If you take away religion, you can’t hire enough police…”
-A Chinese Marxist to Clay Christiansen
Clay Christiansen was a Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Forbes called him “one of the most influential business theorists of the last 50 years.”
He is an unassuming man who stands 6’8″ and played college basketball. But this video has made him more broadly famous than any of his intellectual works. As a professor at Harvard he had a student who was a Marxist economist from China finishing a Fulbright scholarship. Christiansen asked him if there was anything surprising about what he had learned in his time in the U.S.
Without any hesitation, he said, “Yes, I had no idea how critical religion is to the functioning of democracy. The reason why democracy works,” he said, “is not because the government was designed to oversee what everybody does, but democracy works because most people, most of the time voluntarily choose to obey the law. And in your past, most Americans attended a church or synagogue and were taught by someone they respected. Americans followed these rules because they had come to believe that they weren’t just accountable to society, but they were accountable to God.”
He said he wonders if religion loses its influence over Americans, what will happen to democracy? Where are the institutions that are going to teach the next generation of Americans that they too need to voluntarily choose to obey the laws? Because, he said, “If you take away religion, you can’t hire enough police.”
In America, God and Country have been joined since the Mayflower Compact. Yet in Portland this month, protesters burned Bibles and American flags in front of the courthouse. Bible burning? Beating of a trans-sexual woman near to death? Police bludgeoned with baseball bats?
There is such a thing as being too tolerant and we are already getting to the point where we cannot hire enough police.
Pray for our country,
Jim
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