Growing up with a rudimentary understanding of theology, I learned long ago that every good sermon comprises three acts: misery, redemption, and thankfulness. Here is the unfortunate news – I have come to this gathering with the first component (misery).

Twenty years ago, I would have been here to celebrate our solidarity, but today we are convened to deliberate on how we can best unite amid years of intense polarisation, which have been fueled by periods of identity politics, tribal-led populism, and polarising rhetoric. This explains why polarisation has slipped into our everyday life. It is important to know that polarisation is a global problem. In 2019, a study in the UK suggests that over a third of Labour supporters said they would be unhappy if their child married a conservative supporter. It could be worse in America, where only 4% of marriages happen between registered Republicans and registered democrats.

Such a style of politics lacks a sense of solidarity, wherein a supporter of a politician extols the failure or inability of an opposing faction to accomplish a project. Moving forward, the most effective way to foster unity is by strengthening our solidarity. Being part of a country, of a nation should mean common commitments and collective dreams, a community that celebrates its successes and protects its less fortunate, but it seems like our politics is pulling apart, rather than coming together. Our politics has become sharp edged and sharp tongued. Now, I’m not arguing that we should all agree and, in a democracy, we never will, but beneath our bickering, we all have, and I think want, a stake in our communities’ success. So to move beyond our disagreements, we’re going to need some kind of social glue, and that glue is solidarity. And solidarity might not be a word that you throw around every day. And sometimes, in our most wishful, maybe wistful moments, we do feel solidarity with our fellow humans worldwide. Solidarity is about an ‘us’, about a shared fate, about a common humanity, about developing and nurturing a collective identity where what befalls you affects me and vice versa. And the vice versa is crucial because for solidarity to work, it has to be reciprocal. I treat you seriously as a real person with real dreams and desires, rights and  responsibilities, just as I would like to be treated myself, as part of an ‘us’. So solidarity is not the same thing as charity. Now, the act of charity is a moral impulse of the fortunate to provide for the unfortunate. There are givers and then there are recipients. There is an ‘us’, but there’s also a ‘them’. Now, charity is a commendable private virtue, of course, but if we decide to divide our society into a fortunate ‘us’ and an unfortunate ‘them’, then we’ll be dividing ourselves in half, and solidarity is about realizing there is ultimately no ‘them’, only an ‘us’. Solidarity is a reciprocal charity.

If we are to secure our solidarity, we will have to conquer three enemies:

1. The first enemy is ourselves and our difficulty in making sure that present ‘us’ looks out for the future ‘us’  because it’s easy to put off paying for the future.

2. The second enemy of solidarity is dividing our society into an ‘us’ and a ‘them’, and a people that becomes obsessed with binaries cannot easily reclaim unity. If we see our fellow citizens as ‘others’, as getting in our way, as undermining our goals, well, then we simply end up stoking the fires of division. And we see this in the so-called culture wars, over identity, over tribe, yes, also over voting interest. And riled up by social media or by each other down the pub, we end up delighting in divisiveness, but, in my view, these are the empty calories of politics because politics has to be about an ‘us’, not an ‘us’and a ‘them’. Identity politics harms solidarity.

3. The third enemy of solidarity is our political division, which makes it hard for us to build a stable coalition for solidarity. And the nature of that division has changed dramatically in recentyears.

So, what can we do? Well, we don’t have to reinvent the future of solidarity from scratch, and solidarity comes about in two ways. It comes about from feeling like one another and from doing things for one another, and to feel like one another, well, that doesn’t have to cost money, but it’s hardly simple because our national moments of coming together have typically been times of collective suffering.

In conclusion, if we want to heal our divides, to give peace the chance to thrive, to build a Zango-Jaba that attracts ambitious people, then we need to treat people and places seriously, not as problems to be managed. Solidarity is a test for our constituency, about what kind of society we want, and whether we are willing to pay for that when the chips are down. But, the good news is that the future of solidarity is in our hands. It’s about us and it is up to us.

 Thank you