Chapter 23

 A gospel-based program for developing countries

The winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in economic science, Amartya Sen, born in 1933 in India, wrote a book entitled Development as Freedom (1999) in which he points out the great power of individual freedom to overcome any obstacles to achieving subsistence and even prosperity for the people of a country. The LDS church should be a vigorous advocate of freedom and prosperity everywhere in the world, perhaps following his philosophy. We hear stories of entire nations changing their religious affiliation perhaps because a King was converted to a new religious viewpoint. That is not necessarily something we should set as a goal, but, as a practical matter, that could be the result if people are encouraged to understand the gospel and to understand freedom and to promote both of them to improve themselves and improve their nation.

Rather than very cautiously filtering a little bit of charitable money through an organization with a very different ideology, philosophy, and theology, such as the Catholic Relief Services, as in the past, in the future we ought to be administering very large amounts of money from various sources through an organization of our own design which promotes our own ideology, philosophy, and theology. That will assure us that the charitable money, from whatever source, will produce the "biggest bang for the buck."