Imposing

 2026-03-20 18:10

I'm listening to a DadSavesAmerica podcast. The person being interviewed is a teacher/principal (Ian Rowe). He was teaching his students how to have a higher chance of not living in poverty by (1) graduating high school, (2) getting and keeping a full-time job, and (3) if they have kids, getting married first. 97% of millennials who did this avoided poverty and moved into the middle class.

He got push-back from people(1) who were "concerned" that he was "imposing middle-class values onto these kids."

I thought that this was really interesting! If you want to live a middle-class lifestyle, then you need to have(2) middle-class values. Whoa! This is exactly what the church teaches about the Celestial Kingdom. If we want to live in the Celestial Kingdom, we need to have Celestial Kingdom Values.

By telling someone of the standards they need to keep to live a middle-class life, are we imposing upon them? No. We are just giving them information to work with. They can decide how to use it. Similarly, if we tell others about the standards we need to keep to live as God asks us to live, we are not imposing upon them.

question Are there values that we could be living to move upward in our affluence level? What are they, if they exist?

1. "Self-anointed gate-keepers," as Ian Rowe called them.
2. "have" seems inadequate here. Written on the fleshy-tables of the heart(3) or "live" might be more accurate. Not just believe in or proclaim, but use as principles of action.
3. 2 Corinthians verse 3: "Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart." President Russell M. Nelson explained that when doctrines of the gospel are written in the fleshy tables of our hearts, “they become an integral part of our nature” (“Living by Scriptural Guidance,” Ensign, Nov. 2000, 17). This process of internalizing gospel doctrines occurs through the power of the Holy Ghost.

References

https://youtu.be/TKXE5FBwy50?si=VVJR0iB-cDLTq6MA
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/new-testament-student-manual/2-corinthians/chapter-41-2-corinthians-1-5?lang=eng