation would (re)build relationships across our lines of difference and let grievances be spoken and heard — reweaving the social fabric in the very act of deciding what comes next.
Importantly, we would not be attempting something alien to us. Twice in the twentieth century — through the women’s suffrage movement and the civil rights movement — Americans renewed the terms of our common life nonviolently. Founding-scale change without catastrophe is not a fantasy; it is part of our inheritance.
But it need not take a lifetime. The process of achieving women’s right to vote, according to the suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt, cost American women “52 years of pauseless campaign.”8 Fortunately, we have deliberative processes and tools no earlier generation possessed. With focus, the nationwide deliberation campaign could begin to heal our social fissures and surface a common-ground People’s Proposal in as little as one to two years — in time to inform the platforms and candidates of the 2028 election cycle. What took the suffragists half a century of organizing, we can now begin in a single cycle. What the Great American Deliberation asks is that we claim that inheritance courageously and deliberately at a scale worthy of the whole country — and make our Fourth Founding a peaceful one. The planning has already begun.
Danielle M. Reiff is a retired American diplomat, peacebuilder, and writer. Her new book, The Power of Public Love: Evidence and Practices for Weaving the Social Fabric of Peace, will be published in late 2026. As a U.S. diplomat for twenty years, Danielle specialized in supporting democratic transitions and peacebuilding around the world. After retiring, she founded the nonpartisan Peacebuilders initiative to promote nonviolent approaches to complex systems change. She also co-founded the Democracy Renewal Group, Renew American Democracy (RAD) platform, and Renew to Thrive initiative. She believes we must renew our system of self-governance so that all Americans can thrive together.
The Great American Deliberation was originally published by The Democracy Renewal Group and is republished with permission.
