Mormons

Fukuyama praises the Mormons as having good ethical values that societies need. "The Mormons encourage large families, stay-at-home wives, and otherwise strong, traditional family values.

Contemporary Mormons, in other words, exemplify many of the original Puritan virtues, now regarded as intolerably repressive by the rest of American society." But this so-called repressiveness also makes for "a remarkably strong sense of community." They have a welfare program of their own to help their members. "Again, like the early Puritans, the Mormons have been extremely successful economically, consequences of their classic Puritan work ethic."

"The Mormons exemplify the strange paradox of American individualism and communitarianism. From one perspective, they are highly individualistic ... and suffering all the persecution and rejection of apostates ... Yet from another perspective, they are highly communtarian, drawing their members out of exclusive preoccupation with their private lives, taking care of the weak and poorer members of their community, and establishing an astonishing variety of enduring social institutions."

"The Mormons' degree of self-organization and communal self-help is extraordinary by any standard and is much more extensive than for most Protestant sects." Why doesn't he mention that there are even more impressive Unificationist communities that care for their own? Sadly, the Mormons are growing because they are more in line with their Victorian ancestors who valued patriarchy. When you have strong patriarchs you will automatically have larger families. The Mormons have an average of 4.61 children which is twice the US national average. The Hutterites have an average of over 10 children because they are totally patriarchal. When brothers become strong patriarchs they will make sure that they have more than 10 children. True Mother had 14 children. True Parents say they could not balance their life and had to have Mother leave the home and both of them could not talk to their children. The result has been a soap opera disgrace. Regardless of whether it was right for True Parents and some early members to abandon their families, Unificationists must never do this. We must live in communities that are more caring than Mormons. The Mormons do not live together in intentional communities and for some strange reason do not have their own elementary and high schools. This is why their birth rate is 4.61 children instead of over 10.

Multiculturalism

He blasts the multicultural curricula in American classrooms saying, "the underlying message is an ecumenical but false one that all cultures ultimately hold the same decent, liberal values as the writers of the multicultural curriculum itself."

"Americans need to understand that theirs is not simply an individualistic tradition and that historically people have come together, cooperated, and deferred to the authority of a myriad of larger communities. While the state, particularly at the federal level, may not be the appropriate locus of this sense of community for many purposes, the ability to obey communal authority is key to the success of the society."

Religious authority is the key to a success of communities. "... virtually all of the American Founding Fathers believed that a vigorous religious life, with its belief in divine rewards and punishments, was important to the success of American democracy." Unificationist communities should be run by men only. No sister should have position over any man. Only the men should vote on who is to be the leaders and only men make the final decisions on how the community organizes itself. Women can have organizations and women can elect women to lead them, but the ultimate decisions of the community are made by the brothers, and override the decisions any women's organizations may make if the brothers disagree.

RECOGNITION

It is not a theocracy; it is a democracy of believers. We need to balance the needs of the community and the needs of the individual. The Hutterites go too far with socialism and the Mormons go too far in individualism. Principled co-housing communities that respect individual creativity is the middle way between the two extremes. "A dynamic and prosperous capitalist economy is crucial to stable democracy in an even more fundamental way, one that is related to the ultimate end of all human activity. In The End of History and the Last Man, I argued that the human historical process could be understood as the interplay between two large forces. The first was that of rational desire, in which human beings sought to satisfy their material needs through the accumulation of wealth. The second, equally important motor of the historical process was what Hegel called the 'struggle for recognition,' that is, the desire of all human beings to have their essence as free, moral beings recognized by other human beings."

Jean Bethke Elshtain

Professor Elshtain is a prominent intellectual who says in her book Democracy on Trial that America is declining. In speeches gives around the country she says America was better in the past: "Alexis de Tocqueville, in his classic work Democracy in America, argued that one reason the American democracy he surveyed was so sturdy was that citizens took an active part in public affairs. This is important because participating in public affairs means one must move from exclusive and narrowly private interests and occasionally take a look at matters that concern others. In Tocqueville's words, 'As soon as common affairs are treated in common, each man notices that he is not as independent of his fellows as he used to suppose and that to get their help he must offer his aid to them.'"

"In this way civic engagement helped to underscore what Tocqueville called 'self-interest properly understood,' an interest that was never narrowly focused on the self. If Tocqueville were among us today, he would no doubt share the concern of social scientists who have researched the sharp decline in participation. They argue that the evidence points to nothing less than a crisis .... The debilitating effects of rising mistrust, privatization, and anomie are many. For example, there is overwhelming empirical support for the popularly held view that where neighborhoods are intact, drugs and alcohol abuse, crime, teenage childbearing, and truancy among the young diminish. Because neighborhoods are less and less likely to be intact, all forms of socially and self-destructive behavior among the young are on the rise. Americans at the end of the 20th century suffer from the effects of a dramatic decline in the formation of social bonds, networks, and trust."

She says, "Children in particular have borne the brunt of these negative social trends. All one need do is look at any American newspaper any day of the week to read yet another story about the devastating effects of current social trends on the young. Widespread family breakdown generates unparented children who attend schools that increasingly resemble detention centers rather than spaces of enduring training, discipline, and education in a safe environment. Family breakdown contributes to out-of-wedlock births and juvenile violence at unprecedented levels. The family, of course, cannot deal with all of these things alone. Looking at troubles for families points us to a wider disintegration of the social ecology within which families are nested."

... "The world that nourished and sustained such democratic dispositions was a thickly interwoven social fabric -- that web of mediating institutions already noted. Tocqueville, as I have already indicated, saw Americans as civically engaged, arguing that 'Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are forever constantly forming associations' (Democracy in America, p. 513). From this associational enthusiasm, currents of social trust and stewardship flowed. Bonds of social trust, in turn, fueled the penchant for joining and for helping. Other famous visitors to our shores spoke of the 'active beneficence' that characterized the American people."

"Political scientist James Q. Wilson argues that one reason Americans are more cynical and less trusting than they used to be is that government has taken on more and more issues that it is by definition ill-equipped to handle well."

"This is a situation begging for true democratic debate, courageous leadership, wise legislation, and the rebuilding of a sturdy civil society -- a culture of democratic argument."

LEGITAMATE AUTHORITY

"But a tendency manifested itself in the 1960s that now affects our entire culture and makes it difficult to sustain institutional life. I refer to the demand that one go beyond criticizing and challenging the exercise of authority to arguing that authority must be smashed altogether. A dangerous argument flourished that equated coercion and violence on the one hand with authority on the other. This is a terrible mistake. Authority is not tyranny; indeed, authentic politics begin when the power to coerce arbitrarily is rejected. A very common mistake, then, was to presume that one could have community, happiness, and freedom without authority. But authority and community go together. Legitimate authority is required to create and to sustain institutions. And without institutions, community is an empty word, a sentimental greeting, a vague aching of the heart."

DISCIPLINE

"That is why there was always something suspect about a rush to create community without asking how are communities to be sustained? by whom? to what ends? To have community you must have people prepared to shoulder responsibility, to be accountable; otherwise, you have lots of feelings about wanting to do good, but these evaporate like the early morning's dew at the first sign of difficulty. To have community you must have people prepared to accept the discipline necessary to sustain cultural forms. This discipline consists in part in recognition that the world doesn't begin and end at the perimeter of me, as in "me, myself, and I," as my mother was fond of saying. It consists in recognition of the fact that, even as I restrain myself and expect others to restrain themselves in the interest of sustaining a way of life in common, we are all of us beholden to something bigger and beyond, to purposes not reducible to the concatenation of our private passions and interests. And why should we do this? So that, as I noted at the outset, we can come to know a good in common that we cannot know alone."

We get the feeling that she is a communitarian that looks more to government than the church to solve our problems. "But this public-spiritedness is in jeopardy. Our social fabric is frayed. Our trust in our neighbors is low. We don't join as much. We give less money, as an overall percentage of our gross national product, to charity."

She says on the one hand that we need to respect authority and we need courageous leadership. We need to join more. She says the above remarks at a speech she gave at BYU.

In an article in The New Republic she blasted the cults in America. On the one hand she says we need "courageous leadership" but when someone takes leadership, she accuses him of being a cult leader. Apparently the Mormons are not a cult to her anymore. If we took her definition of cults she gives in her article then the founder of the Mormons was a deranged cult leader and the followers of Joseph Smith were brainwashed. Her argument is the same as Steve Hassan's. Our purpose in writing this book is to get the UC to stop doing some of the outrageous and unneeded things it does like fundraising. It's the new millennium and still they write glowingly about how there are young Russians members fundraising in America to give money to some Korean leader working in China. We met one such fundraiser one day spending a few hours selling prints in our town. This kind of nonsense has to stop. The UC dishes out a lot of propaganda about how wonderful and spiritually uplifting so-called fundraising is, but it is all a lie even though some MFTers will swear they found God there. The cup is half empty when it comes to the millions of people they have gotten money for "Christian Youth Counseling" and virtually no one knew they were giving to advance the work of Sun Myung Moon. Perhaps the reason Rev. Moon made everyone live a ridiculous socialist lifestyle in the 70s was because Americans were so out of it, as Elshtain writes. By working for something bigger than themselves they could grow spiritually. Elshtain and Hassan have the illogical view that mainline religions are normal and cults are too demanding and too isolated.

The early Mormons, like most other pioneer religions, were very demanding and banded together against what they saw as a depraved world that needed their truth. She says "Cults are usually dominated 'by an all-powerful guru' and no 'other authority is tolerated.' Not just that. 'Contact with other forms of thought or behavior' is likely to be forbidden and, if it occurs, punished. The cult offers a total meaning system with no grounds for disputation and interpretation. This already distances a cult from the great world religions." Oh yeah? She and Hassan haven't got a clue to what they are talking about. Every religious leader from Jesus to Joseph Smith has demanded obedience. The Bible is filled with quotes of Jesus and Paul saying "don't look back" -- "let the dead bury the dead." Jesus said he came with a sword to divide families. His truth would cause division. And it did and it does today.

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