How Can Latter-Day Saints Sustain Democracy?

I recently lectured on the campus of Brigham Young University where I was asked to reflect on what the role of religion might be in the civic sphere, from the perspective of the LDS faith. You can watch the lecture here.

A main takeaway from the lecture is about the dangers of hyper-partisanship and why religion should call us into the civic sphere to do something different than what partisanship alone does: we should seek to moderate rather than exacerbate the extremes. I said this:

*In his last speech to the nation, George Washington warned against the spirit of faction, or party, which he believed could undermine national unity and give rise to tyranny, if we allowed our affiliation with party to become more important than our commitment to the common good. This is what we today call hyper-partisanship. You know you are a victim of hyper-partisanship when you use labels and group people into enemy camps toward whom you hold suspicions or, worse, contempt, or when you refuse to imagine that the other side has anything of value to offer. You are a victim if you simplify a problem so that its solution is so obvious that only a moron could disagree. You are a victim if you surround yourself in likeminded echo chambers—at church, at home, at work, on social media—because you feel you already know enough. And this might surprise you, but you are a victim of hyper-partisanship if you have been staying on the sidelines, watching both parties fight it out, and feeling disgusted by all of it. Withdrawing from the civic sphere and refusing to inform yourself more or to form opinions because you don’t want to be caught up in the fight is not the answer. You only contribute to the problem by your abdication of your civic duties. When good people withdraw from the civic sphere because of its ugliness, they only make it more ugly. Even if you vote and occasionally donate to a campaign and maybe even spend some of your time on social media throwing a symbolic hand grenade or two of criticism or complaint about the ills of our society, you are doing very little to help. You are actually falling in line, playing your necessary part in a large entertainment business that is making money off of your armchair quarterbacking.”