Deseret Magazine - January 2021

M AG A Z I N E

HEALING AMERICA

BY JEFF FLAKE GABBY GIFFORDS TIM SCOTT CINDY MCCAIN MITT ROMNEY AND MORE

JAN/FEB 2021

ISSUE 01 Volume 01

SHEPHERD OF JUAREZ

THE

CASE

FOR WOODEN

PEWS

THE REDEMPTION OF

ANDY REID

REAL MOMS of

INSTAGRAM

Cleanliness isn’t overrated.

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B A R B A R A B A R R Y. C O M

THE VIEW FROM HERE

BY N A ME H E R E

THIS MAGAZINE HAS BEEN IN THE WORKS SINCE 1847.

BY JESSE HYDE

I

n the spring of 1847, William W. Phelps arrived at Winter Quarters, Nebraska, an encampment of roughly 3,000 Latter-day Saints. Huddled in huts, dugouts and tents along the Missouri River, the Saints, fleeing persecution, had been waiting all winter to set off for the West, in search of their Zion. When Phelps arrived, the first company of pioneers was readying wagon trains headed to the Salt Lake Valley. But Phelps would not be among them, he was told. Instead, he would go east, in search of a printing press.

“This people can not live without intelligence,” Brigham Young wrote in a letter he sent with Phelps, urging church members in the East to help secure a printing press, which they did, in Boston. It would arrive in Salt Lake City two years later, following the same dusty trail the pioneers trekked.

When the first issue of the Deseret News was printed on that press in 1850 it proclaimed: “When we speak, we shall speak freely, without regard to men or party.” Its motto was truth or liberty. Its price was 15 cents.

In the 170 years since, the Deseret News has become the paper of record for a people, a place and a culture. That people (or “this people,” as Brigham Young called them), has changed, as has the Deseret News.

Our readers are now scattered all over the world, with millions reading 6 DESERET MAGAZINE

us online every month, and most (70 %) living outside Utah. They turn to the Deseret News to better understand the culture and place from which they come.

The magazine you’re holding in your hands is a continuation of the legacy that began on that original press, to create a record “worth preserving so that our children’s children may read the doings of their fathers, which otherwise might have been forgotten.”

As you flip through the pages of the inaugural issue, you’ll find thoughtful essays on politics, culture and faith, deeply reported narratives and profiles, beautiful art and stunning photography. We hope to help readers navigate an increasingly complex world, giving them the information and insights needed to live authentic lives rooted in heritage and values.

Through our reporting and essays, readers will better understand the world they inhabit and its intersection with broader culture. This is the power of journalism. And if done well, we believe we can provide something missing from the national media landscape: a perspective and voice unique to who we are, and where we come from. This is the view from the edge of the Rocky Mountains, a view with the great interior West at our feet, looking out into the world. This is the view from here.

PORTRAIT BY RANDY GLASS

CONTENTS

THE VIEW F ROM HERE

6

CONT RIBUTORS

12

H OW HIG HLY R EL IG IOUS WOMEN ARE REDEFINING F EMINISM

18 THE REAL MOMS OF INSTAGRAM

JUDICIA L ACTIV I S M O N THE RIG HT AND L EFT IS THREATENING TH E CONST ITUTION

24

BACKSTAG E AT THE BACHELOR

74

THE L AST WORD

82

14

Meet the internet tastemakers transforming traditions passed down from grandma into art and business.

FLAGLER, FOR FREE

26

The West is booming. So why is this Colorado town giving land away?

WHAT I’VE LEARNED: ABBY HUNTSMAN

16

The rising media star knew leaving “The View” would be hard. Then the pandemic hit.

THE BITTERSWEET RISE OF THE BACKCOUNTRY

34

America is as divided as ever.

Is there room for reconciliation?

8 DESERET MAGAZINE

THE SAINT OF SECOND CHANCES The unlikely story of how a broken city and a man looking for one more chance won it all.

THE SHEPHERD OF JUAREZ

38

In one of the world’s most dangerous cities, a pastor is reshaping the meaning of practical religion.

backcountry. Are they prepared?

46

20

The guy leading BYU basketball back to national prominence reveals his biggest secret to success.

COVID-19 is pushing skiers into the

HEALING AMERICA’S PARTISAN DIVIDE

HOW TO LEAD: CALLING THE SHOTS

58

THE CASE FOR WOODEN PEWS

64

A renewed America will require building back our institutions. Why hard religion is more important than ever.

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CONTRIBUTORS

THOMAS B. GRIFFITH

Thomas Griffith is a former federal judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Before his appointment to the bench he was Senate Legal Counsel, the chief legal officer of the United States Senate.

YUVAL LEVIN

Yuval Levin is the founding editor of National Affairs, director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and a contributing editor of National Review. He is the author of five books on public policy and political theory, including “The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism.” In 2020, he published his latest book, “A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream.”

NANCY FRENCH

MAGA Z IN E

EDITOR JESSE HYDE CREATIVE DIRECTOR DAVID MEREDITH DEPUTY EDITOR CHAD NIELSEN EDITOR-AT-LARGE HAL BOYD CONTRIBUTING JAMES R. GARDNER EDITORS LAUREN STEELE CORRESPONDENT MICHAEL J. MOONEY STAFF WRITERS ETHAN BAUER ERICA EVANS LOIS M. COLLINS KELSEY DALLAS JENNIFER GRAHAM MYA JARADAT SOFIA JEREMIAS JEFF PARROTT

Nancy French is a five-time New York Times bestselling author. She’s also written opinion pieces for The Washington Post, USA Today, and National Review. In 2012, with her husband David French, she ran “Evangelicals for Mitt Romney” for the Romney campaign.

ART DIRECTOR PIERCE THIOT DESIGNERS MIA MEREDITH ALEC FRANCIS DESIGN INTERN S.M. KNOERNSCHILD COPY EDITORS CHRIS MILLER WHITNEY WILDE

PIERCE THIOT

Pierce Thiot is an art director and creative director based in LA and finds time to work between surfing sessions and daily Disneyland attendance. He has worked with agencies internationally and won an Emmy.

RESEARCH SOFIA JEREMIAS JEFF PARROTT ROBERT O’CONNELL CONTRIBUTING BRAD HOLLAND ARTISTS BRIAN CRONIN CHLOE CUSHMAN WESTON COLTON DARIN WARREN COURTNEY MCOMBER RANDY GLASS KYLE HILTON

DESERET NEWS PRESIDENT & JEFF SIMPSON PUBLISHER

MICHAEL J. MOONEY

NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute focusing on issues regarding child welfare. She is a former columnist for the New York Post and a former Wall Street Journal editor and writer, as well as the author of six books. Her latest, “Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage is Transforming America,” was named an editor’s pick by The New York Times Book Review.

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SENIOR VICE ROBIN RITCH PRESIDENT

Michael J. Mooney is a New York Times bestselling author. He writes for ESPN, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, GQ, and Popular Mechanics.

His stories have appeared in multiple editions of The Best American Sports Writing and The Best American Crime Reporting.

ASSOCIATE MICHAEL B. TODD PUBLISHER & CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER HEAD CONTENT DOUG WILKS OFFICER HEAD DIGITAL BURKE OLSEN OFFICER HEAD OF STRATEGIC BOYD MATHESON REACH

WESTON COLTON

Weston Colton is a freelance commercial and editorial photographer based in Utah. While his photography frequently covers everything from lifestyle to product, he especially enjoys photographing people in their own unique, personal environments, combining portraiture and architecture.

DIRECTOR OF JESSICA COLLINGS MARKETING HEAD OF SALES SALLY STEED MANAGING EDITOR, AARON SHILL DESERET.COM DIRECTOR OF CHUCK WING PHOTOGRAPHY ART DIRECTOR, MICHELLE BUDGE DESERET.COM NATIONAL VOICES MATTHEW BROWN EDITOR DIRECTOR OF HEIDI PERRY VISUAL/EDIT DEPARTMENT COPY CHIEF TODD CURTIS

COVER BY PIERCE THIOT

The Canyon art installation by Gordon Huether

WE’RE READY TO FLY WHEN YOU ARE. Now that the new Salt Lake City International Airport is open, there’s a lot for you to enjoy — the views, the technology, the efficiency, the variety of shops and restaurants. And one of the things we think you’ll also like is our commitment to your safety — employing the absolute best practices in sanitization throughout the airport. As the world re-opens to travel, it’s not going to be the same. But when it comes to flying in and out of The New SLC, we think it will be even better.

MODERN FAMILY

WHEN TRADITIONS BECOME TRENDS HOW INTERNET TASTEMAKERS ARE REDEFINING THE MARTHA STEWART AESTHETIC

BY ER ICA EVA N S

B

rittany Watson Jepsen learned how to sew from her grandmother — Dorothy Bradshaw — who had dedicated an entire bedroom in her mid-century Los Angeles home to hems, backstitches, and finish seams. To Jepsen, now 38, it was a sewing room of wonders. There was a cabinet filled with fabrics from all over the world. There were trims and ribbons scattered everywhere. Each piece turned into a patchwork of memories in Jepsen’s mind. Her grandmother’s hands taught her how to create with her own — guiding her around the sewing machine and placing thimbles on her fingers as she attached buttons to cream-colored dresses.

Jepsen, who learned how to make bags, ornaments, Halloween costumes, blankets, dresses, party decorations and more, has since turned these memorable lessons with her grandmother into a thriving brand and creative services studio — The House That Lars Built. The site itself has hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and serves as a lifestyle blog, design studio and shop with collections of licensed product lines.

The House That Lars Built is in fact built upon skills passed down through the generations of her family as a foundation for her own success.

Lifestyle bloggers like Jepsen are in the business of taking the knowledge and love for the creative that was passed down generation by generation in families and sharing it with the whole world. What was once domestic is now a career.

If you scroll through Jepsen’s website, you’ll see posts dedicated to DIY quilted coats, stepby-step instructions on how to create your own wreaths, and roundups of Andy Warhol-inspired home décor. Jepsen is an internet-age tastemaker using timeworn traditions to shape modern aesthetics. “My mom was also instrumental in showing what types of things I could dig into and not limiting creativity to one thing,” Jepsen recalls. “She would say, ‘a creative mess is better than tidy idleness.’”

Through that maternal encouragement — and a tendency to take up all offers of digging in and making messes — Jepsen became fascinated with learning and creating. During one particular 14 DESERET MAGAZINE

creative phase, a pre-teen Jepsen spent hours pouring over a 5-inch thick book that detailed her family tree. She followed the records of each branch, reaching back to Denmark, Norway, and Ireland — and read the first-person accounts of difficult journeys west. These real life tales of adventure inspired her to keep dozens of journals herself. Eventually — as all things seem to do — her journals found a home on the internet. And a blog was born. “I could record experiences and projects influenced by my past,” Jepsen says. “And I found people were interested in them. A lot of the projects I make now are derivative of things I grew up with.”

It’s a delightful spin on the adage that “everything old is new again.” Jepsen has a knack for bringing the past into the present with addictively whimsical originality. One holiday season, she turned black and white photographs of her ancestors into heirloom Christmas ornaments by printing them on linen and stuffing them with cotton to form tiny pillows. Then, using a needle and thread, she outlined elements in the photos like bows, hats, blushing cheeks and bicycle wheels with a cross stitch to add a quaint pop of color. “It gives them a classic, old but new feel,” Jepsen says. “That’s something l like to do with everything.”

Laura Knapp Alviso, 29, is also in the business of making old things new again. Her blog and Instagram account — Knapp Time Crafts — has gained notoriety for refurbishing thrift store finds and creating upcycled décor from items that would otherwise be thrown away.

Alviso’s inspiration comes from her mother, Dianna Knapp. Alviso remembers her mother constantly creating — whether it was cooking, making her own soap or bedecking the house.

During one particularly festive project for a church youth conference, Alviso watched in awe as her mother transformed their entire California home into Whoville — wrapping feather boas around styrofoam balls to create colorful Dr. Seuss-style trees and creating a snow-capped Mount Crumpit out of papier-maché. To Alviso, it was like watching her mother make magic.

But it wasn’t magic. It was simply her mother’s rendition of inventively using practical knowledge passed on from her father, who was a carpenter. “The first time I made something, it was horrible,” Knapp, who hired a fellow church member to come to her house and teach her to sew, says with a laugh. Knapp didn’t know she had to wash the fabric first before sewing a green floral jumper. “I made the outfit and then it shrunk all cattywampus.”

But that didn’t stop Knapp from mastering a multitude of skills and passing them on to her three daughters, including Alviso. One of the early projects was teaching Alviso how to crochet a scarf. “Mom would sit down next to me while she was doing the same thing or watching TV, and periodically she would peek over and say, ‘That’s wrong, let’s fix it,’” Alviso says.

“My girls grew up knowing if they wanted to do something, they could come to me and we could figure it out,” Knapp says.

Their combined imaginations came up with designs for coasters made from ink stamps baked into tile and wedding invitations etched into individual pieces of thinly cut wood. Many of their endeavors, such as sewing beautiful gowns for infants, were motivated by a desire to provide — with flair.

The same is true for Karli Bitner, 28, who lives in a town of 250 in northern Utah. But instead of making dresses or repurposing credenzas, she reimagines food. Her blog, Cooking with Karli, gets close to a million visits per month from people interested in her Instant Pot recipes and decadent dessert posts. “Sharing my food is one of the biggest ways I show people I love that I care about them,” Bitner says. “That has definitely been passed down to me.”

Bitner’s mother — who had seven kids and was famous for her pillowy soft dinner rolls — was her culinary cheerleader, always encouraging her to experiment in the kitchen. “The deal was, if I made something to share my mom would clean up the mess afterwards,” Bitner said. “She was so gracious because I would absolutely destroy the kitchen.”

A hands-off teacher, Bitner’s mother prefers to cook by feel, rather than following a recipe.

She taught Bitner to follow her instincts. Today, Bitner encourages the same kind of freedom and creativity among her three kids (with one on the way). Her kids don’t watch TV, but they love to spend time taking care of the family’s cows and goats, or play with the neighbor’s pigs and chickens. And if they’d rather make mud pies

than the French silk or apple variety, that’s fine with Bitner — for now.

It’s reminiscent of the simple life Jepsen’s grandparents had decades ago when West Los Angeles was still suburban. They raised goats for milk and made everything from scratch — hardpressed habits forged from the Great Depression.

In that home’s sewing room, piles of tattered clothing were mended by the same hands that

made doll dresses and quilted coats out of fanciful fabrics. Recreating memories of the ordinary mingling with the extraordinary has turned into a lifestyle for Alviso, Bitner and Jepsen — one that they want to share with everyone. It seems that although it’s trendy to blog, you might also say that it’s traditional in its own way. But passing on what mustn’t be left behind — well, that’s timeless.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 15

MODERN FAMILY

WHAT I’VE LEARNED: ABBY HUNTSMAN

BY ER ICA EVA N S

W

hen Abby Huntsman left “The View” to move back to Utah in January 2020, it may not have seemed like she was on her way to bigger and better things.

Huntsman, daughter of former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. and granddaughter to billionaire businessman Jon Huntsman Sr., was a rising media star. But after getting a taste of her dream job at “The View” — with celebrities, bright lights and unending demands for her attention — Huntsman wanted out.

A chance to work on her father’s gubernatorial campaign in her home state of Utah was a ticket away from the city. With her husband and three children (all under the age of 4) in tow, Huntsman made the trip back west. But instead of a celebratory homecoming, the year left her family recovering from the coronavirus disease and a defeat in her father’s bid for governor.

Here’s what she learned through it all.

About family: Our whole family was under one roof for a couple months during the campaign — except for my two brothers, who are in the military. We all got sick with COVID-19. I look at my family and everyone is so different — in terms of personalities, careers and even religion. But we would always rally around who was having a tough day and help them.

That’s what family is for in tough times.

About losing: The loss was hard on all of us. My dad is the most resilient in our family. When we were all sad, he said, “We are going to be fine.

This is the career I got into, and we’re going to keep fighting.” I woke up many days being frustrated and not understanding. But every day I would 16 DESERET MAGAZINE

do that, I thought, “I’m wasting a day here.” You can’t look back with regrets.

You just have to be grateful for the opportunity.

About being moderate: I’ve never felt more down the middle and a little lost politically — and there are a lot of people who feel the same way. My advice for people who are feeling anxious is turn off the TV and just be present with whoever’s in the room with you.

About motherhood: Isabel is 3 and the twins are turning 2 in June.

They recently started running around, which is a blessing and a curse. I feel like I don’t have enough hands! I’ve had to learn a lot of patience. Sometimes, you just have to chill out and realize things are going to be OK. It’s so magical to see the world through their eyes. My kids can be mesmerized by a flower or a stick. They find joy in the smallest things, and you realize how quickly we lose that.

About adaptability: This year, I quit my job, we lost the campaign, I got COVID-19. You can check the list of how many things didn’t go as planned. But I honestly wouldn’t change it. I think it teaches you resilience. If you never experience failure, you don’t know what it feels like to really succeed.

About careers: Career needs to be something that makes you happy when you wake up in the morning. A year ago, people would say, “You have it all,” and on paper, I did. I went from living in New York and working at “The View” to doing laundry and wiping mac ’n’ cheese off the floor every day. It’s the opposite of where I thought I would be, but I’ve never felt more sure about what living a happy life means. Now, I am so engaged with continues on page 78 PORTR A I T BY CHLOE CUSHMA N

ELEVATING THE

NATIONAL

DISCOURSE. SALT LAKE CITY: 4,226

Journalism is so much more than clickbait headlines and one-sided finger pointing. At Deseret News, we’re committed to giving readers in Utah and across the nation an outlet for principled, illuminating journalism—where context matters and finding solutions is just as important as highlighting problems.

Join us as we examine the “why” behind today’s most important stories in our new expanded weekly edition, our online coverage, and our new monthly magazine.

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MODERN FAMILY

HOW HIGHLY RELIGIOUS WOMEN ARE REDEFINING FEMINISM

BY N AOMI SCHA EFER R ILEY

T

ry spinning a dozen plates above your head while keeping them from crashing on the kitchen floor. For pandemic-era moms jumping between sinks, stoves, home schooling and (remote) work this is closer to reality than metaphor.

COVID-19 hasn’t exactly been good to women, particularly moms. Sure, we have a better chance of surviving the actual virus (two X chromosomes may boost our immune response); but juggling work calls and grocery runs — all while keeping masks tightly secured to tiny faces lest we incur the scorn of fellow shoppers — has us on edge.

Women are drinking a lot more and, right now, are three times as likely to be suffering from mental health challenges. According to just one of a handful of recent studies, women in 2020 reported 41% more heavy drinking days than in 2019.

The pandemic exacerbated an already impossible situation. How are moms supposed to lean in at work and helicopter parent at home?

Why don’t men do more housework or child care? Is the answer really subsidized day cares and Scandinavian-style taxes?

When Justice Amy Coney Barrett was first nominated to the Supreme Court in September 2020, some concluded she was simply superhuman. No mere mortal could ascend to such Hyperion heights in her career with seven children and a law-partner husband.

But, in addition to her obvious abilities, Barrett’s traditional religion — which has often been criticized for putting men in the driver’s seat — may actually serve as a hidden feminist advantage that helps religious women to balance career and family life.

“We just each shifted and assumed different responsibilities as it made sense. At some point, (my husband) Jesse started doing most of the cooking and grocery shopping,” Barrett explained. She said she resisted at first, but Jesse prevailed. “I think this will make your life less stressful,” he told her. “I’m going to take this on.”

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Barrett’s experience reminded me of things I heard while I was working on a book about religious colleges in America in the early to mid-2000s. I spent time on about two dozen campuses from Brigham Young University and Baylor to Notre Dame and Yeshiva. Even some 15 years ago, I was surprised that despite the stereotypes of religious communities and female subservience, these young women had similar aspirations to their peers at secular schools.

TRADITIONAL RELIGION MAY SERVE AS A HIDDEN ADVANTAGE THAT HELPS WOMEN BALANCE CAREER AND FAMILY LIFE.

What I was finding aligned with the American Freshman Survey, conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA since 1973.

According to its 2019 data, roughly the same percentage of students at secular and religious schools want to be business executives, lawyers or “authorities in their field.” One of the biggest differences, however, is among students who consider having a family “essential” or “very important”— 79.5% of students at four-year Catholic colleges said family was very important or essential to them, compared to 66.5% of students at public universities.

I found through my interviews that the female religious students often exuded a kind of “calm pragmatism” regarding their futures and families. I noted at the time that their personal goals were more directed by God “than their husbands or fathers.”

In the wake of the Barrett nomination, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat asked whether there can be a “conservative feminism that’s distinctive, coherent and influential?”

I think the answer is yes insofar as a serious religious commitment actually seems to more adequately prepare women — and their husbands — to face the competing demands of working motherhood than liberal feminist ideology.

For one thing, family for these women is not really a choice. It’s a given. Which means that religious women and their partners start thinking and planning for family much earlier in life. This puts them at a distinct advantage over those who are trying to juggle the most demanding years in their career along with finding a husband and entering the most labor-intensive period of motherhood.

Additionally, religious women are more likely to find themselves embedded in communities that expose them to the realities of navigating work and family life before they have children of their own. It also provides them with a robust support network when they need help.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, a shared spiritual life often provides the foundation for mutual respect, affection and burden sharing in marriage. As a recent study from the Wheatley Institution at Brigham Young University found, couples who attend church and participate together in religious rituals in the home are more likely than others to report shared decision-making, along the lines of say, the Barretts.

Douthat suggests that conservative feminism doesn’t really play a role in our politics because “it hasn’t been distilled into a policy agenda — pro-woman, pro-mother, pro-work-life balance — by our increasingly male-dominated conservative party.” But these conservative feminists (who may not describe themselves as such) have found a formula for success on their own that doesn’t require imported policies from Scandinavia. And perhaps that’s the most feminist thing of all.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 19

HOW TO LEAD

HOW TO LEAD: CALLING THE SHOTS

BY ETHA N B AUER

M

the team discussed how to hollow out the bricks, Pope showed up with patio ark Pope loves the word relentless. He recruits “relentlessly.” He pavers, much heavier than standard bricks. Nance once told Pope he needed scouts relentlessly. And during his six seasons in the NBA, the to improve his leg strength and should spend more time on a bike. Rather BYU men’s basketball coach hustled relentlessly as the self-titled “worst than opting for a stationary bike, he bought a road bike and started riding NBA player ever.” But his dedication to the concept started as a child, with it between his Bellevue home and the University of Washington campus — his parents. between 15 and 20 miles per day. “He was, and still is to this day, the hard They drilled it into him, and later on, it became central to a career that est-working basketball player I have ever been around,” Didrickson said. from the outside might look like an unqualified success, but to Pope, has In his first season, Pope started every game and was named Pac-10 been just as marked by failure. It’s in those moments, those disappointFreshman of the Year by setting a Washington freshman record with 8.1 ments and setbacks common to everyone, that Pope turns to the relentrebounds (perhaps the most relentless statistic) per game — a record that lessness he’s cultivated since childhood. still stands. But Washington finished with a disappointing 12–17 record.

His dad, Don, was “relentlessly honest,” Pope said. And his mom, LinThe next year, after the Huskies underwhelmed yet da, relentlessly chased big ideas. Like in sixth grade, again with a 13–14 mark, Nance resigned. when Pope needed to design his own country for Pope blamed himself. He was supposed to carry a school project. He started with simple pencil the team, he thought, and despite practicing harder, sketches, but that wasn’t enough for his mom, a hustling harder, lifting harder than anyone could’ve perfectionist. She knew he could do better. And so POPE BLAMED reasonably expected, he couldn’t save the program or Linda brought in Play-Doh to build a three-dimenHIMSELF. HE WAS his coach. He’d failed before, but this was one of his sional map and paint to color-code the regions, and SUPPOSED TO first “big failures” on his path toward a self-bestowed “ they planted a handful of miniature flags. He doesn’t CARRY THE TEAM, AND DESPITE Ph.D. in failing.” “What he views as failure most of us remember what he named the country — “I’m sure PRACTICING HARDER, wouldn’t,” Didrickson said. But the Washington years it was something ridiculous,” he said — but he does HUSTLING HARDER, still burden Pope even now; he calls it an “epic failure” remember he had to turn it sideways to fit it through LIFTING HARDER, where he “just wasn’t good enough to save his coach’s the classroom door and lost a couple of the flags HE COULDN’T job.” But in failure, he found perspective: Setbacks are along the way. “Which was, like, 10 times more than SAVE THE PROGRAM OR HIS COACH. momentary, he realized. They only define you if you what the assignment was supposed to be,” Pope said, dwell on them. with a laugh. “My mom was never satisfied with a So in search of a fresh start, he transferred to Rick status-quo product.” Every assignment, in Linda’s Pitino’s Kentucky in 1993 and, after sitting out for a eyes, could be made rewarding by doing more. By year because of NCAA transfer rules, suited up for the doing extra. By making it special. By being relentless in the pursuit of excellence.

1994-95 season. As an off-the-bench center, he aver Pope applied the same attitude to basketball, and by the time he was aged about 20 minutes per game in his two seasons in Lexington as UK’s a senior at Newport High School in Bellevue, Washington, he was a nasixth man, supporting Southeastern Conference Player of the Year Tony tionally sought-after recruit. He decided to stay close to home and in Delk and future NBA All-Star Antoine Walker, among others. Named 1991 committed to the Washington Huskies and coach Lynn Nance as a team captain his senior year, Pope and the Wildcats won a national a 6-foot-10, first-team all-state center — a “huge recruiting ‘get’” for title in 1996. the program, per the Seattle Times. Pope wanted to elevate the Hus Sure, it helped that he was 6-10, but he wasn’t the fastest or the highest kies to national prominence, and the stories about how he went about it jumper. He was, though, the most dedicated. One time, after gobbling up are legion and legend — well beyond the cliche about starting early and some delicious Memphis barbecue the night before a game, Pope threw up leaving late. on his shirt at practice and kept playing — without protest from his team In the summer before Pope’s freshman year, teammate and roommate mates. “Nobody missed a beat,” former teammate Jeff Sheppard said via Scott Didrickson recalls, an assistant coach concocted a conditioning text. “It was just another day with Mark Pope.” Another time, Sheppard scheme that involved running 3 miles while holding bricks. While most of remembered, Pitino told Pope he needed to put on a few pounds of muscle.

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PORT RA I T BY DA RI N WA RREN

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 21

SECTION

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Pope pounded protein shakes and ate an absurd amount of food throughPitino, among many others, questioned his judgment. Why, they all wonout his entire redshirt year. “Coach was killing me!” Pope texted. But in dered, would Pope give up his spot at one of the world’s most prestigious the summer before his redshirt junior season, Pitino reversed course. Pope medical schools to pursue something as unpredictable as coaching basketneeded to lose weight, Pitino told him, because he was too slow. Pope was ball? The truth was, he’d always had doubts about a career in medicine. disappointed but not deterred. “His next meal,” Sheppard said, “he was School kept him away from his family more than basketball ever did (he eatin’ a salad.” Another time, he injured his knee during a game and conand his wife Lee Anne have four daughters), and though he stayed retinued hustling up and down the court, forcing Pitino to remove him. lentless, he couldn’t ignore the brilliance of his classmates and feared he “He played through fatigue and injury and illness better than anyone couldn’t compare. So he started working his basketball rolodex and in 2009 I’ve ever been around,” Sheppard said. found a spot under Mark Fox in his first year at the University of Georgia However hard he worked, though, he knew he just didn’t have the natu— not as an assistant coach, but as the director of basketball operations. ral talent to star at the highest level. He often thought about Pitino during He spent one season there (2009-10), then one season as an assistant coach his six seasons in the league. “He just — was never off,” Pope recalls. Pitino at Wake Forest (2010-11) before joining Dave Rose’s staff in Provo. always found new ways to test his players’ limits, to the point where on oc In 2015, six years after deciding to coach, he took over the Utah Valley procasion, Pope and his teammates felt something close to hatred for the man gram. He inherited a team that’d gone 11–19 the year before and led it to a 12-18 he’s affectionately labeled “a tyrant.” When it felt like practices and meetrecord in year one. In year 4, the Wolverines went 25-10, good for second in the ings couldn’t get more difficult, Pitino found a way; Western Athletic Conference regular-season standings, he always found a way. Like after Kentucky lost in the and lost by just four points in the conference tourna1995 Elite 8. Pitino re-watched the game with the team ment’s semifinal; if they had won the tournament, they’d twice that night, personally crushing players along the have made the school’s first-ever NCAA Tournament. way. “I’ll never forget it as long as I live,” Pope recalled Utah Valley is no basketball powerhouse, though, and in 2019. The next morning, Pitino scheduled individthat kind of success required relentless creativity. He “WE WERE JUST ual meetings to crush them some more — a necessary once, back in 2016, visited four recruits, from Provo to TRYING TO evil, Pope realized in hindsight, to trample any sense of Twin Falls, Idaho, in a Winnebago covered in WolverBE AS CREATIVE entitlement among the blue-blood high-achievers who ines stickers and flags and banners. All in under 24 hours, AND FUN AND end up at UK. “He was so brutal to us that the only just before the beginning of a recruiting “dead period.”

CRAZY AS WE “He wanted to do something no one else was doing,” option we had was to turn to each other to try and surCOULD BE assistant coach Chris Burgess remembered. It worked; vive him,” Pope said. “And I’m telling you, it wasn’t by TO LEAVE AN three of the four signed with UVU. “We were just trymistake. It was genius.”

IMPRESSION.” Pope applied that wisdom to his career. The lesing to be as creative and fun and crazy as we could be to son wasn’t relentless brutality, but relentlessness in leave an impression.” general. After he became one of four UK players His success brought him back to BYU in 2019 afchosen in the 1996 NBA draft (he was last among ter Rose retired. He already had the Cougars — and the larger basketball world — buzzing. For the first them, at 52nd overall), he realized many fringe playtime since Jimmer Fredette was named the conseners like himself didn’t have the mental and physical sus national college player of the year in 2011, BYU was nationally relevant; stamina to last in an NBA training camp. Some might be better pure players, with more athleticism and better jump shots, but they wouldn’t they’d blown out No. 2 Gonzaga at the sold-out Marriott Center, and mulbe able to battle every single day for six weeks. Using what he learned tiple pundits had declared them a dark horse Final Four team, led by from his parents and Pitino, Pope could outlast them, even if he couldn’t seniors Yoeli Childs, Jake Toolson and TJ Haws. Then COVID-19 happened. outplay them.

Seated in BYU’s film room on Thursday afternoon, March 12, 2020, “He literally worked harder than anybody else,” Didrickson said.

Pope told his players their season was over. He had no encouraging words He lasted just two seasons with all three NBA teams he played for beor cliches. Nothing could ease their grief, he knew. So he turned to what he knows best. “The day of or the next day, he was already talking about tween 1997 and 2005. And after each stop, he moved on quickly in search recruiting and about the next season and about how to get better,” Toolson of new opportunities. Failure and relentlessness became his yin and yang. remembers. “He’s just like, ‘There’s work to be done.’”

“Sports is failure,” he said. “If you’re an athlete, you know failure, and you Entering the 2020-21 season, Toolson and his standout classmates are know it really well.” gone. But there’s some reason for optimism. Starters Alex Barcello and Knowing his time in the NBA would likely be short, he planned for Kolby Lee are back, and BYU outflanked Kentucky, Arizona, Gonzaga and a backup career. He considered many options, but despite studying English in college, he chose medicine. To catch up to other aspiring doctors, others for the services of 7-foot-3 Purdue graduate transfer Matt Haarms; he took science classes at the universities closest to his NBA employers, Haarms was one of the top graduate transfers available, and BYU’s recruitand he studied on team flights. When his playing career ended in 2005, ing win cemented its position as a team of consequence. his efforts paid off with excellent grades and a high MCAT score, and he And if it doesn’t work out, if Pope fails to build on last season’s success, history says that within hours — not days or months — of the final buzzer, landed interviews with Columbia, Yale, NYU and Harvard. He spent three he’ll be looking toward next season, toward new opportunities, and toward years at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons before attacking them relentlessly. dropping out to coach basketball.

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THE NATION

JUDICIAL ACTIVISM ON THE RIGHT AND LEFT IS THREATENING THE CONSTITUTION

BY THOMAS B. GRIFFITH

T

he United States could have created a monarchy. Just imagine the portraits of George Washington holding a scepter. Or the framers could have created an oligarchy of philosopher-kings, or even a theocracy with clergy creating laws.

But they didn’t.

They framed a Constitution instead, outlining a remarkable — albeit intricate — process for rule-making. The laws of the land wouldn’t come from a king or a priest, but from “We the People” through duly elected representatives.

Strikingly, judges played no role in this lawmaking process. This wasn’t an oversight, but rather a central element of the design.

Judges don’t make laws. They resolve disputes by applying the rules created by “We the People.”

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan got it just right when, at her own confirmation hearing in 2010, she flatly rejected a senator’s suggestion that there could be some cases in which the judge might rely on her heart.

It’s “law all the way down,” she insisted.

So, when political leaders, judges or pundits treat the judiciary as simply another legislative body but with funny-looking robes, they do the republic great harm. Call it judicial activism, legislating from the bench or just plain bias — all of it undercuts the nation’s faith in the rule of law.

During her confirmation hearing, Justice Amy Coney Barrett was criticized for refusing to share her personal views on hot-button topics such as abortion, immigration and the Affordable Care Act. Many assumed she was simply hiding a controversial right-wing agenda. These assumptions are not only cynical, but they also display a fundamental misunderstanding of a federal judge’s role.

During my own confirmation proceeding 24 DESERET MAGAZINE

in 2005 to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, I received plenty of advice on being a judge. One suggestion came from a colleague who served as a law clerk on both the court I was set to join and the Supreme Court. If anyone knew what it took to be a good judge, I thought, it was surely this friend.

On his first day as a clerk, the judge for whom my friend was working explained how he decided cases. “First,” the judge said, “I learn the facts of the case as best as I can.” People deserve to have a judge who knows their circumstances.

“Next,” the judge went on, “I think long and hard about the just result, the fair outcome.

Once I’ve figured that out,” he declared, “I look for law that will support my decision.”

That’s how a judge should go about his work, my friend concluded. I thanked him for his counsel, but as I hung up the phone, I vowed to do my best to follow the first part of his advice and completely reject the second part.

As the late professor Herbert Wechsler of Harvard observed, “the deepest problem of our constitutionalism” is when courts function as a “naked power organ.” That happens when judges decide cases based on their own personal politics. This undermines what Yale’s Akhil Amar dubs one of our fundamental liberties: the

people’s right to determine the laws by which they’re governed.

This is an important point lost in our current discourse on the role of judges. In 2018, Chief Justice John Roberts took the unusual step of responding to President Donald Trump’s disparagement of a judge’s ruling because he was appointed by his predecessor. “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” the chief justice said at the time. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

The chief justice’s rebuke could have just as easily been directed at the Democratic senators who tried to make Barrett’s confirmation into a hearing about the wisdom of the Affordable Care Act. A recent survey found that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that Supreme Court justices base their decisions primarily on the law, not on politics. Those who persist in describing judges in partisan terms undermine public confidence in “government of laws and not of men.”

Even in the best of times, confidence in the rule of law is fragile. In these times, there’s no question that our political leaders and commentariat must do better — and so must we.

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Neuropathy 101 What is neuropathy?

Burning, tingling or numbness often leads to a diagnosis of neuropathy, yet in many cases it’s not.

Until recently, doctors were taught that neuropathy is neurological condition that only gets worse. In recent years, neuropathy is being viewed as more of a vascular disease (related to poor circulation) rather than a nerve condition. There are different types of neuropathy, including vascular neuropathy.

What has changed in diagnosing neuropathy?

We’re able to do a more extensive exam to evaluate circulation in the foot to determine if there may be a blockage in the blood vessels below the ankle.

A blockage can limit blood flow and without proper blood supply, the tissues and nerves don’t get the oxygen and nutrients they need to function properly. This may be the cause of symptoms like having to rest when taking a short walk or constant leg pain or cramping.

If there is a blockage, what’s next?

Those who are candidates can have a minimally invasive procedure done in an office setting. It can help allow for better circulation.

What if you’re already being treated for neuropathy?

If you’re not finding relief from medication or treatment, it may be time to consider the fact that it may not be neuropathy. A second opinion may be helpful to determine the cause of the tingling, pain or numbness in your feet.

What’s the concern with traditional treatments?

Just treating the symptoms is my biggest concern with traditional treatments. If we don’t find out what’s causing the problem, all we are doing is suppressing the symptoms allowing the condition to progress. If we can increase the circulation, oxygen and nutrition can get to the affected nerves and regeneration may occur.

When should someone seek help?

It’s best to make an appointment at the first signs of a problem. But it’s never too late seek help.

There are new treatments being developed all the time, so it’s important to learn if there is another option available for you.

THE WEST

FLAGLER, FOR FREE WHILE METRO AREAS IN THE WEST CAN HARDLY KEEP UP WITH GROWTH, SOME RURAL COMMUNITIES ARE DOING EVERYTHING THEY CAN TO CREATE IT.

BY SOFIA JER EMIAS PHOTO ESSAY BY MA R C PISCOTTY

F

or the past 15 years, two billboards have stood on the city limits of Flagler, Colorado, waiting to greet those who may be looking for a place to land. From 10 feet in the air overlooking I-70 and Flagler, the two signs deliver their proclamatory message: “Got Land! Got Water! All we need is you.”

Flagler is a rarity in the West — it’s offering land without a price tag to someone willing to stake a future in the town.

Situated in eastern Colorado, this small town is an agricultural community — akin more to the tilled-and-planted Midwest than the Rocky Mountain reveries most envision upon hearing “Colorado.” The ground is flat, and most houses are separated by a mile or two of grain fields and grassland for cattle. The two main employers in town are a grain co-op and bird seed factory. It’s the kind of small, blue-collar town that residents are quick to compare to Mayberry — the idyllic and sleepy setting of “The Andy Griffith Show” in the 1960s. A trip to the post office turns into an impromptu social event, and shopkeepers know their customers by name. The business district spans one block, and none of the stucco buildings stand higher than two stories tall (with the exception of the grain silos). In Flagler, you don’t only know everyone in town — you also know who everyone’s grandparents were.

The people of Flagler are proud of how much it resembles towns of a bygone era, but they also know the peril of staying the same. That’s why the town has 480 acres of free land available for

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business development. The plot sits right next to town — within city limits — and it’s empty save for the three wells that led Flagler to purchase the land and a two-track gravel bed railroad spur running along the south side.

So far, Flagler hasn’t found the right taker.

Town Clerk Doris King says a few deals have almost come through, but have fallen apart for one reason or another. Tom Bredehoft, Flagler’s mayor, has taken the disappointments in stride.

“We’re just waiting for, or hoping and wishing for any type of industry to come in and put their business on the land.”

Small towns across the country have struggled to maintain their populations as jobs — and the next generation — have migrated to cities. “If you weren’t born into a farming family, then there’s just not much else around here,” King says. But Bredehoft and King think the town has a lot to offer, for the right person or business. Unlike the booming parts of western Colorado, life is slower in Flagler, there’s not many tourists, and the sense of community is strong. “The thing I like about it is I could make five phone calls and tell ’em that you were here down on your luck. And I could have meals or gas money, something, to help you within an hour,” King says. “That’s just the type of people they are here.”

Kit Carson County, where Flagler is located, was one of 11 rural counties in the state that saw a decline in population since 2010 — it lost 14% of its people during the same time period. But

despite the losses, Bredehoft still believes the town is doing something right. In 2012, a Subway shop opened on High Street, right next to the liquor store and across the way from the Loaf ’N Jug gas station. To Bredehoft, having a franchise store open up was a sign of a boon to come.

“That’s been a big thing. ... Once you get certain known businesses in, other ones come in.”

Bredehoft believes in bringing in business — literally. He opened the I-70 Diner in 2007 after finding the building on a dirt lot in Fargo, North Dakota. He had it trucked down on six different semis. And with the help of two cranes, all six pieces were put back together in a day. Today, the diner is easy to spot thanks to the bright pink Cadillac spinning on a 30-foot pole, the glinting chrome doors and the smell of cooking chili (the diner’s specialty).

Flagler’s residents’ willingness to reincarnate has kept the town from disappearing. “Our Main Street’s never looked better in the 49 years that I’ve lived here,” Bredehoft says. “We just want to keep everything we have.”

And it seems that, just maybe, they will. Since the pandemic hit, more people from Denver and the surrounding suburbs have moved into town, according to Tami Witt, a realtor and member of city council. “I’m just really proud of what our little town is doing. And our efforts are starting to pay off,” she says.

But — at least for now — the lot the town is offering for free looks a lot like most of the land in Flagler: flat and full of grain.

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THE WEST

BITTERSWEET RISE OF THE BACKCOUNTRY HOW A PANDEMIC IS RESHAPING THE WAY WE MOVE IN THE MOUNTAINS THE

BY TESS WEAVER STR OKES

K

ristin Weber of Boulder, Colorado, a 47-year-old mother and business owner, tried backcountry skiing last season for the first time. She fell in love with the solace and solitude the sport provided — and with the way ascending a mountain (on skis under her own power) made her feel physically and mentally.

To make backcountry skiing a regular part of her winter, she invested. She bought a pair of women’s all-mountain skis at a garage sale, ordered Dynafit alpine touring bindings and boots online, and signed up for a three-day Level 1 avalanche course in nearby Rocky Mountain National Park. Even though the new setup and education were a financial stretch, she knew her own legs were more of a guarantee than lift-accessed skiing this winter.

“With COVID numbers already on the rise this fall, having a self-propelled way to go up the mountain felt key this ski season,” Weber says. But with everyone looking for solitude, won’t backcountry skiers and snowboarders just end up in a crowd full of loners?

Leading up to ski season, avalanche education courses in Bozeman, Montana sold out; part-time mountain-town residents in Aspen, Colorado, relocated to their second homes; urban buyers scooped up ski-town real estate in places like Jackson, Wyoming to work remotely; and ski resorts such as Vail announced modified operating plans and reservation systems. It feels a little like a beach town stacking sandbags ahead of a hurricane. But this time, the preparation is for a wave of people in a place that can’t stand up to the surge.

Avalanche forecasters and educators worry about increases in human-triggered avalanches, retailers expect new record sales to top last season’s record sales and ski guides are altering their operations to run safely.

Meanwhile, medical professionals warn about backcountry injuries burdening the health care system, and conservationists raise concerns ranging from bighorn sheep population decline to watershed pollution. But one thing everyone agrees on? Increased use this winter will profoundly affect the backcountry forever.

Weber’s path into the backcountry is similar to many other skiers and snowboarders: an interest that’s been building for years due to resort crowding — paired with high prices, curiosity and fitness goals. All of this was accelerated by a pandemic changing the ski area experience and promoting social distancing.

According to Snowsports Industries America, skiing and snowboarding participation is relatively flat year to year, while backcountry skiing and snowboarding continues to grow exponentially.

That’s partly because two of the barriers to entry — specialized gear and education — have been lowered. According to market research firm The NPD Group, sales of backcountry equipment and accessories were trending up all season (it’s the only category in snowsports that’s been steadily growing for a decade) but spiked in March 2020 when ski resorts shut down.

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That’s when sales for Alpine touring skis (which backcountry skiers mount with bindings that allow their boots to come up and down as they walk uphill) jumped from a 34% increase over last season to a 60% increase. A majority of retailers around the country sold out of splitboards. And online sales of skins (the strips of adhesive material affixed to the bases of skis or splitboards to allow them to glide uphill but not slide down) increased 134% over the previous year.

That’s good news for both online retailers and the shrinking population of brick-and-mortar ski shops that haven’t been driven out of business by the internet. In gear-intensive sports like backcountry skiing and backcountry snowboarding, many participants — both new and experienced — need shops and the professionals who run them for boot sizing, ski mounting and tuning up gear. Jason Borro of Skimo Co in Salt Lake City says his retail shop is now growing as fast as his e-commerce site. Due to pandemic-era demand, Skimo doubled its floor space — creating room for socially distanced boot fitting — and hired five more employees.

Colorado’s Cripple Creek Backcountry opened its fifth store, in Denver, in November due to COVID-19-era demand. “Last spring, there were a lot of people on ski vacations who showed up when the resorts closed,” says owner Doug Stenclik. “They’d come to us and say, ‘We hear this is another way to do it.’ This year, it’s a lot of people who rediscovered trail running and biking over the summer and developed a new appreciation for the outdoors. They want to apply their fitness to a new sport.”

Additionally, professional guiding services and avalanche research centers have grown their educational classes and resources — including online classes and more small, outdoor classes — to meet increased demands.

AIARE (American Institute of Avalanche Research and Education), the organization that developed standardized curriculum for avalanche courses, says demand came in earlier than ever this year for many of its 114 providers, with some seeing a 100% growth from last year.

But while the community grows, the wilderness areas where locals can safely recreate cannot grow with it. When Colorado ski resorts shut down last March, hundreds of vehicles parked dangerously along mountain passes, blocking roads used by emergency responders, maintenance crews and avalanche forecasters.

Wyoming’s Teton Pass suffered crowding issues long before the pandemic.

According to the Jackson Hole News and Guide, Teton Pass sees more than 100,000 ski runs a year, which cause human-triggered avalanches, parking conflicts and pedestrian traffic on a highway connecting Teton Valley, Idaho, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming — which is vital to thousands of commuters. In Utah’s Little Cottonwood Canyon (which holds 64 avalanche paths) stakeholders are currently divided over how to mitigate traffic from the 1.2 million vehicle trips and 2.1 million visitors it receives each year. Proposed ideas include widening the road, building gondolas, increasing parking lot space and

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THE WEST

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increasing local bus fleets — and each solution has sparked its own issues.

The increased popularity of backcountry touring is a double-edged sword — bringing welcomed business to local ski shops and offering folks new to the sport an opportunity to get exercise and appreciate nature — but perhaps at the expense of safety, both skier and public.

Beyond the resort boundary, there is no ski patrol to bomb cornices, assess a route’s safety, or carry out a skier with a broken tibia. Backcountry skiing is a matter of life or death. The sport is synonymous with avalanches — which took the lives of 11 skiers and snowboarders in the U.S. last season, according to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, three people died in Colorado in a matter of two days in December of 2020. Even small slides kill. In April, an avalanche in Colorado measuring only 8 inches deep and 100 feet wide was responsible for the death of a 30-year-old skier.

In what comes down to a numbers game, an influx of users into the backcountry will certainly increase the risk of human-triggered avalanches this season. Last March, after chairlifts stopped spinning, the Utah Avalanche Center reported 30 observations of human-triggered slides in just three days, contributing to more than 100 human-triggered avalanches across the state between mid-March and the end of April. At the onset of the lockdown, skiers triggered seven slides in eight days in Telluride, Colorado, prompting rescues that strained medical resources (even occupying a bed in an intensive care unit).

This kind of avalanche activity is a major concern from a public health perspective — creating a reality where resources that are needed in the front country will be directed towards the backcountry, says Kim Levin — an ER doctor, Pitkin County, Colorado, medical officer and avid backcountry skier. “Out of respect for this pandemic and the stress it’s putting on already taxed resources, now is the time to be self-reliant and accountable. It’s not the time to take risks.”

When Utah ski resorts shut down last spring, Utah Avalanche Center greatly increased its social media output, providing a surplus of basic avalanche knowledge to entry-level users. They livestreamed education talks, raised its messaging about the danger of avalanches, conducted media interviews, and provided information about online avalanche education opportunities. And they’ve kept that up this season. Preseason, the Colorado Avalanche Information Center launched an initiative called The Forecast Pledge, with a goal for every backcountry user in Colorado to pledge to check the avalanche forecast before heading out. The organization is offering online versions of its free, youth-focused know before you go programs this season. And while virtual avalanche education is a start, most educators see the necessity of learning in the field.

While avalanches are the primary concern, they are not the only one.

Backcountry skiing is inherently a socially distanced sport, but bigger crowds at backcountry trailheads, parking lots and access points this season means parking could overflow onto busy roads and increased trash and human waste could impact watersheds. And a more crowded skintrack means added human-wildlife interactions. To avoid crowds, many experienced backcountry skiers are pushing further into remote areas, affecting fragile winter habitat. For example, according to Wyoming Game and Fish Department biologists, backcountry skiers are one of the main threats facing the dwindling Teton herd of bighorn sheep. In a University of Wyoming study, GPS data collected over three winters implies the more backcountry skiers enter high-alpine bighorn sheep habitat, the

more bighorn sheep keep moving, taxing their precious winter reserves.

The study suggests that as little as one skier a week can force bighorn sheep into less-ideal habitat.

So, how can you get out and ski or snowboard safely if you’re not planning on riding lifts? Stenclik reports that about half of Cripple Creek’s clients are buying touring gear to skin up ski resorts, where, for the most part, they don’t have to worry about some of the main necessities of backcountry skiing: avalanche gear, route finding and finding a backcountry partner.

“You can enjoy the sport of ski touring without making life and death decisions in avalanche terrain,” says Stenclik. “We ask, ‘Do you ever want to go into avalanche terrain?’ About half say no, one-quarter say they want to learn in a controlled environment and the final quarter are interested in skiing in the backcountry.”

Colorado’s resorts are known for lenient uphill skiing policies, but in Wyoming, Utah and Montana, many ski areas discourage or forbid it. This season, even resorts that do allow uphill traffic are limiting routes and hours and blacking out busy periods.

Enter Bluebird Backcountry, located on Colorado’s Continental Divide near Steamboat Springs. Bluebird is a “backcountry resort” that enables 200 skiers and snowboarders guided or unguided human-powered turns in 4,200 acres of terrain — 1,200 that’s controlled by a ski patrol. At the time of publication, Bluebird had sold all but eight of its 500 season passes (they sold half in the first 48 hours). In last year’s two-week test period, 40% of Bluebird skiers had never skied in the backcountry. “We are trying to solve a problem by creating a less risky place to enjoy all the fruits of backcountry skiing,” says co-founder Erik Lambert. But even Bluebird, which is naturally able to manage numbers and risks, could be affected by COVID-19 this winter.

Regardless of if you are touring uphill at a resort or in the backcountry proper, there is something that we can all do to keep each other and the wilderness safe. Utah Avalanche Center’s Mark Staples warns against “sending it” this season. “It’s not the season to focus on charging hard and riding the raddest lines,” says Staples. “Oftentimes what we see is that one’s ability in a sport doesn’t match up with one’s avalanche skills. Use this season as a learning opportunity.”

Backcountry skiing safer terrain still awards the same lung-busting, leg-burning, calorie-blasting workout on the way up. But, when you’re in a flow state, hearing nothing but your breath and your skis sinking into the snow, the activity feels far from exercise. Based on firsthand knowledge, frolicking in the powder through a beautiful landscape does wonders for perceived effort levels. Many backcountry skiers report benefits beyond the physical, such as a strong connection with nature, lower anxiety levels, improved mood and stress reduction. As Cripple Creek’s Stenclik says: “When things in society get a little uncertain, people find a lot of comfort in getting into the backcountry. It’s an exciting byproduct of this tumultuous time.”

Even for someone like Weber, who admits her risk tolerance is low, the positives of backcountry skiing — the elusive combination of tranquility and exertion — outweigh the challenges. So, she’ll learn as much as she can from experts in the field and experienced friends for not just her own sake, but for everyone’s.

“I know I’m not only responsible for myself, but for my group and the people around me,” says Weber. “Joining the backcountry skiing community, you have to know you’re responsible for the greater whole.”

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LETTER FROM THE FIELD

THE SHEPHERD OF JUAREZ

BY CHA D N IELSEN PHOTOGR A PHY BY WESTON COLTON

I N O NE O F T HE WO R L D’ S D EADL IEST CITIES, RAVAGED BY THE PANDEMIC, PA S T O R J O S E A N T O N I O G A LVA N RUNS A 25-YEAR EXPERIMENT IN MERCY AND RADICAL EMPATHY.

A

black Lincoln crawls along a divided highway, skirting the sunbaked mountains west of Juarez. Behind the wheel, Pastor Jose Antonio Galvan argues with his phone until it starts streaming a sermon.

And the hand of the Lord set me down in a valley full of bones, a voice says in Spanish — the pastor’s own voice, recorded in a makeshift studio at his facility 8 miles southwest of the city. He grins, satisfied, and turns his wayfarers back to the road.

At 69, Galvan cuts a striking figure. Black suit coat over a dark sweater and broad shoulders. Silver locks flowing against caramel skin. The recording continues, reading from the Book of Ezekiel: And he said, make the bones hear the word of the Lord. Galvan jabs a finger for emphasis, because he serves a congregation of people often left for dead, their minds ruined by drugs, lost to age or shattered by violence. The pastor feeds them, rehabilitates them and comforts them on their deathbeds at the center he founded, where he’s spent the past 25 years scrambling to provide disadvantaged patients with basic necessities.

With no institutional backing, every aspect of the Vision in Action Rescue Asylum feels like a miracle. Galvan relies on a few kindred spirits, but leans heavily on patients who’ve become nurses, cooks and bookkeepers, or those few he trusts to drive a pickup and run errands. “People call them human garbage,” the pastor often says, “but I call them hidden treasures.”

The Lincoln passes a hillside emblazoned with whitewashed block letters: JUAREZ THE BIBLE IS THE TRUTH READ IT. The city unfolds below, a labyrinth of improvised barrios spreading through ravines, over mesas and across a broad plain toward the Rio Grande. A blue face mask languishes on the console. Galvan survived COVID-19, but his asylum may not. Donations are harder to come by during the pandemic. The phone loses its signal, the sermon cut short. “You’ll have to hear the rest later,” he says, veering off the highway.

• I • Juarez is a mecca for practical religion. People of faith treat the sick, teach the children, shelter the migrant. They build houses and run food banks, day care centers and rehab facilities, women’s support groups and youth 38 DESERET MAGAZINE

soccer teams, filling gaps in a perpetual humanitarian crisis, fueled by poverty, explosive growth and crime.

Decades of violence have sealed this border town’s reputation as one of the world’s most dangerous cities — an emporium of vice and contraband, where drug cartels rule from the shadows, where gangs and corrupt police act with impunity. That culminated from 2008 to 2012, when nearly 11,000 were reportedly murdered in a city of 1.3 million (now 1.5 million). Others simply disappeared.

About a third of the city’s residents reportedly suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Suicides doubled from 2010 to 2017, with 33 attempts each day. Dr. Jesus Antonio Moreno Leal, an on-call psychiatrist at Vision in Action, blames the drug war, abusive authorities and crushing poverty.

“Imagine all that these families have suffered,” he says. “When you can’t even feed your children, you don’t have a decent place to live, it erodes your mental health.”

Most have nowhere to turn. There are two psychiatric hospitals in Juarez. One is run by the state, with limited capacity despite consistent funding — and it’s temporarily closed for the pandemic. The other is Vision in Action, where cops and rehab centers send the hardest cases.

• I I • From a hotel in downtown El Paso, Texas, I watch the lights of a Homeland Security helicopter as it tracks the border, east to west. Otherwise, it’s hard to tell where one city ends and the other begins. Tall buildings give way to smaller ones that fade into a carpet of lights and the darkness beyond, where Galvan’s Vision in Action awaits.

The next morning, the pastor pulls up outside, driving the Lincoln Continental he calls his only luxury. Galvan lives with his wife in modest Sunland Park, just over the New Mexico state line. Several times a week, he drives south.

My seat slides back and we pull away. In about 15 minutes, we drop over the Bridge of the Americas, one of four connecting the two cities, and breeze through customs. They don’t even check our passports.

Across town, we head west on Federal Highway 2, passing shanty towns known only by their position along the highway (Kilometro 28, Kilometro 30). As Juarez grows, many newcomers find an empty spot of ground and build shelter with whatever materials they can scavenge from the piles of scrap that dot the landscape. It’s not uncommon to raise a family in a cardboard hovel without electricity or potable water. Only the bus is reliable, passing each morning to carry the fortunate to jobs at the maquilas, factories where they print circuit boards, build headlights or package surgical gloves for $9 a day.

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Out past Kilometro 33, Galvan turns onto a dirt road beside a cellphone tower, into a fenced compound. Two yellow dogs — one long-haired, one short — laze in the shadow of a donated ambulance Galvan wants to convert into a mobile food bank. He pulls the Lincoln into a vaulted carport, facing a small courtyard and a blue and white fountain with no running water.

Inside, he’s instantly engulfed by Vision in Action residents crying out, “Papa” and “El Pastor.” Arms wide, he wraps as many as he can in a group hug.

A woman grabs my hand and kisses it over and over, saying “gracias” for no reason. Her worn features and youthful movement make it impossible to guess her age. The pastor smiles over his shoulder.

The center started in an empty shell of a house: four rooms, no roof.

Galvan builds whenever he can get funding. Each addition feels stitched on, from the kitchen to the seniors wing for men and women with dementia. Up a clattering metal staircase, trustees live in a row of tiny apartments on a mezzanine. It’s all in a state of transformation.

Nobody wears a mask. Dr. Sergio Cuellar, the on-call physician, says there hasn’t been a single case of COVID-19 among the 110 patients at the center. Good thing. A test costs $200 in Juarez, if you can find one. Hospitals are overrun, turning patients away without ever seeing a thermometer, telling them to take acetaminophen and “come back when it’s critical.”

Galvan respects the virus; he nursed his wife through COVID-19 for six weeks, fearing she’d die. But he worries for people locked in their homes and out of their churches, and he wonders where he’ll find the next donation to keep this place alive. Then again, he’s been through hard times before.

•I I I • Galvan found religion in a street fight. In 1986, he was drinking in the Plaza de San Lorenzo in El Paso, then a hub for drug dealers. A street preacher shouted at him to repent. Galvan glared back, homeless and drug-addicted, a grimy beard and stray-dog eyes. Heeding a hallucinated voice, he launched his bottle at the preacher’s head, then lunged, punching him repeatedly. Instead of running, the preacher grabbed Galvan by the head, hands like vice grips, and prayed for his attacker. Overcome, Galvan fell to his knees and cried until the police arrived.

That started a long, arduous journey for the former iron worker and undocumented immigrant. He reconciled with his wife, Ester, and their four children, and resolved his pending criminal cases. He preached in the streets of Juarez, recruited for a church and finally became a pastor himself. Several stable years later, he took on the challenge that would define his life.

He started with a soup kitchen downtown and tried his hand at running a rehab, but moved out here in 1995 when the land was donated. He’s run the center ever since. Dr. Cuellar used to see patients at the open-air market in the city center, salvaging what they could from the half-rotten produce the vendors had left behind. That necessity and the pastor’s street smarts have shaped Vision in Action.

New patients are checked by Cuellar and one of two psychiatrists, each dividing time with their own practices. They treat for bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, birth defects, drug-induced psychosis or extreme PTSD. Stabilized patients pitch in. They’ve bundled and sold donated firewood, tended a garden, and cared for pigs, ducks, geese and chickens. They wash the bedding in a large concrete basin, tromping the linens in rubber boots. About 40 of them spread the blankets out to dry over creosote bushes in the desert, then return to gather and fold them in the evening.

“They have a task that gives them some feeling of being useful,” says Morgan Smith, a Santa Fe lawyer who advises Galvan and raises money for several charitable organizations in the borderlands. Smith believes the pas-

tor has stumbled onto something more helpful than sedation and physical enforcement. The work, responsibility and community are healing.

Having found a home, patients might stay for years, even decades, long after their treatment might be considered complete. One, a 24-year-old woman who came in with cartel ties and a violent addiction to crystal methamphetamine, is now a nursing student who runs the yard and metes out medications. Similar successes have filled virtually every position of responsibility. In some cases, patients literally become family; Galvan has performed five marriages between people who met at the center.

Knowing this helps, but nothing lifts the weight from Pastor Galvan’s shoulders. Sitting at his desk, among Aztec kitsch, faux gladiator helmets and unfinished projects, he waves off memories of hard times, when supporters were kidnapped, when patients escaped and did harm, when fire took out the farm animals. He gazes instead at a plaque honoring his son who recently retired from the U.S. Special Forces. And he thinks: If a man like him can raise a Green Beret, anything is possible. Perhaps even his most audacious plan yet.

•IV • Back in the Lincoln, Galvan follows a road through a broad ravine where the city meets the mountains. Turning up an arroyo, he parks and starts hiking. The path winds steeply past shacks fenced with pallets and bed springs, past discarded tires keeping the hillside from slipping away. Above the last house, a crew of eight has leveled the hillside, laid a foundation and built the shell of a cinder block hut, 15-feet square with no roof or doors: headquarters of Radio Vision 107.9, the pastor’s brand-new fundraising project.

A thick extension cord brings electricity from the next house down, which gets it from the next, and so on, back to the grid. Water will eventually arrive in the same manner, consistent with local custom if not the law.

The pastor points to a decrepit playground he wants to rebuild and a shack where he wants to open a computer lab for students. And of course he has those mouths to feed. He hopes the radio station’s advertising revenue will do the trick, even if he doesn’t yet have a broadcast license.

Further on, Galvan reaches the top of a bluff. “We’ll call this Mount Vision,” he says. From here, he can see the whole plain, dotted with native mulberry and invasive chinaberry trees — árbol del paraíso in Spanish.

The tree of paradise. The pastor spreads his arms and thanks his maker.

“This is so beautiful,” he says. “This is so cool.”

As the sun sets, the city scrambles home to beat the 7 p.m. curfew now in place to slow the spread of COVID-19. It’s Friday night and the stores are locked down until Tuesday. Bars and restaurants are closed, too, and churches have been shuttered for months. That won’t stop the violence; eight more people will be killed by day’s end. But Galvan’s crew keeps working, wrangling an FM antenna onto a pole.

Holding out his phone, selfie-style, Galvan, always evangelizing, keeps his Facebook followers informed. In another life, he might have been a painter or a musician. He’s been known to borrow a guitar from a beggar on a plaza by the cathedral and start riffing. He’s done radio shows for years, and soon he’ll have his own frequency to send gospel messages and music to people locked in their homes from here to El Paso and beyond.

A rooster crows from the barrio below. Dogs bark, a truck engine revs, kids laugh and brakes squeal as a white maquila bus slows down for a speed bump. A neighbor taps a stick against a stone, keeping time in a chaotic symphony. Horns and a Caribbean beat erupt over the speaker, and a man shouts, “We’re transmitting!” Taking the microphone, Galvan announces, “This is the first broadcast of Radio Visión, of the people and for the people.”

The crew cheers. Across the plain, the lights of two cities blink and blur as one, then fade into the night.

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HOW TO HEAL AMERICA’S PARTISAN DIVIDE illustration by brian cronin portraits by kyle hilton

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AMERICA IS WOUNDED a contentious election season added another scar to our growing history of division and enmity. Americans haven’t been this far apart from one another in decades. All we seem to agree on is that the other side is an existential threat to the nation we all hold dear. Yet the union stands, and so it must. This is our strength, our bulwark in a tumultuous world.

As President Abraham Lincoln said after an even more harrowing time, one that nearly tore our nation apart: “We are not enemies, but friends.

We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.” That will require more than good intentions. For our inaugural issue, Deseret has convened some of the nation’s leading writers, politicians, religious leaders and thinkers to find specific pathways to common ground. They come from across the country, all over the ideological spectrum. Some have experienced political violence; others have lived with the impacts of bigotry and racism. Each brings unique insight on the healing we so desperately need.

TURN DOWN THE VOLUME

By JEFF FLAKE

“was that gunfire?” I scanned the baseball diamond in front of me.

Colleagues on the infield looked at each other, equally puzzled.

It was a pristine June morning in 2017. The Republican team had traveled across the Potomac to a Virginia suburb to practice for one of Washington’s most anticipated rituals: the annual Congressional Baseball Game.

Having played in the game as a congressman and now as a senator, it would be my 17th contest. And I was happy to be back in the familiar surroundings of center field after several uncomfortable years parked at third base.

I was anxious for the game the following day. My family was in town, and in just 36 hours, they would join some 20,000 fans in the stands as I walked with a bat to home plate. It’s an adrenaline rush for those of us who typically get our kicks from appearing on C-SPAN. This year, however, the adrenaline came early, and for the worst reason.

We were nearing the end of practice, when, seconds after I heard the first shot, an unmistakable volley of gunfire pierced the air, followed by our third baseman yelling “Shooter! Shooter!”

The gunman stood just outside of the third base dugout, firing indiscriminately on the infield with a large caliber rifle. I turned and ran toward the opposite dugout and dove for cover.

The next eight minutes were an intense blur. The gunman fired nearly 100 rounds at members of congress and staff. As the sound of gunfire filled the air, a staff member who had been shot in the lower leg made his way to 48 DESERET MAGAZINE

the dugout before collapsing on top of those of us already on the floor. I tightened a belt around the wound and held it there — a makeshift tourniquet to slow the bleeding. All the while, gunfire raged around us as the Capitol Hill and Alexandria police engaged the shooter.

When the gunfire finally stopped, I ran back out on the field where Congressman Steve Scalise appeared to be in critical condition. I pressed my batting glove against a bullet wound on his thigh while we waited for first responders. I called Steve’s wife, Jennifer, to tell her the news before her television did.

Thankfully Steve and the others who were wounded would recover, and the only life lost that day was that of the gunman, who was mortally wounded in the shootout. The most enduring memory I have of that terrible morning came as I watched bullets dislodge bits of gravel in my path toward the dugout.

I couldn’t help but wonder: Why us? How could anyone look at a bunch of middle-aged lawmakers playing baseball and see the enemy?

It’s a fool’s errand to delve into the psyche of someone sick enough to carry out such an act, but the shooter didn’t hide his view that my political party was such a threat to the nation that we all deserved to die.

Of course, politically motivated violence is no respecter of party. Nearly a year and a half after the baseball shooting, the FBI apprehended a man who mailed pipe bombs to several Democratic politicians and left-leaning media outlets. The bomber had even tweeted pictures of my family along with an aerial photo of my home in Arizona with a caption noting that my house had “a lot of entrances” and that he would see me and my family “soon.”

My sister, Kaija, recently compared our national predicament to the time when our aging father began losing his hearing. Dad controlled the remote in our house, and in his later years, as Kaija put it, “the volume slowly started to creep up and up.” Eventually the whole household was listening to the TV at max volume like it was normal.

That’s where we are. Discourse that would have been unacceptable not long ago has been normalized. It’s so loud that we’re starting to forget who we are, who we represent and the common ground we share.

In 2012, a year after Democratic Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot in the head while greeting constituents at a Tucson supermarket, she courageously attended the State of the Union address before Congress. I’m a Republican, and a conservative one at that, but in a gesture of friendship and solidarity, I sat next to her on the Democratic side of the House Chamber.

During President Barack Obama’s applause lines, Gabby wanted to stand up but was unable to do so on her own due to her continuing recovery. I helped her up, and that often left me standing, a lone Republican among a sea of cheering Democrats. My phone was flooded with furious text messages from those who wanted to know why I stood and how I could “agree with President Obama.”

I thought, “How did we get here? And how can we get back to having the constructive, civil deliberations regarding policy issues that our country deserves?”

I believe in the power of conservative principles to transform lives, lift countries, alleviate suffering and make people prosperous and free. A few years ago, I made a pilgrimage to Dublin, Ireland, to visit Trinity College, the school that shaped the father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke.

I hoped that just by walking those halls his intellect might rub off on me.

My wife concluded that it might take a few more trips.

According to Burke, restraint is a statesman’s chief virtue. “Rage and frenzy,” Burke observed, “will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation and foresight can build up in a hundred years.”

At the heart of conservatism is a healthy distrust of concentrated power, particularly when that power is exercised by the chief executive. Conservatives embrace the art of persuasion. There is a reason why the founders made Congress the Article 1 branch of government. Legislative bodies decide policy through a process of deliberation, not decree. Power emanates from persuasion.

Legislative majorities, if they wish to remain majorities, rely not on brute force, but on convincing others of their ideas. The vessel of political conservatism, the Republican Party, my party, seems to be losing confidence in the power of persuasion. This also seems true with my colleagues across the aisle.

As a nerdy reminder of what it was like when the Republican Party trafficked in ideas, I keep a T-shirt from 1992. At first glance, the T-shirt looks like memorabilia from some touring rock group, with dates listed next to dozens of cities across the country.

On closer inspection, however, the “tour stops” mark the cities where debates took place that year over the flat tax vs. the fair tax between House Republican Minority Leader Dick Armey and the ranking member on the House Ways and Means Committee, Bill Archer.

This was a different Republican Party.

So when I was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2000, I was surprised that my party seemed less interested in ideas and more interested in how to use the levers of power to enact a preestablished agenda.

The Democratic Party was no different. The desire to persuade gave way to “might makes right.” That’s largely the cycle we’ve been in for the past decade. Each party pushes through what it can while it is in the majority and tries to undo what the other party did when they held the reins.

In this game of thrones, elected officials have little incentive to deliberate, let alone cooperate or compromise. Every instinct in this environment encourages a politician to rush to the safety of the tribe, to state their position and stay there. Reaching across the aisle used to get you plaudits.

Today it gets you a primary.

And yet, there’s reason to be optimistic for those who believe that the pursuit of raw power should yield to persuasion.

While we will have a Democrat in the White House, he is thankfully (and I say this as a compliment) a creature of the Senate. Joe Biden’s 36 years in the upper chamber spanned a period when that body further solidified its moniker as the “world’s most deliberative body.” But, even more important, Republicans appear to be on track to maintain control of the Senate and even potentially take back the House of Representatives in 2022.

After spending nearly two decades on Capitol Hill, I’ve come to believe that a divided government is almost always the best government. With divided government, no one party is under the illusion that it can impose its will at the expense of the other. The parties are forced to work together.

The slow pace can be frustrating, but I think at this point the citizenry might prefer boring government.

If you think about it, the only real alternative to working together in this interdependent world is to be alone. I’ve tested that alternative, and believe me, it’s no vacation.

Several years ago, I clicked on Google Earth and located a bunch of small uninhabited islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Determined to live out a strange dream I’ve had since my childhood growing up on a dry, dusty Arizona ranch, I decided to maroon myself on one of these remote Pacific atolls for a week with no food or water and with minimal tools, just to see if I could survive.

A strange idea, I know.

Just how alone was I? After a few days on the island of Jabonwod, I picked up one of the hermit crabs that wandered through my camp and, with a sharpie pen that inexplicably made it into my meager survival kit, I wrote “number one” on his shell. I wanted to know if he would recur during my stay. A while later, I picked up another hermit crab and wrote “number two” on his shell. By the end of the week, I had 126 numbered friends. I grew quite fond of number 72, with whom I often shared scraps of coconut. I was not so fond of 47, who pinched my big toe. And I still miss good ol’ 44.

No man is an island. And no man should be voluntarily alone on an island for long — that I can confirm. When I find it difficult to be civil or pleasant to those with whom I disagree, when I am inclined to ignore the better angels of my nature, I think back on the alternative.

So, in my conversations in the new year, I’m committing to rediscover the healing art of persuasion. Rather than reaching for cruel rhetorical cudgels when challenged by others, I’ll listen. When challenging others, I’ll make better arguments at a lower volume. And I’ll lend my political support to those who do the same.

Jeff Flake served six terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and one term in the U.S. Senate representing Arizona. He is also the author of The New York Times bestseller “Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle.”

OUR STRENGTH IS IN OUR DIVERSITY

By FABIOLA SANTIAGO

we are all marked, shaped by our beginnings. Mine as an American started with a “Freedom Flight” out of Varadero Airport, Cuba, in 1969.

Window seat, my suited father by my side, my mother in front of us trying to keep my rambunctious little brother in check.

Our hearts broken by leaving everyone and everything we loved behind, I nursed in my young heart the useful emotion of hope amid uncertainty.

Three months earlier, the Americans had walked on the moon.

A country that had accomplished this unimaginable feat, I told my 10-year-old self, couldn’t possibly be as bad as we were told in school by teachers forced to indoctrinate children to hate “los yankis.”

Applause rang through the cabin as we landed in Miami, bittersweet tears flowed, and from that moment, my introduction to the United States and my alliance to this country was sealed.

The memory of this point of leaving and arrival — of rupture and repair — keeps me grounded in troubled times. It connects me not only to who I was, an immigrant child, but to what America was, and I believe still is despite the ugly talk, a nation of immigrants.

At the barracks where we were processed at Miami International Airport, kind people offered us ham sandwiches and Coca-Cola. An older woman, a volunteer, approached me and gave me a small handmade green teddy bear made of cloth.

Her gesture so touched me.

I had been forced to leave all but a small doll out of my beautiful collection, now property of the state.

A club to which this woman belonged had made the bears for the Cuban refugee children arriving on what became a historic exodus that brought 265,000 Cuban exiles to the United States between 1965 and 1973.

Fifty-one years later, with the unprecedented times we’re living weighing on my mind, my heart swells at the memory of a welcoming America, beacon of democracy to the world.

Strong and steady in times of strife, land of refuge and opportunity, this is the America I’ve hung on to for the last four years, when I’ve felt alienJANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 49

ated and damaged by the political rhetoric and the disheartening divisions among us growing wider everyday.

It’s hard to hold up a mirror to our own politics, but it’s easy to judge, with or without facts, The Other.

Yet, it is the diversity of experiences and the richness of cultures that distinguishes this land from sea to sea. All that immigrants have brought through the generations from other parts of the world are what makes us most American, unique and exceptional.

But we’ve shattered the joy of our own house.

Restoration requires healing.

The need for healing implies the existence of loss.

We have, in our discord, indeed lost something precious to our national identity. We have become a fractured “we, the people.” It has left us in a state of angst, grief, and its twin brother, anger.

It has made us bitter.

In a misguided shift of blame for our problems, we have lost the innocence with which America embraced and welcomed The Other — and we have left a deep wound.

An election behind us, a hopefully peaceful transfer of power ahead of us, how can we heal our individual and our collective national souls?

We heal by sharing our truths.

We heal by reaching deep into our capacity for empathy and kindness.

We must, at least, attempt to reach out, not as partisans but as participants in democracy.

We’re a nation in pain, torn apart by a political divide now deeply entrenched. But it is possible to search for common ground, to find redemption and reconciliation on our way back, if not to each other, at least to civility and coexistence in our communities.

There’s so much on our plates to resolve.

We can heal if we dare to listen and engage with those with whom we disagree without hurling insults.

We can heal if we step out of red and blue corners, acknowledge that personal experience plays a significant role in shaping our political views — and create spaces where we can share our stories, our humanity.

Make room for people like me, forever touched by the kindness of a stranger and now part of the tapestry that is us, the United States of America.

And never, never underestimate the healing power of a frumpy little bear placed in a little girl’s hands.

Fabiola Santiago is a Miami Herald columnist and author of the novel “Reclaiming Paris.”

mine. But my friendship with him taught me so much and exposed me to different perspectives. That’s something we can all do: expose ourselves to different backgrounds and ideas and learn to respect those we disagree with.

Every American has a different outlook based on his or her experiences in this country, and that’s why I think all Americans can benefit from learning from each other. It is unlikely friendships that teach us and challenge us as people, and these relationships are one way we can help heal this nation.

And there’s no better way to build friendships than by serving others.

As a Christian, I know helping others is one of the core teachings throughout the Bible. It’s how we heal those around us and ourselves. Despite the challenges our nation faced this election season, it is important that we rebuild and unite as Americans; this begins as we reach out to one another and lift those around us.

I created my Opportunity Agenda for this reason — to help Americans who grew up in similar situations as I did and are living without hope for the future. Within my Opportunity Agenda are Opportunity Zones, distressed areas designated by states to allow us to foster entrepreneurship and job creation in neighborhoods that need it the most. Recently, we have seen 1,500 projected jobs coming to Hampton County, South Carolina. And currently Erie, Pennsylvania, is planning to tackle a 25-year revitalization project of its abandoned city in five years. In Charlotte, North Carolina, a group has planned to remodel a hotel, where it will employ and house homeless veterans.

Not every act of service or gesture to help those in need has to be big.

We can heal each other in small ways. It can be something as small as befriending someone from a different background.

Sen. Tim Scott has served as the junior United States Senator for South Carolina since 2013. He is the author of “Unified : How Our Unlikely Friendship Gives Us Hope for a Divided Country” with former Congressman Trey Gowdy.

CHANNELING PAIN INTO PURPOSE

By GABBY GIFFORDS

THE BALM OF SERVICE

By SEN. TIM SCOTT

during my time in washington, I became best friends with former Congressman Trey Gowdy — someone whose background differed from 50 DESERET MAGAZINE

on jan. 8, 2021, it will have been 10 years since I was shot.

Those 10 years have held more highs and lows than I could ever count.

I’ve stared in the face of someone who sought to kill me and faced my own mortality. I wondered if I would ever be able to walk again — and then I did. I wondered if I would ever be able to speak again. And then I did.

I have been fortified and lifted up and encouraged by countless people who have shown me the best of humanity: my doctors. My speech therapist. My husband. My staff. The many, many elected leaders and survivors who have shown courage in the fight for safer gun laws.

In times of difficulty and hardship, my personal heroes, the people I look up to most, don’t ignore their pain, or pretend it doesn’t exist. They acknowledge it, they accept it, and then they move forward. This idea, in its two-word distillation — move ahead — helped me persevere during my recovery.

2020 has been a difficult year for the vast majority of Americans. There has been no shortage of tragedy, suffering and division. When people talk about the future these days, there is often a nostalgia for the past embedded in these hopes and dreams, a wish to go back to the way things were before COVID-19 upended our lives.

But the future can never, and indeed, should never, be just a repeat of the past. We are not the same country we were in February 2020, and we never will be, even after a safe and effective vaccine is available to all who want it. No amount of wishing or longing will allow us to rewrite the past, but the future is ours for the writing.

I can’t go back to the life I had before a gunman murdered six people and injured more than a dozen outside of a supermarket 10 years ago, because I’m not the same person I was back then. Not because of my physical limitations, but because of the strength and fortitude that I’ve developed as a result of these limitations.

Rather than let my suffering overcome me, I overcame my suffering. I channeled my grief and anger into the fight to end gun violence.

Now is the time for us to come together as a nation and do the difficult work of rebuilding. We must reject the notion that our country is irreparably broken, that the cracks and fissures in our nation are stronger than the ties that bind us.

We must move ahead, despite our losses. Channeling our pain into purpose will not make the pain disappear. But it will give us something to fight for, and sometimes that’s all you need to make it to tomorrow.

Gabby Giffords served as a member of the United States House of Representatives representing Arizona’s 8th Congressional District from January 2007 until January 2012, when she resigned due to a severe brain injury suffered during an assassination attempt. A member of the Democratic Party, Giffords was the third woman in Arizona’s history to be elected to the U.S. Congress.

There is good news, however. Even with the deep divides we see around us, those divides are matched by a longing: to be seen as human and worthy of respect, and a longing for connection. It is that longing, coupled with abilities each of us has, that will change our communities and nation back to places where disagreement is healthy and necessary, and all people are respected and valued.

Whether you care about healing divisions in your family, community or country, you are the one who holds the key: practicing and sharing love and exercising your natural curiosity. These are natural gifts that you possess, and here is how to use them: Start with curiosity. I hear every day from someone who can’t “even begin to understand” how (someone) could think the way they do. That is your cue! If you are incredulous or outraged or “can’t imagine” how someone could think that way, ask them. Ask someone you care about and ask with two intentions: look to understand, ask for a story if you are having trouble understanding. And while you seek to understand, also look for where you might find something that resonates with you, even a little.

Along with curiosity, practice love. When I see a photo in the news or hear an outrageous story, I find that I react in negative ways — I recoil or even feel revulsion. That is our next cue: to respond with love. Find the well of love within you and share it with those who are difficult for you to relate to. I am a Christian pastor, and one of my faith practices is to notice those people in the world who I disagree with, and to pray for them. That act of prayer blesses me deeply.

Lastly, to heal our nation’s divides, please make a friend or rekindle a friendship with someone who is very different from you. These seemingly small acts are actually the powerful forces of love. All that is required is for you to be the person you were born to be, a person worthy of respect, deeply connected to our world, and sharing your gifts of curiosity and love.

Rev. Marian Edmonds-Allen is the executive director of Parity, a New York Citybased national nonprofit that works at the intersection of faith and LGBTQ+ concerns, and the director of Blessed by Difference, a project that seeks to promote curious and collaborative bridging across the LGBTQ+ and faith divide.

FINDING YOUR PLACE IN AMERICA

By REV. MARIAN EDMONDS -ALLEN

i’m a bridge builder, someone who works to bring people together across political, social and faith divides. Usually my work centers around the LGBTQ and faith divide, or how religious liberty can bring us all together. Recently, however, people have been reaching out in deep distress asking for help, asking, “Is there a place for me in America? I just can’t stand (those people) and I feel like they have no respect for me, that they hate me for who I am.”

Which “side” does that come from, do you think? The left or the right?

People of faith or secular? Mask wearers, anti-maskers? Whatever you guessed, you are exactly correct. People from all walks of life, all positions on every issue, are saying the same thing – they feel unwelcome, unheard and too often, afraid and even depressed.

HEALING STARTS WITH RESPECTING OTHERS

By CINDY Mc CAIN

in arizona, we start teaching kids the word “respect” in grade school.

If children can learn what it means to respect each other at the age of 6, elected officials can too, and it’s about time that they remembered the meaning of the word.

We, as Americans, should expect more from our leaders.

My husband used to say the most noble thing you can do is serve a cause greater than your own self-interest. Those are the words we both lived by, the words we taught our children, and the words I continue to try and live up to.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 51

John, an icon of decency in politics, believed in working with others, respecting those with different viewpoints, and focusing on doing what was best for the country.

Remembering John’s words and his actions while he served in the Senate made it hard to watch the events that unfolded over the last four years. I couldn’t understand how we got into this situation.

I told other women, we may not agree with Biden on every issue, but we have to step across the aisle and get the country back to a place where decency, honor and respect are core tenets to live and govern by.

That’s the message that resonated with Republican women, and the reason they decided to vote for Biden. Sen. Mitt Romney also provided an important reminder about what was really valuable in an elected official, and I’m so grateful for his hand in all of this.

Biden has already made clear how he’ll lead: He will work for the good of the country rather than the good of himself and his own party. That’s the way he and John worked when they were both in the Senate.

We should look to our elected officials and remind them to respect each other. John said it best in his concession speech in 2008. He said the people have spoken and have elected a new president and it’s time to heal the divide and move forward. I believe there’s only one way this country can heal: respect.

Cindy McCain is an American businesswoman, philanthropist and humanitarian. She is the widow of 2008 Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain from Arizona and the mother of television host and commentator Meghan McCain.

experience, without judgement. Look for good in new relationships and intentions. Challenge yourself this year and look for the good in obscure and less obvious places.

In his book, “Be All You Can Be,” John Maxwell, a renowned author and speaker on leadership said, “If you are unchallenged, you are unchanged.

Leaders stretch with challenges. Followers struggle with challenges. Losers shrink from challenges.”

Look for the good. Build upon the good. You don’t have to look far. It’s there. It starts with you. Be the good.

Theresa Dear is an ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

She serves at DuPage AME Church where she leads community expansion initiatives and serves on the board of REACH, a nonprofit empowerment organization.

FRIENDS CAN DISAGREE

By TOM UDALL

BE THE GOOD

By THERESA DEAR

the media seems to inundate us with negative news. It may all be true and factual, but among every negative thing that we hear or read today, where is the good stuff?

America could be suffering from “good” deficiency, where there has been a severe lack of good. This undiagnosed anemia forces us to look for the good, when it is not presented to us.

Looking for the good is not always an excavation exercise. There are several places we could “look for the good.”

We should look for the good in ourselves. We were amazingly designed — created a little lower than the angels. (Psalm 8:5). Our molecular core is designed for good. Yet, we can become enamored with the belief that our success and status define who we are, but there is a far bigger and greater purpose for us than what the world would have us believe. Sometimes modeling good is how others appreciate, acquire and apply good.

We should also look for the good in our neighbors. Sometimes, we have a tendency to look at others through an opaque filter, with measurements that allow us to size up people and accept or discard them according to our standards. We could be better at being good, if we remove the filter, befriend people who are not like us and sit through the discomfort of the 52 DESERET MAGAZINE

“we disagree in politics — but not in life.” That’s what the late Republican Sen. John McCain said about his bond with my uncle, Mo Udall, a longtime Democratic congressman from Arizona. And it’s a sentiment I hope can guide us moving forward — because we’re going to need to work together to tackle the big issues facing the country.

Finding common ground with those you disagree with is hard. But during my service in Congress, I’ve seen that it’s possible — even on the big issues.

As we confront a period of intense division, I believe that the fundamental barrier to progress in Congress is the flood of powerful, special interest money drowning out the voices of the American people. That’s what promotes extremism, and prevents compromise.

The large majority of elected officials are good people stuck in a broken system. The real reason for obstruction is the special interests that have figured out how to game the system to inflame our partisan divisions and punish compromise.

Not all issues in Congress are stuck in partisan gridlock. Indian Country’s priorities have historically been addressed in a bipartisan manner, with senators working together for better health care, education, housing, and other resources for Native communities. The federal government’s obligation to uphold its trust and treaty obligations is sacred. Some of my proudest achievements have been the result of working with Tribes as vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. Most recently, a bipartisan coalition in the Senate passed legislation that strengthens the principles of Tribal self-governance, provides Native entrepreneurs the resources they need to grow businesses and economies, and secures investments in Native language revitalization. The lesson is: Bipartisan cooperation is possible — but it is still too hard in today’s Congress. We must reform our democratic system and return the real power to the

hands of the American people. And we must remember that while we disagree in politics, we do not disagree that we all want a brighter future for our children and our nation.

Sen. Tom Udall has served as U.S. Senator from New Mexico from 2009 to 2021.

A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the U.S. Representative for New Mexico’s 3rd Congressional District from 1999 to 2009 and was the Attorney General of New Mexico from 1991 to 1999.

CALLING UPON OUR BETTER ANGELS

By SEN. MITT ROMNEY

i didn’t think it would happen here.

The divisiveness, the resentment, the suspicion, the anger that pervade so many countries seemed foreign to the people I had met during my campaigns only a decade or so ago. What impressed me most about my fellow Americans was the optimism, the sense of purpose and the willingness to help one another. The Great Recession had not made us bitter; it seemed to have made us more determined to pull together and cheer each other on.

Something happened to change that — not for everyone, of course, but for what has become a larger and larger portion of us. Following the recession, we looked around to see who was to blame for the misfortune we had experienced. Politicians and the media were quick to point the finger— bankers and Wall Street-types: “They should go to jail.” “Washington had ‘bailed out’ the guilty.”

It was not lost on people vying for our attention that stoking anger enhanced their prospects. The same was known to be true from the beginning of history: Appealing to resentment and our more base inclinations could always attract a crowd. The Founders took every step they could devise to protect the Republic from so-called demagogues; their efforts worked for over 200 years. Several developments have combined to threaten that success.

Institutions that enhance mutual understanding are declining. Americans are less likely to go to church where they interact with people from different races and backgrounds. Social endeavors like the Boy and Girl Scouts are waning. Even face-to-face interaction has become less frequent as we and our children disappear into our cellphones — a trend felt even more acutely because of the ongoing pandemic.

Media, embodied by the likes of Walter Cronkite, once provided information trusted by almost all of us. Newspapers, once admired for their comprehensive and accurate coverage, are closing down. Now our information is curated by apps and crafted by radio and cable networks that appeal to our prejudices. Increasingly, the most successful media personalities rile their target base.

Most disappointing of all, too many political figures have stoked these divisions. Demagogues on the left scapegoat the rich; demagogues on the right scapegoat the immigrant. They each scapegoat the other. Politicians’

language is more vulgar, bullying and offensive. Reagan, Eisenhower, and Kennedy would not recognize today’s political discourse.

My reading of history suggests what can heal social sickness. First, a great leader who “calls upon our better angels” can bring us together.

Churchill rallied his nation to resist and defeat Nazism. Roosevelt elicited the endurance that overcame despair. Lincoln healed a nation torn apart by war, insisting on “malice toward none and charity for all.” I do not believe one can overstate the impact the leader of a nation can have for good or for bad. I earnestly pray that our President can rise to the challenge.

Who we choose to lead us shapes our society. I believe that it is our national character that made America the greatest nation on earth, that the public personal character of leaders like Washington, Lincoln, Reagan and Truman had more influence on us than even the policies they promoted.

Today when I vote, I pay as much attention to the character of the candidate as I do to their policies. If we choose leaders who inflame resentment and division, our nation will be angry and divided. We have a choice to make: Would we rather have our “side” win to punish the “other side” or would we rather have our nation united?

But presidents and politicians are not the only leaders who influence society. Leaders of churches, congregations, classrooms, businesses, charities and homes can influence the character of the nation. When each of us encourages comity, understanding and grace, we heal. When we disparage, bully or treat others with contempt, we deepen the rift that divides us.

I believe that we should watch and read, not just sources we tend to agree with but also sources we disagree with. If Fox is your regular diet, watch NBC, CNN or ABC now and then. Conversely, if MSNBC is your regular, don’t make it exclusive. We need to broaden our reading as well. I note that news organizations like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times make an effort to get the facts and when they make a mistake, they acknowledge it. Social media has no fact-checkers, no editors and often doesn’t even disclose who actually wrote a post.

I pray for the healing of the nation. Literally. I wish there were more faith in God, more reverence for all of his children. A brilliant leader of a respected think-tank in Washington has concluded that love is the only sure answer to what ails us. I think he’s right.

Sen. Mitt Romney has served as a U.S. Senator from Utah since 2019. He previously served as the governor of Massachusetts and was the Republican Party’s nominee for president in 2012.

LEARNING FROM THOSE WHO CAME BEFORE

By GREGORY SMITH

when we turn to our shared history as Americans, we encounter stories that can unite our future. Last September, I played a role on behalf of the White House in facilitating what might seem like a small JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 53

thing: fixing the misspelled headstone of Seraph Young Ford at Arlington National Cemetery.

But I was struck how this gesture brought together people from all different backgrounds — historians, government officials, educators, politicians, and the descendants of Seraph — to remember and honor this American suffragist.

After the Utah territory passed an equal voting law in 1870, Seraph Young — the grandniece of then-president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Brigham Young — became the first woman in the United States to cast a ballot under the new law. Last year marked the 150th anniversary of that historic vote.

But, in many ways, Seraph had been forgotten to history. Her name was misspelled on her own gravestone (it erroneously read “Serath”). Some of her own descendants weren’t fully aware of her historic role until historians drew renewed attention to it.

During a brief ceremony at the Arlington National Cemetery in which a new headstone was featured, Utah dignitaries and White House officials joined Seraph’s own living descendants, including 9-year-old Hope Rice.

Hope’s grandfather, Russell “Rusty” Rice Jr., called the ceremony “absolutely” inspiring for Hope.

That’s what happens when we learn about the stories of those who have come before; those who have toiled and sacrificed to make a better life for us. While some have supposed that we can find better unity by erasing or condemning the past, I witnessed how the past can inspire and unite. This isn’t to say that America should avoid its duty to right wrongs; nor do I believe the nation should gloss over past or present injustices.

In fact, remembering the story of Seraph Young Ford helped inspire us more than a century and a half after she cast her historic vote. Our union grew stronger as we drew inspiration from a woman who fought for a more perfect one.

Gregory Smith is special assistant to President Donald J. Trump and Deputy Director of Political Affairs for Policy and Personnel.

democracy and rule of law in the United States. In 2020, we were sorrowfully reminded of the terrible ways in which we have fallen short of our high ideals, particularly in matters of racial justice and equality. But for all our shortcomings, the vision of America as a shining city on a hill continues to resonate not only for Americans but also for the many drawn to our nation in hopes of achieving their own dreams. Even more remarkable, this vision remains a beacon for those in far flung places from Hong Kong to Venezuela who are bravely fighting to defend their own fundamental rights. They draw both inspiration and courage from the United States.

Their belief in what America aspires to be should encourage and, perhaps in some instances, shame us into more fully living up to our national creed eloquently expressed in the Declaration of Independence but never fully realized. My late father Congressman Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in the Congress, used to refer to this as the long story of closing “America’s hypocrisy gap.” In 2021, we must resolve to do better at closing this gap at home so we will be worthy of the human rights leadership that we have long exercised around the world.

The past year has surely highlighted many ways in which we are divided but, despite the differing political paths that we may take, it is good to remember that every fork in the road is also a place where paths converge.

Though politics and pandemics may separate us, we can still come together around our love of country and our dedication to universal human rights.

Katrina Lantos Swett is the President of the Lantos Foundation. She is also an American educator and the former chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom from 2012 to 2013, and then in 2014 to 2015.

BUILDING BETTER COMMUNITIES

By SEN. BEN SASSE

HEALING OUR NATION THROUGH UNDERSTANDING HUMAN RIGHTS

By KATRINA LANTOS SWETT

it has become almost trite to refer to the year just concluded as difficult, divisive and, due to the pandemic, undeniably deadly. There is a yearning across our land for a path forward toward healing and renewal. Yet, it appears that this path is much like the road “less traveled by” in Robert Frost’s famous poem; it appeals to many, but most travelers are inclined to take the more popular path, which in this day seems to be a path of conflict and discord. I would suggest that the work of global human rights can help us to find and choose to walk the noble, unifying road of respect and unity.

My work fighting for human rights across the globe has given me a powerful awareness of the underlying strength of our system of constitutional 54 DESERET MAGAZINE

what works in america is that we are relational beings and social animals. We are meant to do joint projects and group work. We want to do verbs, not just be nouns; we want to do stuff together. And the word for that is community.

That’s something Alexis de Tocqueville noticed when he visited America in the 1830s to understand what makes us distinct as a nation. What he found is that it’s not isolated individualism that makes us great; it is togetherness.

And it’s not coerced. It’s togetherness that’s by choice as we work together.

Two are better than one because if one falls down, the other can help them up.

What’s happening in America is a collapse of local institutions. The nuclear family structure is in statistical collapse and friendship is strangely in collapse. That ache spills out lots of different places. And one of the places where it spills out is into our politics, because political tribalism is ramping up right now, and that’s happening because the good kind of tribalism is in collapse. Good tribes are your nuclear family. The way you stick up for your brother and your sister, that sort of bond you feel parent to child and child to parent and grandparent and cousin. A good tribe is deep friendship

rather than the social media sense of friends. There’s data which shows if you go from 200 to 500 social media friends, you don’t get any happier. You go from 500 to 1,000 social media friends, you don’t get any happier. If you go from 1,000 to many thousands of social media friends, you actually get less happy, because you have to spend more time tending to the grooming of this online persona.

And conversely, if you go from three to four real human friends, these are people who, when you’re happy, they’re happy — not because it’s transactional, but just because they love you. When my 7-year-old boy is flying down the street on his bike, and the sun is shining on his face, and there’s nothing in the world except that moment of goodness that he’s feeling, my chest expands. I’m just delighted. Or when one of my daughters is hurt by something, I hurt, because they are a part of me and I love them. If you know the person two doors down from you, you’re statistically much likelier to be happy than if you don’t know the person two doors down from you. The social media world has potential for good, but a lot of the time what it really does is displace the local, which is really where people find happiness and meaning.

We’ve got to think about how to love our neighbor. Part of that is I need to understand my neighbor’s view, and I want to have dinner with him or her, and I want to argue and persuade and maybe listen enough to learn or be persuaded. That’s what principled pluralism really is. Government is not going to solve all our problems, government’s not supposed to, and maybe we’ve gotten to this point by thinking the government, and our politics, whether we’re on the left or the right, is going to solve these problems that divide us. The government in its best form in the American system is designed to maintain a framework for ordered liberty, so the really important communities can flower. And those around your dining room table.

To move past what divides us, we have a pretty well thought out understanding of what will make our neighbors happy. And that is family, that is friendship, that is deep work. We’re going to have to together figure out how to build the new habits of social capital and of neighborliness and of community. Despite the fact that technology is always whispering to you, “Hey, the place you’re at right now isn’t that interesting. You should flee to somewhere else.” Actually, most of the time, the really interesting place to be in the long run is by loving the people that God has put in front of you, right where you sit right now.

Sen. Ben Sasse has served as the junior U.S. Senator for Nebraska since 2015. He is the author of “Them: Why We Hate Each Other — And How to Heal.”

THE UNION AND

THE CONSTITUTION FOREVER

By SEN. MIKE LEE

to actually heal america’s political divisions, we first have to remember that disagreement is not a disease. It is a natural, universal and healthy human reality. The tone of political discourse can certainly be-

come toxic, and that is a problem. But political division itself is something prudent societies try to channel or harness, not eradicate.

For the root cause of America’s divisions is a core fact about our nation that we tend to think of as a strength, not a weakness: our diversity.

The reason politicians disagree in Congress is the same reason citizens disagree in the voting booth. The United States is a huge country – third most populous on Earth and fourth largest by area. Of course 330 million people stretched across a continent (and an ocean!), of every race, ethnicity, religion and culture are going to have sharply divergent ideas of the good life, and the government policies that lead to it.

We would not want it any other way. America’s ability to make our diversity a strength is part of what makes us the greatest nation on earth.

Our job is to make sure our diversity pulls us together instead of pulling us apart.

The good news is, we already have a proven way to achieve this goal.

The United States has always been diverse. Our Constitutional framework was specifically written for a regionally, culturally, economically and religiously diverse nation. The Constitution’s checks and balances and separated powers simultaneously empower political majorities while protecting political minorities and, most of all, individual rights.

Given America’s wide diversity, political issues decided at the federal level are by their nature going to be the most divisive. People in the East and the West, on the coasts and in the interior, in rural and urban areas — to say nothing of “red” and “blue” states — are always going to see the world differently.

Allowing 51% of such a diverse society to impose their values and priorities on the other 49% is a recipe for resentment and distrust. That’s why the U.S. Senate requires a super-majority of 60 votes to end debate and pass legislation — to discourage one-sided legislating and encourage consensus and compromise.

Today, with the parties so closely divided, it’s hard to get 60 votes on partisan legislation. You need bipartisan compromise, which on many issues is simply hard to come by. The media sees inaction on controversial issues as a failure. But it’s really just a signal that the country is still making up its mind.

The thing we have to remember is that under our Constitution, this is OK. If states as different as Rhode Island and New Mexico and Alaska have different political preferences, they don’t need to resolve them in a zero-sum war in Washington. Congress can simply devolve decision-making on more contentious issues to the states, where the more homogeneous Rhode Islanders, New Mexicans and Alaskans can experiment with approaches that work best for them.

This isn’t about the size of the federal government — the federal government is going to remain huge for a long time to come. Rather, it’s about the need for national consensus to validate federal policy. 51%-49% issues are controversial, by their nature. Some issues — like national security or immigration – by their nature must be decided at the federal level, no matter how controversial they are. But most issues — from education to welfare to health care to housing to infrastructure — really can be decided at lower, less divided, levels of government.

Blue states can be as blue as they want; red and purple states can go their way too. And all Americans — across the country and across the political spectrum — would be happier not to be in a constant zero-sum battle against the other party on every single issue under the sun. The founders called this approach “federalism.” Philosophers call it “subsidiarity.”

To me, it’s the only realistic way to restore trust in our public institutions, detoxify our national discourse, and heal some of the wounds of our current divisions.

Sen. Mike Lee has represented Utah in the U.S. Senate since 2011. He has published four books since his election to the Senate, including “Written Out of History: The Forgotten Founders Who Fought Big Government.”

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 55

THE SAINT SECTION

OF

SECOND CHANCES by michael j. mooney portrait by pierce thiot

Andy Reid, perhaps the most beloved coach in all of

sports, was at the lowest point of his life and career when he came to Kansas City. How a broken football franchise, a city and the NFL’s most inscrutable figure rose up from multiple tragedies to create something beautiful.

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JANUARY/FEBRUARY JAN/FEB 2021 57

NO CITY LOVES A MAN THE WAY Kansas City loves Andy Reid.

Bakeries here sell cookies shaped like his head, with his trademark glasses and mustache drawn on with icing. At least two different businesses sell prayer candles bearing his likeness. Local TV news recently broadcast a story about a man who meticulously tilled 27 acres of a Missouri soybean field into a portrait of Andy Reid visible from the stratosphere.

A mural on the wall next to McFadden’s Sports Bar in the Power and Light District downtown features several of the Kansas City Chiefs’ most popular players. There’s star quarterback Patrick Mahomes flexing his throwing arm.

There’s veteran tight end Travis Kelce, depicted mid-stride. Defensive end Frank Clark celebrates a tackle. They’re all in uniform with their helmets on.

The only face visible in the massive painting is Andy Reid’s.

It’s not just that the fan base of the Kansas City Chiefs is perhaps the most zealous and loyal in the NFL, or that Reid, the team’s head coach for the last eight seasons, has ushered in an unprecedented era of winning.

They don’t just love him because his brushy mustache and teddy-bear physique make Reid, nicknamed “Big Red,” the most avuncular, everyman character in all of professional sports. Or because he’s prone to hilariously endearing turns of phrase, like shouting “son of a buck” when a play doesn’t go the way he’d planned it, or the time, after an ugly win, he told his team that “not all of Mozart’s paintings were perfect.”

Reid also promotes local businesses any chance he gets, without compensation, publicly espousing his affinity for the ribs at Jack Stack Barbecue — what might be a controversial opinion if uttered by any other public figure. But his contribution to regional commerce, substantial though it may be, isn’t why he’s so beloved, either.

Kansas City’s affection for the 62-year-old head coach is about something deeper than all of that. A sample of that love is on display on a bright, crisp Sunday afternoon in early November, when the Chiefs are hosting the Carolina Panthers. Arrowhead Stadium has about 15,000 distanced fans in attendance. Hundreds more, though, have walked past that giant mural to sit and watch the game for free on an outdoor movie theatre-size screen in the courtyard between the half-dozen open bars and restaurants in the Power and Light District.

This is where thousands of members of what they call “Chiefs Kingdom” jammed together to watch the Super Bowl at the end of last season, before so much of 2020’s chaos unraveled. Now groups are keeping their distance, but every table outside is occupied and a few stragglers are sitting alone on the stairs and leaning along the second-floor railing. Most people are wearing candy-apple red Chiefs hats or shirts. As servers collect food and drink orders before kickoff, the screen briefly shows Reid shuffling down the Chiefs sideline wearing a plastic shield over his face. The fans give a smattering of applause — something that won’t happen again until more than 10 minutes into the game, when Mahomes completes a 14-yard pass to Tyreek Hill.

The Chiefs have been great again this year, losing only once in their first nine games. Early in the second quarter, though, the Panthers are leading 14-3. You might expect to see some anxiety, some frustration. But not here.

The closest anyone gets is when, as the Chiefs face a third down and the screen briefly cuts to Reid’s face calling a play, a man sitting on a picnic table yells out, “Do the right thing, Andy!”

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I EVERY WEEK OF the football season, Andy Reid stands in front of

reporters and answers dozens of questions. And yet he almost never reveals anything even remotely substantive about his team or himself. Every press conference goes the same way. Reid comes in wearing his Chiefs cap and a bright red parka that makes him seem like a floating, disembodied head. He talks about his football team with the caution of a poker player or master politician.

He starts by going over the injuries on the roster, as required by the NFL. Then he often shares some brief thoughts, a sentence or two at most, about the team the Chiefs are playing that week or the way the season is shaping up. Then, without fail, he tells the gathered reporters the same thing, with the same words.

“With that,” he always says, “time’s yours.”

Time’s yours. Like so many things that come out of Reid’s mouth, the utterance is at once insipid and profound.

What usually follows is a series of questions about specific plays, specific players, rivalries, strategies, any number of coaching decisions he’s made that week. He answers in a deliberately guarded tone, stopping periodically to clear his throat. He’s never angry. He’s never rude. He’s never dishonest.

He just delivers one plain-spoken response after another, while doing his best to say nothing at all. And he’s done this several times a week, every week of the season, for more than 20 years.

Despite working under intense public scrutiny — a lot of people have a lot of thoughts about a lot of his decisions — the outside world knows close to nothing about the man. It’s not clear if Reid does anything outside of football except eat and sleep. And Patrick Mahomes often jokes that Reid doesn’t actually sleep.

There are legends about the long hours the coach spends at the office and tales about the way he fiendishly conceives hundreds of offensive plays a season — X’s and O’s, blocks and receiver routes. He draws them up on 5-by-7 notecards and sends them to his players and assistant coaches at all hours of the day. Regular “SportsCenter” viewers have also seen Reid show up to offseason events year after year wearing his bright Hawaiian shirts, even as all the other coaches don expensive suits.

He also mentions cheeseburgers all the time. As far back as his early days in Philadelphia, it’s just a thing he would work into conversations. Reid would sometimes end meetings by saying something along the lines of “Treat you to a cheeseburger!” He’ll sometimes playfully offer to bet with players over something like whether their opponents might start the game with a long pass. The wager is always the same: a cheeseburger.

He almost never gives extended interviews. Even before the public tragedies in his life, he didn’t allow much deep access. But, because he’s been an

NFL coach for so long, you can watch years of press conferences and read dozens of profiles. You can listen to old interviews and find clips of him at practices or in the locker room. And if you look deep enough, between all the intentionally sparing public statements, you’ll see snippets of something bigger. You’ll see glimpses of the real Big Red. He’s funny, gregarious, someone who learns not just the names of everyone in his organization, but the names of their family members. The theme that comes up most, though, is his obsession. The way this game has transfixed him so consistently for so long. It’s not the fame or the roar of the crowd or the way strangers love him with an almost religious devotion. What he really seems to love is the strategy involved in coaching, the chess-match aspects of football. He likes studying until he can figure out a team’s weakness, then he studies some more until he can figure out a way to exploit that weakness.

See, in movies and TV shows, a football coach’s job is to deliver rousing speeches that motivate his team to go out and win. But in the NFL, where players already receive millions of dollars of motivation, speech-giving is a tiny sliver of a coach’s job. Like the CEO of a big corporation, the head coach establishes the culture of a franchise, the energy, the attitude. The best coaches lead by example and spend countless hours preparing for each opponent, scouring game tapes for matchup advantages and weaknesses the way a trial attorney looks for legal loopholes and advantageous precedents. Between personnel research, draft decisions, offseason camps, training camp, and all those games to prepare for there’s always more to do.

In the NFL, the most valuable commodity a football coach has is the one thing Andy Reid happens to mention at every press conference: time.

And the people of Kansas City understand that their team’s head coach will always put in more of it than anyone else.

II

FOOTBALL WAS ALWAYS going to be his life. When they were kids,

Andy’s brother, Reggie, older by 10 years, collected books about camping and hiking. The first time Reggie came home from college, Andy had taken all of those books off the shelves in their room and replaced them with books about football and baseball.

Their family lived in a two-bedroom, stucco house with a tile roof in the Los Feliz part of Los Angeles. His mother was a radiologist with an analytical mind and a compassionate bedside manner. His father was a Hollywood set designer, an artist with an eye for detail. They were strict parents. If Andy didn’t, in his words, “take care of business,” his father, a World War II veteran, would spank him with a razor strap. The coach once told a reporter in Philadelphia that as a kid, he “tried to be smarter than that razor strap.”

He had a reputation as a trustworthy boy. His father got Andy a job with a Hollywood caterer, where he’d sometimes be in charge of things like the meatballs in a talk show green room. One time he had to tell John Wayne that no, he couldn’t have more than three meatballs.

The time he wasn’t working or in school was dedicated to sports. He’d play baseball and football with the neighborhood kids. He kept a scrapbook with L.A. Times stories about the Dodgers. He went to Reggie’s high JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 59

school football games, and then when his brother graduated, the younger Reid kept going. He’d sit in the grandstands, sometimes taking notes about plays, players, some basic strategies of the game.

Reid was also a natural athlete, a fact aided by his size. At 10, he was too big for any of the flag football belts. (They sewed two together.) By the time he was 12, Reid was something like 6 feet tall and weighed north of 200 pounds. He played quarterback in junior high and dominated local Punt, Pass and Kick contests.

One competition in 1971 was held at the Coliseum in Los Angeles and aired on Monday Night Football. The footage periodically resurfaces on the internet. Reid, who had to borrow a jersey from the Rams starting running back that night, is literally more than twice the size of the kid behind him in line for the throwing portion of the contest. He looks like he could be the boy’s father.

In high school, Reid was the baseball team’s starting pitcher and played both offensive and defensive line on the football team — and he was also the team’s place kicker. He’d dreamed of playing football at the University of Southern California, but he wasn’t good enough, so he played at a local community college with the same colors. After two years there, he had an offer from Stanford, but hurt his knee — he still has a deep scar visible when he wears shorts — and ended up on the offensive line at Brigham Young University instead.

Reid was one of the few Lutherans on campus. When he got to BYU he was a journalism major and contributed to the school paper, but he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life. Maybe he could be a doctor, like his mother? Or a sports writer? Then LaVell Edwards, the legendary head football coach at BYU, suggested a new career path to Reid: coaching.

At BYU, Andy Reid also met a woman named Tammy and fell in love.

Not long after that he asked to be baptized by her father into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. When a teammate asked him why, Reid told him, “I really believe for me this is the way.”

The couple was married in 1981, the same year Andy started work as a graduate assistant under Edwards. Over the next decade, as Reid worked his way up the coaching ranks, he and Tammy moved from BYU to San Francisco State, then Northern Arizona, then University of Texas El Paso, then Missouri. Everywhere they went, their social lives revolved around football and their own growing family. Their oldest, Garrett, was born in 1983, followed by Britt and three more kids.

In 1992, Reid was hired by Green Bay Packers head coach Mike Holmgren to be his tight ends coach. Within a few years, Reid was promoted to quarterbacks coach, working closely with future-Hall of Famer Brett Favre as the Packers went to back-to-back Super Bowls and Favre won three league MVP awards.

In 1999, Holmgren left the Packers and the Philadelphia Eagles hired Reid. At 40 years old, Reid was the second youngest head coach in the league. He’d never been a head coach at any level. But Andy Reid turned out to be very good at coaching. Good at recognizing and developing talent. Good at designing plays and figuring out a way to win more football games than he lost.

A lot more. When he took over the Eagles, they had one of the worst records in the league. In his third year with the team, they made it to the conference championship game — one win away from playing in the Super 60 DESERET MAGAZINE

Bowl. In fact, with Reid at the helm, Philadelphia made it to five conference games. They lost four of them. The one Super Bowl they made? They lost by three points to Bill Belichick, Tom Brady and the New England Patriots.

Imagine setting out every year with the same goal. Then coming close — sometimes really, really close! — but never achieving that goal. That’s what Andy Reid was known for after 14 years in Philadelphia. After more than two decades as a head coach, Reid had won more professional football games than all but five men in the history of the sport. But not the one game that matters most.

You’d think that might eat at him. You’d think the Sisyphean futility might eventually break him. But every year, he’d take a few days off at the end of the season. Then he’d be ready to do it all over again.

III THE STORIES ABOUT the insanely long hours he’d work started in Green Bay. Reid would wake up at 3 a.m., spend a few hours at the office, come back home to have breakfast with his kids, then head back to the office until deep into the night. Then when he got to Philadelphia, the breakfasts stopped. When the Eagles built a new training facility in 2001, they made sure Reid’s office was big enough to fit a bed. Some weeks he’d spend three or four nights there.

He tried to make it to as many of his son’s high school football games as possible, even if it meant coming late and only watching a few plays from the parking lot before going back to the office. Even on holidays, Reid couldn’t resist his work. One Christmas when Andy was still in Green Bay, Reggie came to visit. The Packers played a game that day, but after dinner Andy asked his brother if he wanted to go to the office with him to watch film of offensive linemen.

For years, the only thing the public saw was the coach’s mellow demeanor at press conferences and the intensity on display during games. The first hint to the outside world that all was not well in Reid’s home life came in early 2007, when both Garrett and Britt were arrested six hours apart after separate incidents. Garrett, 24 at the time, pleaded guilty to drug possession. Britt, who was 22, pleaded guilty to pointing a gun at someone.

Then, a few months later, Britt was arrested again after he appeared lost in the parking lot of a Dick’s Sporting Goods and police found more than 200 pills in his Dodge Ram. His blood reportedly tested positive for nine different controlled substances. A judge equated the Reid household to a “drug emporium” and called the Reids “a family in crisis.” Outside his court hearing, Britt was swarmed by reporters. Wearing a pinstripe suit and a red tie, he appeared gaunt. As he was being escorted back to jail for violating his probation, he looked into some of the TV news cameras, smiled and said, “Hi Mom and Dad.”

Andy Reid did something he’d never done before: He took time away from football. He asked the organization for a five-week leave of absence. The coach tried to understand addiction the way he understood football. When something goes wrong in a football game, you can look at the tape. You can see who made the mistake and you can correct it. But life isn’t like that.

Still, Reid wanted to know which approaches work best, which variables contribute to better outcomes. He wanted to plot his way to victory in this battle like he had so many times as a coach.

When none of that worked, Reid drove his oldest son to multiple detox facilities. After Reid went back to work the next month, he continued making weekly trips to the jail where both sons were serving their time. He also talked to a few coaching friends he knew had dealt with similar issues in their families. Mostly, though, he didn’t talk about his family’s struggles.

The next window into the Reid household came five years later, in 2012. One morning during the Eagles training camp that year, at Lehigh University, Garrett was found unresponsive in his room. Also in the room: heroin, syringes and a spoon. Garrett, nicknamed “Little Red,” was 29 by then and had been assisting the Eagles strength and conditioning staff. Things seemed to be going better. There were struggles, but most of the time he’d seemed happy, healthy. A team doctor tried to revive him, but Garrett was gone.

Nearly 1,000 people attended the funeral, more than the church could hold. Current and former players. Current and former assistant coaches.

People from throughout the Eagles organization. Friends and opponents from around the league, including Bill Belichick and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. All coming to give their condolences to Reid and his family.

People who were there say Reid spent much of the time consoling others.

He disappeared from public for a day, but then it was back to the business of football. He showed up to the regular press conference before the next preseason game. He walked to the podium in a black T-shirt and white Eagles hat. His mustache looked like it hadn’t been trimmed in days.

“All right,” he said as he looked out at the reporters assembled in front of him. “I’m a humble man standing before you.” He said he was touched by the outpouring of support from fans, members of the media, people all over what he called his “football family.” He stammered and his voice cracked a few times, but he never cried. He said that he’d miss the friendship he had with Garrett and that he knew his son would want him to go back to coaching. He thanked God for giving him what he called “the strength to work through this.”

The Eagles went 4-12 that season, the worst record of Reid’s career. He was fired on New Year’s Eve. Multiple teams sent private planes to Philadelphia to interview Reid for potential coaching positions. One was from the Kansas City Chiefs.

IV A MONTH BEFORE the Eagles fired Reid, a Chiefs linebacker named Jovan Belcher drove his Bentley to the team practice facilities, next to Arrowhead Stadium, and stepped out of the car with a gun pointed to his own temple. Belcher had just shot his 22-year-old girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins, nine times, killing her in the home they shared with their 3-month-old daughter.

Scott Pioli, the Chiefs general manager at the time, was just arriving for a Bible study. He tried to convince Belcher to drop the gun. Soon the team’s then-head coach Romeo Crennel was in the parking lot, too.

Belcher thanked both men for the opportunities they’d given him and asked if Chiefs owner Clark Hunt would look after his daughter. As the sound of sirens got closer, Belcher knelt on the ground and shot himself in the head.

The sports world was shocked, outraged. Columnists and commentators from coast to coast weighed in with opinions on everything from football and domestic violence to gun culture to the hidden dangers of concussions.

(A post-mortem of Belcher’s brain showed signs of CTE, a neurodegenerative disease triggered by head trauma and linked to dementia, memory loss and depression.)

The entire Chiefs organization was stunned. There weren’t many public statements because — well, what could anyone say? The Chiefs had long struggled on the field — the last time they’d won a playoff game was in the early 1990s, when Joe Montana was finishing his career in Kansas City — but the franchise had always tried to maintain a wholesome, family-friendly identity in the community. The team finished the season with the worst record in the league, then Hunt dismissed most of the front office and coaching staff.

All of this was just another blow to the people of Kansas City. Most of the 20th century was a slow bleed of people and money exiting the region.

The city was also slower than other parts of the country to recover after the Great Recession in 2008. Downtown has seen new developments in the last few years, but other parts of town haven’t been so fortunate.

Football can’t bring back factory jobs. It can’t find houses for families experiencing homelessness or feed the hungry. But it can bring a temporary reprieve from the stresses of life. It can unite strangers, if only for a moment. It can give an entire region a reason to feel proud.

The franchise was looking for someone who could help both the organization and the community heal. The meeting with Reid was scheduled for two or three hours. It lasted for nine. Hunt, whose father founded the franchise and coined the term “Super Bowl,” wanted to know if Reid was ready to coach again. Reid convinced him he was.

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that point. Football is his escape from the pains of life. It’s a world he can control. It’s a world that makes sense. So Reid canceled his other meetings, talked it over with Tammy and took the Chiefs job — and immediately started studying and scouting and plotting all over again.

Sports Illustrated reported Britt Reid saying that “taking a year off and sitting around thinking about something tragic” wouldn’t have been good for his father. And a longtime friend of Andy’s has been quoted saying he suspected the coach “feared the emptiness” of not coaching.

Here’s how the coach himself put it, in his very Andy Reid way: “It probably was a good healing process for me and for the Chiefs,” The Washington Post’s Kent Babb reported him saying. “They had gone through some things. I went through some things. It was a good match.”

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V

IN REID’S FIRST season coaching in Kansas City, the team started

9-0 and made the playoffs. Like his time in Philadelphia, Reid’s coaching tenure here has been defined by his ability to recognize and cultivate talented players and coaches. While he was with the Eagles, Reid had famously signed Michael Vick after the quarterback served 21 months in federal prison on dog fighting charges. But in Kansas City, the coach seemed even more dedicated to using football to provide second chances in life.

In 2013, he drafted tight end Travis Kelce, who’d been suspended at the University of Cincinnati after testing positive for marijuana. Within a few years, he became one of the best players in the NFL. Then in 2015, the team drafted cornerback Marcus Peters, who had been kicked off the University of Washington football team for fighting with his own coaches. A year after that, the Chiefs selected wide receiver Demarcus Robinson, who had been suspended four times at the University of Florida.

Then Reid drafted Tyreek Hill, a wide receiver who had been dismissed from the Oklahoma State team after he was arrested for domestic violence.

The Chiefs also traded for defensive end Frank Clark, who was dismissed from the University of Michigan football team — also for domestic violence.

Critics have suggested Reid was getting more desperate to win a Super Bowl, that he was filling his roster with talented criminals. Others understandably questioned the decision to bring in known domestic abusers only a few years after the Belcher incident.

But Reid’s players and closest friends see something different. They see a man who knows that doing bad things doesn’t always make someone a bad person. They see a man who believes people are worthy of redemption — and maybe football can help.

It doesn’t always work. The team traded away Peters and cut running back Kareem Hunt after video surfaced of him pushing and kicking a woman. But most of the so-called “problem players” Reid has brought in have thrived on the field and avoided trouble off of it.

He also seems to have changed his approach to work-life balance in at least a few small ways. He talks about the importance of family more. He says the word family more than he ever used to. The Chiefs training facility has signs up that say “ENTER AS A TEAM, LEAVE AS FAMILY.” He also makes time for his nine grandkids. His office often has toys on the floor. He even takes a few hours off work every so often to go to dance recitals and school basketball games. It’s not a lot of time away, but in a job where any minute of preparation could be the difference between success and failure, it’s something.

Reid hasn’t just used his time in Kansas City to give second chances to players with problematic pasts, either. He’s done the same thing with coaches. The Chiefs linebackers coach, for example, spent time in jail on gun and drug charges. But he served his time and worked his way up from a low-level assistant job. That coach’s name? Britt Reid.

Last year Andy Reid was asked about his relationship with Britt, who wears a red beard reminiscent of his father’s mustache.

“I’m probably too hard on Britt,” the elder Reid said. “But that probably comes with the territory when you’re the coach’s kid. I’m proud of him for the job that he’s done.”

While some things changed when the Reids moved to Kansas City, some things didn’t. Andy Reid has had a winning record every season he’s been with the Chiefs, but his streak of painful playoff losses followed him from Philadelphia. At the end of the 2013 season, the Chiefs lost 45-44 in a devastating shootout to the Indianapolis Colts. At the end of the 2015 season, Reid led the Chiefs to the franchise’s first playoff win in 22 years, but then lost the next week to the New England Patriots. In the 2016 playoffs, the Chiefs lost to the Steelers 18-16. The year after that Reid lost to the Titans 22-21.

In the 2017 draft, the Chiefs traded up to select Patrick Mahomes II from Texas Tech. Mahomes, the son of a professional baseball player,

seemed to have a special mix of raw physical talent, mental acuity, and the natural ability to lead. In all his time strategizing and scheming, Reid had never had a chess piece like this.

Mahomes was a backup in his first season, watching from the sidelines to learn all the subtle things about being a professional quarterback. In his first year as Reid’s starting quarterback, Mahomes led the league in touchdown passes, won the NFL MVP and brought the Chiefs to the conference championship game, one win away from the Super Bowl. Again Reid’s team faced the Patriots. This time, as the fourth quarter wound down, the Chiefs intercepted Brady to seal the victory — except an off-sides penalty negated the interception and gave Brady a second chance. The Patriots went on to tie the game, then win in overtime.

In replays of the interception-called-back, Chiefs defensive end Dee Ford had lined up 4 inches past the line of scrimmage. Four inches was the difference between going to the Super Bowl and going home to wait another year.

Reid has watched supportively as his former colleagues and assistants — guys who got started as his interns — became head coaches and won Super Bowl rings before him. Comments about how he could never win the games that mattered most didn’t seem to bother Reid. Even in the losses, he’s learned, there’s something positive.

VI

ALL OF THOSE PAINFUL positive lessons over the years finally paid off. At the end of the 2019 season, Andy Reid got his second chance to coach in a Super Bowl. On the team’s flight to Miami, Reid wore a suit and a Chiefs-red tie. His players, though, all wore aloha shirts to honor their coach. At one of the media events, Reid was asked about spending time with his grandkids. He smiled.

“They keep you young,” he said, “and at the same time make you feel old.”

Then he might have meant to describe that paradox as “bittersweet.”

But that’s not what the coach said. Instead, in his Andy Reid way, he went on to say, “It’s kind of like sweet and sour pork.”

On their first possession of the game, the Chiefs pushed deep into enemy territory before facing a fourth down on the 49ers 6-yard line. Most coaches probably would have kicked a field goal in that spot. But not Andy Reid. Instead, he called a play that involved Mahomes and three other players in the backfield twirling in unison in the same direction before the snap. The ball went directly to the running back, Damien Williams, who picked up the first down and was called down just short of the end zone.

Mahomes ran the ball in for a touchdown on the next play, but that crazy twirling play — apparently inspired by something Reid found in old footage of the 1948 Rose Bowl — will feature on highlight reels for decades. continues on page 78 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 63

The Case for Wooden Pews – Why hard Religion is more Important than E ver –

by Yuval Levin

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we are living in an era of unprecedented doubt. While belief in God remains high, public confidence in religious institutions is at its lowest since routine polling on the question began. In 1975, Gallup found that nearly 70% of Americans expressed either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in organized religion. By last year, that figure stood at just 42%. Regular church attendance is also near a modern nadir. Even before COVID-19, the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Americans who report attending a religious service at least once a month fell over the past decade from 52% to about 42%.

Of course, not everything is trending downward. For example, the percentage of highly religious Americans, according to a 2017 study from sociologists at Harvard and Indiana University, has remained relatively constant. And the most religious in America appear to be engaging in their faith with continued intensity.

Speaking to The Washington Post, one of the researchers compared this phenomenon to a “container getting smaller, but more concentrated.”

So what is happening with religion in America?

The answer, at least in part, may have to do with how different faith communities have reacted to this crisis of trust in organized religion.

Some leaders and institutions have responded by making their religious orders less demanding and therefore (they hope) more appealing. By emphasizing broad commitments to justice and deemphasizing specific strictures on personal behavior, they hope to draw more people to church, and ultimately into faith. On some level, this seems intuitive. Softer pews might make people more comfortable in the congregation.

The logic of such a response is not hard to understand. The demands of traditional religion seem at odds with the spirit of the age. Potential parishioners, particularly younger ones, are opting for a culture of choice and expression over one of faith and obedience. So, the thinking goes, closing the distance between the two can draw them in.

The broken state of our society seems to lend support to that logic.

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and cultural conflict is in many respects a crisis of meaning. That loss may be the result of a religious hunger left unsated by a society without a traditional vocabulary of sin or redemption. The very forms of our conflicts over race, sexuality and the meaning of our history are an indication of such hunger — we need only witness the accusations of wickedness, calls for redemptive deliverance, persecutions of heretics and demands for purification.

The “great awokening” sweeping some of our elite institutions hints at an opening. Showing younger Americans that our country’s religious traditions stand for social justice, too, as they surely do, might help clear the path to such an awakening.

But this logic mistakes the character of the crisis American religion now confronts. It is not exactly a crisis of belief in the teachings of traditional religion, but rather a crisis of confidence in the institutions that claim to embody them. In other words, Americans aren’t losing their faith in God. Eighty-seven percent of the public expressed belief in God last year in Gallup’s figures, which is roughly the level pollsters have found for many decades. What Americans do have trouble believing, however, is that our institutions — our churches, seminaries, religious schools and charities — remain capable of forming trustworthy people who actually exhibit the integrity they preach.

To overcome such doubts, and to appeal to persuadable younger Americans, our religious institutions need to show not that they are continuous with the larger culture but that they are capable of addressing its deficiencies — that they can speak with legitimate authority and be counted on to do the work of molding souls and shaping character. The problem, in other words, may be that our pews have grown too soft, not too hard. to grasp the nature of this problem, it is useful to see the decline of trust in organized religion in the context of a larger collapse of confidence in our society’s core institutions. Here, too, the numbers are stark.

Gallup has kept track of Americans’ confidence in various institutions for decades — in most cases from 1973 until today. The trend is

unmistakable. From “big business,” the branches of the federal government, the news media and even the medical system, confidence in our institutions has fallen. There have been modest moments of recovery, but in most cases, the decline through the 1970s and ’80s was gradual at first, growing a little steeper in the 1990s and accelerating further in the past two decades.

In the mid-1970s, 80% of Americans told Gallup they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the medical system, for instance.

In 2020, the figure was nearly 30% lower. Sixty two percent, meanwhile, expressed confidence in public schools back then — last year, it was 41%. Even those figures, however, are likely higher than normal as Americans have rallied around beleaguered health care workers and teachers on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2019, for example, the same confidence figures for public schools and the medical system were at 29% and 36%, respectively.

In 1975, a year after Richard Nixon’s resignation in disgrace, 52% of Americans expressed confidence in the presidency — in 2020, only 39% of Americans did. This pattern holds for nearly all the institutions Gallup has asked about. Just one institution — the military — is significantly more trusted today than in the 1970s (claiming the confidence of 72% of the public in 2020, compared to 58% in 1975). The American people have gone from extraordinary levels of confidence in our major institutions to striking levels of mistrust.

Part of the reason for this pattern is surely that Americans’ faith in institutions was unusually high in the middle part of the 20th century.

Emerging from decades of social, cultural and political consolidation and the searing experiences of depression and war, Americans in the 1950s and early 1960s had extraordinary confidence in the large institutions that dominated the life of the nation, and some of the subsequent decline in trust was a kind of normalization. But that doesn’t explain the increasing intensity of that decline, or its acceleration in this century. Something more has been happening.

If we were to look at one institution or another on its own, it might

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be easy to come up with plausible explanations. Some specific scandal, failure or controversy could probably help justify each case, including those of some of our religious institutions. But to see that nearly all American institutions have been losing the public’s trust at the same time is to recognize that deeper forces are at play, and that what has been happening might be best understood as a shift in how we think about institutions more generally.

Institutions are perhaps best understood as the durable forms of our common life: They are the shapes and structures of what we do together. Each involves a group of people organized around a common aim and taking action together toward achieving it in ways that give each person a role in relation to others.

Each core institution of our society thus performs an important task — educating children, enforcing the law, serving the poor, providing some service, meeting some need. And it does that by establishing a structure and process, a form, for combining efforts toward accomplishing that task. But as it does so, each institution also forms the people within it to carry out that task. It shapes behavior and character. That’s why we trust the institution and the people who compose it.

We trust political institutions when they undertake a solemn obligation to the public interest and shape the people who populate them to do the same. We trust a business because it promises quality and reliability and rewards its workers when they deliver those.

We trust the military because it values courage, honor and duty in carrying out the defense of the nation and forms human beings who do, too.

We lose faith in an institution when we no longer believe it plays this ethical or formative role of teaching the people within it to be trustworthy. This can happen through simple corruption, when an institution’s attempts to be formative fail to overcome the vices of the people within it, and it instead masks their treachery — as when a bank

cheats its customers, or a member of the clergy abuses a child.

That kind of abuse of power obviously undermines trust in institutions. It is common in our time as in every time. But for that very reason, it doesn’t really explain the exceptional collapse of trust in American institutions in recent decades.

What stands out about our era is a distinct kind of institutional dereliction — a failure even to attempt to form trustworthy people, and a tendency to think of institutions not as molds of character and behavior but as platforms for performance and prominence.

In one arena after another, we find people who should be formed by institutions acting like the institutions are simply podiums from which to preach. Many members of Congress, for example, now use their positions not to advance legislation but to elevate themselves, raise their profiles and perform for the cameras in the reality show of our unceasing culture war.

The same pattern is rampant in the elite professional world. Check in on Twitter right now, and you’ll find countless journalists, for instance, leveraging the hard-earned reputations of the institutions they work for to build their personal brands outside of those institutions’ structures of editing and verification — leaving the public unsure of just why reporters should be trusted. Public health experts who put political expression above professional rigor in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic (for instance telling the public that protests for racial justice are safe but funerals for beloved family members are not) have similarly undermined the public’s trust in their profession. The same too often happens in the sciences, in law and in other professions meant to offer expertise.

The few exceptions to the pattern of declining confidence in institutions tend to prove this rule.

The military is the most conspicuous exception and also the most unabashedly formative of our national institutions — molding men and women who clearly take a standard of behavior and responsibility seriously.

But our religious institutions have too rarely been exceptions. In many prominent establishments of American religion today we find institutions intended to change hearts and save souls used instead as stages for political theater — not so much forming those within as giving them an outlet. This has made religious institutions harder to trust, and it has also made it more difficult for them to effectively perform their crucial educational, civic, social and charitable functions.

But most important, it has made it difficult for them to speak with authority about the truth. our religious institutions are most important not for reasons of civic utility, such as running soup kitchens or cleaning up after natural disasters. No, their highest function is offering us access to the fullest truth about our world. The great variety of religious convictions in our diverse society means that our ecosystem of sects and churches is variegated, too. For its believers, though, each faith serves the highest purpose. To find the worldly forms of our faiths sheared by the same hurricane winds that have done so much harm to our secular institutions is therefore to appreciate the depth of the problem we face.

But it is also to perceive the possibility of real solutions. If the widespread loss of confidence in our institutions is a function of their loss of focus and purpose — of their becoming mere platforms for performance — then a recovery of that trust would have to begin with a recovery of institutional purpose and commitment.

All of us have roles to play in some institutions we care about, be they familial or communal, educational or professional. Rebuilding trust in those institutions will require the people within them — that is, each of us — to be more trustworthy. And that must mean, in part, letting the distinct integrities and purposes of these institutions shape us, rather than just using them as stages from which to be seen and heard.

As a practical matter, this can mean forcing ourselves, in little moments of decision, to ask the great unasked question of our time: JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 69

SECTION

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“Given my role here, how should I behave?” That’s what people who take an institution they’re involved with seriously would ask.

“As a president or a member of Congress, a teacher or a scientist, a lawyer or a doctor, a pastor or a congregant, a parent or a neighbor, what should I do here?”

The people we most respect these days seem to ask that kind of question before they make important judgments. And the people who drive us crazy, who we think are part of the problem, are often those who clearly fail to ask it when they should.

Asking such questions of ourselves would be a first step toward grasping our responsibilities, recovering the great diversity of interlocking purposes that our institutions ought to serve, and constraining elites and people in power so that the larger society can better trust them. It would not be a substitute for institutional reforms but a prerequisite for them.

And asking such questions is one thing we all can do to take on the complicated social crisis we are living through and begin to rebuild the bonds of trust essential for a free society.

This is why religious institutions are especially crucial to addressing the problems we face. A recovery of institutional responsibility throughout our society would need to involve a kind of devotion, even submission, to institutional formation. And this broader shift is most likely to emerge among those who experience religious formation. A recovery of community begins with modeling the kind of community life shared by those with common religious convictions.

Such communities offer a way out of the endless combat of our culture war. The fact is that an attractive community, which provides a venue for genuine flourishing, can change minds far better than an argument can. A way of life can be persuasive, even when we seem unable to persuade each other of much. But such community life requires healthy institu-

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tions that attract our loyalty and devotion, and can make real demands on us. this is the ironic truth at the heart of America’s social crisis: We have become disillusioned and alienated from our institutions not because they are too demanding but because they are not demanding enough. We want to be called to acts of devotion, not just affirmed in acts of expression.

Our religious institutions are best positioned to make such demands, since they speak for a truth that stands outside the expressive individualism that has come to dominate our culture.

Yet it is precisely for their capacity to build morally cohesive and formative communities that our religious institutions have become increasingly controversial in contemporary America. The question at the heart of some of our most divisive cultural conflicts has been whether institutions that embody the religious convictions of their members, leaders or owners will be permitted to embody those convictions when they are not shared by our society’s cultural elites. Whether it’s a Latter-day Saint college, a Lutheran hospital, a Catholic adoption agency, a Jewish social service organization, an evangelical-owned businesses or countless other institutions moved by a religious mission, the all-pervasive culture war now threatens the integrity of these essential forms of association, just when that integrity is most badly needed.

It should not surprise religious traditionalists that efforts to embody their beliefs in communal practices and institutional forms would be controversial in our time. But they should not take that fact as a reason to back down, or to soften the demands of their faith. Yes, those demands are why certain acolytes of self-expression find religion so threatening, but they are also why many yearning for meaning might actually come to find faith appealing again.

Observers of modern democracy since Alexis de Tocqueville have noted that in free societies

it is precisely the moral and religious institutions that hold firm to orthodoxy, and not those that seek modernization and accommodation, which have proven most attractive — thanks in no small part to their countercultural character. In our time, no less than any other, traditionalists should live out their faiths and their ways in the world, confident that their instruction and example will make that world better and that people will be drawn to the spark. In an era of declining confidence in mass institutions, we are more than ever in need of institutions of interpersonal moral formation.

Both the libertarian and the progressive ideals of freedom assume a human person already fully formed, requiring only liberation from oppression of various sorts to be free. But our traditions have always opposed this vision with a more skeptical view, which assumes that the human person is imperfect and unformed — perhaps even fallen. This other ideal comes loaded with low expectations of the individual, but it therefore demands a lot of our institutions.

It assumes that each of us is born deficient but capable of moral improvement which happens soul by soul guided by pro-social communities. This process cannot be entirely circumvented by social or political transformation.

Building individual character and virtue, then, is the foremost work of every generation. To fail to engage in it is to regress to barbarism. And to engage in it is our highest purpose. In different terms, by different means, this is what all of our traditional religions teach. It is by advancing this idea that we can best meet the rising generation’s hunger for meaning and truth. But a recovery of trust in our religious institutions first requires a recovery of confidence on their part as well. Put a different way, our ability to pass along the teachings of the great faith traditions to another generation, and to sustain the preconditions for a free society, demands the kind of pews that help us sit upright.

PORTION S OF THIS ESSAY WERE A DA PT ED F ROM YUVA L LEVIN ’S BOOK , “A T I ME TO B UI L D.”

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 73

PURSUITS

BACKSTAGE

AT THE

BACHELOR

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straightened out my silver dress at the Four Seasons resort, cognizant of cameras perched on ladders and strategically placed uplighting.

Six million people were about to witness this wedding on live television. It was 2014, and I was in a Santa Barbara audience chock full of reality TV stars. Some were teetering on gravity-defying heels; at least one was sporting a miniature dog in a purse. As a ghostwriter, I’ve been on a Romney presidential campaign bus, a Trump presidential campaign plane, the set of “Dancing With the Stars,” at 30 Rock, Fox studios, an Olympic gymnastics training center, and — now — at a rare “Bachelor” wedding.

I was preparing to help former bachelor Sean Lowe write a memoir, which became “For the Right Reasons: America’s Favorite Bachelor on Faith, Love, Marriage, and Why Nice Guys Finish First.” I spied many of the show’s favorites in the audience — host Chris Harrison, Trista and Ryan Sutter, Molly and Jason Mesnick — as we watched Sean walk his mom down the aisle. This was my first wedding segmented by commercial breaks.

When the bride-to-be (and Season 17 winner) Catherine Giudici appeared, Sean’s eyes filled with tears. The audience rose, then something unexpected happened. The musical duo 2Cellos didn’t begin playing the traditional “Wedding March” or Pachelbel’s Canon in D. Evidently, amid the chaos of wedding planning, Sean and Catherine forgot to select a song. So 2Cellos called an audible — they played Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature.”

It was an interesting choice. The song is about being unable to control carnal desire, the opposite of Sean and Catherine’s relationship philosophy. If you watched Sean’s season of “The Bachelor,” then you’ve heard — a few thousand times — the nickname “The Virgin Bachelor.” At age 24, Sean had committed to save sex for marriage.

He used the “overnight dates” to get to know the women instead of de facto honeymoon auditions.

After his proposal, people couldn’t understand — or believe — the couple’s decision to wait 16 months between the proposal and the wedding.

When they gamely took a lie detector test on a late-night show (and passed with flying colors), 74 DESERET MAGAZINE

Jimmy Kimmel remarked, “I’m proud and disappointed at the same time.”

But tonight was the night. In her personal vows, Catherine said with emotion, “Sometimes I think I’m going to explode from how much I love you. ... And tonight, we get to become one.”

The producers were ecstatic about the wedding, since successful “Bachelor” unions don’t frequently occur. In fact, Sean is the only “Bachelor” to have married the woman to whom he proposed on the show. This month, Matt James — a real estate broker — is trying to find true love in the show’s 25th season.

It’s been six years since Sean and Catherine’s wedding ceremony. They’re still together, and they’re the proud parents of three children. It’s the unusual success story for a show built on the promise of fairy tale endings and why so many of us keep coming back season after season. But the payoff is rare, and the show itself is often an impediment to love lasting beyond 10 episodes. The show’s rose ceremonies, it turns out, may actually hinder the likelihood of ring ceremonies.

Having written about “The Bachelor” at length (and watched more seasons than I care to admit), I’ve seen a pattern of obstacles that the participants must overcome to find true love.

The challenge starts with the show’s timeline and competition, but it also extends to a franchise-wide culture of prioritizing hothouse drama, sensuous jacuzzi scenes and, during “The Bachelorette’s” last season, a strip dodgeball game. Mirroring broader cultural trends, intimate matters like faith, values and family are too often left on the cutting room floor.

• I • the scene is the same every season, and it’s always unbearably awkward: roughly 25 women exit a series of limos, full of Botox, lip injections and high hopes. The producers encourage the women to make a good impression, which results in many ill-advised gimmicks. Who wants to be known as the woman who needed an “emotional support cow” as happened in Season 24, or as

the cadaver tissue saleswoman who brought in a slimy, fake heart in Season 19?

These strategies are necessary — there are more than two dozen female contestants each season. And a person’s natural charm simply can’t unfold organically over the course of eight weeks when everyone is jockeying for attention.

Perhaps you could find true love in that environment, but could you do it while being filmed — or while your potential spouse dates 24 other people? That’s a lot to pack into a few months.

Jason and Molly Mesnick admitted they fell in love after the show, not on it.

Yet, the girls (and the guys) try. They vie desperately for attention, attempting to share something special on that first, tipsy evening.

Plenty of drinks meet the arrivals, and the show doesn’t reveal that these opening evenings actually stretch for hours. Participants, new to the whole phenomenon, usually don’t know to pace themselves as the show films all the arrivals, gawky greetings and confessionals. Presumably the resulting train wreck makes for good TV. The rose ceremony itself seems to last for about five minutes, but it takes a long time to actually film. When Sean’s first rose ceremony was finally over at 6 a.m., the host Chris Harrison made everyone breakfast burritos.

The highly packed environment reduces everyone to a walking elevator pitch, as they try to relay their relevant life information as quickly as possible. Conversations are squished into small moments, like Cinderella’s stepsisters trying on a glass slipper.

These brief chats are essential, since oneon-one dates are so few and far between. Ever notice no one really eats on those dimly lit romantic dates? That’s because the producers send food to the participants’ hotel rooms first, so they don’t slurp their meals on camera while wearing the super-sensitive microphones. This is not an easy environment in which to make a permanent, life-changing decision. And it even becomes harder when the kind of conversations that matter most when thinking about marriage — including personal values — are typically ushered away from cameras, if they occur at all.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 75

•I I • marriage counselors aren’t shy about getting on the same page about topics like faith and values before tying the knot. Religion, however, is almost never brought up seriously on the show unless it’s a matter of contention. And this is true even when the participants themselves are overtly religious. In 2010, Jake Pavelka was nominated to be the “Bachelor” by members of his Methodist church who were tired of the drinking and sex of previous seasons. When asked, “What is the most important thing in your life?” Jake answered, “God.” When asked for his definition of love, he quoted scripture.

That’s the most play his faith got.

Season 8’s bachelorette Emily Maynard didn’t announce herself as Christian, but viewers picked up clues: she prayed before deciding to go on the show, purchased a crucifix in one episode, and mentioned a mission trip. She also said she wouldn’t have a sensuous Jacuzzi scene or cohabitate prior to tying the knot. One of her suitors — Jef Holm — had Latter-day Saint parents.

However, their faith was essentially blurred out of the show like a wardrobe malfunction. During the hometown visit, Jef ’s parents were described as “away doing charity work” (they were mission presidents in South Carolina for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). Emily actually later confessed to being attracted to Jef ’s knowledge of scripture and even considered converting to the church, though none of this was on the show. In the end, it didn’t seem that this kind of faith exploration and journey was given the space that personal religious discovery deserves.

Other Latter-day Saint participants have been on the show, but with the rare exception their faith has been discernible only from their Utah addresses or short bios on the show’s website. Independently produced internet spinoff shows called “The Mormon Bachelor” and “The Mormon Bachelorette” have popped up attempting to create marriages, without the alcohol, sex and drama of their ABC counterparts.

After various copyright violations, a handful of cringeworthy seasons, and some laudatory success in producing marriages, those shows ceased only to give way to an admittedly less serious iteration called “Provo’s Most Eligible.”

During Season 15 of ABC’s “The Bachelorette,” faith spilled out into the open, but rather than a nuanced portrayal, the show’s narrative became a subtle manifesto against “outdated” religious ideology. Bachelorette Hannah Brown initially bonded with the “good Christian boy from Gainesville, Georgia” Luke Parker over their shared spirituality. But, after a hometown visit to Luke’s pre-church Sunday School, the storyline shifted to how his faith principles were 76 DESERET MAGAZINE

too controlling. This caused Hannah to declare, “I have had sex ... and Jesus still loves me.” The confrontation seemed ginned up for cameras — devoid of any respectful discussion of differing religious convictions.

In Sean’s season — the one whose wedding I attended — the show never tied his decision to wait until marriage for sex to his religious convictions. When his season came down to two women — Catherine and Lindsay Yenter — most assumed he’d select the latter since she ostensibly shared the same faith. However, going into the finale in Thailand, he still hadn’t made up his mind.

The viewers at home didn’t see Sean’s latenight request to see Catherine in her hotel room to discuss her receptivity to Christianity, a factor he wanted to determine before proposing the next day. The producers stood by their iron-clad “no interaction off camera” rule. The whole series is geared to catch the surprised joy of the woman’s face when the bachelor drops to one knee. Millions of dollars are invested to capture that one, romantic shot. They weren’t about to let Sean accidentally spoil the surprise because of Jesus.

Yet, he persisted. He believed God was the highest expression of love and our search for a semblance of that on earth reflects something mysterious and important of that divine quality.

So, the producers escorted Sean to Catherine’s hotel room and pressed their ears to the door to make sure no secrets were shared. But Sean didn’t reveal that he’d propose to Catherine the following day. All the nervous producers probably heard was sincere talk about faith, about the values that make for real, lasting intimacy.

•I I I • the first season of “The Bachelor” debuted in 2002 — the same year Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped and Kelly Clarkson won the original “American Idol.” In the ensuing 19 years, much has happened in the culture, especially in the world of relationships. Recently, the rise of the #MeToo movement caused us to take more seriously the problems arising from radical power imbalances in relationships. When it comes to the dynamic of “The Bachelor,” one can’t help but raise these questions.

This, of course, is true by design, which is why feminists have to let their ideology take a back seat to their enjoyment of the drama. In a Vogue article trying to get to the bottom of why feminists watch, Huffington Post editor Emma Gray said, “‘The Bachelor’ is something that we can sink our teeth into as engaged feminists. It taps into all of these really base and often regressive ideas our society has about how love and sex and courtship should look. That makes it really ripe territory to analyze from a socio-

logical perspective.”

Maybe. But isn’t it just fun to see people fall in love?

When Matt James (this season’s bachelor) was announced on “Good Morning America,” the host told James, “It’s … a guilty pleasure we’re not supposed to take seriously in the grand scheme of things.” He’s partly correct: Many viewers seem to watch it ironically — as a part of a social phenomenon that includes viewing parties and hashtags and water cooler conversations.

This posture seeps into the show itself. Very rarely do the bachelors or the bachelorettes come on the show “for the right reasons.” Frequently, the men’s applications are sent in by others (as in the cases of Pavlenka, Lowe and more) which creates a sort of passive, let’s-travel-to-exotic-locations-and-see-what-happens vibe.

That’s hard to balance with participants who had to take off time from work for an undetermined period, leave children in the care of others, or buy all of their own clothing.

They also have to do their own hair and makeup. But there’s a pressure to play down the importance of the show and the occupational and financial sacrifices, especially for the women. It’s considered unattractive to go on the marriage show if someone is too “into” getting married. This means when there’s conflict in the house, usually the participant who cares too much is sent home.

In Season 24, Kelsey Weier left the show before her rival, and the eventual winner, Hannah Ann Sluss. And yet, it was Kelsey who brought an expensive bottle of champagne to share with bachelor Peter Weber, and it was Hannah who mistakenly opened it before Kelsey ever got the chance to. Really, who would bring such an expensive gift to share with a stranger? And who would make a fuss that it was opened? Have some self-respect, right? There’s a fine line between desire and dignity, it seems. We tend to secretly walk that line like a tightrope, teetering above our deepest longings while acting like we’re on a casual stroll.

“We are not as cynical as we pretend to be,” writer Roxane Gay observed in The New York Times. “The real shame of ‘The Bachelor’ and ‘The Bachelorette,’ of the absurd theater of romantic comedies, of the sweeping passion of romance novels, is that they know where we are most tender and they aim right for that place.”

And so, we gather around the electronic hearth and mock others for their desire to seek love while our hearts are actually tugged and our hopes elevated beyond what is reasonable for highly orchestrated dates on a reality show.

The truth is that our deepest desires won’t be satisfied by romance alone — our own or that of a stranger on TV. Maybe when 2Cellos began playing that Michael Jackson song, it was both

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VII Continued from page 76:

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more — and less — subversive than I thought.

The show, after all, thrives on our most natural human longing for true, genuine — even godly — love. It’s the song we all hum. But just as the beautiful food arranged on the plates is for show, we know what we’re watching isn’t aimed to sate us. Designed for an enduring transcendent love, too many of us find ourselves famished for it.

And that’s enough to propel us back to the table week after week, season after season, year after year — in the hopes of catching a taste of the real thing.

As the final seconds ticked down, players and coaches started hugging Reid. They all knew how long he’d climbed to get to this point and most seemed happier for the coach than they were for themselves.

Then the confetti fell and the football field devolved into a throbbing swarm of humanity: players and coaches from both teams shaking hands, family members dancing with their arms in the air, media people everywhere. At some point, Andy Reid’s cap got knocked from his head. There, standing next to the coach, ready to pick up the cap and place it gently back on his head was Britt.

At the postgame press conference Reid said he was happy for the Hunt family. He said he was happy for Kansas City. He said was proud of his team and the way everyone kept their poise when they were down. Someone asked him what he was going to do to celebrate. He said he was going to have a double cheeseburger, extra cheese.

Reid said he was “very excited” about finally getting the win that had eluded him, but from watching him, it was hard to know. Sure, his face was red from the laughing and the hugs, but every time someone asked him how he felt, he said he was happy for all the people around him. Mostly, he seemed like the same subdued guy he’d always been. Patrick Mahomes joked that night that he expected Reid to take exactly three days off before he’s back in the office, studying film.

A few weeks later Reid was interviewed by NFL Films for a short documentary about the team’s amazing season. He wore a Hawaiian shirt, of course. The producers asked him again how he felt. Reid rocked back and forth a bit in his seat.

“I know this is corny,” he said. “But I enjoy every moment I have a chance to coach in the NFL.”

Continued from page 16:

my kids and myself. I can actually hear the birds chirping. In New York, there were so many days where I’d be rushing to work, checking Twitter, calling the nanny, studying up for the show and just running on that treadmill. Birds never crossed my mind.

About what’s most important:

The coronavirus put everything into perspective.

Now, we are so thankful for health. Family and health are more important than any job. While this year has been the hardest of our lives, it has also been the most fulfilling.

this interview has been edited for length and clarity.

78 DESERET MAGAZINE

back in the power and Light District, nobody is nervous about the Panthers game. At one point, the Chiefs score on a play that has Mahomes running back and forth behind the offensive line before the ball is snapped — the kind of play that will appear over and over on highlight shows this week. Kansas City comes from behind and wins the game.

Reid walks off the field a winner. And all the people gathered to watch the game downtown pour into the streets feeling like jubilant winners. This is why they have the stickers and the cookies and the prayer candles. Because they believe in Andy Reid the coach, but they also believe in Andy Reid the man.

As they leave the Power and Light District, dozens of fans walk past the mural of the players and head coach. Amid the elation of the victory, most people don’t stop or even look at the painting. Some groups stop long enough to pose for social media-ready photos in front of it.

Others do something else. Something more subtle. As they pass by, some people reach out gently and tap the painted brick wall. Like a brief homage. They don’t touch the face of the star quarterback, though. Or the veteran tight end.

No, one person after another reaches out and puts a hand under the image of Andy Reid.

Deseret Magazine is published ten times a year by Deseret News Publishing Company, with double issues in January/February and July/August. The Deseret News principal office is 55 N. 300 West, Suite 500, Salt Lake City, Utah. Subscriptions are $29 a year. To subscribe visit pages.deseret.com/ subscribe. Copyright 2021 Deseret News Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA.

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THE LAST WORD

OUR HISTORY IS OUR PRESENT A CONVERSATION WITH THE REV. AMOS C. BROWN

BY LOIS M. COLLINS

T

he Rev. Amos C. Brown is an icon of the American civil rights movement. As a young man he was arrested alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at a lunch counter sit-in and belonged to the Freedom Riders, a group of activists who took bus trips through the South in 1961 to protest segregation. Last year, Brown signed a joint op-ed with President Russell M. Nelson of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who Brown has called “a brother from another mother and a brother from another faith tradition,” calling for “racial harmony” in the wake of the George Floyd killing and protests across the nation. Brown has been a pastor of San Francisco’s Third Baptist Church since 1976 and has served as chairman of religious affairs for the NAACP. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Our nation is so divided right now, what can we do to find common ground with those who see the world differently than we do?

We need to seek engagement and social justice. The world would be a better place if we just follow the original tenets, teachings and examples of Jesus of Nazareth. That’s what I learned in Mississippi. My parents knew that and that is the basis of everything I have done. Dr. King was no politician. He was a prophetic preacher who took the ethic of Jesus and connected it with the high-sounding principles of this nation. It comes down to following Jesus. Only Jesus. If we would only follow Jesus, we would not be in this situation.

What did you learn from Dr. King about standing for principle while

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still seeking goodwill and cooperation with those who see the world differently, and may even oppose the cause you’re engaged in?

The notion of personalism. It’s the idea that every human being is a per-

son created in the image of God. And that regardless of how different they may be, they should be respected.

Earlier this year you joined with leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to call on parents and families to be the first line of defense against hate and prejudice and discrimination. Why does it start with the family, in your opinion?

Because we are fashioned on the basis of what we meet in that nuclear

family setting. Family is that primary network in which children begin to learn and to model those principles and ethical girds. The goals are the making of beloved community. That’s it. Tennyson said in Ulysses, “I am a part of all that I have met.” I am. I am a part of all that I have met. We become who we are based on our meetings in life.

It’s very unfortunate that too many children, too many persons in the early developmental stages of life meet hate, meet racist, biased attitudes. So if you want a better society, start with family and with the spiritual family.

You’ve had a very challenging, interesting and rewarding life. Is there a moment that stands out for you as especially difficult or that was a learning moment?

I would say when I saw a magazine cover of the mutilated head of Em-

mett Till. That really shook me. And when I ran to Mr. Medgar Evers, who was the newly appointed field director of the NAACP and told him how PORTRAIT BY RANDY GLASS

upset I was over what these two white men did to Emmett Till, who was the same age as I was. And this gentleman told me, “Don’t just be angry or upset, let’s be smart and strategic.”

That was a defining moment for me. And I organized the first NAACP youth council in the state of Mississippi in 1955. And then Mr. Evers brought me to San Francisco to the national convention and I was at that meeting in 1956. Last week of June, first of July where I first met Dr. Martin Luther King here in San Francisco. He spoke for Youth Night, that Wednesday night.

I will never forget that moment when he ended his speech with the words “I have a dream that the day will come when all of God’s children from bass black to treble white will be significant on the Constitution’s keyboard.”

What have you learned as a pastor in a very vibrant, diverse city about the role of faith and churches in pushing for change? What made you the effective pastor you are today?

I am a truth teller. A truth follower with respect and love. And I have

always sought to be an instrument for community and bringing people together. E pluribus unum. One out of many. To get harmony — the best blends of great music have different notes that make an octave, a chord, a symphony of great music.

I am imperfect, but I always tried to be on the side of showing my works.

Jesus’s brother James said that faith without works is dead and I’ve tried to keep that tension and to be balanced in my thinking, balanced in my spirituality. It takes two wings for a bird to fly and two wings for an airplane to stay in the air. They need balance.

Is there a verse of scripture that speaks to you the most?

I think there are two of them. Micah 6:8: “What does the Lord require of the man or woman but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”

And then naturally the book of Amos, it was also Dr. King’s favorite scripture.

“That justice roll down like waters and righteousness in an ever-flowing stream.” Amos 5:24. And I would say there is a third that was one of Jesus’ texts when he preached his first sermon. Luke 4:18 “The spirit of the Lord is upon me. He has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor” … to give sight to the blind — you know the scripture.

Do you read a lot?

Oh yes. I think that reading gives us a sankofa experience. In Ghana

there’s a bird called a Sankofa bird.

The bird looks backwards to move forward and the bird has an egg in its mouth, which symbolizes if you want to really go forward and do things, create possibilities, you’ve got to look backwards. Know history.

Learn from the life experiences of other persons besides yourself. See a new perspective. It keeps you from being cynical and bitter. Our history is our present.

That’s an interesting point. Because it seems like you’ve seen a lot in your life that could have made you cynical and bitter. Have you consciously tried not to become cynical and bitter?

Oh yes. If you become cynical or bitter, it does more injury to the person

who is bitter than the perpetrator. It’s destructive.

When I was in Ghana last year, a gentleman whose son my wife and I sponsor who’s now on his way to get his medical degree — he’s already got his master’s. And he’s a classical musician, too. Back at the age of 13, he had written three symphonies and two sonatas. I met him when I was there in Ghana for the 50th anniversary of the independence of Ghana in 2007. His father gave me this Sankofa cane. A walking cane. And the handle is a carving on this bird with the egg in his mouth and looking backwards to go forward.

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