A Pence For Your Thoughts

This vice-president seems to get fewer invitations to give commencement addresses than the last one although arguably he has a lot more to say. “Faith is rising across America: in communities large and small, in good times and in times of great hardship, the faith of the American people shines forth,” Vice President Mike Pence told Hillsdale College’s graduating class this year. “I see this as I travel across this great land, as countless Americans take the time to tell us, often with great emotion, the sweetest of words: ‘I’m praying for you.'”

(Yet and still, there are people who view this four-word statement as an insult because, as a therapist once said, “It assumes they’ve done something wrong.” But people who feel this way don’t believe they can do any wrong.–ed)

“Even as many continue to forecast the decline of religion in American life, the truth is, as President Trump recently said, this is a nation of faith—and faith continues to exert an extraordinary hold on the hearts and minds of our people,” the vice president said. “The percentage of Americans who live out their religion on a weekly basis—praying, going to church, reading the Bible—has remained remarkably consistent over the decades, even as the population of the United States has grown by leaps and bounds.”

“And for my part, I’ve long believed that nothing is more important to our nation’s future.”

By the way, the vice-president also dropped an interesting tidbit about Hillsdale itself: “For the founders of Hillsdale College, the principles of the American Founding were universally true—true for all people and true at all times. So upon its founding in 1844, this College became the first to prohibit, in its charter, any discrimination based on race, sex, or national origin.”

Given the considerable effort that proudly liberal institutions of higher learning have made in recent years to scrub their past clean, Hillsdale’s pre-civil war proclamation shows that the steadfastly conservative, traditional college has indeed been on the right side of history.

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