I sent the following email to our students last week:

Our Pepperdine Caruso Law community will join others across our nation in casting votes for leaders of our federal, state, and local governments this Tuesday, November 5, 2024. In this 60th presidential election in our nation’s history, we will once again exercise the power of self-government and embody the virtues of liberty, equality, and the rule of law upon which our constitutional republic stands.

As we cast our votes and await the collective will of our fellow citizens, our law school community will remain rooted in faith, hope, and love.

My wife Courtney and I invite you to come and share a meal together and hear a message of unity at the Dean’s Bible Study this Wednesday, November 6, at our on-campus home. All are welcome, regardless of your faith tradition (if any).

* 6:00 pm Dinner
* 7:00 pm Message (Bound Together in Christ: Embracing Unity in a Divided World) …

Thank you for your commitment to one another and for being part of this very special community.

Larissa Phillips (The Free Press), Whatever Happens, Love Thy Neighbor:

I’m a Democrat living in a red, rural county. Trump supporters have mowed my lawn, walked my dog, and eroded my prejudices with their humanity.

On Election Day four years ago, I drove to my local firehouse to cast my vote for Joe Biden. But as I went to enter the building, I froze for a moment; my neighbor, a man who has a giant billowing Trump flag on his lawn, was manning the door. Each of us knew exactly who the other was voting for, and I briefly wondered if we ought to hate each other for it.

But by that point, I’d spent a decade as a Democrat living in Trump Country. And in that time I’d slowly come to reject the political prejudice so common among my tribe. …

Before we moved here, my husband, our two kids, and I lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where almost everyone we socialized with was just like me: a loyal Democrat, passionately pro-choice, mostly atheist, and in favor of the most extreme gun control measures. …

By the time Biden announced his candidacy, I’d been living upstate for 10 years. A decade of farming had made me less aloof, because farming entails emergencies, and so often my neighbors were there to help. It’s hard to care where someone stands on politics when they race to your house to save a dying lamb. When their wife helps search for your runaway dogs. When they deliver and stack 50 hay bales within hours of your asking for it, and afterward make pleasant chitchat. This is the gift of living in a rural area: I keep finding reasons to see my political adversaries as human.

And when it came time to vote in 2020, my Trump-supporting neighbor held the door of the firehouse open for me, and we exchanged hellos as I went through it.

At the time, my old tribe was prepping for war. I kept reading on Facebook and in other venues about Democrats who refused to do business with people who had voted for Trump. They fired their realtor or stopped shopping at a certain store. Even after Biden was elected, this attitude persisted. In 2021, Virginia Heffernan wrote a column in the Los Angeles Times about her conflicted feelings when a Trump-supporting neighbor plowed the driveway of her “pandemic getaway.” In it, she wrote that she couldn’t “give my neighbors absolution,” adding: “Free driveway work, as nice as it is, is just not the same currency as justice and truth.”

But personally I’ve been stunned by the depth of my neighbors’ generosity. “I saw you and your husband out here with that little mower,” one guy knocked on my door to tell me. “It’s ridiculous.” He said he was coming over with his massive sit-on mower. He made quick work of our lawn, then waved away my profuse—and unconflicted—thanks. Another neighbor practically screeched to a halt when he saw us clearing snow off our driveway with handheld shovels. He just happened to have a snowplow attachment on the ATV he was hauling on the platform trailer attached to his truck. Within minutes he’d unloaded it and was clearing our driveway.

And then, last winter, my son, then 24, was driving a few miles from the house when he found himself sliding off the icy road into a snowbank. Hopelessly stuck, he gunned the engine of his little sedan, to no avail. Then, two trucks pulled over and three burly guys got out. After ribbing him a bit for his pathetic predicament, they motioned him out of his car. One hopped in the driver’s seat while the other two pushed and heaved. When that didn’t work, all three got behind the car and essentially lifted and shoved it back up to the road. My son thanked them; the apparent leader of the trio said, “I lost my job today. I was looking for something good to do.”

I know that in this part of the country, white men who work manual jobs will likely vote overwhelmingly for Trump. Increasingly, I hear Democrats describing such voters as not simply bad people but evil. The men who helped my son get back on the road are the people my lefty tribe claims are destroying our country. It worries me that, per The New York Times this week, the Americans who’ve moved since the last election seem to have overwhelmingly chosen neighborhoods where a higher percentage of people share their politics. And so, whatever the next administration has in store, fewer Americans will be exposed to the kindness, the sheer humanity, of people who don’t share their political beliefs. That doesn’t bode well for the nation.

I, for one, am grateful to have had such exposure. My mind has been opened, and I like to think I might have opened a few minds, too. 

Dispatch Faith:  After This Election, How Do We Live With One Another?, by Bonnie Kristian (Christianity Today):

Well, it’s nearly over. Election Day is almost here, and how it will end I dare not predict. The only sure forecast I’ve been willing to venture—as someone who lives in a purple part of a purple state, with signs for both candidates on my block—is that it was always going to be a close race.

There’s plenty of political analysis teasing out what’s in store in the weeks and years ahead. But the more immediate question for most of us, especially people of faith and even those who live in a more politically homogenous area, is: How do we live with one another? …

What I want to suggest here is twofold: First, that this wish for depolarization will probably go unfulfilled, at least for the foreseeable future. It certainly isn’t a prospect on which we can rely. But second, that this is not cause for despair. That’s not because our differences don’t matter. In many cases, they matter very much. But they are not all that matters, and they do not determine how we treat each other.

This may sound very blithe right now, whether you’re troubled by one or both of the possible outcomes of the presidential race, or by the overall drift of our culture, or by all of it. It may even sound worse than blithe: silly, naïve, kumbaya oblivion to a country divided against itself. The last year has been dominated by debate over abortion, immigration, war, and rumors of war. It’s easy to make a case, if you take these things seriously, that a moral life will be a combative life—that if you’re true to your convictions, you will end friendships, ostracize family, and change churches and jobs when the disagreement becomes too great.

Maybe, sometimes. For instance, there are lines across which a fellow Christian’s politics would lead me to question her faith and whether we really ought to go to church together. But whenever the question is raised of cutting people off over politics, as it recently was by J.D. Vance and others, my instinctive answer is no. …

If I’m right about what Jesus meant when he said to love our enemies, most of the church, now and in centuries past, has either grossly misunderstood or willfully ignored a significant command straight from the mouth of Christ. But even if so, my fellow believers are no less fellow believers. We disagree about this, and we live with it, because Christians can be at once faithful and wrong. The defining beliefs of Christianity do not answer every serious question Christians may have—far from it. I see the fruits of faithfulness in many Christians who disagree with me about violence, and I have no doubt there are undiscovered errors in my thinking, too. …

Toward the end of Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis takes up the mystery of Christian behavior: “If Christianity is true why are not all Christians obviously nicer than all non-Christians?” It’s a reasonable question, Lewis says, in the sense that if we saw no difference in people’s behavior before and after conversion, we might fairly wonder whether the conversions were not “largely imaginary.”

But consider, Lewis continues, a scenario in which “Christian Miss Bates may have an unkinder tongue than unbelieving Dick Firkin.” We want to say that if Christianity is real, then it ought to be apparent in these two: Miss Bates ought to be kinder than Dick. But that’s the wrong comparison, Lewis explains. The right comparisons are “what Miss Bates’s tongue would be like if she were not a Christian and what Dick’s would be like if he became one.” For all you know, God has already done a wonder in Miss Bates, while Dick is frittering away a naturally good temperament.

“What can you ever really know of other people’s souls,” Lewis muses, “of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles?” Give them grace—and seek it for yourself.

Lewis was speaking of right behavior, but I think something very similar can be said of right thinking—in politics and beyond. We all have an obligation to conform our thinking to the truth, just as we all have an obligation to be kind. But when we believe ourselves to be correct and others in error, we should remember how little we really know of their souls, their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles—and how likely it is that we too have serious mistakes lurking undiscovered in our minds. …

[W]e are also remarkably free and prosperous and safe to a degree even near-peer nations can’t match. There’s a reason almost no one makes good on those traditional election-season threats to move abroad—or, if they do, why they move with a valid American passport firmly in hand. Our lives, our Constitution, our country are the envy of much of the world. So yes, we have repairs to make, but we also have a house worth repairing.

How do we live with one another? For all our differences, we already do.

Rishi Jaitly (Virginia Tech), The Wonder Years:

I Was an Early Fundraiser for Kamala Harris. Barack Obama Changed My Life. I’ve Helped Launch and Lead Liberal-leaning Institutions. Why Do I Find Myself Politically Adrift?

Two-and-a-half years ago, in March 2022, as I was getting to know Virginia Tech, where I’m currently privileged to serve, I attended an event one evening in our Blacksburg campus’s Squires Student Center.

Prominent progressive Cornel West, now an independent candidate for president, who previously challenged President Biden in the 2024 primaries, and prominent conservative Robert George spoke together at a forum entitled: “I See You.”

Moderated in conversation by Dr. Sylvester Johnson, a leading scholar of African American religion, West and George spoke for more than an hour not merely about disagreeing without being disagreeable, but about something deeper: about feeling fondness, and even love, for one another… not in spite of their differences, but because of them.

“I see you.”

I keep the flier of that evening’s event on my office’s wall.

Here at Virginia Tech, where our motto is “That I May Serve,” I felt called the following year to develop a program& that draws on the humanities to usher in a world in which a culture of fully — and substantively — seeing others isn’t merely regarded as a cutesy ripple, but a critical requisite for leading civic waves we can be proud of.

I’m asked often by friends and family: why draw on the humanities? And what are they, anyway?

Fortunately, months before the launch of ChatGPT, I had ready a six-word poem I’d written to help express the antidote — indeed, the North Star — our culture sorely needs:

Awe and wonder,
in the other

Can we be friends with people with whom we have deep moral and political disagreements?

Yes.

1. We can and must love each other despite deep disagreements. And we must honor each other's right to freedom of thought and speech.

2. Please do not demand conformity to your own…

— Robert P. George (@McCormickProf) November 2, 2024

Douglas Murray (The Free Press), Whoever Loses, They Should Lose Like Nixon:

Grace in defeat is important for democracy. Both presidential candidates must be prepared to accept America’s choice next week.

Perhaps every election feels like it is the most febrile. But this one really does. There is the name-calling, of course, and the outrageous claims made by both sides. Yet one of the more concerning features of this race is the suspicion—indeed, the certainty—that the other side intends to cheat, or not accept the result. It is a terrible thing for a democracy that trust in the system should reach such a low.

As I have said often in the last four years, democracy depends on election results being clear and agreed upon, and for that to happen requires two things. Not only that one side wins, and knows it has won, but also that another side loses, and knows it has lost. That is the only way for a losing—as well as a winning—side to move on and adapt to the realities that have produced the result.

Which brings me to Richard Nixon.

Nixon is not often cited these days as an example of best practice. But in the case of the concession speech he made the night of the 1960 presidential election, it would be fair to do so. The race that year was exceptionally close. …

Something else that makes the 1960 election seem strangely modern was that there was serious controversy over voter fraud. Nixon lost Illinois and Texas—which together represented 51 electoral college votes—by the slimmest of margins. In the former, Kennedy won by a mere 9,000 votes amid allegations that Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley had used the city’s Democrat machine to manipulate vote totals in Kennedy’s favor. In Texas, the margin was almost as small, and the accusations of fraud almost as credible. If Nixon had won Illinois and Texas, he would have won the nation. …

[A]s Nixon wrote in his memoirs: “There was tremendous pressure from reporters and commentators for me to concede. …[H]e didn’t sugarcoat what he had come to say, which was the thing the crowd did not want to hear.

“One of the great features of America is that we have political contests. That they are very hard fought, as this one was hard fought, and once the decision is made, we unite behind the man who is elected,” began Nixon. “I want Senator Kennedy to know, and I want all of you to know, that certainly if this trend does continue and he does become our next president, he will have my wholehearted support and yours as well.” …

Stopping just short of a concession, Nixon then turned his attention away from his political opponents, and towards the United States, and what it represents.

“Having been to all of the 50 states of this nation since the nominating convention in Chicago, having seen the American people, seen them by the hundreds of thousands and perhaps the millions, in the towns and cities of America, I have great faith about the future of this country. I have great faith that our people, Republicans, Democrats alike, will unite behind our next president in seeing that America does meet the challenge which destiny has placed upon us. And that challenge is to give the leadership to the whole world which will produce a world in which all men can have what we have in the United States: freedom, independence, the right to live in peace with our neighbors.

Nixon formally conceded the next morning, at 9:47 a.m. in Los Angeles. …

Perhaps Nixon’s gracefulness in defeat came in part from his determination that he would stand to fight another day, and win. What he chose to do with his time in office once he got there is, of course, another story. But as the United States prepares to elect its next president, this speech is a perfect reminder that unity will always be more important than victory.

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