Michigan is one of the states that will decide the election in 2024, and the western side of the state is one region within Michigan where the divisions are the strongest. Driving through my neighborhood, yard signs for Harris and Trump punctuate the lawns of many of my neighbors. Last week I needed to drive outside my city to a business in a rural location in a neighboring county. Driving for an hour, I was struck by the frequency, content and size of the signs dotting the forests and farms lining the road. A number of the commercially produced signs featured slogans I cannot repeat on this podcast without marking the episode as explicit. I noticed myself thinking that if my car broke down here, I wondered if I would be safe. Weeks earlier, someone had vandalized my car, after failing to deface the image of the presidential candidate depicted on a small sticker on my car window. I wondered if someone wanted to hurt my car, would they want to hurt me as well? And I’m thinking this as a white guy in a majority-white rural community. I don’t assume that this kind of fear is unique, or that these kinds of actions are exclusive to the members of one political party alone. However, it calls into question how united we are as the United States of America.

Our team of Christian antiracist educators and friends sit down to talk about what it means to be “one nation” in this current historical moment in America.

Let’s go now and listen to this conversation.