Do Conservatives Care to Have a Conscience?

By Kathryn Jean Lopez

Monday, June 08, 2026

 

‘I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever.”

 

If you’ve ever seen the clearest and bluest of the Atlantic in the Caribbean, you have a sense of what the weather has been like in Washington, D.C., in recent days. I haven’t been here in a while, but it sure welcomed me back well. I had the opportunity to see the town from a Virginia balcony with a comprehensive view. And for a bit, all I could look at was the Jefferson Memorial.

 

Almost obsessively.

 

Later on, I opened up Mike Pence’s new book, What Conservatives Believe: Rediscovering the Conservative Conscience, launched Tuesday. Right away, I realized why I couldn’t take my eyes off Jefferson’s spot on the Tidal Basin. It’s the inscription, which Pence remembers taking note of when he and his family first moved to the nation’s capital and took the whole walking tour of the monuments and museums.

 

“Etched on an inside wall of the open-air structure, it faces the statue of the primary author of the Declaration of Independence: “God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?”

 

He notes the trembling more than once in his book. It’s at the core of who we are — as people and as a country.

 

He writes: “Etched on an inside wall of the open-air structure, it faces the statue of the primary author of the Declaration of Independence: ‘God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?’”

 

Jefferson, of course, was writing about slavery, “which haunted the man from Monticello to the end of his days.” They immediately haunted Pence, as “applied to the plight of the unborn.”

 

“That’s the thing about timeless values,” the former vice president writes: “They possess the power to instruct and inspire in different times and circumstances.”

 

We will be judged by how we treat our most vulnerable. That’s a paraphrase of what he writes. It’s my conviction. No may about it. No question about it. Not that I think Pence has any doubt. He goes on to define the most vulnerable as: “the aged, infirm, disabled, and the unborn.” He writes: “No class of Americans is more vulnerable or marginalized than unborn children. They are truly the least among us, utterly dependent on others for everything.” He insists: “The starting point for protecting them is the recognition that everyone born and unborn enjoys a God-given right to life, from conception to natural death and at all points in between.” Most babyboomer Democrats whose names you would know once basically held that view — it was mainstream. Now abortion is being delivered by your mailman and assisted-suicide can come by doctor prescription — and for situations that are far from terminal.

 

That’s not mercy; that’s murder.

 

When I was looking for Pence’s book in a sea of Jill Biden’s East Wing memoir in a new Barnes & Noble (a new bookstore! Bookworms swoon! Civilization may survive yet!) in the old Woodward & Lothrop building near Ford’s Theatre, I saw a book by Walter Isaacson on the Declaration of Independence, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. Now, needless to say, the president of the Aspen Institute isn’t going to be writing like Mike Pence, but his chapter on life was disappointing. It’s positively Lockean. Property is supreme. The challenge to humanity to steward life is missing. It is what it is, but it misses the life — and love — of the sentence.

 

Pence, not far from Isaacson, did make up for it, though, writing that he “saw Roe v. Wade as a rejection of the opening line of the Declaration of Independence.” The Indiana native says: “The right to life is our first freedom, and our unalienable right as Americans. It is the foundation upon which every other right rests. None of them matters without this one. As the great congressman Henry Hyde once told me: “Democracy is meaningless without respect for the sanctity of human life.”

 

Isaacson did nothing wrong. But you shouldn’t have to write a manifesto for conservative renewal to get that. It should be the stuff of America’s 250th anniversary coffee-table books. It should be part of the air we breathe — to give thanks for life and to cherish and protect it. Men died to give us the freedom to live. They died so we could live the lives we do.

 

“Courage inspires imitation,” Pence writes in the book. “So does weakness.” And he quotes Proverbs 24: “Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter. If you say, ‘But we knew nothing about this,’ does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who guards your life know it? Will he not repay everyone according to what they have done?”

 

Coraggio. That’s what the late Great John Paul II rallied us to. “And let us all join in that one prayer,” is how Mother Teresa ended her 1979 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance remarks. “God give us courage to protect the unborn child, for the child is the greatest gift of God to a family, to a nation and to the whole world. God bless you!”

 

That’s the thing: God has blessed us. What are we going to do in return? “Silence is not an option,” is Pence’s takeaway from Scripture on these points. “Dobbs,” he writes, “was a great victory and a crucial turning point. Yet it was not the end of the fight for life but merely the end of the beginning.” There are “new battlefields” now, he says, and this is an opportunity for the U.S. for new life — “a chance for renewal, restoration, and redemption.”

 

“Conservatives,” Pence writes, “must seize the opportunity to pursue a future in which Americans celebrate the gift of life, honor the promise of the Declaration, come alongside women in need, stand up for the weak, and declare without apology that every life matters and every child deserves a chance.”

 

This is not just a cause for conservatives. But if the word means anything, conservatives better be for these. Consider this year’s Independence Day fireworks your starting command to renew the face of the earth with the Spirit of God flowing through our authentic desire to conserve the good and consider it our duty to pass on this country and its commitment to life even better than it was, with a declaration to live by.