ONE: United We Stand
They say two things to never bring up in polite conversation are religion and politics. No one wants to insult someone else’s religious beliefs and everyone knows politics can get ugly. When you combine the two, things usually get even worse like with the vicious fights over science education (evolution vs. creationism), school prayer, and stem cell research.
ONE on the other hand has united people of every religion and non-religious people. Secular humanists, like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, have long been at the forefront of development, and many religions have a distinguished history of helping the poor (I’ve heard poverty is mentioned 2000 times in the New Testament).
Nick Kristoff who won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on Darfur wrote a column published yesterday about this effect where Evangelical Christians in particular are taking up the banner of social justice and promoting traditionally liberal issues, including development assistance. (Likewise, traditional opponents of free trade are promoting trade reform.) He doesn’t mention ONE by name, but his article is certainly in the spirit of it.
Now of course ONE can’t resolve all the disputes, and, as he notes, some issues continue to be divisive (needle exchange and contraceptive programs in PEPFAR 2 for instance). But if we do our best and the poor lift themselves out of poverty, when historians look back in a few centuries they’ll mostly be writing about how Americans and people world-wide put aside their differences and worked together on the most pressing issue of the era.
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