3 virtues America needs to sustain the Constitution today

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Divisions among the Founding Fathers 237 years ago this month imperiled the Constitutional Convention. George Washington explained what saved the Constitution when he submitted it to Congress that September with a letter.

“The Constitution, which we now present, is the result of a spirit of amity, and of that mutual deference and concession which the peculiarity of our political situation rendered indispensable,” Washington wrote .

Amity, mutual deference and concession are not just three virtues that created the Constitution, former BYU general counsel Thomas Griffith said Friday, June 28, at the annual conference of Braver Angels in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

“They are needed to sustain the Constitution today,” said Griffith, former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, widely considered the second-most important and powerful court in the country.

The example set by Washington, Benjamin Franklin and others in 1787 is vital in “this perilous moment” of “toxic political polarization,” Griffith said during a week that included a presidential debate and major Supreme Court rulings.

Griffith also quoted President Dallin H. Oaks, first counselor in the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who recently told church members that, “on contested issues, we should seek to moderate and unify.”

The Constitutional Convention moderated division in three key ways, Griffith said, pulling from a journal article by Stanford’s Derek Webb, “The Original Meaning of Civility: Democratic Deliberation at the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention”:

• First, the convention’s rules banned talking, reading and writing while someone was speaking, which promoted careful listening.
• Second, the delegates formed dinner groups across regional and ideological lines. (Griffith loosely paraphrased what George Mason of Virginia wrote to his son — “People from New England aren’t so bad after all!”)
• Third and most important, a group of moderates met in Benjamin Franklin’s home and agreed “to persuade their colleagues to compromise for the sake of unity even before they knew the terms of the compromise.”

They put, Griffith said, “the nation’s well-being ahead of (their) own interests.”

Griffith recommended a new book he called the most important ever written on the Constitution: “American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation — And Could Again.” He said the author, Yuval Levin, shows that the Constitution not only protects Americans’ rights, it also creates a governmental structure that “can only work when majorities and minorities act together through negotiation, compromise, and conciliation.”

“Following the processes of government the Constitution creates gives us practical experience in living and acting together,” Griffith said.

Braver Angels is dedicated to political depolarization. It promotes the active listening modeled by Washington, Franklin and the rest of those who were in Philadelphia in 1787.

For example, Braver Angels kicked off its convention last week by hosting what it called the largest cross-partisan Biden-Trump debate watch party in the country. Hundreds of Biden voters and Trump voters watched the presidential debate side by side, then spoke civilly about what they’d watched, following the organization’s guidelines for conversations “between conservative Reds and liberal Blues.”

Braver Angels has created a petition asking U.S. leaders to address division in America, hosts workshops on difficult issues to seek cross-partisan points of agreement and is sponsoring an election day activity to have Red/Blue pairs show up together at the polls.

The Deseret News is partnering with the ”A Braver Way” podcast during the four months leading up to the presidential election. To read a Deseret News Q&A with the podcaster, Mónica Guzmán, author of “I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times,” click here .

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About the church

• Elder Matthew S. Holland spoke at Provo’s annual Freedom Festival. He said Americans should never forget that God is the source of these “unalienable rights.”
• Here’s an excellent, detailed 96-hour timeline surrounding the martyrdom of Joseph Smith, republished on the 180th anniversary. And here’s a new story with historians who spent years studying the prophet Joseph Smith’s life: This is what they learned about him .
• The First Presidency announced the dedication and open house dates for the Tallahassee Florida Temple . Meanwhile, the Orlando Florida Temple has closed for renovation while a recently renovated one, the Toronto Ontario Temple, is scheduled to reopen in December .
• Don’t miss the remarkable story of how BYU runner James Corrigan improbably made the U.S. Olympic team. It took finishing in the top three at the U.S. Olympic trials and an 11th-hour mad scramble to find another race in search of another qualification . Former BYU runner Courtney Wayment also made the U.S. Olympic team.
• A Latter-day Saint teenager carried the Olympic torch in French Polynesia .
• A former editor of the Church News, Dell Van Orden, died at age 88 .

What I’m reading

• Latter-day Saints in the United States disagree about Trump vs. Biden, but enjoy worship together on Sunday .
• A day in the life of Beacon, the therapy dog at the U.S. Olympic gymnastics trials .
• The Rubik’s Cube turned 50. Here’s a feature about its creator and history .