The pastor of one of the churches in my town, a man who considers himself a progressive, has put up Psalm 133:1 on the signboard outside his church: "How good and pleasant it is when people live together in unity."
Reading this as I drove by the other day caused me to reflect.
The sign is doubtless intended as a critique of the social and political hostilities that beset our nation and to serve as a pastoral adjuration to our townspeople, who are overwhelmingly conservative, to refrain from participating in these bitter conflicts.
Yet it was not conservatives but the left who split the country over the 2000 Bush/Gore election.
Nor was it conservatives but rather the left who refused to accept Trump's legitimacy in 2016 and spent four years dividing the country by trying to oust him from office with phony allegations of "Russian collusion" and sundry other mendacities.
Nor is it conservatives but rather the left who today attack anyone who follows their 2000 and 2016 example by questioning the legitimacy of Biden's election, and it's the left that has torn the country apart by attacking freedom of speech and religion as well as traditional views of marriage, gender, race and immigration and by trying to destroy the careers of anyone who opposes, or even just disagrees, with them.
Perhaps the pastor meant to post the message, "How good and pleasant it is when people acquiesce to the socialist/progressive agenda" but found it too long to fit on the signboard.
Of course, no one of good will would dispute that it is good and pleasant to live together in unity, but a man of the left might do well to understand that we live in a historical moment in which it is his political fellow-travelers who most of all need to hear and heed that message.