How to Make a Liberal

I have spent some time this week while on Whidbey Island in Washington State watching people. Everybody in Washington State is now wearing masks indoors and outdoors on our beach! I think of my grandparents who fought in WWII and my parents who both served in the Korean War. How do a people allow themselves to become supplicants depending on and following a government that has no business telling them how to go about conducting their everyday affairs? How does one become a liberal?

The first step in my opinion is to marginalize the role of the family. Make mothers and fathers less important. Who teaches a child about God and Jesus and who teaches them how to pray? If the child is lucky their parents and grandparents. And with an early understanding about their place in the world who teaches them about good and evil, about making right choices, about being accountable to themselves and others? Who teaches them about the value of work and physical labor, about respecting the work of others, and about Biblical “first instances, The Ten Commandments, concepts that as they grow older will have a foundation in Natural Law Philosophy.? Who teaches them about risk and who puts winning and losing in the proper context? Who teaches them not to lie and cheat or be corrupt? Who teaches them to STAND ALONE against the crowd and to trust their own “voice within” before trusting or following anything or anyone else? I truly believe that the visceral hate that many liberals feel toward Donald Trump is based on their jealousy of his self-confidence when standing alone against the crowd. As Rudyard Kipling opined”—“If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you and make allowance for their doubting”, or “if you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it a game of pitch and toss and lose and start again at your beginnings and never breath a word about your loss”.

Liberals despise this kind of self-confidence. Conservative’s respect and revere it. And I am not talking of a “pridefulness” that is centered on self, but a moral certitude based on a faith in God—our Founders said “Devine Providence”. Those whose principles based on such a certitude cannot be bought with the promise of utopian rule that subjugates and then enslaves. Those who value the collective above the individual disparage the role of family and close relationship, substituting alliance to a faceless state, and substituting reverence for God and an understanding of His role in creating the “hole in our hearts” that only He can fill. He gives us the choice of exercising our gift of “free will” and exercising the liberty that He gave us when making decisions about our own lives and the lives we hold most dear to us. You get to choose how you will live and how you will die and how you will think—not government or your employer or your teacher.

C. S. Lewis opined that much of what we believe spiritually we learn before we are 13 years old, and much of that before we are three. Like so many things it is both complicated and simple in the ask and in the execution. My Quaker grandmother taught me early on that the answers are simple: Who made you? God. Why did he make you? To glorify His name and to love and be loved. Pretty simple yet we spend a lifetime hearing that it is really more complicated than that. For some reason in chemistry, and thermodynamics, and genetics, I was always able to see the hand of God and The Great Design. Same thing last night when I looked at the sunset across Admiralty Inlet and the Olympic Mountains. Others see the glory of nature without recognizing the glory of the Creator—why? Part of that answer may be that they were never taught early on in life to look for it. How lucky was I to have a grandmother and parents who taught me to look beyond what I could only see with my eyes? Is that not the predicate for science? Why did we invent microscopes or telescopes? Why do we have neutron accelerators and why did we invent all the spectrometries—mass, infrared, and whatever is next? Is there not a “hole in our hearts” to see what we cannot see? And then when we find it, we must admit that it is as real as what we can see—yes? What else are we not seeing?

For an unashamed Christian conservative, I therefore chose to stay in “the fight”. Mother Teresa taught us that we are not called on to win, but that we are called on to be faithful. Didn’t many of our first settlers cross a great ocean at great risk to themselves and their families in order to secure the liberty to practice their faith and exercise their own God given “free will”? We are only called on to be faithful, not to win, or make money, or achieve fame or office. Pretty simple but many times we make it complicated.

I am reminded that on his death bed Fr. Pierre John Desmet who was truly one of the great explorers and proselytizers of the Pacific Northwest, was asked—“Why Father did you cross the ocean and come to America to preach to the Native Americans?” We should all remember his answer for the way it should help us prioritize our lives. “I did not come to America to preach to the Indian tribes, I came to glorify God” First things first. Everything else will fall into place.

If you want to make a liberal—don’t teach your children those first things (instances). Your own career and making money are certainly more important than your job as husband and wife—mother and father, isn’t it? Don’t spend time with yourself. Don’t pray or read the Bible. Let your kids figure it out for themselves—there will be plenty of time for that later when they start getting participation trophies and A’s in sociology. Then see what happens when the government tries to teach them with CRT (Critical Race Theory) and utopian ideas or maybe just some form of encouraging “free thinking philosophy”—does that mean you just live your own life based on your own experiences which will serve as a bases for your own philosophy? Why is it so surprising that so many of our most educated—even in the professional classes have such little understanding of Biblical and American History? No wonder they are tearing down statues. They don’t know what to think because those who care least about them, are their teachers, and just maybe they see themselves as their own god.

E PLURIBUS UNUM