The Utah Compromise Shows How Negotiation Can Protect Competing Convictions

In a 2021 speech at the University of Virginia, Latter-day Saint leader Dallin Oaks said that Christians in civic life should practice patience, negotiation and reasonable accommodation. Jonathan Rauch found the argument surprising. Oaks was speaking for a conservative church that opposed same-sex marriage, and Rauch had grown up hearing Christian rhetoric directed against people like him. Yet Rauch heard in the speech a civic theology: a developed account of how Christians should act in public life. He said the argument was grounded in both an understanding of the Constitution and Christ’s teaching, and differed from the confrontational politics he associated with white evangelicalism.

The surprise was not that a religious leader spoke about politics, but what Oaks said Christians should do in public life. As Rauch summarized the speech, Christ wanted Christians to practice patience, negotiation and reasonable accommodation. Rauch saw this as countercultural in a period of high polarization, when he felt that both left and right were moving toward more fearful and heightened rhetoric. He also stressed the distance between Oaks’s public argument and the Latter-day Saint Church’s record: it opposed same-sex marriage, and in 2008 had used its institutional influence against it in California. Rauch noted that the church had “real blots on its record,” including the abuse described by his first editor, Deborah Laake, who later died by suicide.

The Utah Compromise gave Rauch a practical example of the kind of pluralist politics Oaks described. In 2008, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints helped mobilize against same-sex marriage in California. Rauch said the backlash was intense enough that church members began asking what role they wanted to play. That led to a period of conversations and trust-building with Troy Williams, head of the LGBT organization Equality Utah. The conversations were initially tense, Rauch said. In 2015, the church, Equality Utah and conservative Republicans in the Utah legislature reached an agreement.

The deal paired an anti-discrimination law protecting LGBT people in employment and housing with protections and opt-outs for religious communities. Those carve-outs mattered: Brigham Young University, for example, did not have to place same-sex married couples in married student housing. Rauch, who spent 20 years working for same-sex marriage, said many gay people object to such exemptions. He does not. He argued that he does not need every baker to make him a wedding cake, and that requiring a Christian baker to act against conscience should not be the price of protecting gay people unless the circumstance makes that requirement crucial.

That position is part of the compromise’s tension, not a claim that everyone should find its terms acceptable. Rauch said he understood why some people in the gay community disliked the carve-outs. He also connected his view to the experience of gay people as a group that had been excluded from employment, commerce, churches and polite society. In his view, denying a Christian baker freedom of conscience could repeat a form of exclusion, unless there was a compelling reason to do so. He described the agreement as a way to enlarge the space in which people from both communities could live according to their convictions.

Rauch said the agreement produced a level of trust and cooperation between LGBT and faith communities that Utah had not previously achieved. He also said Utah became tied for second place in the country for support of anti-discrimination protections for LGBT people. These are Rauch’s descriptions of the deal and its effects; they do not settle the disagreement over whether its protections were sufficient.

Ismail Royer, who said he opposed the compromise from the right, asked whether functioning pluralism requires negotiated packages like Utah’s, or whether people might live alongside one another while continuing to disagree. Royer described a close friendship with a pastor married to another man, though Royer does not regard same-sex relationships as marriage. Some people, he said, will not talk to him because of his religious views. His question was whether the Utah agreement was necessary, or whether coexistence could rest on people maintaining their disagreements without framing one another’s views as a denial of someone’s right to exist.

Rauch responded by asking what, specifically, made the Utah agreement unacceptable to its critics. He said the church’s position was that discrimination in housing and employment based on sexual orientation was not part of its tradition; with its core interests protected, it did not see the agreement as surrender. He suggested that people can mistake a possible positive-sum arrangement for a zero-sum choice. That answer does not eliminate the disagreement over which interests are core or how much protection is enough. It does explain why Rauch regards the negotiated package as more than a midpoint between opposing positions.

For Rauch, the deal also illustrates a distinction between compromise as surrender and compromise as a process. He connected it to James Madison’s constitutional vision: rules in a pluralist society should make people negotiate, and the process can generate new solutions rather than simply divide the distance between two positions. He returned to that idea at the end of the discussion, describing compromise as a way of finding “new solutions to old problems,” not a mechanical split in which both parties give up what matters most.

Eboo Patel connected the Utah example to a broader question: can religious institutions treat cooperation across faiths as an obligation rooted in their own traditions, rather than as a concession to modern pressure? He pointed to the account of the Prophet Muhammad’s move to Medina, including the Constitution of Medina, a mosque open to the city’s residents, and a marketplace intended to let different communities trade. Patel said he had learned about the marketplace from Sheikh Hamza. His point was that interfaith cooperation can be part of a tradition’s demands, not a dilution of it. He read Oaks’s argument for patience, negotiation and reasonable accommodation in civic life in the same way: as a claim about what the tradition requires.

For Rauch, that argument carried particular force because he had grown up hearing religious language used against people like him. He described himself as Jewish, gay and an atheist, and recalled the homophobia of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as a Christian pastor’s claim that God did not hear the prayers of Jews. He said he had once understood Christianity as cruel and hypocritical because of its treatment of minorities. His view changed as he came to distinguish the teachings of Jesus from the conduct of Christians, and to see a connection between Jesus’s teachings and the pluralist principles associated with Madison.

Rauch also revisited an earlier argument of his own: that religion would best be diminished by ignoring it. He called that position the dumbest thing he had written. He said that as religious affiliation fell below half of Americans, other social indicators also worsened, though he did not list them in the discussion. Faith, in his view, is a load-bearing part of American society; its decline can leave damage beyond religious institutions. He now argues that the country needs Christianity to be more Christian.

At the center of his account is an identification that does not depend on agreement. After hearing Oaks speak, Rauch said, he did not feel he had to set aside his own identity in order to listen. Because someone from a tradition very different from his was appealing to a pluralist civic order, Rauch felt a sense of identity with him. Patel pressed on the word “identity”: what makes that possible when the other person belongs to a community that has also been part of a hurtful history? Rauch’s answer was not that the history disappeared, but that his commitments were multiple. His Judaism and homosexuality mattered, as did his commitment to the Constitution and its pluralist vision.

Patel asked Amanda Ripley whether Rauch’s response was a rare personal virtue or a capacity American civic life needs more people to develop. Ripley answered that the country needs this capacity precisely because it does not have one shared narrative to rely on. That makes Americans vulnerable to political manipulation, she said, and means they need higher-level skills for handling conflict. She called Rauch “conflict fluent”: able to remain in difficult disagreement without returning contempt for contempt.

But Patel’s question about whether people should be invited into hard conversations exposed a tension in that ideal. He asked whether an institution should protect someone like Rauch from having to hear a leader from a community associated with past harm, or invite him while acknowledging that history. Ripley said people have to be met where they are. The invitation should be offered, she said, without assuming that everyone will be able or willing to accept it.

She also questioned the way refusal can be framed. Saying “I can’t talk to a person who denies my right to exist” can feel righteous, moral and powerful, she said; sometimes it is. Often, though, she said, it can be another form of conflict avoidance. Patel pushed back against treating this as simply a conflict between equals. Rauch’s experience as a gay, Jewish, atheist child listening to Christian radio was shaped by oppression, Patel argued. It was not an equal-power relationship. He asked whether a person with that history should be free to say no.

Ripley did not dismiss the possibility. Patel agreed that Rauch would have every right to refuse, given his background, but argued that refusal should be the exception rather than the rule. That distinction is easy to state and difficult to apply: the same invitation can be an opening to relationship for one person and an unfair demand on another. Ripley’s position leaves room for both claims. Institutions should invite people into contact, but should not assume that an invitation creates an obligation to participate.

Patel described the people willing to enter such conversations as “6s and 7s” on a scale of difficulty, with a visit by Shirley Chisholm to George Wallace in the hospital after he was shot as an example closer to the far end. He argued that a pluralistic society needs many people willing to do the less extraordinary but still difficult work. Not everyone can be a 9 or a 10, he said, and not everyone should be. Ripley agreed that more people seemed ready to be 6s and 7s than in 2021, but said there were not enough.

Patel’s question then shifted from whether people should take that risk to how they might learn to do it. Ripley said conflict fluency develops within organizations and cultures that can make it easier or harder. She pointed to Latter-day Saint communities and the Bahá’í faith as examples of settings with practices that shape how members relate to one another.

In the Bahá’í communities Ripley described, local elections have no campaigning or parties. Members consider what qualities their community needs, pray, and then each write down nine people they believe fit those needs. Election is treated not as a status prize but as a call to humility and service. Ripley recalled a Bahá’í woman, Ndidi Lawson, who had young children and was busy; one evening, someone came to her door with a small gift bag to tell her she had been elected. Ripley offered this as an example of how a community’s practices can make a particular understanding of leadership possible.

She also described a hospital in Jerusalem where, as she recounted it, Palestinian doctors treated Israeli soldiers and Israeli nurses treated wounded Palestinians. A Palestinian man visiting his sick father watched a Palestinian doctor leave a waiting room after speaking to a religious Jewish woman. The woman asked another Jewish woman whether he was the doctor. The other woman said yes, and that he was a great doctor; the first woman settled back to wait. Ripley’s point was that the hospital’s norms made a different interaction possible from the norms outside it. In her account, the people had not changed; the setting shaped what they could do together.

These examples suggest that conflict fluency is not simply a matter of individual courage. Institutions can establish routines, expectations and forms of authority that reduce the cost of cooperation. But Patel asked a further question: can institutions produce leaders who carry those practices beyond the institution? Rauch’s public writing and speaking, Patel argued, made him more than someone who could manage a disagreement privately. He had become an advocate for the ethic itself.

The question of how institutions cultivate cooperation also raised a concern about what they might lose by doing so. A participant from the Episcopal Church described a tradition that had used doctrinal flexibility to preserve a broad center. He referred to “Latitudinarianism,” a willingness to treat some doctrinal issues as indifferent so that the center could hold. But he worried that this strategy could leave people thinking that if everything was indifferent, the institution itself was indifferent. He contrasted this with more tightly bounded institutions, including the Latter-day Saints and Jehovah’s Witnesses, which he said were larger than the Anglican Communion.

His question was not simply whether religious institutions should engage across differences. It was how they could do so without weakening the goods and sense of identity they exist to sustain. If a tradition’s openness contributes to a loss of members, while stricter institutions retain more of their people, what incentive is there to take the risk? The question put pressure on the idea that openness is automatically an institutional good.

Rauch declined to offer a simple answer about how religious institutions should balance openness and identity. He pointed instead to a rabbi in the audience whose congregation had developed a program in which people discuss foundational American texts alongside their own faith traditions. He also asked why universities so often serve as the default setting for conversations about pluralism, when religious communities themselves may be among the first places to build the habits involved.

Ripley’s answer was that the method matters. A community can lean into conflict carefully and emerge with stronger ties, or do so destructively and emerge frayed. Patel responded to the concern about religious identity by arguing that cooperation across faiths need not mean weakening a tradition. It can instead be made a requirement of the tradition. He pointed to Islamic teachings and accounts of the Prophet Muhammad’s conduct in Medina, and said that in this understanding, positive relationships with people of other faiths do not make someone less Muslim. He also said Oaks’s argument could be read as a claim about what the Latter-day Saint tradition requires.

The discussion did not resolve how a tradition should decide which beliefs and practices are essential, or how it should judge the institutional costs of broadening its membership. Instead, it offered two different ways to approach the problem: build practices that help members engage across difference, and make the case for that engagement from within the tradition itself. For the Episcopal participant, the risk was that too much flexibility might hollow out institutional identity. For Patel, the answer was not to make religious communities less distinctive, but to connect the work of cooperation to the depth of their commitments.

A different audience member raised the question of how religious leaders are trained. He said that in the Presbyterian seminary world he knew, people entering Protestant ministry seemed increasingly interested in social-justice advocacy and less interested in serving as associate pastors focused on compromise and pastoral care. He was careful not to generalize too broadly, but said the change over the past decade raised concerns about what kinds of leaders seminaries were producing.

Patel widened the question to ideological sorting across institutions. He suggested that religious communities might be drawing from increasingly different political and ideological pools, with some traditions becoming strongly associated with one side and others with the other. He also raised a parallel concern about counseling psychology: if the people entering a profession are ideologically skewed, a teenager dealing with problems such as gambling, pornography or video games may have difficulty finding a counselor they instinctively trust to understand them.

Rauch said this pattern was not specific to seminaries or any single faith. People were sorting by party and ideology across American society, and in the short and medium term the problem seemed to him to be worsening. He did not claim to know an easy solution. He pointed to civil-society efforts, including Braver Angels and initiatives intended to improve viewpoint diversity in graduate education, as attempts to counter self-segregation.

Ripley connected sorting to fear. When people are anxious about the future, she said, they seek clarity; psychological “splitting” can make it comforting to divide the world into good and evil. Lowering the threat level can make it easier to resist that impulse. She pointed to violence interrupters’ work to reduce the sense of immediate threat, and argued that making manipulation visible could help people become less willing to be played by conflict entrepreneurs.

One obstacle to healthier conflict is what Ripley called “conflict entrepreneurs”: people or organizations that exploit and inflame conflict for attention, power, belonging or a sense of importance. The incentives are powerful, she said, and institutions often reward this behavior. Her own daily discipline, she said, was to try not to become one.

Ripley argued that communities shifting from dysfunctional to healthier conflict first have to manage the conflict entrepreneurs in their midst, sometimes by creating distance from them. She also emphasized that they can change. Some of the strongest conflict experts, she said, had once been conflict entrepreneurs. She cited Curtis Toler, formerly a gang leader on Chicago’s South Side, who helped create and run Chicago CRED, a violence-interruption organization. His past, Ripley said, gave him an understanding of the draw of conflict entrepreneurship. Leaving the door open for people to change is part of the work.

Young people see many examples of conflict designed to inflame, but too few models of people finding ways to coexist while they disagree. Ripley said such examples are plentiful but poorly told. A “nice” story about people getting along is unlikely to hold attention. A better account makes constructive conflict a mystery: what changed, how did it happen, and what made the unexpected outcome possible?

Ripley described a story about a small town in upstate New York, where an established Republican recruited a Democrat to run for local office, unsettling people who expected party loyalty. The reporting began when her co-founder saw both candidates’ signs in one yard, then followed the question of how the arrangement came about. In another example, Ripley wrote about a congressional committee split between Republicans and Democrats that managed to do substantial work even though members initially would not sit in the same room after January 6. She said the committee was the only one in Congress to bring in a mediator to discuss the attack confidentially.

These cases, she argued, are not rare exceptions so much as underreported forms of public life. To make them useful, storytellers need to show the difficulty and mechanism of change, not present cooperation as a sentimental lesson. Ripley said that people were receiving more information than ever while also tuning out more, and that they were looking for better ways to understand the surrounding disorder. Patel noted a related challenge: a public saturated with claims about a shared world may find it increasingly difficult to coordinate around what is true. Ripley agreed that people were looking for a different way to make sense of the chaos.

Patel linked the problem of cooperation to social capital and diversity. He described Robert Putnam’s work as finding that, as a geographical area becomes more diverse, measures including volunteering, wellbeing, safety and voting can fall. Patel said those measures rise over the longer term, and proposed that institutions can help accelerate the adjustment by learning how to make diversity an asset. He named athletic leagues and hospitals as examples of settings where people from different backgrounds learn to work together. His question was how to speed that process and build institutions that can nurture leaders who carry the work into public life.

A later question put pressure on that account: do institutions change because they deliberately learn how to handle diversity, or because the people who grew up together in diverse settings eventually enter institutional leadership? Patel offered what he called the straightforward answer: people from diverse backgrounds, especially children, end up in the same schools, athletic leagues and other institutions, and over time those institutions learn to deal with diversity better. He also pointed to acute moments such as World War II, when people from different religious communities were told they were on the same team and needed to work together. He cited Putnam’s paper and the Robbers Cave experiment as relevant accounts, but did not claim that the institutional or generational explanation alone settled the question.

Ripley also proposed that people might be encouraged to identify along a different line: not only left and right, but those willing to enter difficult conversations and those who recoil from them. She described this as a potentially risky form of “splitting,” but also as a countercultural distinction that could make the willingness to face hard conversations a source of identity. She said younger people were exposed to many poor examples of conflict, but also wanted to figure out how to avoid repeating the mistakes of older generations.

An audience member asked whether the internet is inherently a machine for polarization, pointing to incentives for attacking others to attract followers and attention. Ripley answered that the internet is a polarization machine as currently configured, but said it does not have to be that way: changing algorithms could change the incentives. She agreed that conflict is rewarded, cultivated and celebrated, and said there had never been a better time to be a conflict entrepreneur. At the same time, she thought people were becoming tired of the dynamic.

The exchange did not settle how much of the effect comes from design or how it varies across platforms. Ripley suggested that anonymity and local norms matter: people may behave differently in a Reddit group than on Twitter. Patel asked whether people are more likely to reward a conflict entrepreneur online than in person. Rauch pointed out that online attention can make people rich, so the rewards do not remain virtual. The discussion left open why behavior differs between platforms, while making the broader point that norms help shape what people do in a given setting.

Michael Holzman, whom Rauch described as his rabbi, proposed “atonement entrepreneurs” as a counterpart to conflict entrepreneurs. The key turn in the Utah story, Holzman suggested, was that Latter-day Saint leaders looked inward and asked what their own actions had contributed to the backlash, rather than looking outward for what was wrong with their critics. He asked how civic and religious leaders could make atonement part of public leadership.

Rauch welcomed the idea, but said atonement was difficult. In his life as a gay person, he had met many Christians who had said or done harmful things about homosexuality, but only one who apologized directly. He knew of one major religious figure, Pope Francis, who had done something comparable, though indirectly. Rauch said he was still waiting for broader atonement.

For now, he said, he would accept compromise. He distinguished it from simply splitting the difference, which leaves both sides unhappy and requires each to surrender what matters most. In the Madisonian sense he described, compromise is creative: people find a new solution to an old problem, sometimes by adding ideas or bringing in more participants. Children who cannot agree about which game to play might invent a new one or invite other children in, he said. In Congress, negotiations can also leave participants with more ideas, more players and a better proposal than they began with.

Rauch argued that the Constitution makes negotiation a recurring civic obligation by requiring people to have contact with one another through the process. That process is imperfect and may fall short of atonement, but it can still require patience, negotiation and mutual accommodation. His closing distinction was not that compromise makes harm disappear, or that every person must accept an invitation to engage. It was that negotiated solutions can create ways to live together without requiring either side to abandon every core commitment.