Behold, how good and how pleasant it is

For brothers to dwell together in unity!

It is like the precious oil upon the head,

Coming down upon the beard,

Even Aaron's beard,

Coming down upon the edge of his robes.

It is like the dew of Hermon

Coming down upon the mountains of Zion;

For there the LORD commanded the blessing--life forever. (Ps. 133:1-3)

Those verses paint a beautiful picture – one that, were the liberals not so anti-Christian, they might quote at us.  For the liberals are big on unity (at least their version of it).  When Barack Obama was running for president, he claimed that he would unify a divided country.  The liberals support the United Nations, and all sorts of other efforts to get people to sit down, give up their cherished convictions, and become one.

But there’s one little thing in this passage from the book of Psalms which throws a very large monkey wrench into the works.  David (this is a psalm of David) wrote of brothers dwelling together in unity.  And what that little word tells us is that there can be no unity unless there is first a basis for unity.

The prophet Amos asked, “Do two men walk together unless they have made an appointment?” (Amos 3:3)  And Paul spoke at a little length:

Do not be bound together with unbelievers; for what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness?  Or what harmony has Christ with Belial, or what has a believer in common with an unbeliever?  Or what agreement has the temple of God with idols?  For we are the temple of the living God; just as God said, "I WILL DWELL IN THEM AND WALK AMONG THEM; AND I WILL BE THEIR GOD, AND THEY SHALL BE MY PEOPLE.  Therefore, COME OUT FROM THEIR MIDST AND BE SEPARATE," says the Lord.  "AND DO NOT TOUCH WHAT IS UNCLEAN; And I will welcome you.” (2 Cor. 6:14-17)

Clearly there is a time and place to avoid unity.  And I contend that when it comes to the leading political ideologies in this country, the last thing we want (and, in truth, the last thing they want) is unity.

Can conservatives have true unity with liberals?  Well, let’s go back to what Paul said.  In several different ways he points out that people and groups with opposing views and goals can’t have unity – for they’re opposed to each other.  Any “unity” which might arise between such people is a mere façade – a pretense which is a lie.

For conservatives to sit down with liberals, and work together, means that either

     1. One side or the other is lying about something

     2. One side or the other has give up what it stands for

We’ve seen this in the ecumenical movement.  Those denominations which have gone ecumenical have, in order to find things to agree on, given up things which they once stood for.  And the process of surrendering cherished principles has led to a surrender of the Christian faith itself.  When you visit an ecumenical congregation you might hear Shakespeare from the pulpit, but you’re not likely to hear Isaiah; you might learn about the latest psychological self-help ideas, but you won’t hear about the Lord Christ and His atoning work.  Christianity got in the way of “unity,” and so Christianity went out the door.

We saw it in 1939, when Hitler and Stalin (actually it was Joachim Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, but they were acting for their masters) sat down together, and arose with a non-aggression pact in hand that allowed them to divide Poland between them.  It looked like two sworn enemies – National Socialism and Communist socialism – had achieved unity, but it was all a lie, for it wasn’t very long afterwards that the Wehrmacht turned east and attacked the Soviet Union.

Neither of these scenarios – compromising everything important, or lying like a dog – is true unity.  There may be an appearance of unity, but it’s phony.  What you’ve got isn’t unity, but people giving up their souls on the one hand, or making a mockery of their word on the other, in order to achieve the appearance of agreement when there is no fundamental agreement at all.

I don’t propose to lie in order to make the liberals like me.  Quite the contrary – one of the many motivations for me to be honestly a conservative is the fact that liberals hate conservatives.  I wear their scorn like a badge of honor.  As long as the liberals hate me, I know I’m doing something right, for the reason they hate conservatives is that we stand in the way of their intention to bring every single human being under their control.  If they hate me, it means I’m still doing my bit to block the road.

And I certainly won’t give up my convictions.  Why should I surrender the truth, when it’s the truth?  Why should I embrace a lie when I have the truth already?  I remember once a friend of mine asked if I’d ever committed adultery.  My response was instinctive: I’m not an idiot; of course I haven’t, for why would I want second best when I’m already married to the best woman on earth?  And my response to anything which might ask me to give up my conservatism in order to achieve unity is much the same.  Why should I cease to believe the truth, in order to adopt an infamous falsehood?

I’ve already got unity.  Wherever there’s someone who believes what Ronald Reagan stood for, there is my brother.  Any place someone holds to the convictions of William F. Buckley, there is my sister.  Anywhere and anytime people listen to Rush Limbaugh and give his statements a “ditto,” there is my family.

There was an occasion when someone told Jesus that His mother and brothers were outside and wanted to see Him.  And Jesus said, “whoever does the will of My Father who is in heaven, he is My brother and sister and mother.” (Matt. 12:50)  It wasn’t that He rejected His earthly family – on the cross He made it a point to provide for His mother, and the only time He ever did what someone else told Him to do was when His mother came to Him at the wedding in Cana – but that He understood that brotherhood is more than genetic connection.  Those who served His Father were (and are) His brothers, His sisters…His family.

And we can think of conservatism in that way.  Those who walk with us are our brothers, our sisters, those to whom we are politically as close as a family.  And that is unity.  I have unity with everyone who desires liberty, who opposes tyranny, who thinks that what someone earns belongs to the one who earned it and not to the government, who wishes to curb unconstitutional spending and unconscionable taxation, who seeks to return to a genuine condition of government of, by, and for the people.  I don’t need to give up my views, or pretend I have, in order to sit down with liberals.  I have conservatives with whom I can sit down.

As for the liberals, they had better get out of our way, for we are united, and we aren’t about to give up

In a certain sense, the political debate which this country has been going through for decades, and which is now at white heat, is almost religious in nature.  I am not the first, nor the only, observer to note that the devotion of Barack Obama’s followers is not significantly different from the adoration that members of any religion give to their God.  And that is merely one manifestation of the way liberals approach things.

I am not saying that either conservatism or liberalism is a de facto religion.  There are and have been atheists on the conservative side (I was one until my conversion in 1983, and Ayn Rand was vicious in her atheism), and there is rampant atheism among liberals, both avowed and de facto (when you’ve redefined God to the point where He’s no more real or powerful than a puff of smoke, you’ve essentially denied His existence).  So neither of these ideologies is, strictly speaking, a religion.  But liberalism comes close to it, while conservatism makes it a point not to be a religion.

I’m not a philosopher, nor the son of one, but I’ve learned a philosophical term from Ayn Rand – epistemology.  That’s the study of how we learn things, of how we come to our positions, or so I understand it.  And it is in the realm of epistemology that conservatism and liberalism differ most fundamentally.

Liberalism is, above all, an emotional position.  Rush Limbaugh says that the most gutless choice you can make is to be a liberal, because you don’t have to deal with the consequences of your actions, you don’t have to apply any sort of skull sweat – all you have to do is make sure that your words and actions make you and others feel good.  How many times have we heard some liberal, promoting whatever cause, making the point not that this will do a good thing, or that it will be inherently virtuous, but that it will make you feel good?

Liberalism is all about emotion.  We see that openly and flagrantly in the worship of Barack Obama.  His speeches are short on content (and those who serve him seemingly pay no attention to what little content there is), but they’re long on high-sounding language that if you swallow it uncritically makes you feel good.  At the infamous rally in Florida, both Henrietta Hughes and the punk (I disremember his name) who couldn’t manage to work himself up to shift manager at McDonald’s after four years, approached Obama in a highly emotional manner.  Instead of standing up like free people describing their situations with dignity and honor, Hughes wept and begged like any bum on the street, and the McDonald’s punk acted like Obama was his god incarnate in the flesh (in fact, he reminded me of North Koreans openly weeping at the feet of statues of Kim Il-sung when the “Great Leader” died).

Conservatism isn’t so.  I don’t say that conservatives are without emotion – far from it.  If you want to see an emotional conservative, get me started on Ronald Reagan.  I never met the man, and so this may be using purple prose, but I think it’s safe to say that in a sense I loved him.  After living through Nixon, Ford, and Carter (I lived through Kennedy and Johnson too, but I was only eight when Johnson left the White House), the advent of Ronald Reagan was like spring suddenly replacing an interminable ice age.  The full effects of his reforms took a little time to take hold, but I was in the Air Force when he took office and the difference was almost immediate.  Not only did I now have a commander-in-chief who was proud of the military and of whom I could be proud, but my financial situation improved dramatically.  I got out of the Air Force in 1982, and during the rest of Reagan’s administration I was a civilian – and I can honestly say that at no subsequent time have I and my family had it as good, overall, as we did during Reagan’s eight years in office.  So yeah, I’m real emotional about Ronald Reagan.

But my emotions are a reaction, not a cause.  They don’t form my views, but rather are a side effect of reality.  I don’t wish we had Reagan back because he inspired good feelings in me, but for solid, objective, rational reasons (to put it bluntly, he’d be a better president as an embalmed corpse than the clueless socialist we’ve got now).

And that’s conservatism.  To be a conservative is to apply reason to things.  It is to use one’s mind in evaluating data and reaching decisions.  It is to think about things, rather than merely feeling.

I have often faced the question, “What is your feeling about this?”  And my standard reply is, “What I feel is irrelevant.  But here’s what I think about it.”  If I guided my life by my feelings, I would conclude God is great on even days, and that He’s dead on odd days.  If my emotions formed my opinions, I’d decide about once a month that my wife hates me and I ought to leave her (she loves me, and if I left I’d be a natural born fool).  If I based my political convictions on my feelings, I might be conservative today, liberal tomorrow, and anarchist the day after.

Emotions are the most fickle, fallible, and unreliable guide we can have.  God created us with emotions, but they – like every other part of us – have suffered from the fall, and respond to the wrong things, or wrongly to the right things.  We can’t depend on emotions to guide us – emotions led Germany into the nightmare of the Third Reich, they led Cambodia into the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge regime, they led the People’s Temple into mass suicide in Guyana, and they led a mob below Pilate’s balcony to demand the crucifixion of the Messiah they’d been seeking for centuries.  You can’t depend on emotions, and conservatives don’t.

But liberals do.  And that is the most fundamental difference between us.  Liberals are liberals because their emotions lead them that way.  Conservatives are conservatives because our minds lead us that way.  A liberal could function, politically, if he possessed no reasoning power whatsoever, for reason doesn’t form his political views.  But a conservative who lost the power of ratiocination would be lost politically; his entire ideology comes from thought, rather than from feelings.

And so the choice is clear.  You can go through life believing what feels right, and be a liberal.  Or you can think, and be a conservative.