Suddenly I’m not just stepping out of a car along I-80 in Iowa. As I look into the joyous faces of these young people, I feel a jolt. I remember another state and another time when young people felt they had to take their country into their own hands. I think my friends and I looked that way when, as college students, we plunged into the politics of the New Hampshire primary. We were fed up with another war. Yes, I was one of McGovern’s kids and I know exactly how these young people feel. I want to tell them this feeling that you must try to help your country be its best self is a terrific feeling and if you try you can keep it all your life.

These are not the only younger folks I see here in Iowa, however. On the access road to my motel, I had passed another motel and another parking lot. There were people getting out of cars, many of them lifting sleepy children to carry them to bed. Huckabee stickers abounded there. These, I believe, are some of the young, Christian evangelical families who came out in droves to support Mike Huckabee and who are, in large part, responsible for his win in Iowa. This is another kind of children’s crusade, a crusade by young parents who believe Huckabee embodies their values of Christian social conservatism.

There are children’s crusades going on here in Iowa. But the young people in these two parking lots are striving for different visions of America; one group yearns to heal divisions in the body politic and take the country in a new direction, the other group longs for a mono-culture of fixed virtues.

I’m biased, I know, toward the larger vision that the children in my parking lot seem to hold, a vision strong enough to bring them back early from their winter college break. The vision of the larger social good, and not the mono-culture one, is what I believe, in fact, the Christian faith teaches. I have accidentally stopped at the right motel.