The Society We Deserve

Why does it feel like everyone is just looking out for themselves now?

Loneliness is at a hundred-year high. Trust in institutions - and in each other - keeps falling. Nearly every group in America feels slandered, threatened, and certain that some other group has given up on the common good. We are standing at an edge: the edge of despair, or the edge of possibility.

The Society We Deserve makes the case for possibility. Rev. Terry Kyllo - a Lutheran pastor who left parish ministry to counter a well-funded campaign of anti-Muslim dehumanization, and stayed to become one of Washington State's most experienced bridge-builders - argues that our crisis is not that Americans stopped sharing values. It is that we stopped sharing experiences. Our differences are not the problem; our distance is. In that distance, fear fills the gap, dehumanization weaponizes what we love, and democracy starts to come apart.

The way back is neither complicated nor beyond us. Human beings survived and thrived through cooperation within groups and between groups - and cooperation grows the way it always has: through first experiences, shared meals, shared service, and the slow, repeatable work of building trust. Kyllo maps the path from relationship to trust, to belonging, to shared responsibility, to communities that solve problems together - with stories from ten years of gatherings where Christians and Muslims, conservatives and progressives, discovered they were never as far apart as they had been told.

Written for readers who are exhausted by outrage but not ready to give up, The Society We Deserve is a field-tested vision of civic renewal - and an invitation to help build a society where everyone belongs and everyone can thrive.