One
The power of singular focus
Description
Deidra Riggs opens her 2017 book with a scene she knows well: a room full of people who agree, in principle, that they should be together. They nod at the language of unity. They sing about it. And then, over coffee afterward, they sort themselves by the things that were supposed to no longer matter — background, politics, the neighborhood they drove in from. Riggs, a writer and speaker who has spent years working inside American Christian communities on questions of race and belonging, noticed that the gap between what these rooms professed and what they practiced was not a small one. It was the whole distance.
Her book takes a single word as its title and its argument. "One" is what the communities she moves through say they want to be. It is also, she argues, the thing they most consistently fail to become — not for lack of good feeling, but because becoming one asks for something more costly than good feeling. It asks people to stay in relationship with those they would rather avoid, to keep showing up at the same table when leaving would be easier and quieter.
Riggs writes from a specific tradition and speaks to a specific audience, but the tension she describes travels well beyond any one congregation. The pull toward people who already resemble us is not a religious problem. It is a human default, and she is interested in what it costs to override it on purpose.
The question we’re asking : What does it actually take for a community that says it wants to be "one" to stop sorting itself back into comfortable pieces?What we’ll see : How Riggs reframes reconciliation as sustained, uncomfortable presence rather than warm agreement — and why the smallest word carries the heaviest demand.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The word that keeps dividing us
The through-line of Riggs's book is a suspicion she states plainly: much of what passes for unity is really uniformity. A group feels like one thing because everyone in it already agreed on most things before they arrived. Riggs, who is Black and has spent much of her working life in predominantly white evangelical spaces, has watched this dynamic from the inside. The room congratulates itself on harmony while quietly making sure the range of people in it stays narrow enough that harmony comes cheap.
She is careful not to make this a story about villains. The people she describes are not, for the most part, acting in bad faith. They believe the language they use. The problem is that the language of oneness has been allowed to float free of any practice that would test it. You can say a community is one and never once have to sit across from someone whose experience of that community is entirely different from yours. The word does no work. It decorates.
02Chapter 2 — What reconciliation actually asks
If oneness has been reduced to a mood, reconciliation has been reduced to an event — a service, a statement, a moment of apology after which everyone can feel the matter is closed. Riggs spends a good part of the book dismantling this. Reconciliation, in her account, is not a thing you announce and then have. It is a relationship you keep, and keeping it is slow, unglamorous, and frequently uncomfortable.
She draws a sharp line between two things that often get confused: agreement and presence. Agreement is when people already share a view and enjoy each other for it. Presence is staying in the room with someone whose view, or whose life, unsettles yours — and not leaving. Riggs argues that the second is the actual substance of being one, and that communities keep reaching for the first because it feels like the same thing and costs almost nothing.
03Chapter 3 — The table is the argument
The image Riggs keeps returning to is the table — who sits at it, who is missing from it, and what it would take to widen it. It's not a decorative metaphor for her. The table is where the abstract word "one" either becomes real or stays a slogan, because a table is a place you cannot occupy without noticing exactly who is beside you and who is not.
Her point about most tables is uncomfortable and simple: they fill up with people who look, think, vote, and worship like the person who set them. This happens without anyone deciding it should. It is the path of least resistance, the natural drift of comfort. Riggs's argument is that a community serious about oneness has to work against this drift deliberately, because left alone it will always reproduce sameness and call the result togetherness.
04Chapter 4 — A church that stops sorting people
Step back from Riggs's specific context — a writer speaking largely to American Christians about race — and the shape of her claim turns out to describe far more than any one congregation. Every community that prizes belonging faces the same quiet mechanism she names: the drift toward people who already resemble us, dressed up afterward as unity. Churches are simply a place where the gap between the ideal and the practice is unusually easy to see, because the ideal is stated so often and so beautifully.
What Riggs is really describing is the difference between a group held together by likeness and a group held together by commitment. The first kind feels wonderful and asks nothing; it stays intact only as long as no one too different tries to join. The second kind is harder, slower, and more fragile, because it depends on people choosing each other across the very lines that likeness would have let them avoid. She argues that only the second kind earns the word "one" — the first has merely borrowed it.
05Conclusion
Riggs ends more or less where she began: in a room full of people who mean well and drift apart anyway. What has changed by the last pages is not the room but the reader's sense of what would have to happen inside it. The word "one" no longer sounds like a comfort. It sounds like an assignment — the ongoing, unfinished work of staying present to people it would be easier to leave. She offers no ceremony that completes it and no metric that measures it, only the daily decision not to sort.