As the election approaches, Mark Beckwith, Friday’s speaker at the Amos Fortune Forum series in Jaffrey, said that there’s room for Republicans and Democrats to come together and find areas of agreement – what he called “common ground,” rather than “compromise.”

Beckwith’s talk, titled “Seeing Beyond Polarization,” drew on his experiences with Braver Angels, a nonpartisan group aimed at closing the political divide, as well as his experiences as a bishop in the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, N.J., and advocate for gun violence prevention. He said everyone has moments of cultural blindness.

When he was newly elected to his bishop position, Beckwith said, he noticed that there was a soup kitchen near the church. But within a few weeks, he rarely noticed the men who would line up there every day to be served breakfast and lunch – he was focused, instead, on the people in his diocese. That was until a few years into his position, when a priest within the diocese inquired about the soup kitchen, and they two went there together to have conversations with the 250 men who attended every day.

“Who I didn’t see,” admitted Beckwith. “Some of them lived with a level of faith and courage that had never been tested to that degree in me. And I didn’t see them.”

Beckwith said it can be hard to see the other side when living on the fringes. His main topic was entering the “mondorla,” the Italian word for “almond,” describing the shape when two circles meet – the overlapping of the Venn diagram.

He said the most obvious divide in today’s American culture is that between the red and the blue – Republicans and Democrats.

“There are forces and voices, and we all know where they come from, and some of us subscribe to them, that want us to stay at the edge of the red and blue circle,” Beckwith said. Braver Angels has been doing work to try to step into the intersection of those two viewpoints, and Beckwith said that unless more people try to close that gap, the polarization will “destroy us.”

Braver Angels, formed in 2016, has been working to find the common ground between those of differing beliefs, with an alliance in every state, including New Hampshire. It has held workshops and training with citizens and legislators across the country to reduce polarization. Polarization, Beckwith said, was “not worth continuing,” and “not effective.”

One of the efforts of Braver Angels in the upcoming election in November will be to pair Republicans and Democrats at polling placed with signs that say “We vote differently, but we hold America together.”

Beckwith said entering into that mutual space helps continue conversations that people can’t if they stay firmly on one side. For example, he said that as part of his efforts advocating against gun violence, he attended a gun show. He said by the end of the day, he had to acknowledge that there was a vocabulary and a real culture around gun ownership and history that he didn’t understand, and that was a fundamental part of the American culture.

He said that learning the differences between “automatic” and “semi-automatic” and talking about “gun safety” rather than “gun control” were just some of the changes he had to make to how he spoke about the issue, in order to keep the conversation going.

The Aug. 2 forum is “The Folkway: Fifty Years Out,” with Gordon Peery. The Amos Fortune Forum is held every Friday in the summertime at 8 p.m. at the Jaffrey Meetinghouse. Talks are available on the Amos Fortune Forum YouTube page.

Ashley Saari can be reached at 603-924-7172, Ext. 244, or asaari@ledger tran script.com. She’s on X @AshleySaariMLT.