…as a covenant people, our behavioral loyalties are to be with the Lord, not with the Caesars of this world….
If we are meek and have the gift of the Holy Ghost, we will not be subject to the manipulation of our appetites by the trendy….
Given our contemporary context, no wonder President Thomas S. Monson recently cautioned Church members not to put “popularity over principle.”
If becoming popular requires participating in the follies and the fashions of the world, it is too big a price to pay for fleeting approval.
Neal A. Maxwell, “Popularity and Principle,” Ensign, Mar 1995, 12
We do not serve our Savior well if we fear man more than God. He rebuked some leaders in His restored Church for seeking the praise of the world and for having their minds on the things of the earth more than on the things of the Lord (see D&C 30:2; 58:39). Those chastisements remind us that we are called to establish the Lord’s standards, not to follow the world’s. Elder John A. Widtsoe declared, “We cannot walk as other men, or talk as other men, or do as other men, for we have a different destiny, obligation, and responsibility placed upon us, and we must fit ourselves [to it].” That reality has current application to every trendy action, including immodest dress. As a wise friend observed, “You can’t be a life saver if you look like all the other swimmers on the beach.”
Those who are caught up in trying to save their lives by seeking the praise of the world are actually rejecting the Savior’s teaching that the only way to save our eternal life is to love one another and lose our lives in service.
C. S. Lewis explained this teaching of the Savior: “The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first—wanting to be the centre—wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the human race. Some people think the fall of man had something to do with sex, but that is a mistake. . . . What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could ‘be like gods’—could set up on their own as if they had created themselves—be their own masters—invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come . . . the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”
Elder Dallin H. Oaks, “Unselfish Service,” April General Conference, 2009