Americans’ ignorance on the need for religious freedom is more than just evidence of a failure to properly educate the population. It can prevent the nation from winning the war against terrorism. 

That war, by the way, is as much a war of ideas as it is of bombs and surprise attacks against innocent people. To quote the late Adda Bozeman, an expert on the interrelation of statecraft and culture said, our ideas “must be in good fighting shape.”

Or, to quote Jennifer A. Marshall of The Heritage Foundation, “This war of ideas calls for stronger substance than Coca-Cola and Britney Spears.”
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It calls for a clear articulation of America’s founding ideals, and an ability to explain to the world how those ideals can lead to peace and freedom.

Unfortunately, many Americans are flabby and ill prepared for the battle. They know far more about Coca-Cola and Star Wars than they do about the core liberties that allow them to enjoy life.
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An opinion poll published Wednesday by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public 

Before everyone starts handing out party favors in anticipation, or perhaps dread, of the Year of the Trump (what is the proper party favor for dread, anyway?), it’s time to hand out awards for everything that happened in 2015.
And when it comes to Utah, a distinguished panel of one (myself) has duly deliberated and decided on a cavalcade of citations to cast, although, thankfully, not in such annoying, yet alluring, alliteration.
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Ahem! Attention please, while the awards are presented, and please hold your applause until you 

​Utah’s humming economy carries a certain note of satisfaction to it. The perpetual lifestyle critics who say the state won’t be accepted until it lets liquor flow free or until it keeps people from flocking to Idaho every week for lottery tickets appear increasingly foolish as the long-trending record unfolds.
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For the fifth time in six years, Forbes lists Utah No. 1 for business, noting, among other things, its 3.8 percent growth in jobs in 2015. Meanwhile, Fodor’s named Utah the No. 1 tourist destination for 2016 — in the world, that is. That ought to help a tourism industry that already grew 44 percent over the last decade without Fodor’s help.

Benjamin Franklin famously referred to honesty as “the best policy.” Mark Twain cynically added, “when there is money in it.”

We have been conditioned to believe Twain had it right. At least, political scandals and police blotters would indicate that money is the overriding goal of human behavior for many.
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But that doesn’t explain the mystery student who attended Riverton Elementary School nearly 50 years ago.

​My barber told me why he supports Ben Carson for president.

“He’s a real guy; someone who has had to hold down a job and deal with real life, like you and me,” he said.
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My barber gets paid more per hair when I’m in his chair than at most other times of the day, so there is ample opportunity for conversation. His opinion was a little confusing, in that Carson’s career as a neurosurgeon doesn’t exactly put him in our social circles. Neither would we fit in with the sorts of folks Donald Trump might invite to dinner. But I got the point. 

Today’s pundits aren’t the first to worry that too much freedom leads people to bad behavior. In 1795, as Wikipedia informs us, the Irish writer and explorer Isaac Weld traveled to the United States and said of the people, “… civility cannot be purchased from them on any terms; they seem to think that it is incompatible with freedom...”

And his notes indicate he hadn’t even attended a BYU-Utah game.

Americans have a great ability to get lost in the forest of meaningless trivialities, missing things on the horizon that truly matter. Now that December has come, the forest is getting thick, indeed.

“Yeah, there's a lot of bad 'isms' floatin' around this world,” the character known only as Alfred, a janitor at Macy’s, says in the 1947 version of Miracle on 34th Street, “but one of the worst is commercialism. Make a buck, make a buck. Even in Brooklyn it's the same — don't care what Christmas stands for, just make a buck, make a buck.”
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The commercialism of Christmas is not a new concern. Neither is its cousin, the concern over popular culture’s dilution of the true meaning of the season. But these concerns are merging in confusing ways. And so, many Americans in 2015 find themselves criticizing big businesses for not being Christ-centered enough in their commercialization of Christmas. 

Politicians willing to spend political capital on their ideas come around less often than rainy days during an inversion. Utah has lost two of them this year.

Their lives as public servants prove one thing. People often clamor for leaders who put principle ahead of politics, but the rare politicians who do so often get crushed for it.

Former Gov. Norm Bangerter, who died in April, survived a raucous political convention in 1988 to