All signs suggest a certain community should fail.

And then, it doesn’t.

Why did it succeed? For commentator John Sanphillippo, the answer is often culture.

When a community possesses all the “qualities that should result in long-term failure,” but the community still thrives, Sanphillippo writes that “local culture” frequently makes the difference.

It’s a phenomenon Sanphillippo christened “murbanism” or “Mormon urbanism.” Sanphillippo, who’s not a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (“I’m the opposite of a Mormon if such a thing exists”), uses “murbanism” as shorthand for the impact a culture — such as Mormon culture — can have on a local community’s resilience, adaptation and eventual success.

Yet Sanphillippo is not alone in his views. He is part of a growing chorus singing the virtues of pro-social culture in general, and Latter-day Saints culture in particular.

The idea that culture makes a difference, however, is not axiomatic.

In their influential book, "Why Nations Fail," social scientists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson downplay the role of culture in the rise and fall of nations. They argue, for example, that culture does not “explain the divergent paths of North and South Koreas” — after all, they reason, both nations grew out of a common heritage. They similarly point to a community that is divided by the U.S.-Mexican border. The economic prospects differ vastly between the U.S. and the Mexican sides, and yet, the cultural heritage is largely the same.

“Political institutions,” they contend, not cultures, are what make the difference.

Yet, Acemoglu and Robinson’s theory leaves the reader wondering how to account for the vast differences between communities that, say, already share similar political institutions. Nor do the authors help us to understand whether culture is a factor in shaping political institutions in the first place. In other words, their arguments, though important, do not discredit culture.

Meanwhile, in the United States issues related to culture are having a bit of a comeback, and a few social commentators are even singling out Latter-day Saints.

Journalist Michael Dougherty, for example, identified “Mormon culture” as an ideal incubator for a new “successor class” to refresh what he characterized as the dominant “WASP” establishment. “Mormon American subculture,” he said, “produces cities where middle class families thrive, and where divorce and dysfunction are low. Socially, if not theologically, Mormons are a modus vivendi between Mainline Protestantism and Evangelicalism.”

In a similar — albeit more tongue-in-cheek — observation, Matthew Schmitz of First Things recently remarked, “I, for one, would be happy to see Mike Lee, the Mormon senator, installed as a Caesar. I’d like to just turn our polity over to him and to a Mormon ruling class, because they have preserved WASP virtues without accepting the worst of the left-wing ideology. So I’d like to just see the Mormons run the country, and I think a lot of Americans feel the same way.”

While certainly flattering, I’ve been around enough Latter-day Saints (myself included) to know that both collectively and individually we still need fine-tuning.

And yet, as these comments suggest, even outsiders to the Mormon community sense how the faith fosters both profound community connections and alluring pro-social values.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Joseph Smith’s brother Hyrum observed that “Men’s souls conform to the society in which they live, with very few exceptions, and when men come to live with the Mormons, their souls swell as if they were going to stride the planets.”

Just last week after the devastating floods in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a local resident and writer for the American Conservative, Rod Dreher, was out volunteering at a nearby shelter.

At the shelter, Dreher immediately recognized the manager from his local Apple computer store, Brent Mangum. He met him the previous night while trying to salvage his computer hard drive. The Apple store was unfortunately just about to close due to the rapidly rising water.

Recognizing each other at the shelter, Brent said, “You came in yesterday!”

Dreher replied, “You’re the Apple guy!”

When Dreher left the shelter “after seven that night,” he saw Brent “still in place, still working.”

The next day, Dreher returned to the Apple store to finally get his hard drive fixed.

Brent was there, and the two struck up a conversation.

“Turns out his family is now hosting their second displaced flood victim family,” Dreher wrote about the conversation. “‘We’re pretty much at capacity now,’ he said. I asked him what made him go out to the shelter on Sunday to work. ‘Well, I’m part of the LDS Church, and that’s what we do,’ he said. ‘Some of us guys from the church figured we needed to be there.’”

Dreher summed it up:

“Mormons. I should have known. That is what they do.”

For at least one Apple store manager in Louisiana, culture and community still matter.

Hal Boyd is the opinion editor of the Deseret News.