Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com.

We hear it whispered that our cherished American experiment in democracy — which we used to be so proud of — is going belly up. Naysayers say that either our rapidly rising national debt will bankrupt us or that a newly emergent power like China will crush us.

To me, the biggest dangers to our survival are our raging cultural wars, which are destroying us from within the same way an autoimmune disorder destroys the human body from the inside out.

I’m acutely aware of how important my human body is right now after returning home from Concord Hospital, where they magically replaced a faulty valve in my heart through a catheter. My recuperation is a powerful reminder that a person is pretty useless without a healthy body, just as a country is pretty useless if it is divided against itself.

Thirty years ago, the sociologist James Hunter coined the term “cultural war” to describe the widening societal divide that was turning neighbors into enemies. Since then, the situation has gotten so bad that he has written a new book warning that “culture wars have so thoroughly poisoned American politics that they’ve made authoritarianism dangerously attractive to too many.”⁠

Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, New Hampshire was already starting to divide into camps, but I was still able to talk to acquaintances on the other side of the divide, engaging in amiable conversations about politics as if we were debating whether the better car was a Chevy or a Ford. My arguments didn’t gain any converts, but I didn’t hate my opponents and they didn’t hate me.

Hunter notes that such exchanges, even though they didn’t change minds, were valuable in enabling each side to view the other as a fellow citizen, not the enemy. Now that has changed: Nothing is a laughing matter, and everything has taken on life or death importance. Hunter notes this saying “America’s culture wars have metastasized so that many groups believe they are in a maximalist battle against their own extinction. Whether it’s far-right [white nationalists] panicking over the declining white birth rate or academic theorists popularizing the belief that words are violence...”

We are increasingly viewing each other as enemies, no longer as neighbors. The gap is becoming unbridgeable. In this new cult of the individual, old community guidelines and aspirations have been kicked into the dirt.

We are exhausted from the continuing rancor and distrust while dreading what lies ahead after the results of the last election. We’ve had all we can stand! Under these circumstances, it would be tempting to roll over and give up, but we can’t because there is more at stake than we realize.

Our founding fathers held dear the Latin phrase embedded in our national motto, E pluribus unum, meaning “out of many, one.” According to Hunter, this was the “founding aspiration and glue that holds our country together.” The part of this agreement that is crucial to democracy is “that we will not kill each other over our differences. Instead, we will talk through those differences.”

The pivotal phrase is “we will talk through our differences.”

Never in recorded history has there been a civil war that didn’t first begin as a culture war. To forestall that possibility, we have to regain the fortitude and discipline to work through difficult issues in a responsible manner without flagrant lies or grandstanding.

As a nation, we have a decent track record of bridging our differences democratically, except, of course, for our Civil War. That exception led to the unimaginable slaughter of 620,000 of our fellow Americans, our own flesh and blood.

Tragically, we are approaching that danger zone again as politicians like President Trump delight in dividing us, paralyzing our democratic way of life and replacing it with a transactional society where the person in power always wins. You know that person, the one screaming in your ear ‘what have you done for me lately?’

We need more courageous souls who speak truth to power, like the Right Rev. Mariann Budde, who gave the sermon Tuesday at President Trump’s final inauguration event at the Washington National Cathedral.

She chastised Trump, who sat a few feet away, saying “in the name of God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.” She also issued this stern warning: “The culture of contempt that has become normalized in this country threatens to destroy us.”

She rejected Trump’s transactional, dog-eat-dog philosophy and instead offered the three foundations of genuine unity: “honesty, humility, and honoring the inherent dignity of every human.”⁠

May future historians mark this sermon as the turning point that woke up America!