Four years ago, the political mood seemed much more caustic. Everyone knew that Certain Catastrophe awaited if the wrong guy got elected and this furor pervaded every corner of our online and real-world existence.
The tone is different today, and it’s not just a lesson learned about the futility of arguing politics. A majority of Americans have unfavorable views of both major party’s presidential candidates and believe our country is in decline. In fact, they are the least liked candidates in Pew’s polling history, and that disfavor extends to other executive and congressional leaders as well. Sixty percent of Americans say “the system is broken” and nearly 70% feel that those in charge don’t care about them. Political outrage has given way to disappointment and disillusion.
So what’s a civically minded person to do?
Latter-day Saint history might hold some answers. In 1831, Joseph Smith revealed that the Saints were to build Zion in Missouri. When they got to Independence, however, they did not find a land flowing with milk and honey. “Even Joseph Smith described feeling anxiety regarding the location,” Amanda Freebairn writes. “The Lord wasn’t handing them the Promised Land, He was asking them to build it.”
Bridging the gap between reality and expectation is a central part of the Christian story. God didn’t send Noah the ark; He commanded him to build it. After being delivered from the Egyptians, the children of Israel traipsed through a vast desert wasteland for 40 years before reaching Canaan.
As with the restored church, the early Christian church grew and evolved gradually over time, threatened in its infancy by persecution and martyrdom. It seems that God loves his people too much to spare them from hard work.
This ethic of building things is vividly fresh in Latter-day Saint memory. We can touch the temples that God asked our ancestors (spiritual or literal) to build and we can walk the trails on which God led them to their own kind of promised land.
That land was not a carefree Eden; it was Deseret, signifying industry. This was a place where God’s favor meant neither ease nor rest, but one in which the Saints’ blood and tears would nourish the seeds of His eternal purposes.
God’s blessings, then, cannot be understood only as a particular outcome or destination, though such things play their part. As it was for the Book of Mormon prophet Nephi and the biblical children of Israel, the journey itself is where we find some of the most concrete evidence of God’s love and favor.
The everyday work of building people and things endows us with the knowledge and skills to recognize, create and protect what’s true and good. Without this divine education, no land would hold any lasting promise, however full of milk and honey.
Scruton understood this. In this writer’s humble opinion, Roger Scruton was modern conservatism’s most under-appreciated intellectual. Scruton wrote a great deal about aesthetics and his political thinking was shaped by his profound appreciation for the beauty of the world around him. His conservatism was not a po-faced grip on the past; he believed that real progress must be anchored by “the sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.”
Building requires a very different set of skills from tearing things down. Compared with building a house, for example, demolition takes comparatively little time, foresight or skill. On the other hand, constructing a house requires a great deal of knowledge, resources, planning, problem-solving and patience. Modern home building generally requires more of these than any one person possesses.
When it comes to our laws, culture and institutions, the work of building is infinitely more complex. Our commitments to freedom of conscience, human equality, impartial justice or scientific inquiry might seem like self-evident truths plucked from the tree of Reason, but in fact they were nurtured, developed and refined in a piece-meal fashion over many centuries as men and women sought principled solutions for the difficulties of their time. These principles and commitments constitute another kind of temple — if not to God, then at least to the ideals inspired by our understanding of the divine will. But these are temples we can’t touch and, often, can’t even see because we’ve never known anything else. For all their ubiquity, they are nevertheless susceptible to destruction. Maybe it’s authoritarian threats to our civic institutions or the subtler undermining of our social and cultural ones, like family and faith. Often, these destructive impulses are clothed in the language of “justice” and “progress.”
Latter-day Saints are not just builders, we are also civically minded as a matter of culture and doctrine. Church leaders have repeatedly counseled us to engage prayerfully (rather than dogmatically) with the candidates and issues of our day, to embrace compromise and to disagree without being disagreeable. Jonathan Rauch, “a self-described atheistic Jewish gay man,” has praised Latter-day Saints for their “civic theology” of tolerance and pluralism.
The Latter-day Saint commitment to civility, compromise and civic processes for achieving desired political outcomes are not, as some have argued, the patriotic pieties of an unpopular minority religion. They are another means by which the Saints continue their ethic of building things. As in matters of faith, our political attitudes should be that of builders, committed to a long-term vision focused on creating something of lasting value, rather than merely tearing down what stands in our way.
Unfortunately, our broader political discourse tends to treat compromise, civility and process as capitulations to the enemy or a forfeiture of one’s political purity. Really, they’re just part of the unglamorous but practical work of building a bridge from our reality to our ideals (in lieu of simply dictating one’s demands).
Perhaps part of our disenchantment with the current selection of candidates stems from our growing realization that tribalistic, zero-sum politics are good for generating lists of nonnegotiables, but little else of lasting value. We can’t really force a particular outcome, and trying to do so is just wearing everyone out.
Another way of stating this is that the world we want will not materialize simply by electing the right people or party. In fact, putting all our eggs in the candidate-basket can lead us to view the political process as a means of salvation. Dan Ellsworth and Jeff Bennion wrote about this “transfer of our devotion from God to politics,” with the attendant expectation that others are the problem and need to change. When our particular program takes on divine significance, those who oppose us are not just wrong, but evil.
None of this means we shouldn’t take seriously our responsibility to vote and participate in the democratic process. But such an overly narrow focus becomes toxic when it generates an attitude of anxious engagement in political outcomes, directing our energy away from the small and simple things through which real progress occurs: the everyday work of building up others, our relationships, our institutions and the customs that make our way of life possible.
At the 80th anniversary D-Day commemoration, actor Tom Hanks called this “the slow melding of the truth to the actual practical life we end up living,” emphasizing core “virtues” and “the good deed that we practice with our neighbor.”
If we are not capable of living fulfilling and peaceable private lives, politics will not amend our deeper problems; it will amplify them.
In other words, if you’re often disappointed (as I am) in the political options before you, remember that the best things are built, not voted. The candidates and policies we vote on tomorrow are a product of the kind of life we dedicate ourselves to living now.