Tim Shriver, founder and CEO of Unite.

Photograph by Tony Powell

The Christian Citizen spoke with Tim Shriver, founder and CEO of Unite, and host of “Need a Lift?” about his efforts to encourage dignity in politics and provide an alternative for people who are hungry for belonging, purpose, and the belief that we can all somehow work together. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. The full interview can be viewed below.

You have long been involved with the Special Olympics movement and are the founder and CEO of Unite. What is Unite? When and why did you start it?

I’ve had the great privilege of being involved in the Special Olympics movement for most of my life, since I was a child when my mother was experimenting with play and summer camp activities and sports with children who, in those days, in the 1960s, were coming from institutions. I’ve had this extraordinary front-row seat for the best in humanity — volunteers, coaches, sponsors, donors, people without disabilities, and people with disabilities — bringing out the most beautiful and most joy-filled and most potential-laden parts of themselves, taking a chance on each other, taking a chance on themselves, trusting in communities to be places of welcome. It’s just been unbelievable to watch the Special Olympics movement over the course of my life. Now, close to 5 million people in almost 200 countries are creating small Special Olympics events in all their neighborhoods and communities all over the world.

When I decided to step down from the day-to-day role about six years ago, the question I had was, how can I share what I’ve learned from the athletes of Special Olympics in another way, in some other context? I looked around and what I saw in our country was just the opposite — cynicism, hostility, dehumanization, and lack of trust in each other. In the words of one of our social and emotional learning curriculums, naysayers everywhere. When we teach kids this, you know, we have this little model of the horse inside you, the little naysayer. But the naysayers are kind of out of control. I asked myself, is that the real story of us? And my conclusion was, no, that’s not who we are. That’s a distortion of who we are. All that hostility and this unbridled contempt is the problem. It’s not that we differ [and] that creates divisions. It’s contempt and fear and hostility and dehumanization that create division.

Now, if you think division is the problem, what’s the opposite? Unity. And so many prayers that I heard in the back of my conscience, you know I heard all these prayers from liturgies about, that they might be one, and in union with, and so that the children would be one so that you and I might be one. And I thought to myself, that doesn’t mean we all agree. Unity doesn’t mean we all agree. Unity doesn’t mean we’re all the same. Unity means that, at some level, we are bound together in a creative force field, in an ultimate meaning, where somehow, we are in this together. At some level, we know that. That’s what I’ve seen in the Special Olympics. You can have an athlete with Down Syndrome and a Nobel Prize-winning professor, and when you put them on the playing field together, they somehow see in each other the same. They see the parts of themselves that are bound together, and you don’t have to explain it. You just know it.

I wanted to create an organization that brought people together in the face of a spiritual crisis and that tries to come up with solutions that can invite us to reconnect with that part of ourselves that’s hungry for belonging, hungry for purpose, and hungry to believe that we can all somehow work together. We’ve got a lot of little projects that are trying to take on a huge problem. We’ve got our Dignity Index, and we’ve got a podcast that I’m launching called “Need a Lift?” which is just interviewing folks, giving people the stories of the work of the best of humanity and never giving in to hatred and contempt and dehumanization, but taking them where they are, and they are out there, and transforming them into something beautiful. That’s my hope.

You mentioned one of these projects, the Dignity Index, which is a scoring tool for political rhetoric. Walk us through how that works.

The Dignity Index takes this idea that contempt is the problem, not the difference. Most people think, oh, the country’s going down the tubes because we can’t agree on the border, or we can’t agree on education, or we can’t agree on guns or something like that. The Dignity Index is trying to say if we have a problem, it’s not that we don’t agree. It’s that we treat each other with contempt when we disagree. So, people said, well, that’s all nice, but how do you know if you’re treating someone with contempt? We built a scale that shows you on a scale of one to eight where you are. When you say to your friend at work that you’re wrong about, let’s say, gun rights. When you say that you know you’re wrong about it, and you’re a real danger to the country, we can score that because that’s a score that carries quite a lot of contempt in it. It’s either a three on our scale or maybe even a two. It depends on the context. If, on the other hand, I say, I don’t agree with you on gun rights, but I value your story, and I know you have opinions, too, I would give that something like a five, or even maybe a six, on the scale, because that suggests a sense of respect for your opinion. It doesn’t mean I agree with your opinion.

The Dignity Index is a scoring tool. You could score Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, but you can also score yourself. You could score your spouse. You could score your teacher. You could score your best friend who posted something on social media last week. And by scoring, it’s not that you weaponize the idea, like, see, I caught you, Curtis, I found you in contempt. What the index does is it almost intuitively reveals to you that you could use more dignity if you wanted to. You don’t have to sacrifice your principles to make a point. You just have to add a principle which is, when I disagree with you, I will never violate your dignity. And that opens up for people that they can treat people with dignity even in the face of significant and passionate disagreement. It’s kind of liberating because I think people find in their faith this message: love your enemies, we are one, and we’re all hungry for the same things. God has been so gracious and generous and kind and merciful to all of us. We know that, but then we don’t feel it when we’re in a conversation or when we’re in a debate. So, the Dignity Index kind helps us hold together how to disagree, and how to do it while still preserving and even elevating the dignity of others.

You piloted this program in Utah during the Congressional elections in 2022. What are some of the key findings that came out of that pilot project?

First, the instrument works. In terms of the social science, we’ve normed and validated it so that we’re confident that in multiple uses, it tells us the same thing, and we’re also confident that even if different people use it, they will come up with the same score. We have high confidence in the reliability and validity of the instrument. It’s objective. That means if I scored Donald Trump and a passionate Trump supporter scored Donald Trump, we’d score it the same if we’re using the instrument properly, or if I score Kamala Harris and a passionate Harris supporter scored Kamala Harris, we’d score her the same because the instrument tells an objective score.

The second thing we found out was that journalists really liked it. They were excited when Mike Lee scored this or Evan McMullin scored that. This ended up triggering a conversation about dignity and contempt in local media markets throughout Utah.

The third, and maybe the most exciting, thing we found was what we call the mirror effect. The people we trained to do the scoring became less and less interested in scoring others, and more and more interested in using the index to change themselves. And that was an aha moment for us. We didn’t see that coming. We thought, oh, if you prove that Kamala Harris is worse or better than Donald Trump or the other way around, then we’ll make them more effective politically or challenge them to do better politically. What people are interested in is how they can bring more dignity to their own lives as much as they want to know how they can use it as a tool to judge other people.

That’s opened for us a whole horizon of work. Schools now want to use the Dignity Index so kids can learn not how to judge other kids but how they can get better at how to disagree. College campuses want to use it so they can teach kids how to challenge their professors, how to engage in debate in classes, and even how to protest if they want to protest but to do so with dignity. Corporations can use this for team building and for improving, improving onboarding processes, and building a corporate culture around dignity so that there’s not all this tension and fear around political issues and so on. I’d encourage anyone to go to dignityindex.us and play with it for five minutes. You can get it quite quickly, and it’s quite a lot of fun, honestly.

You wrote an article in early August celebrating the fact that both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were talking about unity. You wrote, and I quote, “If given a choice, a large swath of Americans will vote for the person who offers a credible and serious effort to unite us. Both candidates have said the same thing. The one who really means it – and acts on it – will win.” That was prior to the Presidential debate. Do you still believe that today and do you see either candidate making a serious effort to bring Americans together?

I absolutely believe it. In fact, I believe it more than when I wrote it. The data, particularly now, just looking at this from a purely political perspective, as we hear over and over again, what matters in this election is swing voters in purple states. There’s a handful of states — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, and so on — that are up for grabs. And in those states, there are voters who are undecided. Here’s what we know about those voters, they’re part of the exhausted majority.

The exhausted majority are Americans who are turned off by contempt, who believe we have more in common than the politicians tell us, and who want real solutions. That’s the definition of a dignity voter: people who believe we have more in common, no longer want to be swallowed up by contempt, and want real solutions to problems. They don’t necessarily agree on all the issues, but they agree on those things. The more we look at those swing voters in those states, what they’re waiting for is the candidate who will signal to them that they will dial down the dehumanization of their opponents, that they will increase an emphasis on common values and common commitments, and that they will be practical about bringing people together to solve problems.

As swing voters go to the polls in November, the person who in their minds has answered those questions affirmatively will be the person they vote for, and I don’t think it will be driven by party affiliation. I don’t think it’ll be driven by how much snark you can put on your social media, how many zingers you get in a debate, how your photo ops look, or those kinds of things. I think it’ll be driven by the signal — almost like the Bat signal — that I’m going to tone down the contempt by listening to my voters who don’t agree with me. I’m going to bring out the common values, and I’m going to solve problems. The person who does that wins.

You’re working with a bipartisan panel of individuals who’ve been trained in how to use the Dignity Index. They watched and scored the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. How did the candidates do?

What we score is the language that the candidates use when they address each other. Because we’re primarily interested in how we treat each other. We’re not scoring your soaring rhetoric about the future — America is going to be this, or America is going to be that, or America should be this, or America should be that. We don’t measure any of that. We measure when Vice President Harris turns to President Trump and says you are an X.Y.Z., or when President Trump turns to Vice President Harris and says you are an X.Y.Z. On those portions of the debate where they addressed each other, they both, I’m sorry to say, scored at the low end of the scale in the three and even the two range.

There were a few sections where they scored in what we would call the five range, expressing a sort of equanimity about equal time and a balanced approach to the other. For example, when Vice President Harris spoke about the Middle East conflict, she expressed a sort of an all sides need to be heard approach. When President Trump spoke about some of the attacks Vice President Harris had made about him on the sales tax, he just spoke factually. He didn’t call her a name. He just said that’s not accurate. That would be like a five on the scale. He didn’t say he loved her or he valued her humanity, but he didn’t call her a name, so those would be like fives. We had a few of those, but for the most part, if a swing voter was tuning in and wishing they could hear either one of those candidates turn to the other and say, you know, on Election Day, I know that there’ll be 75 million Americans who aren’t going to vote for me and I want to address them and you, and let you know that every one of them will be important to me if I’m elected, and every one of them has interests and concerns that I want to understand more deeply, and, if and when I become President, I promise you that I will treat every one of your voters with as much dignity as I treat my own — we didn’t hear that. But that kind of message, I think, would sweep swing voters into the camp of whoever said it. Of course, they’d want to know if it’s true, and they’d want to make sure it’s believable, and politicians are often accused of being inauthentic. But if you could convince them that you meant it, I think you’d win.

The United States faces a host of problems and challenges — national security, the economy, border security, immigration — yet you’ve said that contempt is the biggest single problem we face right now. Can you say more about that?

Here’s the issue. We can’t solve any of those other problems if we insist on demonizing and dehumanizing half the country. All the biggest problems require a coordinated effort, and what this country has done well, when it’s been at its best has been to marshal a collective effort across parties, across states, across ethnicity in pursuit of a common goal. When we’ve done that, even when we’ve had to oppose forces within the country, we have shined. We have been a beacon to the world. We can’t do that if we’re dehumanizing each other. We can’t support a resolution of national security interests in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, or in Asia, in the South China Sea — we can’t be effective if people, both friend and foe, don’t believe they can trust us, don’t believe we can act, don’t believe we’re unified, don’t believe we have the power of common purpose.

The same thing is true at home. Whatever your belief is on climate change or the border or taxes, I mean all these things on guns, they all require a broad consensus to solve, and you can’t produce a consensus if the culture promotes contempt for people on the other side of a position.

At Unite, our premise isn’t that we have the most important issue. Our premise is that our culture is making it impossible to solve our issues. So, we must address the culture, and the problem in the culture is quite singular. The problem in the culture is not differences of opinion; it’s dehumanizing contempt for people with whom we differ.

Do you see this as primarily a concern for our national politics? Or is this rise in contempt and lack of dignity increasingly becoming an issue at the state and local level, as well?

The hardest part of exploring this question is seeing the toll that contempt takes on our personal and social lives. Millions of Americans have ended a relationship with someone they are either related to or are close to over politics. Almost half of our teenagers report feeling despair about themselves and about the future. Majorities of Americans no longer believe that we can solve problems. We are grieving maybe in the wake of Covid, maybe in the wake of other problems. But as one spiritual teacher of mine said, the most painful grief is the loss of hope. Contempt saps us of hope, and so I think that, unfortunately, when we see dehumanization on cable news, or we see it on social media, or we hear it from our political leaders, it eats us from the inside out. It’s not just about who scored a point in a political debate. It’s making us sick as human beings. It’s making us heartbroken. It’s making us afraid. It’s making us lonely. It’s making us hostile to each other. And we don’t flourish as a species when we’re hostile, when we’re embattled, and when we’re besieged by others. We depend on love, I dare say, and this is making it hard for us to have confidence in each other.

Politicians will say contempt wins, but at what cost? Are you okay with being part of the reason that nearly half of American teenagers are sad and hopeless? Are you okay with that? Because I’m not. I was born and raised in a political family with strong political beliefs. I’m not willing for any of those beliefs to spin a story that puts millions of American teenagers into despair. It’s not worth it to me. The cost is too high, and if that’s what it takes for me to get elected to the Congress, or the Senate, or the mayor’s office, or First Selectman, I’m not going to do it. I don’t want to do it. I think we must see it in those terms. We must see how brutal the effect of our leaders using contempt is on our personal lives.

You’ve talked about hope and love. It all connects with faith. What role do you see for religious leaders in this? How can people of faith more broadly get involved in the work of Unite and the Dignity Index?

I think the first thing is just to realize we can bring our faith to our political convictions. I like to say to people, if you get a fundraising email from someone you love, let’s just say you love a candidate, and they send you a fundraising email that says, could you give 25 bucks because my opponent is the devil. Write them back. Tell them you love what they do and you want to vote for them, but you will not give to an email that dehumanizes other Americans. That’s what a person of faith could do, stand up for the idea that we’re invited as people of faith to love our enemies. If that’s our tradition, we’re invited as people of faith to see that God is ever merciful. If that’s in our tradition, we’re invited to be agents of God’s will here on earth. We can be people of faith and still believe I really want this person to win, but no, I will not support you if you violate the most fundamental principles of my faith tradition. I believe in you because I think you will help us come closer to the God of love, but you’re not going to get us there by treating other people with hatred and contempt.

These are small actions that I think can shift the way we see our faith. Sometimes we see our faith just in terms of the principle — I’m pro-life, or I’m pro-choice, or I’m pro-immigrant, or I’m anti-immigrant. My faith teaches me these things. I’m pro-gun or anti-gun because of my faith. Okay, that’s fine. I’m not against any of that. Hold on to your principles on all those things, even if they’re all in disagreement with mine. But there’s another principle of our faith that we share, which is that we love one another. That’s how people will know you’re a follower of the Christian tradition of Jesus. They will know you’re a follower because you love one another, so you may love me, even if I disagree with you, and that’s a calling of your faith and a calling of mine too.

In an article about your participation in the Disagree Better Summit in Oklahoma City in August, which we republished in The Christian Citizen in September, you wrote about the times we are living in being a spiritual crisis. What did you take from that event specifically, which was held at the memorial site of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing?

Americans hear you must get to the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Niagara Falls. There are so many beautiful sights, the mountain ranges of the west and the east, the oceanfront, beautiful sites in New England and Florida, California, and the Pacific Northwest. Go to Oklahoma City. Put it on your bucket list. Visit the site. Learn about the people whose lives were taken in an instant of terror by their fellow Americans. Learn about who they are and who they could have been. For me, it was just a stark reminder. The beauty of the site is quite extraordinary, and the images of the little children who were killed — three, four, and five-year-olds.

It’s a question I guess we’ve been asking since the first words of the Bible were written. Why do we resort to violence? I mean, there must be better ways to solve problems, and, in this day and age, when our rhetoric is so casual, almost indifferently violent, it felt like a wake-up call to me. Looking at the faces of those children. Seeing the survivor tree. Hearing the stories of the heroes who tried to help and save people. We can’t excuse people who make these kinds of incidents more likely. We can’t allow ourselves to be guilty of making it more likely that these kinds of incidents will happen. We’ve got to change the way we address each other because when we speak about our fellow Americans as being subhuman or evil, some people will hear that as a call to violence, and it will be random and it will be brutal, and it will be irreversible. It’s not worth it. No political race is worth it, and no political issue is worth the taking of those innocent lives.

You mentioned the corrosive effect of contempt on families and friendships. You talked about your own family. Your family’s long been prominent in American politics and public service. How has what you’ve learned through all of this shaped your interactions and relationships with members of your own family?

Well, you know we have a little skill toolkit for how to elevate the way you address others when you disagree. It includes things like being curious, not furious. Regulate, then debate. Listen to hear, not to respond. This is an important one — challenge ideas, don’t attack people. I have used all those skills with my siblings, cousins, and children to try to manage the level of disappointment, anger, and fear that political divisions have caused in my family. I’m not going to tell you I’m great at it because I’m not, and I don’t think any of us are, because this is not a skill I practiced as a kid, and it’s not a skill I’ve honed over 20 or 30 years. But these are skills I’m really working hard at.

How do I listen to those on the other side of these issues within my own family to try to understand more deeply rather than just counterattack? How do I get in touch with my core? How do I regulate myself so that I can see a little bit more clearly the goodness in my family members who are saying things that otherwise might trigger me? It doesn’t mean I agree with them. In this case, I don’t agree with several members of my family. I don’t agree with them at all. I think their policies and the outcomes of their policies are very misguided, but I’m trying hard not to say they’re jerks, or they’re idiots, or they’re stupid, or they’ve sold out, or, you know, all these ad hominem attacks that don’t help.

So, I’m working on it. I’m a work in progress, and I’m encouraging other members of my family to try to use the same skills on both sides of these debates. It’s very painful though, unimaginable to me even six or eight months ago. We’re just one example. We’re not exceptional in this regard. Unfortunately, as I said, it’s millions of Americans who won’t have Thanksgiving dinner this year with some member of their family because they can’t stand them anymore.

You didn’t begin this work in preparation for a single election. As you look beyond the election, what’s next?

We’re trying to amplify this conversation in many communities to get in the game and help us figure out how to do this. I’m starting a podcast called “Need a Lift?” because I want to elevate the voices of people who are transforming conflict into purpose and new and more creative solutions to problems. There are tens of millions of Americans doing that. I call it “Need a Lift?” because I think we all need one. I know I do. My guests all give us a lift and remind us we can do this. Don’t give up. Take a chance on each other. That’s the message of “Need a Lift?” We’re going to build other storytelling tools that invite storytellers to come in and tell these stories.

I had the great privilege to talk to Steve Hartman of CBS News about his lifetime of telling stories that uplift people, and I asked him, “What is the lesson?” He said, “People are good.” That’s the lesson he’s learned after 30 years at CBS. If you want to become a journalist, listen to Steve Hartman describe how he tells those stories, how he gets them placed on the CBS Morning News and the CBS Evening News, and how they get huge audiences.

I’ll talk to Michael Phelps. I’m talking to Rainn Wilson whose deep, deep faith reminds us that people of faith will enable us, will empower us, to be able to transform these conflicts. We’re trying to build a bigger and bigger conversation. We’re tiny. We don’t need to control it. We don’t need to own it, lead it, or anything. We just want to join it, and we want other people to join us. Let’s have a conversation about how we can build the movement for dignity in our country that gives us a chance to believe in ourselves again.

Any final thoughts for our readers?

I just want to say, with so much respect, while I don’t come from your faith tradition, I have so much respect for the ways in which Baptist communities of all different sorts and sizes around this country have deepened a sense of service in the communities in which they operate and have reminded people of the sacredness of life over generations and have brought people back to Biblical wisdom. Repeatedly, all these gifts are needed. Now, I don’t care whether you’re a Republican or Democrat. I really, honestly, deeply do not care. A pathway to bring the richness of your tradition back into the American conversation, not to make people Baptists, Catholics, Jews, or Protestants, whatever it is, but to make us all better Americans, that’s my hope.