This writer and peace activist offers an alternative approach to guide Americans through their racial and political division.
St. Francis of Assisi unexpectedly found himself in some contentious situations charting a path toward peace. Whether mediating between a class conflict in Assisi, dialoguing with a sultan during the Fifth Crusade, or, even when he was weak and dying, seeking to reconcile the bishop and podestà (mayor) who were locked in a bitter dispute—there was Francis, in the middle of it all, seeking peace.
Chloé Valdary has had a similar trajectory in her life, somehow finding herself in the crosshairs of some of the most polarized spaces in culture and politics, also offering a path toward peace in a frantic, vitriolic world. Valdary has written about hot topics like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. She has made appearances on shows and podcasts across the political spectrum, and she is a perpetual jack-in-the-box, bursting from whichever ideological box you try to fit her in. One of her clients calls Valdary a “prophet” and the “ultimate peacemaker of our time.” She is only 32.
Theory of Enchantment
Valdary, a New Orleans native, was raised in an obscure Christian denomination (most comparable, she says, to Seventh Day Adventist) and grew up observing all the holy days of the Old Testament. This quasi-Jewish upbringing opened her eyes to rising anti-Semitism in the United States as she studied at the University of New Orleans from 2012 to 2015. Majoring in international studies, she delved into the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and ventured into activism. She founded Allies of Israel, a pro-Israel student group that promoted and advocated for the Jewish state, marking the beginning of her public activism.
“But the activism that I did,” Valdary says, “while it was instructive, it was lacking intentional rooting in love.” Valdary’s role as a peacemaker was evolving. She longed for activism grounded in love and compassion.
In 2014, Valdary was named a Robert L. Bartley Fellow at The Wall Street Journal, where she was mentored by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bret Stephens. He has described Valdary as “an enterprising and productive thinker and writer” with “an independent cast of mind and a roving curiosity.” Under Stephens’ tutelage, she developed three guiding principles for Israelis and Palestinians to honor one another’s humanity and move toward peace:
1) Treat people like human beings, not political
abstractions.
2) Criticize to uplift and empower.
3) Root everything you do in love and compassion.
For two years she worked for OpenDor Media (OpenDorMedia.org), a Jewish nonprofit in Jerusalem, where she lectured around the world on these principles. She was eventually advised to build a course, which she developed using pop culture—from Black Panther to Disney to John Mayer and Beyoncé songs—to help communicate the protocols. The course was called Theory of Enchantment. The notion of enchantment, Valdary says, invited people into a sense of magic, a curiosity and wonder for human beings (even those they disagreed with), as well as a relationship with the mystery that is oneself—a mystery that also includes one’s darkness and insecurities.
“I use that as a launching pad to talk about racism,” says Valdary. “Because racism in the American context is an inability to take in the darker brother and darker sister, which is just a reflection of being unable to absorb or be in relationship with your own darkness. . . . The course is an apprenticeship for people to discover their being and to love their being deeply for the purpose of not projecting their insecurities onto others, which I believe is the seed of bigotry.”
In 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the emphasis around the country for workplaces to implement DEI programs, Valdary’s Theory of Enchantment was positioned as an alternative approach to DEI. A difference in her approach from others is highlighted in her 2017 piece for The New York Times in which she wrestles with activists’ generalizations about “Whiteness” and the notion that “nonracist White people simply don’t exist” in the aftermath of the protests in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Valdary wrote in the Times: “I was raised in a community in New Orleans where my parents taught me that the beauty of our people’s historical struggle for freedom and equality was that it ultimately spoke to the oneness of all human beings. . . . I was taught that if someone White makes assumptions about me or my people, the proper response is not to go around making assumptions about them. That creates a downward spiral into hatred fueled by ignorance. The proper response to prejudice is not to treat our close-minded neighbors as though they weren’t human; that is how they have treated us. It is precisely because I love myself that I refuse to hate another.”
In those years of racial and political unrest, Valdary was thrust into the spotlight. In June 2020 she delivered her TED Talk, “How Love Can Help Repair Social Inequality.” In January 2021, Theory of Enchantment was featured in The Atlantic. Valdary appeared on hit cable shows and podcasts. She amassed over 100,000 followers on Twitter, now X. People quickly learned that Valdary does not fit easily into boxes. Her nuanced approach to race, identity, and conflict invited people into the uncomfortable, disorienting space of love and acceptance, even in an information age marked by labeling, demonizing, and cheapening people to their identity or political ideas.
“Chloé’s teachings are universal,” says Mark Melvin, CEO and founder of Touchstone Climbing, who has used Theory of Enchantment as a DEI program in his network of climbing gyms in California. “She asks us to study ourselves and accept our strengths and weaknesses as a path to appreciating others, a message that transcends all religions and attitudes. It has given us all a comfort in talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion, but also inherent racism in America.”
The ‘Other’ as Teacher and Beloved
Though Theory of Enchantment began as a tool for peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, its approach to DEI catapulted Valdary into the role of a public intellectual guiding others through the chaos toward healing amid the nationwide “racial reckoning.”
“Was it weird for me? That’s a great question,” she reflects. “But I think that it was such a whirlwind that I didn’t really pause to clock it.”
In a crucial moment, Valdary had helped remind people of the effectiveness of the activism of the civil rights movement—progress that was rooted in love, compassion, and nonviolence. But the challenge (and invitation) of Valdary’s principles is that they elevate the humanity of the “other”—whoever the “other” may be for each person or group. Many missed this. Valdary could sometimes be tokenized as a Black woman, her viewpoints weaponized by intellectuals to dismiss progressive activists. And some critics accused her of being “anti-Black” or for not standing up with “their own.”
“My own?” Valdary asks. “My whole life has been a meditation on this. What does the concept of ‘my own’ mean? Who was the first Homo sapien to utter the words ‘my own’? I am called Chloé because my parents fell in love with the Chloé perfume in France, which means that the sound that invokes me, the name that summons me into being, was in part formed by my relationship between my parents, between these two entrepreneurs who created Chloé perfume, between rose and amber wood and honey, between the actual aromas and fragrances and plants that went into creating this perfume.
“So, who is my own? Am I French? Yes. Am I rose? Yes. Am I Port City of New Orleans? Yes. So that’s what I mean when I say that I am radically other.”
Valdary says that to see one another as “radically other” is to deepen an awareness of the complexity and mystery that each human embodies, thus evoking a sense of wonder and compassion, even amid disagreement and conflict. This is what makes Valdary’s Theory of Enchantment intuitively Franciscan, despite her not having a Catholic background.
In Francis’ world, when Muslims were cheapened to political abstractions, Francis learned to see them as beautiful human beings (Principle 1)—beloved children of God. When he met with Sultan Malik al-Kamil for several days during the Fifth Crusade, it is likely they had debates about spiritual matters, yet had a mutual respect for one another in their religious disagreements (Principle 2) that made way for the deepening of their friendship.
“Dialogue—dia-logos—it’s a very deep Greek idea,” says Valdary. “It’s related to when Jesus says that, ‘Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I will abide in the midst.’”
Francis’ world was an enchanting one, radiating with a God who loved him, everyone, and everything. For Francis, the incarnation—God becoming one with the creation and humanity—invited “incarnational” living, in which one’s very life is rooted in the humble love and compassion (Principle 3) that God shows us.
Chloé Valdary: Creating a Sound Bowl
“I’m still in an active participatory relationship with these protocols,” Valdary says. “They are a compass, that no matter what territory I’m in, it is a useful tool and a useful beacon to point me in the right direction.”
While continuing to teach the principles of Theory of Enchantment in schools, companies, and government organizations, Valdary’s journey also has come full circle since October 7, 2023, when Hamas-led militant groups launched the deadliest attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
“Now I’m returning to the Israel-Palestine conversation,” Valdary says. “I’m returning to the Black-Jewish conversation. I’m returning to that frequency, to that sound bowl, if you will. But I think ultimately all of these things have always been dancing with each other anyway. . . . I exist in a web of mutual relations that shape and inform me, not the other way around.”
“I don’t mean this to sound calloused or egocentric,” she continues, “but I continue to be changed and transformed by the conflict. It has been instructive for me to see and examine the ways in which I dehumanize Israelis and Palestinians in my own thinking—to see how the ‘monster,’ or the force of dehumanization, comes up within me in response to October 7, to Gaza, etc.”
While writing her first book, Valdary is working with friends to create an organization called Sanctuary, a place of healing for Brooklyn’s Black and Jewish diaspora, in which there has been a history of ethnic conflict.
“That’ll be interesting to see what comes out of breaking bread together and having difficult conversations and making music together, which I’m especially excited about,” Valdary says. “I believe my role today, in this very apocalyptic hour, is not to give people solutions. I thought, you know, for a long time that my job was to give people solutions. But I think that my role is actually, almost, to create like a sound bowl. It’s to sing for people when they’re mourning, when they’re angry, when they’re suffering, when they’re bitter. It’s to invite people to dance when these forces are moving through them as a way to commune in interrelationship with those forces.”
Today Valdary is more focused on peacemaking than being a public intellectual. In December 2024 she deleted her X account because she didn’t like its effect on her ego. She hasn’t posted on Facebook in two years. She’s active on Substack, where she has a couple thousand followers, as well as Instagram, where her posts get limited engagement compared to her days in the Twittersphere.
But she is grounded, more focused on peacemaking, more focused on her north star.
Agape Love
“Is it true that St. Francis of Assisi used to walk on his hands?” Valdary asks as the conversation on Franciscan Media’s Off the Page podcast moves toward a conclusion. She heard this, she says, from a stanza in “The Cave” by Mumford & Sons: “So come out of your cave walking on your hands / And see the world hanging upside down / You can understand dependence / When you know the maker’s land.” These lines are believed to be a reference to G.K. Chesterton’s biography on St. Francis of Assisi: “He [Francis] looked at the world as differently from other men as if he had come out of that dark hole walking on his hands.”
Valdary then shares that one of her spiritual practices is capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art created by slaves who were taken by the Portuguese. “This is all connected, I promise,” she laughs. Capoeira, she says, masqueraded as a dance but was actually a form of resistance against slave owners in Brazil.
“You don’t actually do capoeira, you don’t fight capoeira, you play capoeira, [and] I love the beautiful linguistics of that,” she beams. “But anyway, in capoeira, you walk on your hands a lot. You do these headstands and handstands and kicks—and you walk on your hands. And there’s this circular nature in capoeira, which I sense when I hear stories about Francis of Assisi. I sense this in him when I hear about his relationship with the sultan. And when we talk about dia-logos, there’s this encircling nature—not linear, which is very different—but this encircling, enfolding nature that I experience as the nature of love. It’s this nature of agape—a Christian concept—that Dr. King practiced, right?
“This agape love informs you. It’s like the type of love a parent has for a child. By [parents] loving you, you actually grow up. By loving you, you become raised. Listen to the vegetative nature of that language. Even husbandry is an agricultural term. And there’s this enfolding nature of love in which one cannot help but lose themselves, meaning you cannot help but be changed through this type of love that I am describing. This type of love, which we’ve been describing throughout talking about all of the principles, you are forever changed by it.
“So, to root everything you do in love and compassion, the third principle is to say that we enter into this devotional practice with self and ‘other’ and with the other that is yourself, and as you become, you will notice that the unfolding will create within you this capacity for grace.… It will put you in touch with the earth, which is what the word ‘humble’ means: hummus, ‘of the earth,’ ‘of the land.’ I want to stress that this type of love is not something that can be ascertained or approximated simply through talking.”
Valdary pauses, “You have to dance in order to experience this. You have to chant.”
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