‘If you take away religion..."
Clay Christensen:
“Some time ago I had a conversation with a Marxist economist from China. He was coming to the end of a Fulbright fellowship here in Boston. I asked him if he had learned anything that was surprising or unexpected.’
Without any hesitation he said “Yeah…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 is designed to oversee what everybody does. Democracy works because most people, most of the time voluntarily choose to obey the law.
In your past, most Americans attended a church or synagogue every week and were taught there by people they respected.”
My friend went on to say that “Americans follow these rules because they had come to believe that they weren’t just accountable to society, but they were accountable to God.”
He stated that “As 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 must voluntarily choose to obey the laws? …Because if you take away religion, you can’t hire enough police.”
‘If you take away religion, you can’t hire enough police.’
John Adams once said that the U.S. Constitution “was made only for a moral and religious people.”
Clay Christensen Harvard Prof: Democracy Doesn’t Work Without Religion
A Rhodes Scholar and the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard
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In this context, where does that leave us today?
Nell
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