“Religion: A Moral Compass for Living,” Liahona, July 2021
Religion: A Moral Compass for Living
By Elder Jeffrey R. Holland
Of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles
From a Brigham Young University Education Week devotional address, “Religion: Bound by Loving Ties,” delivered August 16, 2016. For the full address, go to speeches.byu.edu.
Religion has been the principal influence that has kept Western social, political, and cultural life moral.
Photograph from Getty Images
“There is no significant example in history … of [any] society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion,” said historians Will and Ariel Durant.1
If that is true—and surely we feel it is—then we should be genuinely concerned over the assertion that the single most distinguishing feature of modern life is the rise of secularism with its attendant dismissal of, cynicism toward, or marked disenchantment with religion.
How wonderfully prophetic Elder Neal A. Maxwell of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (1926–2004) was back in 1978 when he said: “We shall see in our time a maximum … effort … to establish irreligion as the state religion. [Secularists will use] the carefully preserved and cultivated freedoms of Western civilization to shrink freedom even as [they reject] the value … of our rich Judeo-Christian heritage.”
Continuing, he said: “Your discipleship may see the time come when religious convictions are heavily discounted. … This new irreligious imperialism [will seek] to disallow certain … opinions simply because those opinions grow out of religious convictions.”2
That forecast of turbulent religious weather issued over 40 years ago is steadily being fulfilled virtually every day somewhere in the world in the minimization of—or open hostility toward—religious practice, religious expression, and even, in some cases, the very idea of religious belief itself.
It has been principally the world’s great faiths that speak to the collective good of society, that offer us a code of conduct and moral compass for living, that help us exult in profound human love, and that strengthen us against profound human loss. If we lose consideration of these deeper elements of our mortal existence—divine elements, if you will—we lose much, some would say most, of that which has value in life.
In fact, religion has been the principal influence that has kept Western social, political, and cultural life moral, to the extent that these have been moral. And I shudder at how immoral life might have been—then and now—without that influence. Centuries of religious belief, including institutional church- or synagogue- or mosque-going, have clearly been preeminent in shaping our notions of right and wrong.