Bill Doherty, “America’s Therapist,” to testify at Congressional select committee

Bill Doherty, professor in the Department of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota, will testify Thursday before the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress about what Congress can do to depolarize itself. It will be streamed live and later available on YouTube.

The Select Committee is holding two hearings on depolarizing Congress. The first – held Thursday, June 17 – featured Yuval Levin, the Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and Molly Reynolds, a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institute and discussed methods to foster civility and bipartisanship.

The second will be Thursday, June 24, 11 a.m. (EST) and will feature practitioners sharing ideas to bring groups together across the political divide. The hearing will be livestreamed at the Select Committee’s Youtube site.

Doherty is a marriage and family therapist and is a co-founder of Braver Angels, an organization with the mission to “bring Americans together to bridge the partisan divide and strengthen our democratic republic.” Braver Angels has sponsored over a thousand workshops around the country – many facilitated by Dr. Doherty – since 2016 to help depolarize reds and blues, conservatives and liberals and others.

In November 2019, Representative Dean Phillips (D, MN-03), a member of the Select Committee, was introduced to Doherty and his work with Braver Angels. Eight of Representative Phillips’s staffers and six from Representative Pete Stauber’s office (R, MN-08) participated in a depolarization workshop facilitated by Doherty.

In addition to Thursday’s testimony, Doherty will facilitate a pilot workshop with groups of constituents ranging from very red to very blue in late August and the initiative may be scaled to include members of Congress.