Erickson: Everybody has their hill to die on,
the question is
are you going to die on every hill?
Many of you are either in or headed
to or headed out of college and you encounter one
of the most dangerous species on planet earth.
The liberal professor.
My first encounter with a liberal professor was... Now,
first of all, you need to understand,
I went to Mercer University.
I got a scholarship to go to Duke.
I went went up, saw Duke.
It was a very beautiful campus,
but the people were very insistent that I needed them,
they didn't need me.
My mom insisted I go checkout
this small Baptist school in Macon, Georgia, Mercer.
And I say, I was like, oh, Baptist university.
It'll be fairly safe.
My first week in school, my professor decided to
breastfeed her three-year-old
in front of us before deciding
that we needed to go experience the world
and have our first experience at a gay bar.
At a Baptist university, I was a little bit flummoxed
by the whole thing.
And then I went to church,
and I grew up in a very conservative church environment
and went to the first Baptist church down in Macon.
Grew up in the first Baptist church in Jackson, Louisiana.
And the woman in the pulpit
was encouraging people to close their Bibles
and open their hymnal and spend more time there
instead of the Bible. I didn't know what to expect.
It was very upside down world having grown up the way I did.
And I realized that my college career was essentially
the world challenging me to build my own worldview.
And either you're going to embrace the view
of the apathetic world
or you're going to embrace a view that values something.
And the question is, what do you believe?
What's your worldview?
I can't speak for you, I'll speak for me.
My world view is
I believe there's a heaven, there's a hell,
there's a last day.
I'm on the winning team.
I don't have to be a brain jackass everyday
because I know how it ends.
I've read the story.
It ends with a guy on a pale horse
and Johnny Cash and singing backup music.
And it'll happen.
Some of you will disagree with that.
You'll have your own worldview.
It's totally fine.
I think my worldview is right.
You'll think your worldview is right.
The question is, do you have one?
We're in this weird realignment,
a lot of people keep asking me
what's going on in the conservative movement?
What does it stand for?
Some conservatives now think things
that they were diametrically opposed to
just five, six years ago.
Some progressives, all of a sudden think,
you know, my views aren't working out.
So well, maybe I need to go the other direction.
What do you believe?
How do you express your beliefs?
It matters.
And it really does matter now.
You're at the age where you have to
start thinking about these things.
You're at the age where what you think now
will begin to shape your direction in life in the future.
There will be some of you in this room
who things don't work out so well,
and the question will be, was it really someone else's fault
or are you trying to blame the world for your own fault?
And will you get angry about it?
Some of you it'll work out very well
and the question will be, does it work out so well
you forget all the other people around you
or do you recognize that the world or God,
whatever your world view is, has been generous to you
so you'll be generous to other people?
Will you give back to an organization like this
and credit it with helping you form your worldview?
What will you do?
It matters,
and it probably matters more than you realize because
you're at the point where you're probably
not thinking "what is my worldview?"
But it matters right now in particular
more than it did when I was here 28 years ago,
because when I was here then,
the entire conservative movement in America
kind of agreed on the same stuff.
Now it kind of doesn't.
Everybody's squabbling with each other.
And you know, the most amazing thing
if we're really honest about it,
is most of the fights inside the conservative movement
aren't over a whole lot.
It's like campuses, academics, the faculty,
they always squabble over the most meaningless things,
and they're always the most violent fights too.
But everybody has their hill to die on. The question is,
are you going to die on every hill
or do you have a worldview
good enough so that you know
that you can't die on every hill?
You have to pick which ones you're going to die on
because there will come a time
where you have to pick that fight.
The fight where you have to decide
the hill you'll die on.