BBC Radio 4 2016-09-27

Good morning

It’s not been a good year for unity.

We’ve had the EU referendum, The Conservative and Labour parties have been riven with acrimonious disputes, and the Church of England faces the prospect of a possible split over sexuality.

Calls for unity are everywhere: unify the country, unify the party, unify the church!. Occasionally these calls feel like thinly veiled demands for the other side to get in line.

Conflict resolution practitioners think deeply about unity and many of them, religious or not, draw on ideas first laid out in the New Testament. The principles for dealing with division we find there have stood the test of time.

However, they require a very different approach from the ones we are now seeing played out.

Those who are engaged in today’s battles do not often use the language of empathy, or forgiveness. But these have to be the building blocks of any healing that will hold.

Unity is not just a fragile coalition of self-interest. It requires real human connectedness, which doesn’t dwell comfortably alongside self-righteousness and an overweening desire to win, or at least to be proved right.

September is the anniversary of the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young black girls at the height of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King’s response was radical. He said “we must not lose faith in our white brothers”.

He didn’t lash out, blame, or start reaching for a basket to put deplorables in. He made sure that training to be part of the civil rights movement involved a lot of role-play, designed to help activists understand what it would feel like to be a white policeman holding back a black crowd.

His movement, inspired by the New Testament, was built on forgiveness and empathy, and was incredibly effective at persuasion. Jesus says love the people who oppose you, irritate you and give you a tough time. Pray for them, even. I’ve found it is actually pretty hard to pray for someone without beginning to empathise with them - it has an annoying habit of building understanding.

Generations of conflict resolution practitioners have found how radical and successful forgiveness and empathy can be in situations of entrenched disagreement. But it’s much, much harder than cheap calls for unity.