Bridgebuilding Isn’t Self-Sacrifice—It’s Smart Strategy

My life’s work has been to connect with people who believe differently than I do and to build with them toward something that works better for all of us than what we have now.  

This work - often called bridging - gets a lot of criticism.  

The main critique is that bridging legitimizes harmful beliefs. Others think that compromise on a moral issue is itself wrong, that working with people you disagree with will make you (evil) like them, or that working with them undermines advocacy.  

I appreciate these criticisms. There are real issues to work through there. But also, these criticisms assume that bridging work means sacrificing your own strong beliefs to acquiesce to some mealy mushy middle.  

Nope. It is not self-sacrificing – it’s strategic. 

For me, bridging work has always been about making space for myself where I haven't felt welcome. It's not altruism – it’s self-interest.  

Here’s How It Started. 

I grew up as an atheist in the Bible Belt in NE Florida. By the time I was in grade school, I was already marked as different. By high school, it was worse—prayer over the loudspeakers at football games, creationism taught in public school science class, and a steady stream of bullying by Christian kids because I said honestly that I didn’t go to church. Tired of the bullying in one particular class, I once pulled a religious plaque off the classroom wall and took it to the school office, explaining that it violated my First Amendment rights. I was suspended for stealing. 

The hypocrisy of it burned an angry hole in my gut. I didn’t start as an angry atheist, but by the time I got out of that school, I was one. I devoured Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, seeking intellectual justification for the truth I knew: that religion felt exclusionary and oppressive. By the time I got to college, I studied religion and history—not just out of intellectual curiosity, but because I was trying to figure out what was wrong with these people. I had read the Bible – how had stories about Jesus, who healed and fed people, ended up like this? 

I spent years feeding my anger, feeling righteous about it, and letting it eat me from the inside. Three lessons taught me how to be strategic instead of reactionary. 

1. Anger feels powerful, but it is a powerful trap. 

I recently wrote about this first lesson in The Florida Times-Union: watching someone close to me lean into anger as a kind of armor made me realize I was doing the same thing. Anger felt powerful, but it also kept me stuck.  

2. Hold on to integrity – and the Golden Rule. 

The second experience was about integrity. I was rightly furious at the hypocrisy of those kids wearing WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) bracelets while calling me names and spitting at me in the hallways—not to mention the school administration charging me with stealing instead of reprimanding the teacher for violating First Amendment rights. 

The problem wasn’t just their beliefs—it was their dogmatism. Their certainty that they were right and everyone else was wrong. One day, it hit me that I was doing exactly the same thing by espousing dogmatic, angry atheism. That realization stung. And it forced me to rethink how I stood up for myself. 

If I wanted to be taken seriously, I had to take other people seriously. Not (just) because it was morally right. But because I wanted my own rights of conscience to be acknowledged. 

3. Granting someone their humanity doesn’t mean diminishing your own. 

Third, I had a chance to go to Cambridge University in England. It tested my commitment to lessons # 1 & 2. I had applied to study in the history department, looking to do a project about Augustine of Hippo and his just war theory. When the acceptance letter came, it was from the divinity school. It wasn’t what I was expecting, but I wasn’t going to turn down the offer. The day I walked in, I met my three classmates in the Church History master’s program: a nun, a priest, and an Anglican seminarian. It felt like a cosmic joke. 

Had I met these folks a few years previously, I might have walked out, but by this time I was willing to ask about other people’s experiences. And I was honest about my own. 

My classmates thought I was a little odd, sure, but they didn’t see me as illegitimate.  

There it was: the gold standard for coexistence. You don’t have to understand or agree with someone’s theology. In fact, you get to think that someone else’s theology (or political worldview) is wrongheaded, foolish, or frankly nuts. My classmates at Cambridge probably thought all of that about me. And I thought at least some of that about some of them, but we recognized each other’s human right of conscience to decide for ourselves.   

Since then, I’ve spent my life building relationships and productive collaborations with people who are vastly different than I am.  

There’s tension there, at the connection point between expanding what is possible by expanding partnerships, and pulling toward what my own values say is right.  

Selfish Bridging 

This work—this messy, frustrating, deeply human work of religious and democratic pluralism—is often framed as a moral obligation. But to be honest: for me, it’s also been practical and self-serving.  

I wanted to be seen and taken seriously as an atheist, so when I was at the Aspen Institute Religion & Society Program, I made a space for others to be seen and taken seriously in their beliefs, including people like me. 

In one example, we convened a group on religious freedom; we brought together Southern Baptists, Latter-day Saints, Reform Jews, Methodists, Catholics, Muslims, and yes, atheists, among others. Not because we suddenly shared a worldview, but because we all had a stake in defending religious freedom. 

Bringing together a coalition that diverse didn’t mean we promised not to fight against each other or to pretend our disagreements didn’t exist. It meant we understood that on this issue, we needed each other. 

I didn’t give up my beliefs to do that – I made an active claim for them.  

That’s not altruism. That’s strategy. 

Building Strategic Bridges In Coalition 

Bridging work is often about prejudice reduction, as I’ve written about here. But bridgebuilding techniques of relationship-building and conflict management can be used in lots of contexts, and one of them is coalition-building for advocacy. That work is not about agreeing. It’s about leveraging overlapping interests to get things done.  

In my research on multifaith organizations (The Foundation Review), I found that the most effective coalitions don’t just bring together different perspectives—they actively navigate conflict across diverse relationships (aka bridgebuilding) while staying focused on shared goals. These organizations succeed because they don’t demand uniformity of belief. Instead, they practice what social scientists call dual-identity contact: they hold space for both common identity and deep disagreements at the same time. 

This model isn’t just about religious pluralism. It’s a strategy for any movement trying to survive in a polarized society. Multifaith organizations offer a blueprint for how to build durable social change. Building on real, direct, and honest relationships they: 

• Tolerate disagreement rather than purging members over ideological purity. 

• Shift partners based on the issue at hand, rather than treating alliances as fixed. This works when people engage honestly about their values and values differences upfront. 

• Shatter binaries, avoiding the trap of “us vs. them” thinking. 

That’s a lesson for any movement that wants to build good solutions that last: you don’t have to agree on everything—you just need to know when collaboration serves your interests, and you have to have relationships strong enough to acknowledge and work across real differences. 

That’s how real progress happens. 

To work together on one thing today doesn’t mean you won’t show up on opposite sides of protest lines tomorrow. It simply means you know when to build and when to contest.  

That is the tension of expanding what is possible and holding onto individual values. Like the warp and weft of cloth, pull too far in either direction, and the cloth pulls apart. Allow them to hold each other in tension and you have something both strong and supple.  

We talk a lot these days about polarization, about how we dehumanize each other, about how impossible it seems to work across divides. But if you want to be treated as human, you have to assume that others are human, too. 

You don’t have to agree. You don’t have to like them. But you do have to recognize their right to exist as humans in the world, just as you demand to exist in it yourself. And offering humanity doesn’t mean you stop fighting if they want to do something that threatens yours. It actually means you have a relational bond to build from.  

I know it feels scary and perhaps insane to try to partner with someone who just wants you to go away. Creating a space for yourself that includes them, too, can disarm them, and you can both get to reasonable solutions where your own needs and theirs are met. Bridgebuilding is a way of being for individuals or organizations that help navigate that work. 

That’s why I show up to this work. It’s not because I have some moral obligation or that I’m selling myself out, but because I want a seat at the table. And that requires me to make space for others, too. 

It’s not noble. It’s necessary.  

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If your organization is feeling trapped in this changing and polarized moment and you want to expand what's possible, get in touch. Cohesion Strategy can help.