Contemplating 'Togetherness' in a world with different grounds
How to live faithfully in the world
A book for Christians who want to live faithfully in the world!
We share our thoughts and concerns with Tim Keller and his friends, whom we love and respect.
How can Christians reach out to the world across differences?
How can we maintain our distinctness without blending in with the world?
How can we serve others without cowering defensively?

Living in an extremely divided and hostile world
We live in an age of extreme division and even hostility.
Americans today disagree about the purpose of our nation, the nature of the common good, or even the meaning of human flourishing.
These differences of opinion affect not only what we think, but also how we think and how we see the world.
In the midst of such profound division, how can Christians remain faithful to the gospel while respecting those who hold fundamentally different beliefs?

This is the central question of this book.
“How can Christians relate to people of different faiths while respecting them and maintaining their evangelical convictions?” The two of us have been corresponding for several years, and this book was conceived.
We were all exploring how people transcend deep, painful differences to find common ground.
We wanted to learn how to respond in a Christian way to the reality of our differences, to what scholars call the "hard reality of pluralism."
The reality of pluralism is often obscured, at least in the United States, by the ideals of "one indivisible nation" and the pursuit of a "more perfect union."
But what generally defines our existence is difference and disagreement rather than agreement.
Americans, like most citizens of Western countries today, struggle to find common ground about the purpose of their country, the nature of the common good, and the meaning of human flourishing.
These differences of opinion affect not only what we think, but also how we think and see the world.
Deep and unbridgeable differences on the most important issues – this is the reality of pluralism today.
Understanding pluralism is about understanding our past.
The reason America is not, and never has been, a thoroughly 'Christian nation' is because of the reality of pluralism.
It is clear that white Protestant culture, or Judeo-Christian culture as some call it, influenced our nation's founding fathers and shaped middle-class norms and values ​​for a significant period of American history.
This shared culture—a supposed agreement on the nature of religious practice and public morality—brought about important social benefits, including the construction and maintenance of various institutions and infrastructure.
The vast majority of today's philanthropic sector—private colleges and universities, hospitals, and social service organizations—has its roots in Protestant (and later Catholic and Jewish) communities.
But this shared Protestant culture failed to recognize many serious injustices, and sometimes even allowed them to persist.
Protestants have often been indifferent, and sometimes even hostile, to the various demands for religious freedom made by religious minorities.
White Protestants were largely absent from the civil rights movement, and some even engaged in racial discrimination, which persists today.
Protestant culture has used its social and legal power to suppress diverse views on race, religion, gender, and sexuality.

In this Protestant-dominated culture, many Christians have forgotten the biblical counsel that we have no lasting city on earth (Hebrews 13:14) and that we should not put our trust in earthly rulers (Psalm 146:3).
Over the generations, some Christians have become so caught up in the ostentatious elements of earthly citizenship that they have lost sight of the object of their primary loyalty.
We are called to love our neighbors, but our true citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20).

The consensus once taken for granted in Protestant culture has weakened in recent years, partly due to a growing awareness of the differences between religious (and increasingly non-religious) beliefs.
At the same time, as the social trend toward individualism and autonomy deepened and accelerated, trust in social institutions such as corporations, the media, government, church, and even the family eroded.
But even as Protestant culture declined, no successor culture emerged.
Neither evangelicalism, Roman Catholicism, nor secularism have replaced the previously taken-for-granted consensus.

Against this backdrop, we asked ourselves how we can find common ground in an age where we cannot agree on the common good.
We also wanted to explore how Christians can practice humility, patience, and tolerance—three civic practices that John Inazu suggests in his book Confident Pluralism.
We believe that implementing these practices is fully consistent with witnessing to the Gospel in a time of profound division.
In fact, humility, patience, and tolerance not only make room for the gospel, but also point to the three Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love, respectively.

The first practice, humility, recognizes that in a world where people have vastly different views on fundamental issues, neither Christians nor non-Christians can always prove that they are right and the other is wrong.
Christians can practice humility in public life because they recognize the limitations of human reason, including their own, and because they know that they are saved by faith, not by moral acts or goodness.
This confident faith is the foundation of our relationship with God, but it does not provide unshakable certainty about all matters.
(omission)

---From the "Prologue"