In a stirring moment Tuesday at BYU, the Jewish leader of the National Constitution Center asked nearly 5,000 students to stand together in the Marriott Center on campus and recite the aspirational virtues listed in a Latter-day Saint scripture.
National Constitution Center President Jeffrey Rosen told the campus forum assembly that he didn’t connect to the Quaker values he read as an English major in the 1980s, a decade marked by greed and excess.
But when he sat down during the COVID-19 pandemic and began to read the books the Founding Fathers read, he discovered the exhilarating ancient meaning behind the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. Rosen published his findings in a 2024 book, “The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.”
A revelation about what the ‘pursuit of happiness’ meant to the Founders
“It was a revelation for me, and there’s not other words strong enough that’s strong enough to describe the insight that for the Founders and for the Ancients and for people throughout human history, happiness has meant not feeling good but being good, not the pursuit of immediate pleasure but the pursuit of long-term virtue,” said Rosen, host of the “We the People” podcast.
The lessons he found in his reading were life changing, he said, and caused him to become a missionary for studying the ideals of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
“What I came to realize by reading the wisdom literature is that by virtues, the Founders and the Ancients meant something in particular,” Rosen said. “They meant self-mastery, self-improvement, character improvement, being your best self, overcoming your ego-based passions and emotions so that you can serve other people and connect to the divine.
“It is ultimately a quest for moral perfection.”
Speaker asks BYU students to stand and recite Doctrine and Covenants 4
Midway through the forum, Rosen said university leaders had told him about the virtues listed in Doctrine and Covenants 4, and he asked the students to recite it for him, knowing that more than half of all BYU students learned the seven verses by heart as missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“And faith, hope, charity and love, with an eye single to the glory of God, qualify him for the work,” the 4,856 in attendance said by memory. “Remember faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, brotherly kindness, godliness, charity, humility, diligence.”
“Amen,” Rosen said when the students finished, as he stood in front of large screens depicting the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. “Beautiful. Beautiful.”
He said that both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson independently attempted to chart daily progress on a dozen different personal values like humility and temperance. Rosen tried, too, with a friend, but they gave up on making daily check marks as the two Founders had, because perfection is difficult.
Rosen invited BYU students to continue the quest knowing they are human and will make mistakes. He told them they are “uniquely well-prepared” for attempting daily cultivation of virtue because they learned practical ways to improve themselves on missions or in high school seminary classes.
‘Without virtue, happiness cannot be’
The Founders, he said, believed in personal and political self-government that seeks “to overcome unproductive passions and emotions like anger and jealousy and fear.”
Rosen noted that some Founders floundered on the issue of slavery, mentioning that he had learned that John Quincy Adams and Joseph Smith arrived at about the same time at the conclusion that the Bible forbids slavery.
Rosen’s book lists the reading materials of several figures of America’s founding, materials that inspired their lives and the founding’s documents.
When John Quincy Adams died, for example, he said, “I am composed.” It was a nod to a book that Rosen found Jefferson and Franklin and others considered vital, “Tusculan Disputations,” by Cicero.
“A perfectly composed person is one who has achieved virtuous self-mastery,” Rosen said of Cicero’s philosophy.
Franklin chose one passage as the motto for his own self-improvement project:
“Without virtue, happiness cannot be,” Cicero wrote.
Make reading a habit
Rosen invited students emerging into adulthood in an age when communication is frequently based on “enrage to engage” and held within filter bubbles and echo chambers to “get back into the habit of reading.”
“When I wake up, I am not allowed to browse or surf until I’ve read for a half hour or hour,” Rosen said of his own prescription. “That’s my injunction to you: Carve out time to read.”
Rosen praised BYU President Shane Reese for making learning about the Constitution an emphasis at the university.
“It was quite impressive,” said BYU student Tanner Bartlome, 21, a sophomore in chemical engineering from South Jordan, Utah. “I thought it was inspirational to stand up with other brothers and sisters and recite that scripture together.”
Quoting Rosen, Bartlome noted that many of the Founders tried to disagree agreeably. The student said it was an admirable trait.
“That’s certainly on the fall rather than on the rise today,” he said, “but it’s something we should all try to make better rather than worse.”
BYU Vice President Justin Collings said Rosen’s “We the People” podcast is a “superb model of respectful, civil, enlightened and illuminating public discourse.”
Collings noted that Rosen has received an honor from France that is the equivalent of being knighted. He proposed the Rosen be dubbed, “Sir Jeffrey of the chivalric order of Constitutional virtue.”
Where to watch the forum now
Rosen’s forum address can be viewed for free at BYUtv.org.
Rosen is a professor at the George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic. He is the author of The New York Times bestseller, “Conversations with RBG: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law.” He earned degrees at Harvard College, Oxford University and Yale Law School.
The last three episodes of the “We the People” podcast are:
“My Fellow Americans: Presidents and Their Inaugural Addresses.”