In these increasingly polarized times, when hateful words and actions have become far too commonplace, it is appropriate to remember experiences that have shaped one’s convictions. Some of the most enduring lessons of my life did not come from a classroom, a political convention, or a newspaper editorial. They came from my Quaker grandparents in Philadelphia.
For the first five years of my life, I lived with them while my father, was deployed to Korea and Japan. They helped raise me during those uncertain years. My memories from that early period are scattered, as childhood memories often are, but one scene has never left me.
When I was five years old, I was finally considered old enough to accompany my grandparents to a Quaker meeting. I remember the quiet dignity of the meeting hall, the solemnity of the gathering, and the people assembled there. But I also remember something unsettling.
As my grandparents entered the building and made their way toward their customary seats, several people standing in the atrium turned their backs on them.
At the time, I did not understand why. I only knew that the adults around me had created an atmosphere that made a child uncomfortable. Much later, I came to understand the reason: my grandparents’ son—my uncle—was serving as a Navy pilot in the Korean conflict.
Quakers have a long and honorable tradition of conscientious objection. Their historic testimony against war deserves respect, even from those who do not share it. War is terrible. It destroys lives, families, and nations. No thoughtful person should regard it casually.
But my grandparents were proud of their son’s service and believed that there are times where evil must be confronted. They did not celebrate war. They did not ridicule their Friends for opposing it. They simply loved their son and believed he was serving his country honorably in a just and moral cause.
The people who turned their backs on them evidently saw no such distinction. In their moral certainty, they treated decent people as though they were guilty by association.
Nearly 20 years later, I had lunch with my grandmother in Swarthmore and asked her about those years. I told her that, as a child, I had sensed something cold and inhospitable around the meetings, even though I did not understand its source.
My grandmother offered an observation I have never forgotten sometimes the people who preach tolerance can themselves be the most intolerant. She believed that some people too readily assume the moral high ground without first examining the moral predicates or precedents for doing so.
She frequently referred to Matthew 7:3: “Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the log in your own eye?” It was not merely a religious quotation to her. It was a warning against self-righteousness—a reminder that moral judgment ought to begin with humility.
Years later, she took me to the Union League of Philadelphia and introduced me to the Lincoln Library on the second floor. There she directed my attention to a memorialized conversation involving Abraham Lincoln and a young child during the Civil War.
The child reportedly asked Lincoln whether God was on the side of the Union. Lincoln’s answer remains as profound today as it was during that terrible national struggle:
“The question is not whether God is on our side, but whether we are on God’s side.”
That is the true contest in the hearts of men and women. It was true in Lincoln’s day. It was true in my grandmother’s day. It remains true today, and will true forever.
We live in a country where many citizens sincerely disagree about the role of government, the meaning of equality, the proper limits of power, the nature of human rights, and the moral foundations of public life. Disagreement is not the danger. America was built upon argument, persuasion, elections, and the rule of law.
The danger comes when political disagreement becomes moral exile—when one side concludes that the other must not merely be defeated at the ballot box but silenced, punished, excluded, or driven from public life.
Those of us who believe in traditional Western values, natural law, constitutional government, individual liberty, religious faith, free markets, and the limited role of the state have reason to be concerned about the growing appetite for centralized bureaucratic power. Too often, political movements that speak in the language of compassion propose systems that place more and more authority in distant institutions, unaccountable agencies, and ideological gatekeepers.
A democratic republic depends upon the belief that no group, party, or class possesses a monopoly on virtue. It also depends on the conviction that human beings are more than economic units, voting blocs, or subjects to be managed by government.
The American tradition, at its best, recognizes rights that precede government. It acknowledges duties that government cannot fulfill. It leaves room for families, churches, charities, neighborhoods, voluntary associations, businesses, and local communities to exercise responsibility and compassion.
This is why faith communities have played such an important role in America’s social progress. Christian and Jewish citizens, clergy, and institutions have repeatedly stood at the forefront of efforts to defend human dignity, care for the poor, oppose slavery, advance civil rights, resist totalitarianism, protect religious liberty, and defend the vulnerable.
The record is not perfect; no human institution is perfect. Religious people, like everyone else, have sometimes failed badly to live up to their own principles. But the moral language of the Anglo-American Western tradition that supported basic human rights, abolition, civil-rights reform, humanitarian work, and the defense of human life, was always rooted in the belief that every person is created with inherent worth.
Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, William Wilberforce, Abraham Lincoln, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did not call Americans to abandon moral truth. They appealed to it. Dr. King did not ask the nation to replace one form of injustice with another. He asked America to live up to its founding promise.
That is an important distinction today.
There are those who describe themselves as agents of progress but appear less interested in reforming institutions than in dismantling them. A revolution, however disruptive, should at least offer a coherent vision of a better future. An insurrectionary spirit merely tears down what exists while offering little except increased control by those who claim to know better.
We should be wary of any political philosophy—of the right or the left—that measures its success by the power it acquires over its opponents. We should reject the temptation to believe that government can legislate virtue into the human heart. It cannot.
Government has an essential role: to preserve order, protect liberty, defend the nation, enforce equal justice, and safeguard the rights of citizens. But government cannot create character. It cannot manufacture compassion. It cannot make people love their neighbors. It cannot replace faith, family, conscience, and personal responsibility.
The lesson I learned from my grandparents is simple. We must be willing to defend our convictions without denying the humanity of those who disagree with us. We must resist the easy comfort of assuming that our side is always righteous and the other side is always wicked.
Before we declare that God is on our side, we should ask Lincoln’s harder question: Are we on God’s side? That question should guide our public conduct, our political arguments, and our votes. So, get informed. Participate. Vote. And, in the coming election, I urge voters to examine Proposition 1 carefully and vote against it. But above all, let us remember that a free people cannot remain free if they lose the capacity to disagree without hatred.
