By Don White

When choices are placed before moral people, they choose to do right, even when it’s hard. The undisciplined have a hard time not only choosing the right but in deciding what is right. None of us will be required to go through what our Savior Jesus Christ experienced in atoning for our sins. Though he was the literal son of God, he had a moral decision to make, that is to suffer in Gethsemane and on Golgotha for our sins. It was not easy. He could have taken the easy way out, but he did not. It was his decision to follow the instructions given him by God The Father, just as it is our decision to do certain difficult things in our lives which will never come close to comparing to what pain and suffering the Savior was subjected to.

God gave man dominion over certain things on this earth, such as the natural resources, the trees, plants, animals, and birds. We have a duty to learn what is right and to always do so, or else God will remove our freedom to choose.

Moral discipline is the consistent exercise of agency to choose the right and to follow up by doing what is right.

Moral agency is a God-given gift. We all have it.

“…for positive outcomes, moral agency must be accompanied by moral discipline,” said D. Todd Christopherson . “By moral discipline, I mean self-discipline based on moral standards.”

It rejects the self-absorbed life in favor of developing character.

We live in a world where for more than a generation people have failed to foster moral discipline. They have taught that truth is relative and that everyone decides for himself or herself what is right. Concepts such as sin and wrong have been condemned as “value judgments” and partly as a result church attendance is down and atheism is increasing.

Self Discipline Has Eroded

As the Lord describes it, The scriptures say: “Every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god” (Doctrine and Covenants 1:16)

Because of this, self-discipline has eroded and societies are left to try to maintain order and civility by compulsion. Elder Christopherson says that the lack of internal control by individuals breeds external control by governments.

Witness the desire for governments to control gun ownership, banks, car companies, insurers, health insurance, the kind of air conditioner you have. By egregiously taxing fossil fuels, Washington controls how much CO2 you can emit even when Global Warming has been proven to be a big Al Gore myth to make him richer. If it wasn’t, why did Gore refuse to debate Lord Monkton?

More Laws Are Not The Answer

One columnist observed that “gentlemanly behavior once protected women from coarse behavior. Today, we expect sexual harassment laws to restrain coarse behavior. . . .If someone differs with your opinion, they call it a racist comment.

“Policemen and laws can never replace customs, traditions and moral values as a means for regulating human behavior,” said Walter Williams. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. “Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we’ve become,” he said. If republicans read the above, knowing democrats are the party that likes rules, regulations and more laws, they could take the easy way out and say all democrats are uncivilized, which of course is not true.

Our Economic Collapse Was Caused By Bad Conduct

America experienced first a housing meltdown starting in the last months of 2009, then a devastating economic recession affecting the entire world. The collapse was brought on by multiple causes, but one of the major causes was widespread dishonest and unethical conduct, particularly in the U.S. housing and financial markets.

Reactions have focused on enacting more and stronger regulation. Perhaps that may dissuade some from unprincipled conduct, but others will simply get more creative in their circumvention.There are never enough rules to anticipate and cover every situation. Even if there were, enforcement would be impossibly expensive and burdensome. This approach leads to diminished freedom for everyone and eventually to socialism or communism.

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen said, “We would not accept the yoke of Christ; so now we must tremble at the yoke of Caesar.”

Don’t Let The Law Be Your Moral Compass

If you accept what is legal as your standard of personal or professional conduct, you will deny yourself of that which is truly noble in your personal dignity and worth, said James E. Faust.

In the final analysis, we need an internal compass. The external compass of the law and what people generally do is corrupt. Only a moral compass found in each person can effectively deal with the root causes as well as the symptoms of societal decay.

Editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal once observed:
“Sin isn’t something that many people, including most churches, have spent much time talking about or worrying about through the years of the [sexual] revolution. But we will say this for sin: it at least offered a frame of reference for personal behavior. When the frame was dismantled, guilt wasn’t the only thing that fell away; we also lost the guide wire of personal responsibility. . . . 

“The United States has a drug problem and a high-school-sex problem and a welfare problem and an AIDS problem and a rape problem. None of this will go away until more people in positions of responsibility are willing to come forward and explain, in frankly moral terms, that some of the things that people do nowadays are wrong” (“The Joy of What?” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 12, 1991, A14).

Moral discipline is learned at home.

 There are those who would denigrate the home. They would take children from the bosoms of our mothers and substitute the learning of the state. These days it is some Marxist, godless dogma taught by radicals in Washington or by teachers and professors.

Our home teaching should center on morals and faith – in God. Too many of the rising generation lack this kind of grounding. Thus, too many are going wayward without the inner compass needed to tell right from wrong. We must declare the essential need to keep the commandments of God and to walk uprightly before Him in soberness, or in other words, with reverence. Each must be persuaded that service and sacrifice for the wellbeing and happiness of others are far superior to making one’s own comfort and possessions the highest priority.

This requires more than an occasional reference to one or another gospel principle. There must be constant teaching, mostly by example. Henry B. Eyring expressed the vision we strive to attain:

Teaching Begins In The Home

We as parents cannot seek neutral ground when it comes to our children’s home education. We can and we must impose on our children when they are young true gospel principles, or the time-honored principles that you, the parent, has.

Some parents say they don’t want to impose anything upon their children – let them make up their own minds when they are old enough. But unless they have absorbed their parent’s faith before they leave home, they will never get it. Free agency is not violated when you teach a child to be good. The intelligent use of agency requires knowledge of the truth, of things as they really are. Without that, young people can hardly be expected to understand and evaluate the alternatives that come before them.

“Parents should consider how the adversary approaches their children,” says Christophersen. “He [Satan] and his followers are not promoting objectivity but are vigorous, multimedia advocates of sin and selfishness.”

As Proverbs says, teach a child when he is young and when he is old he will not depart far from it.

You Can’t Be Neutral About Right and Wrong!

Seeking to be neutral about the gospel is, in reality, to reject the existence of God and His authority. We must, rather, acknowledge Him and His omniscience if we want our children to see life’s choices clearly and be able to think for themselves. They should not have to learn by sad experience that “wickedness never was happiness” (Alma 41:10)

All of us experience temptations. So did the Savior, but He gave no heed unto them. We do not have to yield simply because a temptation surfaces. We may want to, but we don’t have to. An incredulous female friend asked a young adult woman, committed to living the law of chastity, how it was possible that she had never “slept with anybody.”

“Don’t you want to?” the friend asked. The young woman thought: “The question intrigued me, because it was so utterly beside the point. . . . Mere wanting is hardly a proper guide for moral conduct.” (Sarah E. Hinckly)

“The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations”2 Peter 2:9).

Can Good People And a Righteous American Spirit Save This Land?

As much as I will fight the erosion of our Constitutional rights in America, we cannot presume that the future will resemble the past. Fight as we will, if it comes down to losing political battles that drain our government of the tools to keep us free, we must not shun the further struggle. And that could include losing things and patterns we have relied upon economically, politically, socially, should they suddenly be taken from us.

This nation became far to materialistic, and as a result we are experiencing a winnowing. We must never lose, however, our desire and determination to be good people. If we have been moral in the past, it will continue to see us through. And we will continue to be good examples to those less fortunate.

Each of us should continue to be of service to one another; to give of our time and effort to help others; to give of our time or whatever is necessary to maintain the integrity of our homes and neighborhoods. A million righteous homes could easily translate into many more millions of goodly people. Good people are examples to one another and can easily be the stuff that keeps our American way of life from completely crumbling.

If we will cultivate virtue, in bad times it will come back to bless us. We may thereby have an impact on future trends and events. At a minimum, moral discipline will be of immense help to us as we deal with whatever stresses and challenges may come in a disintegrating society. We will be fortified in the moral discipline needed to walk uprightly before God and as examples to our family members and in the work place. One small example of good can do wonders, for it will be multiplied millions of times. Our love for what is right is a virtue and it can grow and grow in our hearts and spread to others who see our unselfish attitude, the spirit of God-like love and good works and they will want to be one with us.