Benson: The Great Struggle for Freedom, Here and Abroard

Today, there is a great threat to freedom. The Church is prospering and growing, but all over the world the light of freedom is being diminished. A great struggle for the minds of men is now being waged. At issue is whether or not man’s basic inalienable rights of life, liberty, property, and pursuit of happiness shall be recognized. It is the same struggle over which the war in heaven was waged. In undiminished fury, and with an anxiety that his time is short—and it is—the great adversary to all men is attempting to destroy man’s freedom and to see him totally subjugated. There are evidences of this struggle all about us. A system of slavery, communism, has imprisoned the minds and bodies of over one billion of the earth’s inhabitants. Today, forty-five percent of the people of the world, in sixty-five nations, live under totalitarian dictatorships or forms of government that deny people most or all of their political and religious freedom. We further read and hear about international terrorism where nations are blackmailed and there is no regard for human life.

Even among free nations we see the encroachment of government upon the lives of the citizenry by excessive taxation and regulation, all done under the guise that the people would not willfully or charitably distribute their wealth, so the government must take it from them. We further observe promises by the state of security, whereby men are taken care of from the womb to the tomb rather than earning this security by the “sweat of their brow”; deception in high places, with the justification that “the end justifies the means”; atheism; agnosticism; immorality; and dishonesty. The attendant results of such sin and usurpation of power are a general distrust of government officials; an insatiable, covetous spirit for more and more material wants; personal debt to satisfy this craving; and the disintegration of the family unit.

Ezra Taft Benson, This Nation Shall Endure, 1977