By Selwyn Duke

Below is a very short video on the link between healthy representative government and religion. My friend Thomas Lifson, publisher of American Thinker, made me aware of it via a blog post he penned today. Lifson provides a short bio on the man in the video, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, who, it appears, has had a very interesting and eventful life. Among other things, he recently had to completely relearn how to speak after suffering a stroke some years ago that robbed him of the ability. Yet he still remains what Lifson characterizes as "one of the most important thinkers of our era." Enjoy his commentary, and then please see my remarks below.

While I agree with the spirit of Christensen's comments, I must reiterate a point I've made in the past: Saying we need "religion" as a remedy is much like saying we need "ideology" to solve a problem. Just any ideology will do? 

Like ideology, "religion" is a category, not a creed; it includes the good, the bad and the ugly. In point of fact, most religions that have existed (I'm including the various pre-Christian-era pagan ones here) have been relatively destructive. This is not to impugn "religion," mind you, as the same can be said of "belief systems" (I really dislike that term) no matter what we call them. As to this, the terms "secular" and "religious" didn't even exist in English until relatively recently, and the distinction between the two is, in the most significant sense, a false one. This is because the only distinction that really matters is "true and untrue." 

And for most of Christendom's history, that was precisely how people viewed matters. Call it orthodoxy and heterodoxy (or heresy), but it all amounted to not a relativistic world view but one recognizing Truth's existence and that we can choose only one of two paths: embracement of it — or denial of it.