Senator Lee is operating on a while different level from most of his peers.  His Social Capital Index is a case in point.  

 

Some of the maps will look interesting to those who are informed about Albion’s Seed and other indicators of the ethnic make-up of America.

I want to talk about this section:

Most surprisingly, despite the outsized role that religious communities have played in social capital investment, [37] several religious indicators were unrelated to our social capital index, including religious adherence rates (-0.02), congregations per capita (0.08), frequent church attendance (-0.34), and participation in a religious group (0.22). This absence of correlation—if not the negative correlations—recurred at the county level, where the correlation between religious adherence and our social capital index was only 0.17 and the correlation between congregations per capita and our index was 0.24. The relationship between religion and social capital will be a subject of future Social Capital Project research. 38

We Mormons pride ourselves on having functional communities in which people can flourish, and we are right to do so.  Still, it can’t be denied from both scripture and from our experience as missionaries, that comfortable people have a hard time embracing the gospel.  High social capital can be a local optima trap.

High social capital is something like terrestriality.  It is not the goal.  Eternal love and undying glory are the goal.  Being an ok guy and a nice neighbor is not enough.


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