america's founding values
i actually teach information systems so like database management and computer programming and often on the first day of class i'll start off by asking my students i'll say so what does it mean to be an american you know and they're they're like checking the syllabus to making sure they're in the right place and everything and and um you know they're kind of shy to answer there at the very first of class and then they realize oh he's he's serious you know he he wants an answer and so almost always the first answer that comes out is it means you're a citizen of the united states of america and that's true in one sense but in our language we have an expression that there's not an analogous expression in most for most other countries and that is un-american it means something to be un-american there's not an expression on mexican or un-irish those are not terms that they use in those cultures and so i'll i'll push and i'll say what does it mean to be american in the opposite sense that it means to be un-american a long awkward pause and then you know they finally realize if we're ever getting to database management we're going to have to answer this question and almost always the first thing that comes up is that something along the lines of there's a we have a shared belief in liberty or of freedom and that is absolutely right that has been something that has defined our people since before we were a separate nation i mean just just even as part of the british colonies in north america we had the shared understanding of freedom and i'm going to share with you a little bit tonight about how we ended up having that it's a we had a very different feeling about freedom than our european progenitors did and either the other europeans who were alive you know at that time in the 18th century were very very different the culture in fact our culture was so different you know we'll end up going to war because we can't understand why those folks in england are being so unreasonable and they can't understand why we're being so unreasonable and it's because we have such a different culture that we perceive the same the same events very very differently um but but liberty was one of at least seven different values that really defined american culture and made american culture different from european culture different from just english culture in general and of those seven that we started off with and there may be there may have been more there's seven that i've kind of identified and think yeah this is this is really what made us different there's only two of them that we still unite around today and so when i push my students and say okay shared belief in liberty right what else nothing else comes with any degree of regularity they'll come up with some pretty good things but nothing happens i can i can't count on any one of those other ones showing up on any given semester the other one that i think we haven't lost is uh justice so let me kind of take these two justice and liberty as ones that we still feel as part of our of our national identity how did we end up feeling so differently about liberty so it turns out that most of the british colonies in north america started off as commercial endeavors you say jamestown you know jamestown's first permanent colony in north america or first one to kind of make it what was jamestown here to do you know what were they were they coming over here to are you here you know what we want to somehow populate north america no they're here to find gold that's what they're here for it is uh the virginia company is an offshoot of the london company and they are here to find gold for 100 years england has been watching spain bringing back a a fleet of treasure ships every year full of gold and silver and they get the feeling gold is everywhere in north america you just have to go over and get it in fact the biggest problem that jamestown had when they first were getting established is that they were having trouble getting people to do the kind of work that it would take to sustain them because they're too busy looking for gold it's like there's got to be gold around here somewhere you know let's go find it that's what we're here for uh and so um so so not all of them but most of them start as as these commercial endeavors they're here to make money and one by one they fail and the and the crown kind of says well we've got this foothold here in north america these folks over here kind of counting on you know some connection back here with the country and the the crown kind of reluctantly takes these colonies on as royal colonies so they're now no longer managed by whatever company the london company that started them up after they failed they now you know are under the management of the crown and the crown realizes at this point this is not a money-making proposition and so we end up with a policy that won't get named until the 1770s of salutatory neglect it means we're we are neglecting the colonies but it's it's it's because we love them in fact one of the great supporters of america in parliament and there weren't very many uh was a guy named edmund burke and he's trying to argue we got to quit trying to oppress the colonies in north america um let's just keep doing what we've do what we've been doing what have we been doing nothing we passed laws over here that says you know americans you're only allowed to trade with england and you know what they ignore those laws and they trade with everyone and that is and burke says that's fantastic because they get rich they've got all kinds of money that they can buy english goods with let them keep doing that they'll make us all rich um he was not quite a lone voice but almost a loan voice you know he'd make these great impassioned pleas and then the things that he's arguing for will get defeated 34 votes to 187 or 234 so you know kind of these large spreads we look at the arguments he made today and we think wow how could anyone vote against that well they could and so but it was this idea that it cost the feeling was as long as you don't cost us anything you can do whatever you want so in 1619 when we get the very first representative body the house of burgess just kind of springs up we need to somehow organize ourselves parliament's not making laws for us that deal with the things we really have have dealt with here parliament kind of says wow they just made a representative body we hadn't didn't ever expect them to do that but whatever you know they didn't they didn't try to stop them they just kind of let it happen and as a result for 150 years more in some cases we got to thinking that that was normal that that for us to be able to just decide what we're going to do that that's normal that's not normal anywhere else in the world and so as a result we think that's our birthright to have this liberty and after the after the french indian war when remember the idea was as long as you don't cost us anything you can do whatever you want the french indian war was crazy expensive and so england now says okay you're costing us you're not going to get to do whatever you want anymore we're going to get serious about collecting these taxes it worked pretty well for 100 years they've levy taxes we'd ignore them they'd send someone to enforce them they'd find out it cost more to enforce the tax and they get by enforcing the tax they'd stop enforcing the tax and we'd move on we thought that was the way it's supposed to be and so um when after the french indian war they start to pull back this liberty we said no and we thought that was something worth fighting for and so so from that time to this day we have felt that liberty is part of what it means to be an american uh similar with justice so justice was something that we felt really we felt really differently about and part of the reason is is that when the colonies were established they got a charter like a paper you know kind of set up with a king's signature on it that says you're a colony over there and you know these are kind of the rules well when these colonies came under um you know instead of under the management of the corporations but under the management of the crown and as parliament starts to think you know what we think we want to change the deal parliament would just make a law that changes what it just changes the deal and we said wait a minute we have a charter that says how we're supposed to run over here and you can't just change it as a result we start being really interested in the law and injustice and being very kind of serious about it in fact kind of at the same time when edmund burke in parliament is trying to argue that we lay off the colonies he says listen my fellow parliamentarians here you don't understand he says almost everyone in america is a lawyer and he's exaggerating here um but he says in no other country is the study of law more prominent it's in america where we first get people who to try to make their career in the law we think john john adams is one so um kind of before the era of john adams if you practice the law it was something that gentlemen did in their spare time you know it was really rare for someone to say what's you know what's your occupation what's your career it's a it's a what we call a barrister or a solicitor but a lawyer really unusual but here in america we think yeah i guess that's a way that you could make a living and he says not only that i'm informed by prominent booksellers here in london that they sell more of blackstone's the uh blackson's commentary on the law which is the main legal book of the day they sell more of those in america than they do in england and we're printing this book over here and in fact the americans they start printing on their own they're printing it over there without our permission but they're just printing it and using it themselves over there and and what he's arguing is that these americans are serious about the law and if you guys just pass something that isn't like really sound they're they're going to find holes in it they're just going to not do it because they'll know that it's not legal and so we so and this is another one so so when i guess the point that we can kind of see that we still see this as a national value is that when we see someone or we hear someone who's acting in the name of america doing something that is clearly unjust we have kind of a national response to it when we find out that our government is holding people in a in a prison without the prospect of a trial a prison they couldn't even build in america they built in cuba we say there's something wrong with that maybe we don't know what the answer is but that's not right and the reason is because it's a violation of a shared national principle that we still hold so these two liberty and justice we haven't lost we've never lost it now that doesn't that's not to say that america has always acted according to those values there have been times when we've done things as i just mentioned we've done things that you know we think wow that kind of violates that principle but there's a response in the nation when that happens um but there's at least five others that defined us and made us who we were by the 1770s that said oh yeah that's that's part of our culture that we no longer see as part of our culture today and so what i'd like to do with the rest of the time is is kind of raise your awareness about these other five values convince you that they really are values that define us as americans and you probably won't need to that much convincing to understand that they're not part of our national part of what it means to be an american today but hopefully as you're as we're kind of coming into this time of where we really think about um the founding of our nation to think wow that's what i could do to be a great american is to kind of re-embrace fully the set of values that made americans who we were in the 1770s at the founding of our nation the first of these what i refer to as the lost founding values then goes by a term in fact most of them go by terms that we don't use in our national discussion anymore the term is divine providence so we ask people today educated people what what's divine providence and they'll get the word divine they'll say it's got something to do with god and that's about as far as we get and and they're right it does have something with god but it's it's not just a belief in god it is a belief in a providential god a god with a plan a god who is concerned with the affairs of nations and intervenes in the lives of men and women and in fact this shows up in our i mean in our founding document i mean this this term shows up in the declaration of independence most people well the vast majority of americans have never read the declaration of independence which i think is absolutely absurd since it's our founding document it's one page you know it's an easy read maybe it's not an easier you know it's a short read they're familiar but they're familiar with with three sentences they're familiar with the first tenets when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bad sleep they think okay yeah we ask them where that's from and and they'll say it's from the constitution we'll give them credit for it's a founding document it's the wrong one but we get it they're familiar with the first sentence of the second paragraph we hold these truths to be self-evident they still will say declaration on that and they're familiar with the last half of the last sentence we mutually pledge to each other to each other our lives our fortunes and our sacred honor and that's because they heard it on national treasure but but this value shows up in the first half of that last sentence so if we kind of look at the structure of the declaration of independence we've got a couple of paragraphs at the beginning that kind of lay the groundwork and then we have 27 28 depending on how you count grievances that we lay at the feet of king george he's done this and this and this and this and for all these reasons we're going to declare independence and then we declare our independence we have the language that comes right from the virginia convention that these free that are that these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states right we've declared our independence and then we get this kind of conclusion where we say and this is the sentence and for the support of this declaration this declaration that we're free and independent with a firm protection with let's see and for the support of this declaration relying firmly on the protection of divine providence we mutually pledge to each other our lives our fortunes and our sacred honor so this idea of divine providence of this belief in a providential god um that was that was part of what it meant to be an american we kind of go back and look at the various kind of attempts that we had to unify the colonies usually the first time we really did it was 1774 in the first continental congress this is the first time that we get the language used generally that is the united colonies of america we had an attempt back in 1754 the albany plan where we're trying to unite the colonies again not against mother england but we're we're having trouble on the frontier and it turns out the indian nations they're way more coordinated than the colonies were up until the 1770s the colonies saw themselves as individual competitors for royal favors they didn't want to work together because they were competing with the other colonies to get favors from the king but we go back to the very earliest kind of the very earliest attempt that we had to kind of get a union of the states and was actually the united colonies of new england 16 1640s where they're saying yeah we're going to get together kind of for our own mutual defense here out in in the wilderness and in that kind of in this plan for the united colonies of new england they say here's the things that you know we all agree on and the first thing that they say in the the paperwork for this this union is all right we all came here so that we could establish the work of god and this was the reason that we're here and so from our very earliest time of our founding this sense that we're here to accomplish the work of god has been part of what we believe in part of what it means to be an american um today more definitely more so than than it was felt in england or in the rest of europe um these folks left their homes came to a new world to be able to worship the way that they wanted to worship and to put forth the work of god today we we don't feel that's part of our national identity today i mean the good news here is that if we kind of compare religious beliefs in america to religious beliefs in europe we ask a you know survey anonymous survey you know do you believe in god about 20 of people in europe will say yeah 15 to 20 i believe in god in america it's about 80 to 85 percent of people will say i believe in god um but and so we can kind of see that there is some sense that there's still a difference there but we no longer see it as part of our national identity we really do believe that someone could be an atheist and be a perfectly good american there's no there's no and there shouldn't be any kind of religious test for citizenship in the united states of america but what i am saying here is that when the vast majority of americans believe that that there's a god who's concerned about what i do that america is a better place to live in fact when we think about divine providence in fact it was probably uh none of the founders talked more about divine providence than george washington did in fact a letter that he wrote to samuel langston in 1789 kind of right as the constitution is being ratified he says the man must be bad indeed who can look upon the events of the american revolution without the warmest regard for the divine providence of god that was so often manifest in our behalf and he will talk over and over again when it seemed as if the war was over and then the hand of god would intervene and be able to save the army so that he could live to fight another day and he laid those miracles at the feet of divine providence at the feet of god um but it's not just this divine providence in the sense that god's going to intervene and do stuff kind of the second way that divine providence acts is that there's some responsibility that we have to help bring forward the work of god in the world and so when we really do embrace this ideal of divine providence part of what we do is we seek out actively what is it that god wants me to do in this world now we all have leisure time in fact we ask in our culture today we ask someone what what does leisure mean and we'll get to ours it means relaxation or means recreation that's not even remotely close to what the term leisure means if we ask you know what is leisure time leisure time is you have a certain amount of time that it takes to put food on the table keep a roof over your head and keep the wolf from the door to just to get by all the other time you have in your life is leisure time so so leisure time is what you have left over after what it takes to get by and in our culture today we think that is synonymous with relaxation and recreation um but one of the main things that you will do with your leisure time if you really embrace and understand divine providence is you will say part of this time i'm going to use to find out what does god want me to do and work to accomplish the work of god to find out what your divine mission is and to work to accomplish that so that's kind of the first of the what we refer to as the lost founding values is this divine providence second one is very closely tied to that and again it's a term that we don't use anymore the term that the founders used was private virtue and so today for us that means the kind of the closest term we have for that today is individual morality and in fact the connection between liberty and virtue is a really fascinating connection and as we look in the writings of the founders for the first thing is that listen if we live in a in a regime where we are compelled to do what god wants us to do there's there's no virtue there you can't you you can't expect any eternal reward for that because it's not a free will offering right for for you to offer your will to the father it's not a free offering if you're compelled to do it and so a fundamental reason why we embrace liberty is so that we can make the free will choice to serve god that's a big part of of liberty but this but the reverse of that is true is that if we if we give liberty without virtue in the people then that liberty will be abused this is exactly what we are wrestling with at this moment in our in our country with um with the with the questions about rights for abortion it is are we going to have freedom in the absence of personal morality and that's something that our founders would say that's absolutely absurd you you just can't long sustain freedom if you don't have private virtue so private virtue is this sense of of doing the right thing even when no one's looking now today in america i think most people still feel this sense they should do the right thing but it's often now connected to whatever religious upbringing that we might have but that's not where the connection was at the founding of the united states of america so if we look at the french indian war 1750 starts in 1755 um starts out very bad for the british we have in fact by this time general washington he's actually colonel washington is retired 1755 he's retired from military service his plan is to live out the rest of his life as a gentleman farmer uh there in virginia and then the french indian war happens and he thinks oh you know edward braddock is coming over edward braddock is the one that great britain sent over to convince the french were really serious about this very successful kind of old school european general and washington kind of signs up to go fight with him anyway um the first engagement with braddock is known to this day as braddock's defeat the name of the battle is braddock's defeats also known the battle of the banang gahela but it is the worst british military defeat in history period the point is that and that the whole story is fascinating i wish i had another 30 minutes or so to kind of just dive into that story but the point is at the beginning of the french indian war the war is going really badly for the british so badly in fact that in virginia they're not able to meet their quotas of militia to kind of sign up to go and actually fight and so um that's that's the problem folks the feeling is yeah the war is so far away if it comes closer maybe we'll sign up well that changes almost overnight when a man by the name of samuel davies um gives a gives a sermon and he actually gives this sermon on the occasion of a few of these folks who have signed up to go fight in the war and when i first read about this i thought how could it be i mean first of all who even listens to a sermon and how could just one sermon you know really change the minds of people on a broad scale and the reason is when he had a good sermon you didn't just give it one place you kind of gave it over and over again and if it was good enough printers would get a hold of the text and they would print it and sell it with or without your permission you know and so this is like popular reading of the day so his his sermon is called the curse of cowardice and in it he lays out the argument why you have a god-given responsibility to fight to defend your country and uh he did which he does just he does this masterfully and then he gets to the end and he makes he may he reminds us something in this space of private virtue that i want to tell to you because you kind of see the connection between divine providence and private virtue this is not something new that he's exposing to these folks he's reminding them of something that they already know so he's gone through this whole he's been going at it for about three hours now and as a normal like sermon length of the day and and he says here i thought to have concluded have you ever had that happen you know and the the guy or the person's given the talk maybe in church in conclusion and there's like 10 more minutes before he actually sits down and you think you know because what happened here here i thought to have concluded but i must take a few minutes more to ask this crowd is there nothing that can be done by those of us who remain at home towards the defense of our country and to ensure the success of the expedition now at hand he says shall we sin on still impenitent and incorrigible should we live as though we and our country were self-dependent and had nothing to do with the supreme ruler of the universe he said can an army of saints or of heroes defend an obnoxious people ripe for destruction from the righteous judgments of god he's reminding us that for god to be able to intervene on our behalves and fight our battles we have to qualify for that and we do that by living a life of private virtue making the right choice even when no one's looking not because we're presbyterian or because we're congregationalists or because we're anglican but because we're american that for god to help our country we have to qualify for that and so and again this is one that uh that we've that we've lost we don't see that as part of our national identity anymore i briefly i'll tell you the kind of the story that i kind of realized this on i was watching a movie long after it came out it was probably only about 2005 that i kind of rewatched this again but it was from the 1990s a movie called the rocketeer any of you remember this one as a disney movie yeah some of you saw this one anyway in this in this movie kind of the whole tension is is that we've got during world war ii and and hughes aircraft has invented a rocket that you can strap to the back of a person and they can fly you know and this is going to change the war but the germans are after it and they've hired kind of local organized crime to go and steal this rocket pack and kind of the whole tension around the movie is is that we're we're trying to recover the pack which gets stolen and then gets lost and then recovered and for the whole movie we have the head um organized criminal guy by the name of eddie valentine um kind of fighting back and forth trying to capture this this rocket pack from the main federal agent who's trying to recover it and uh they spend most of the time pointing their guns at each other you know trying to recover it has of course fallen into the hands of the man who'll become known as the rocketeer who will use it to save the day and get the girl and so forth but but they're at the climax of the movie we find out when the when the when eddie valentine realizes unbeknowingly and unknowingly he's been working for the germans are the ones who are really you know paying him for this and when that happens you know he kind of switches sides he's now trying to recover and we see the federal agent and eddie valentine kind of side by side now both pointing their their guns at the german and the the germans and the federal agent kind of looks at him this is a man who's um in terms of private virtue none he's a career criminal right he looks it can listen i'm puzzled why are you helping me and he says this he delivers this line he says i may not make an honest buck but i am one hundred percent american and you kind of have this patriotic sense of pride you know and you just think yeah it's one person and what doesn't happen in that moment of the movie what doesn't happen is there's nothing in your mind that goes wait a minute that's that's wrong how could you be 100 american if you totally violate one of our identifying values of private virtue you don't feel that and it's because we don't we don't see it as part of our national identity anymore so so that's private virtue second so we have divine providence private version the third one that i want to talk about is was probably the first one actually to arise in america and it's a term we don't hear very often anymore it's called what we would call the american work ethic i was kind of surprised last year to see in the wall street journal that that term appear in the title of an article in the wall street journal but the question was is the american work ethic dead that was the that was the title i thought oh yeah maybe it is i'm not sure so um how does the american work ethic you know kind of arrive and why does it you know why is it different than the european work ethic and it all kind of goes back here to virginia to jamestown colony in virginia so jamestown comes over here they're looking for gold problem is there's no gold and so but the investors have dumped all kinds of money into jamestown and they're looking for a return so what do the folks over in jamestown do they figure we've got it we're going to make glass over here i mean glass is pretty it's pretty expensive stuff to buy you know blown glass you know kind of glassware goblets and things and the problem is is that it takes a lot of fuel to make glass and by this time england is almost entirely deforested we've cut down all the all the trees for building ships and for burning wood we've only recently discovered that there's coal there's lots of coal in england but we didn't realize you could burn it until you know pretty recently so there's just no there's no we get over here to virginia and there's these huge old growth hardwood forests they think there's all this fuel great we're going to use this fuel we've got sand sands everywhere over here we're going to make glass we're going to send it back they can never get their kilns working right they have to and ultimately they can't be profitable with that either it's not until they find out that there's a plant that grows really well here in virginia that they'll pay good morning money for in europe what is it yeah tobacco it's not even it's not even local tobacco local tobacco apparently is really bad tobacco this is from south america john rolfe brought it up here grows great they think this is going to this is going to be it and it is it's going to make jamestown financially successful until they over produce and the price of tobacco collapses here's the problem it takes a lot of people to cultivate tobacco and there's there's no people i mean there's not many people over here by the way the local inhabitants the indians they're like yeah we're not we're not doing that and so i think we've got to figure out how we're going to get people to come over here to cultivate tobacco here can you imagine go back to the investors all right investors just got to come up with enough money to send a lot of people over here and we're really going to make some money this time i know third time's the charm and you know it's going to work there's no more money coming but we look at the societal structure at this time most of europe is in the feudal system in the feudal system we have about five percent of the people own the land uh and their their their their responsibility is to protect everyone else so these are the nobles they um they own the land if some invading force comes in their job to repel them we got about five percent of the people who are the clergy you know so their job is you know we got five percent the nobles their job is to fight we got five percent of the population that's the clergy their job is to pray and we got 90 of the population their job is to work they work the land they don't own the land they work the land um you can't seem so strange to us that you can't buy land you cannot buy land in europe land it changes hands only by inheritance and by the way if you you know have two sons which one gets the land can you split it and give it to both only in the region today that we call germany was that allowed everywhere else in europe no no you gotta you gotta give that land to one person and the whole reason is is that we don't wanna split the estate because the king wants to work with a small set of nobles and if the states keep splitting and getting smaller and smaller it's too many nobles to work with and it's difficult to manage and so this is the way that society is organized but can you imagine there's lots of folks in england who know how to work the land you can imagine the first recruiting posters come to america we'll give you the same deal you get in england you can work for me for your whole life and never get anywhere by the way we don't know if we're gonna have enough food to make it through the winter and the local inhabitants could rise up and kill us at any moment you know no one takes that deal but so feudal fuel societies as i described but in the beginning in the 1400s we started to get another group and that's what we would call merchants where we said listen if you if if your father if you were the second son the third son your father had money in addition to land he could outfit you with a ship and you could go to sea and you could make your fortune well by the 1600s we have a whole class in england and in europe called the merchant class they're fabulously wealthy second-class citizens because they can't own land the land went to their older brother they can't own it they really really want land they've got money they want land virginia says virginia company says oh we've got land and by the way you guys already have ships bring some people over here we'll give you land in fact we'll allocate 100 acres for every person you bring over 50 of it goes to you the moment they step off the boat and if they die before their seven years they're up which they'll collect the other 50 the individual will collect the 50 but if they don't make it that seven years then mr merchant it's going to go to you so the merchants are like yeah this is a great deal but now the deal the same as dealers before come over here and work you might the chances of you living long enough to collect about 50 percent and yeah it's going to be rough but if you make it that 50 you'll become a landowner there is no other path to land ownership than inheritance so for these folks who are born as serfs as the ones who work the land there is nothing they can do with their labor to improve their live in life that's different in america and it's the only place in the world that it's different now in america if you come and through your own labor you can become a land owner in seven years and if you continue to be industrious you can buy more property and you can become out of a great landowner you can improve the life for for yourself and your family in a single generation and it's all because of your work as a result work takes on a very different character in america we see work as something that's noble whereas in europe if you work it is a sign of the lowness of your class and there is nothing that you can do to change that and so i remember i was watching uh harry potter the first the first movie of harry potter harry potter and the sorcerer's stone and in it a mouthful maybe you're familiar with the characters malfoy and harry get caught dueling and their punishment is detention with hagrid in the forbidden forest and when malfoy finds out that he's got to go and work his response is so indicative of the way to this day the way that labor is viewed in most of europe is he says no that's servant stuff i mean we have to go and work with hagrid he says that's servant's stuff and say that's that's beneath my station to have to go and work and but here in america we feel really differently about it and so that's you know that was so so that's like another one of these now we lost it today let me give you the feeling here here i was my first professorship was at tulane university in new orleans i'm trying to get to know the members of the ward or the branch actually that i was in in new orleans and so i'm talking to this guy he's nine years old like after sacrament meeting he's headed off to primary what do you say to a nine-year-old what's your name how old are you where do you go to school you know what grade are you in that's after that that's it i'm close we're out of questions go to primary and uh oh no i asked him what do you want to be when you grow up he said i want to be a public assistant i had no idea what a public assistant was i thought that sounds very noble but a public assistant and uh he goes to primary and the second counselor in the branch presidency was within earshot of that conversation and i looked at him said what's a public assistant and he said he means he wants to be on public assistance and i was just completely floored by that i mean to think that that like welfare is a career aspiration now um absolutely amazing and you'll you know you'll see this too i mean you'll agree with me because from time to time you'll see you know some expose on the news about someone who's taking advantage of the welfare system they're using food stamps to buy shrimp and other things that we you know lobster and whatever things that we can't afford um you know on the money that we earn and we'll think all kinds of bad things about that person but you know what we won't we won't say in our minds we won't say wow that's really un-american because we don't see it as part of our national identity anymore so divine providence private virtue work ethic um divine problem yeah so the fourth one then it's a very different feeling about education um in america we believe that everyone should be able to read and write when you say that when i say america i mean british colonies of north america 1600s particularly in new england we think that everyone should be able to read and write that's crazy what percentage of european population can read and write about 10 the clergy and the nobility about 10 can read and write here we think it should be everyone why why do we feel differently about it here in the 1600s what's that it's no it's not well yeah this was like like 17 middle 1700s were there yeah yeah it's because we want everyone to be able to engage the word of god for themselves that's the reason it's for we want you to be able to read the bible and so that's that's why we feel strongly about this as a result by the 1770s about 95 of men in urban areas can read and write at least at a basic level for women it's about they're about 20 behind so about 75 percent of women if we go into rural areas those numbers shift again by about another 20 which means anywhere that you went in in america british colonies of north america if you're free you you most of you can read and write there's no other place in the world with with the possible exception of scotland at this time where the literacy rates come even close to that by some measures it is the most literate society that the world has ever produced for example when i lived in new orleans i was shocked to find out that the literacy rate among adults in the greater new orleans area was 48 that most of the adults in new orleans were in new orleans were illiterate those statistics may have changed dramatically after hurricane katrina and i'm not sure what it is today but they used to have a thing called radio for the blind and print handicapped you know where they would just like read the newspaper over the radio that's what it is even the comics you know here in this you know here calvin now is eating a sandwich and incomes hobbs and that's how they would would kind of go through it and so we still feel very strongly about education today but it's really different feeling about education if we kind of go back to the 16 1700s we'll say wow there are more universities per capita in the british colonies of north america than anywhere else in the world and who are these folks i mean who who fills the roles of these colleges well first of all to be admitted to harvard or to yale or to king's college now columbia william and mary you've got to already be able to read greek and latin i mean to start you've got to be able to read uh those because what are we doing you're studying the classics you're you're reading homer um you're you're doing you know or is this job training no these folks are farmers there's nothing about how to plant and when to harvest it's all about what we call a classical liberal arts education uh and and this this is the kind of edges i heard someone say something about liberty over here this is the kind of education that it takes to be able to maintain liberty in fact jefferson had a very nice it's kind of come to us as a little couplet he said a little bit differently i'm going to say i'm going to say it the way that we that we say it today and then i'll give you the full text of it he says the people that expect to remain ignorant and free wants what never has been and what can never be kind of nice it flows it rhymes and so forth but what he really said was the people that expected to remain ignorant and free in a state of civilization want what never has been and what can never be so the founders understood that we have to be educated to be able to maintain liberty the good news is we still feel pretty strongly about education here in utah one third of every tax dollar that you send to the governor goes into education it's the biggest element that we spend of our tax money but it's a really different kind of education we ask kids as young as fourth grade why do you go to school in fact i was given this talk uh in a different setting and there was fourth grade really unusual for the fourth graders in the audience when i'm talking about these things there are some fourth graders here and i thought it's risky but i'm going to ask him right here why do you go to school please say the right thing right and uh without missing a beat because i want to get a good job someday that's right that's right that's what they'll say that's not the reason they go to school why do fourth graders go to school their mom makes them go to school that's the reason they go to school but we've trained them at that young age the reason you need an education is to support liberty no just to be able to get a good job we see education as job training and in fact we think about that kind of liberal arts education this one that the founders felt so strongly about it's actually become a punchline i was reading in one of my favorite books the bathroom reader have you have you heard of it anyway various things that you can read in a short time you know one page it was just like here's a bunch of bumper stickers you know reading bumper stickers and uh you know one of them was i have a liberal arts education would you like fries with that you guys laughed that's not funny i mean it's a punch line right but yeah we we we don't value that kind of education that our founders thought was so strong so are so important to maintaining liberty so you know if there's something you could say you know what can i do to be a great american it is um you probably didn't have a liberal arts education but it's not too late um read the classics so spend some time you know engaging in with the great minds of antiquity okay the last one and we're going to go over by just a couple of minutes so that so um divine providence private virtue work ethic liberal education the kind by the way when we say liberal education liberal arts education it's the same route as liberty right it's the education it takes for liberty uh the fifth and final one of all the five this is the one that i'm most concerned about because not only do we no longer see it as part of our national identity but we've become disconnected from most most of us have become disconnected from it on an individual level as well the term that the founders use was public virtue and you might think well i know what private virtue is doing the right thing when no one's looking public virtue must be doing the right thing when people are looking that's not what it is at all it's gone from our discussion our national discussion we don't even understand the term anymore um benjamin franklin was a loyalist until 1774 where he thought we've got to get back together with england in early 1775 he writes a letter back to one of the main loyalists who's still in his hometown of philadelphia joseph galloway and in it he says he's he's kind of partially making up his mind to switch to be a patriot and at the same time trying to convince galloway who's a strong who will never change by the way but he's a strong loyalist he said he says this in the letter when i think of the corruption that exists among all orders of men in this rotten old state he's talking about england he's writing from england and i consider the glorious public virtue so prevalent in our rising country i cannot but apprehend more evil than good from a closer union he's now saying i think we need to separate and he and the argument that he puts forth is the corruption that he sees in england versus this public virtue what is he talking about i'll tell you a quick story to get to the heart of public virtue 1775 was a great year for the american revolution for the american side 1776 not so much it's it's one loss after another after another washington by december 1776 washington has ten thousand men in the continental army about six and a half thousand are fit for service and most of them go home january 1st their enlistments are over and it's been a bad year morale is really low they're not signing up again washington thinks we've got to do something to change the morale here and um to get these guys to sign up because they all go home i've got no army the war's over the the revolution is done uh and that's when he makes the decision to attack trenton you're familiar with the battle of trenton even if you don't know it by name because this is the one where you get the picture of washington crossing the delaware right you know he's standing up and he's not standing in the boat by the way but he's standing in the boat they got the flag with the stars that flag hasn't been made a lot of things wrong about the picture but you know though you know what i'm talking about right in this he's gonna he's gonna cross you can take 2000 men he's gonna cross the delaware he's one of three groups that's supposed to attack trenton together this is the only group that makes it there and he and his hope is if we can have a victory then i'll get these guys to be able to sign up again and so if he wrote in his journal what his highest hopes were for the next day when they attacked trenton he would not have come anywhere close to what actually happened it is the most lopsided victory in the american revolution on either side two americans will die but they will die they will freeze to death on the way over none will die in the battle and they will kill about 125 hessian soldiers and take captive another 800 hessian soldiers um it is great victory there's no strategic importance to uh to trenton they don't have to hold the city so they go they spend a day there they they eat they drink they get warm and they get out because they know that the british are going to respond but it was exactly what he needed and so it's now december 31st 1776 most of his army goes home the next day and he's going to make his his appeal to them washington is not an orator we can count the number of times that washington spoke and it changed history on one hand this is one of them he calls up the guard and he says to them you know he has something really uncharacteristic for him he acts outside of his authority congress has just recently given him the permission to offer bounties meaning i'm going to pay you a little extra to stick around he doesn't even he doesn't know that they've given the permission yet so he's kind of going beyond what he thinks he's allowed to do and he offers them an extra month's pay if they'll re-enlist and he calls for those who will re-enlist to step forward the drums roll and no one steps forward no one that's it it's over the army's gone and then he speaks from his heart he says this my brave fellows you have done everything i have asked and more than could reasonably be expected but your country is at stake your wives your homes and all that you hold dear you have worn yourselves out with fatigues and hardships but we know not how to spare you if you will consent to stay one month longer you will render that service to the cause of liberty and to your country that you could probably never do under any other circumstance again he calls for those to step forward who would re-enlist again the drums roll and again no one steps forward and then a single soldier stepped forward and then another and another and then there's this there's this moment of confusion where people are making deals all right list if you were enlist and they start to advance by pairs and then in some cases by entire companies and most of the men who were scheduled to go home the following day will re-enlist when washington appealed to their own pecuniary interest to pay them more no one was moved by it but when he makes an appeal to their public virtue suddenly most will re-enlist public virtue is this idea that in a government that's of the people by the people and for the people from time to time every person needs to make an individual sacrifice for the good of the country that when we go to the to vote it's not just who will give the most to me but who will do the best for the country and this is the one that i think we've lost the most um like if it's a like non-presidential election year what what what kind of percentage of voter turnout does it take for us to think it's been a pretty good turnout about 30 percent we think 30 of the registered voters show up to vote in a non-presidential year we go that's pretty good and then of the ones who show up who actually took time to actually study out and figure out can to make the individual sacrifice to become an informed voter this is a tough one for us so as we think about this fifth of the lost founding values what is it that you can do starts by by becoming a really informed voter and making the the choice not for who gonna put more in my pocket but who's gonna do the right thing and the best thing for the country those are the founding values and what it takes to be a great american is to embrace them all it's my hope that we'll be able to do that this year as we come into the fourth of july celebrations in the name of jesus christ amen thank you for that message
posted by Gove Allen @ November 14, 2024
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