Establishing Zion

Democracy is in measurable decline across virtually every region of the world, and the United States is not exempt. What is eroding is not primarily the constitutional framework but the civic values that must live in the hearts of citizens for any framework to function. This is not a partisan observation. It is a structural one, and it points directly to the work Zion communities must do — not waiting for national politics to improve, but building the habits, relationships, and institutions of self-governance at the neighborhood and community level where Zion actually begins.

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Aurelia Rogers and Richard Ballantyne are the chapter's two exemplars of what citizen-level governance action looks like in practice. Rogers founded the Primary organization after observing that the boys of Farmington, Utah were running wild on Sundays while their parents attended meetings. She did not petition Church headquarters for a program. She identified a need in her community, organized a response, and sustained it patiently over years until it became part of the Church's permanent structure. Ballantyne started the first Sunday School among the Utah Saints in the same spirit — seeing a need, acting without waiting for direction, and building something that lasted. Neither of them was given authority to act. Both of them acted from accountability — the accountability that flows from belonging to a community and caring about its health.

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The physical design of neighborhoods is not merely an aesthetic preference. It is a condition for the face-to-face interaction that self-governance requires. The plat for the City of Zion that Joseph Smith designed — with wide streets, generous lots, and a temple at the center — and Barcelona's Eixample district both demonstrate that walkable, pedestrian-scaled neighborhoods create the conditions for the casual daily encounters from which community trust and civic engagement grow. When people do not know their neighbors, do not share public spaces, and do not encounter one another except in automobiles, the social capital that democratic self-governance requires cannot accumulate. The built environment either supports or undermines the civic life Zion requires.

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The My Hometown Initiative in West Valley City, Utah is the chapter's most instructive contemporary example. For years, the city government had invested in the Glendale neighborhood with conventional public programs — infrastructure improvements, social services, community centers — without producing lasting change. The breakthrough came when a stake president and a city administrator asked a different question: not "what can government do for this community?" but "how can government help this community solve its own problems?" The shift was from government as provider to government as partner. Residents who had been consumers of public services became citizens taking ownership of their neighborhood's future. The cooperative action that years of public investment had failed to produce emerged almost immediately once the question changed.

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That shift — from asking government to solve problems to asking government to help communities solve their own problems — is the governance equivalent of the shift from institutional direction to covenant agency that runs through the entire book. It is the same move President Nelson makes when he calls members to lead rather than follow in the work of salvation and exaltation. It is the same move the 2020 General Handbook makes when it places the work squarely in the home. In every domain, the pattern is the same: transformed people, acting from covenant, taking genuine responsibility for the communities they inhabit.

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Active citizenship grounded in the five foundation stones looks like Aurelia Rogers and Richard Ballantyne — seeing a need, acting without waiting for permission, sustaining the effort patiently, and building something that lasts. It looks like the residents of Glendale who stopped waiting for the city to fix their neighborhood and started fixing it themselves. It looks like covenant people who understand that Zion will not be delivered from on high but built, neighborhood by neighborhood, family by family, organization by organization, by people who have chosen to take responsibility for the communities they inhabit.