Amber,

Thanks so much for taking our photos, but I thought we agreed you were going to photoshop off 50 pounds or so before you posted them>?

slight head-swap...

 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 

Grant sang this song in front of the whole congregation on Sunday and got rave reviews.

My father-in-law passed this on to us today. It is a talk by Elder Clayton Christensen given at the commencement exercises of Southern New Hampshire University May 18, 2009. This talk was referred to by Elder Quentin Cook in conference. Elder Christensen, a Harvard Business School graduate,

I learned the importance of this question in a conversation 12 years ago with a Marxist economist from China who was nearing the end of a fellowship in Boston, where he had come to study two topics that were foreign to him: democracy and capitalism. I asked my friend if he had learned here anything on these topics that was surprising or unexpected. His response was immediate and, to me, quite profound: “I had no idea how critical religion is to the functioning of democracy and capitalism.” Though de Toqueville also had observed this, I had never made this association between religion, democracy and capitalism in my mind. But it was like this guy parachuted in from Mars – and this is what he saw. He continued,

“In your past, most Americans attended a church or synagogue every week. These are institutions that people respected. When you were there, from your youngest years, you were taught that you should voluntarily obey the law; that you should respect other people’s property, and not steal it. You were taught never to lie. Americans followed these rules because they had come to believe that even if the police didn’t catch them when they broke a law, God would catch them. Democracy works because most people most of the time voluntarily obey your laws.

“You can say the same for capitalism,” my friend continued. “It works because Americans have been taught in their churches that they should keep their promises and not tell lies. An advanced economy cannot function if people cannot expect that when they sign contracts, the other people will voluntarily uphold their obligations. Capitalism works because most people voluntarily keep their promises.”

My friend then invited me to look around the world at those countries where, in his words, “America had snapped its fingers at the country and demanded, ‘We want democracy here, and we want it now!’” Unless there was already a strong religious foundation in those countries, he asserted, democracy has failed miserably. There are religions in every country, of course. But he made clear that democracy-enabling religions are those that support the sanctity of life, the equality of people, the importance of respecting others’ property, and of personal honesty and integrity. Those religions also had to be strong enough that they held power over the behavior of the population. People had to believe that God would punish them even if the police and court system did not. He then gave some examples.

In Russia, for instance, there are religions – but few people are influenced by them. As a result many people avoid taxes, and the government cannot collect them. Murder, bribery and stealing are a part of everyday life. He noted that American foreign policy has been naïve in Haiti and the nations of Africa that have been torn by such brutal civil strife. “You just think that because democracy works for you that it will work everywhere. It only works where there is a strong foundation of religion.” In the course of researching the issue my friend posed I happened upon an elegant summary of what he was trying to teach me, penned by Lord John Fletcher Moulton, the great English jurist, who wrote that the probability that democracy and free markets will flourish in a nation is proportional to “the extent of obedience to the unenforceable.”

My Chinese friend heightened a vague but nagging concern I’ve harbored – that as religion loses its power over the lives of Americans, what will happen to our democracy? Our prosperity? We are living on momentum. The ethic of obedience to the unenforceable was established by vibrant religions, and some of these teachings have become a part of our culture. As a result, today there are many Americans who are not religious, who still voluntarily obey the law, comply with contracts, value honesty and integrity and respect other people’s rights and property. This is because certain religious teachings have become embedded in our culture. But is culture a stalwart protector of democracy’s enabling values? I don’t think so.

Those who seek to minimize the role that religions can play in the public stage are making two very serious mistakes. First, they are seeking to minimize the very institutions that have given us our civil liberties in the first place. And second, the debate swirling in judicial discourse about the separation of church and state is a false dichotomy. There are two classes of religions, if we broadly define as philosophical traditions: theistic religions and atheistic ones. Zealots of atheistic religions who assert that theistic religions must be swept off the democratic stage, even as they knit the doctrines of their religions into our legal and regulatory fabric, are asking the wrong question, and therefore giving us an answer that may well prove to be toxic to democracy.

My Chinese friend’s insight has helped me understand what the valuable question really is: “Because democracy is possible only when most people most of the time voluntarily obey the laws, what institutions can we rely upon to inculcate this instinct amongst the American people? And how can we strengthen those institutions, so that they do this better?”

When the instinct of even a minority of people in a society is to steal what belongs to others, lie when it suits their selfish purposes, evade taxes, demand bribes and disregard the rights of others, then capitalism won’t work, either. Just look at our current economic crisis. It didn’t take many Americans whose instinct was to take what belongs to others and to stretch rather than obey the rules, to cause capitalism to very nearly collapse.

When the extent of disobedience to the unenforceable grows, not just democracy, but prosperity becomes in jeopardy. We treasure democracy because it gives us freedoms of speech and the press. But democracy without near-universal obedience to the unenforceable strips from us other crucial freedoms, which include the freedom from want, and the freedom to be employed. I again ask what I believe is a crucial question for America: Because capitalism and the prosperity it brings are possible only when most people most of the time voluntarily obey the laws, what institutions can we rely upon to inculcate this instinct amongst the people, before they arrive in our executive suites and on Wall Street? And how can we strengthen the institutions that teach these things, so that they do it better?

When a nation lacks the requisite foundation of extensive obedience to the unenforceable, what form of government will work?

Unfortunately democracy and capitalism won’t. It requires the rule of someone who can define good laws and then wield the power required to compel obedience. Living proofs of this hypothesis cover the globe. Just run this experiment. The next time you’re in a taxi with a Haitian cab driver, just ask whether things are better now under democracy than they were under the corrupt rule of the Duvaliers. I guarantee that every one of them pines for the day when there was an iron-fisted ruler who had the instinct and ability to stomp his heel into the chest of those who didn’t follow the rules.

It’s not a coincidence that the countries that have transitioned from poverty to prosperity in the last 40 years – including Korea, Chile, Taiwan, Singapore, Portugal and the Dominican Republic – all were led by relatively honest but iron-fisted dictators, who had the instinct and ability to wield power quite ruthlessly, in some instances, to break the vested interests of those that profited from the corruption that had trapped those nations in poverty. Impoverished countries with democratic governments such as the Philippines and India, in contrast, struggle to prosper because imposition of democracy has simply democratized corruption to the point that capitalism won’t work: The investments that would stimulate economic growth simply cannot be made, because you can’t bribe enough people to make anything happen.

Those who assume that the atheistic religions of secularism are a better backbone for freedom and prosperity than the theistic ones that they are trying to push under the back seat, have a huge burden of proof which they’ve not had the intellectual fortitude to discuss, let alone bring forward.

In his October 2010 General Conference Elder Quentin L. Cook summarized the talk this way, “. . . in societies where the citizens are taught from a young age to feel accountable to God for honesty and integrity, they will abide by rules and practices that, while unenforceable, promote democratic ideals. In societies where this is not true, there cannot be enough policemen to enforce honest behavior.”

de Toqueville, after traveling America trying to discover what made it tick, was to have said something such as, America is great because it is good. When it ceases to be good, it will cease to be great. (Actually it seems that the source of the quote is in question but the thought is good). Anyway, so much of our “goodness” is so dependent upon the basic religious beliefs and traditions held by our predecessors and passed down from generation to generation, creating our moral center and base. That moral center and base are always in danger of being marginalized or legislated away, moving from freedom of religion to freedom from religion. Freedom and religion are “only one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in our bloodstream.” (Ronald Reagan?)

On Oct. 3 against the Chargers, he got it. He came in for Anderson and stared at 10 faces in the huddle, veterans, Pro Bowlers and men who have been to the Super Bowl. He barked out one sentence that dripped with confidence, contained at least two expletives, and was described as somewhat shocking.

"I can't repeat what he said," receiver Larry Fitzgerald says, citing Hall's reputation as a man of faith.

"It was something that we wouldn't expect from a BYU guy, a Mormon guy," says center Lyle Sendlein. "I mean, none of us really knew him. He had never really taken reps with the first [team] offensive line before. So that being his first impression, I guess it kind of eased the tension of breaking a new guy in.

We are playing the waiting game at Allysons (this is Mom). It is fun though and being around Calvin is so much fun. Wait, I said fun twice. Keep Allyson in your prayers. Love Mom