Movers and shakers met on Capitol Hill Thursday morning for the seventieth-annual National Prayer Breakfast.

The Evangelical but ecumenical breakfast has experienced a lot of changes in recent years. Members of Congress have taken control and created a new non-profit to run the breakfast in response to several misgivings about how the Fellowship Foundation, the non-profit that started the National Prayer Breakfast, managed the event. Since, the meeting has become more intimate, cutting about nine-tenths of the number of attendees, and has moved from a roving lavish D.C. hotel to Capitol Hill. One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is that the president gives an address.

President Joe Biden checked that box this year. In his address, the president implored members of Congress to continue their fights, but carry them out in a respectful manner. “I don’t know how we do that anymore. But we have to. We have to start treating each other in ways different than we have, in my humble opinion.”

He did have one suggestion, however. “Let’s just sort of, kind of join hands again a little bit,” Biden, famous for his touchy-feely sensibilities, told the crowd.

This writer’s bad jokes aside, Biden said he and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had a productive meeting Wednesday. “Let’s start treating each other with respect. That’s what Kevin and I are going to do, not a joke. Very good meeting yesterday. I think we got to do it across the board. Doesn’t mean we’ve got to agree – fight like hell – but let’s treat each other with respect.”

It’s a message that seems inoffensive enough. And, in part, this side of Biden is why he currently resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Whether the 2020 election was stolen or not, Biden is in the White House because some thought he would create a modern era of good feelings, or at least a return to normalcy.

But good feelings and normalcy in our current context aren’t what they once were. Sure, Republicans can be permitted to “fight like hell” for a little while, just as long as they follow the script: liberal modernity must always win. The industrial slaughter of the unborn must continue. If you do have children, then you ought to let the state education system imbue them with LGBTQ ideology and critical race theory. If your child decides they are the opposite gender, you better not suggest it was the education system that encouraged them to live that lifestyle—they were born that way—and you certainly don’t have a say in whether the state can force-feed your child foreign hormones or mutilate their body.

It’s true, we may all be neighbors. But as Our Lord says in Matthew 10:34-36: 

Think not that I came to send peace on the earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law: and a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.

A house divided may fall, but a house built upon sand surely will.