There are moments in presidential campaigns when candidates, perhaps inadvertently, reveal their deepest beliefs, dropping all pretense and showing who they really are.  One such memorable episode was Hillary Clinton’s consigning Trump supporters to a “basket of deplorables,” demonstrating her essentially elitist attitude, and her contempt for those who might question her fitness for the highest office in the land.  A strikingly similar occurrence happened on Friday, Oct. 18, at a Kamala Harris event, in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

A group of attendees, interrupted Harris’s remarks in favor of abortion by responding: “Jesus is Lord!” “You guys are at the wrong rally,” Harris said mockingly. “No, I think you meant to go to the smaller one down the street,” apparently referring to a Trump gathering. They were promptly ushered out of the venue.

Donald Trump, in contrast, has recently explained that he avoided an assassin’s bullet by the grace of God, when he turned his head and the projectile grazed his ear instead of taking his life.  It would be difficult to draw a starker line between the nature of the two campaigns.  One suggests that there is no place in the public square for Christian, and, quite possibly, any religious understanding of life, while the other gratefully acknowledges the presence of a higher power that guides earthly events.

Those in charge of the Democrats, who selected Vice President Harris to replace Joe Biden, probably understood that their party—with its inability to define what a woman is, with its suggestion that biological males should be able to compete in women’s sports and its curious  insistence that one sex can be wrongly trapped in the body of another, and with its thoroughgoing “woke” ideology—is living in an alternative reality, or at least one very different from that of our founders and other human beings until quite recently.

John Adams famously wrote that our Constitution was written and designed only for a “religious people,” and could be maintained by no other.  The Pennsylvania State Constitution of 1776, reflecting similar views, would not permit any legislators who did not believe in a providential deity who rewarded the good and punished the wicked.

The election of 2024 is about the economy, immigration, regulation, taxation, the administrative state, and other obvious economic and political disagreements, but it should also be understood as a continuation of the profound cultural divide exposed in the last 70 or so years, a divide that touches the very nature of our being, and the meaning and value of human life itself.  With the Supreme Court’s decisions beginning in the ’60s barring prayers and Bible reading in our public schools, it was only a short time before virtually the entire bench and the law school professoriate embraced a radically anti-Christian understanding of our Constitution and laws. 

That understanding is certainly not shared by many Americans who, whether they knew it or not, live in the same moral universe as John Adams and the drafters of Pennsylvania’s 1776 Constitution. Donald Trump gets this, Kamala Harris does not. 

The principal difficulty the framers foresaw was that of ensuring that the American people would possess sufficient virtue to be able to preserve the Constitution Adams venerated. 

In the West, after two millennia or so of experience, it remains clear that the best means of preserving that sort of virtue is a healthy regard for the fact that we humans are flawed and cultivating a clear understanding that whatever wisdom and judgment we possess can only be taught and maintained by tradition, by reverence, and by belief in a superintending benevolent and omnipotent power.  Those who shouted at Kamala Harris grasped that. She clearly does not.