LDS Quotes on Secularism & Worldliness
“Those who ‘live without God in the world’ anxiously glean their few and fleeting satisfactions, but they are unable to find real happiness….”Ignorant of the plan of salvation, many simply do not know what the journey of life is all about. Therefore, modern selfishness and skepticism brush aside the significance of the Savior…”
| Ensign, March 1998
“Whether young or old, we need to be good friends, but also to pick our friends carefully. By choosing the Lord first, choosing one’s friends becomes easier and much safer. Consider the contrasting friendships in the city of Enoch compared to peers in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah! The citizens of the city of Enoch chose Jesus and a way of life, then became everlasting friends. So much depends on whom and what we seek first.”
“What the secularists are increasingly demanding, in their disingenuous way, is that religious people, when they act politically, act only on secularist grounds. They are trying to equate acting on religion with establishing religion. And—I repeat—the consequence of such logic is really to establish secularism.”
“Some men who are evidently unable to gain respect by the goodness of their lives, use as justification for their actions the statement that Eve was told that Adam should rule over her. How much sadness, how much tragedy, how much heartbreak has been caused through centuries of time by weak men who have used that as a scriptural warrant for atrocious behavior! They do not recognize that the same account indicates that Eve was given as a helpmeet to Adam. The facts are that they stood side by side in the garden. They were expelled from the garden together, and they worked together, side by side, in gaining their bread by the sweat of their brows.”
| Ensign, November 1991, p. 51
“Not all will follow the map [Heavenly Father has given us]. They may look at it. They may think it is reasonable, perhaps even true. But they do not follow the divine directions. Many believe that any road will take them to a ‘happily ever after.’ Some may even become angry when others who know the way try to help and tell them. They suppose that such advice is outdated, irrelevant, out of touch with modern life. Sisters, they suppose wrong.”
| "Your Happily Ever After," Ensign, May 2010
“Your love, like a flower, must be nourished. There will come a great love and interdependence between you, for your love is a divine one. It is deep, inclusive, comprehensive. It is not like that association of the world which is misnamed love, but which is mostly physical attraction. When marriage is based on this only, the parties soon tire of each other. There is a break and a divorce, and a new, fresher physical attraction comes with another marriage which in turn may last only until it, too, becomes stale.”
| Faith Precedes the Miracle, 130–31
“Our sexuality has been animalized, stripped of the intricacy of feeling with which human beings have endowed it, leaving us to contemplate only the act, and to fear our impotence in it. It is this animalization from which the sexual manuals cannot escape, even when they try to do so, because they are reflections of it. They might [as well] be textbooks for veterinarians.”
| Seven Deadly Sins
Call it secularism or modernity or the technological age or existentialism on steroids—whatever you want to call such an approach to life, we do know a thing or two about it. Most important, we know that it cannot answer the yearning questions of the soul, nor is it substantial enough to sustain us in times of moral crises.
| Religion: Bound by Loving Ties
“Thus does Mormon, the prophet, accurately describe our own society [see Mormon 8:36-37) of elegantly dressed, competitive, fashion-infatuated, status-conscious people. Note that the Lord does not stress the ordinary iniquities of crime and immorality, of atheism and lawlessness. Instead he stresses the intolerance, the uncharitable state of mind, and the vanity that exist in our present world. He warns us of the pride, the envy, the arrogance, and the malice that exist in our day. We do not persecute the poor; we simply tend to ignore them and forget them as the prophet predicted. (See Mormon 8:39.)”
| “A Disease Called Pride,” BYU Speeches of the Year, October 13, 1971, p. 4
“The religious community must unite to be sure we are not coerced or deterred into silence by . . . intimidation or threatening rhetoric. Whether or not such actions are anti-religious, they are surely antidemocratic and should be condemned by all who are interested in democratic government,” he said. “There should be room for all good-faith views in the public square, be they secular, religious, or a mixture of the two. When expressed sincerely and without sanctimoniousness, the religious voice adds much to the text and tenor of public debate.”