I was speaking at a church conference once, and happened to tell the story of a single mother I knew who was in a dark place. One of the men in the audience walked up after and wrote a four-digit check, then asked all others present to consider helping any way they could. It’s not that conservatives have the generosity market cornered, but man do they do that sort of thing often. I could fill a newspaper with stories of rents paid, vehicles given, losses restored, and dozens of other acts of remarkable kindness, often bestowed upon strangers whose only identifying characteristic was a deep need for mercy and hope.

I worked in the church for years. You miss it when you leave. Secular types are often better at waxing poetic about communities than actually creating them, much less committing to messy ones full of hurting people who often have little else in common. But there’s something beautiful about regularly breaking bread with people you have to challenge yourself to love, mostly because you often find that you do grow to love them, often in ways that tolerance alone could never pull out of you. This matters. As an old Bible teacher I knew used to say, “love can bring you to places where dynamite couldn’t blow you”.

Conservatives are a people of myths, true. But this is often ridiculed by those who forget how important myths really are. While believing in an idea of America is problematic when it blinds you to the reality of what America is, those ideas are also what drove millions of young men and women to leave the comforts of home to stand against the darkness spreading across Europe seventy-five years ago. It’s easy to criticize patriotism gone wrong, and easy to forget how much value it creates when it goes right. You can make any numbers of correct arguments about Vietnam or Iraq, but the US Armed Forces are still a real benefit to this world, and most of their recruits don’t come from liberal homes.

Conservatives are also a people of tradition. And while rituals should never be treated as sacred, they ought to be seen as meaningful. Group prayer can be a source of profound unity. It’s hard to hold a grudge against someone when you’re holding their hand as they plead to the Almighty for the well-being of someone you love more than you love being right. We shouldn’t force children from secular homes to say “under God”, or even to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in the first place. But we ought to teach them to appreciate how some say those words as a means of reflecting their deep beliefs in transcendent powers that guard those things which all of us hold dear.

Liberals sometimes accuse conservatives of fetishizing the idea of responsibility. Perhaps this claim has merit. But that concession would have no bearing on the fact that I’ve worked with hundreds of teens and would unblinkingly choose a helper from a conservative home over a liberal one if that’s all I knew about them. They simply show up more consistently for unpleasant things, whether that’s raising a barn or voting for the third time that year.

I’ve also been confronted more often in life by conservatives, often to my benefit. Conservatives can be bullheaded, but they tend to care more about continuing the conversation. Liberals, in my experience, are quicker to write off relationships when the gap seems too large. They forgive, but they forget. Thing is, healthy communities require people to want to bridge the differences, to commit to endless debates that never quite get resolved, but that somehow lead to both parties working alongside each other as they carry on arguing.

I once lived on a farm fifteen minutes outside a town of 2,000. Nearly everyone there worked with their hands. Though I’ve done hard labor before, at heart I’m a knowledge worker who gets cold sweats when more than 500 yards from a cafe with the means of making a good cortado. If the economy depended upon me to milk cows at 5am, we’d all be eating our Wheaties with apple juice (which I’ve done and really would not recommend). Most liberals prefer for someone else to milk the cows and for the state to sweep the sidewalks. While there are economic arguments to be made to those ends, there’s also a civic argument about the value of getting out your broom and chatting with the neighbor you’d otherwise never speak to as they do the same. That life isn’t for me, but I wouldn’t want to live in a country where it wasn’t for somebody.

While in conservative country, I once had a marketing client who didn’t know what Google was. He’d heard the name, but no one had ever explained it to him. The world was passing him by. Liberals are good at creating programs for people like him. Conservatives are better at asking their neighbors if they need that kind of help. The same applies to changes to society itself. Some people take decades to “get it”. Conservatives tend to be more committed to helping others through that journey in a way that actually works. It’s good that liberals fund programs for professionals to do the hard lifting, but some people trust neighbors over experts for reasons that you or I could never hope to shake them of. I’m glad good people are there to fill those holes.

The last ballot I cast was for a liberal, and as things stand today the next one will be too. But that’s only because societies are complicated and some changes take deep time. I have dear friends from nearly all positions on the spectrum, and I’m richer for them. I don’t reduce them to who they voted for, and I hope they do me the same charity. I do believe that politics matter, just as I believe that knowing a person’s voting history doesn’t tell you much about them. All the things I said above could apply to a Trump voter or the most strident socialist. But the thing is that they do apply to a lot of conservatives, which is why, though I don’t live among them anymore, I’m still happy to visit home once in a while.

PS - “Conservative” can mean many things (as can “liberal”). I’ve covered that at length elsewhere. Here I just use it as shorthand to mean those who call themselves conservatives, whatever their more nuanced political persuasion.