Are secular liberals and devout Christian conservatives so different when it comes to how they look at the world and how they treat others? If you asked the average American they would say the two groups are as different as night and day. But are they?
Secular liberals are often considered the “far left” and devout Christians the “far right”. However, if you talk to both groups they will say they care about people, don’t want people to suffer and believe in charity and love.
Recently I was on a business trip in California and saw a man in his late 20’s or 30’s. He was so kind and offered the bench he was sitting on to an older woman and then took some trash he saw someone left on the ground and put it in a garbage can. By face value, I would have never known his political affiliation. Then he reached for his backpack and put on a “F**K” Trump cap.
Well, then I knew that he was not a Conservative Christian. Was he secular, that I cannot say for sure, but what I can say is that he embraced Christian values of caring for the elderly, caring about our environment but his hat showed a divisiveness that was viscerally upsetting to me.
What every American secular liberal doesn’t realize is that if they don’t believe in murder, stealing, lying and cheating somewhere in their background was most likely a Christian or Jewish parent or grandparent who passed those values onto them. Those values come from the Ten Commandments and are not only absorbed into us because of our family, but because our entire country was founded on Judeo-Christian Ethics.
On the other hand, I have seen good Christian people show no respect for those whose views don’t exactly match their own. Whatever happened to love thy neighbor as thyself? How about how religion teaches us how we shouldn’t be haughty because we are all God’s children and equal in his eyes.
Many secular liberals are not comfortable with the holiday of Christmas, yet they stand for the values of peace on earth and good will toward men.
Folks, we must stop looking at what divides us and focus on what unites us or we cannot go on as a country. It has gotten so contentious lately that a friend of mind finds herself embarrassed to tell her other friends that she represents Republicans in business because she fears they will look down on her.
Then that same friend finds it difficult to share with her clients whom she is close to, that she is friends with liberals because they will think she makes poor choices in friends.
When did things get so ugly? I think it started around the time of the Bush vs. Gore election. Someone I know had a first birthday party for their daughter and invited family to their home for a celebration. They had one cousin on their mother’s side who was a liberal, secular lawyer and supported Gore and their uncle on their father’s side was a conservative CEO, religious and a Bush supporter. By the end of the party the fight between the two of them over who would make a better president got so bad that everyone else left the party. That was the beginning to the end of civility in my book!
There is so much we as Americans can agree on. We want to live in safety and with freedom. We all enjoy a good hot dog on the Fourth of July even if some of us would prefer it be vegan. We all love the smell of pumpkin pie in the fall and look forward to Thanksgiving with family and friends. We want good schools for our children and safe neighborhoods for them to grow up in. We want health care that is good plus affordable. We know we have to pay taxes to get the services we want, we just want them to be distributed in a fair manner.
We are the greatest country on earth and God has shined his light on us for over 240 years. If we come together and realize we have more in common than what divides us, there is no problem we cannot conquer
Noelle Nikpour is a Republican strategist and fundraiser, television commentator and author of Branding America.
