During the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin famously said, “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately.” In light of the daily assaults on the religious freedom of Americans, people of faith should heed Franklin’s advice.

Over ninety percent of the population believes in God, professed Christians still make up the vast majority of the population and atheists are a tiny minority.  And yet, somehow, secular progressives are pushing faith to the fringes. Secular progressivism is on the forward march and religious freedom is in grave danger. How did this happen?

42,000 and Still Counting

At The Stream, we’re convinced a big problem is our own lack of unity. On the night He was betrayed, Jesus prayed that His disciples might be one, as He and the Father are one. For a thousand years, the Body of Christ was unified. In 1054, however, tensions between East and West led to a tragic split that has never fully healed.

Then, in 1517, Martin Luther, responding to widespread frustration and corruption, sparked the Protestant Reformation in the West. Since then, Protestants and Catholics have spilt time, energy and blood fighting each other — to say nothing of how Christians have often treated Jews. There are now some 42,000 denominations worldwide and still counting. We’re much better at fragmenting than at working together. But we know that the Lord wants us to discover the unity He prayed for.

With us divided, secularists have pushed believers farther and farther to the margins and turned millions of Americans against the very freedom they enjoy. What our grandparents treated as common sense — the right to life, the nature and dignity of marriage — are now treated as bigotry. Religious freedom is becoming mere freedom to have secret beliefs. The moral consensus that sustained our country has ceased to exist.

Ecumenism of the Trenches

Ironically, the progress of secularism has started to bring believers together. Praying outside Planned Parenthood offices, orthodox Catholics have found they have more in common with faithful Lutherans than with liberal Catholics who think like secularists.

While campaigning for a state referendum on marriage, Southern Baptists have joined forces with Pentecostals whom they used to avoid.

At crisis pregnancy centers, staunch Calvinists have learned they have a lot more in common with evangelical Methodists than they do with liberal Presbyterians.

Mennonites, Catholics and Southern Baptists have joined hands to push back against federal assaults on their freedom.

Baptist theologian Timothy George has called this phenomenon an “ecumenism of the trenches.” If we’re only held together by shared policy opinions and a common opponent, however, then our alliance will be only a weak marriage of convenience. I believe something more is possible. Believers need to go beyond defensive alliances on public policy and strive for a deeper and more lasting unity.

Sure, we have important doctrinal disagreements. Yet we share core beliefs and moral principles and we worship the same God.(There’s only one.) If we stand on these, we can partly fulfill Jesus’ prayer for our unity, even though we’re still divided by institutions and doctrines.

Not Squishy Ecumenism

What we need is highest common denominator ecumenism, not the squishy ecumenical campaigns of the last century. That movement was centered in the National Council of Churches (NCC) in the United States and the World Council of Churches (WCC) internationally. Despite a hopeful beginning, these organizations ended up as outlets for left-wing political activists in mainline denominations, who were reliably wrong on every major cultural issue. And by the 1980s they were denouncing Israel and the United States but providing support for the Soviet Union and leftist movements in Latin America.

Thankfully, these groups have lost most of their influence. Even the media seem to know that they speak only for themselves and not for Christians in general. The NCC and WCC were right to strive for unity. Their error was to ground that unity in partisan politics rather than in the Living God, His eternal principles, and fundamental truths about man and creation. We must avoid their mistake.

Jesus would never have prayed for His followers to be one with Him and perfected in unity if it were impossible or unimportant. St. Paul challenged the church at Ephesus to make “every effort to preserve the unity of the Spirit in a bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:3), and he urged the church at Rome not to behave arrogantly toward their Jewish neighbors (Romans 11:17-21).

Unity is a sign of the kingdom of God; in our division we have reduced God’s kingdom to a future reward rather than a living, present reality. To paraphrase Ben Franklin, we must learn to pull together, or we will most assuredly be torn apart.

Jay W. Richards, PhD, is Executive Editor of The Stream. For more information related to this article, see James Robison and Jay W. Richards, Indivisible: Restoring Faith, Family & Freedom Before It’s Too Late.