“The face of sin today often wears the Halloween mask of tolerance. Do not be deceived. Behind that facade is heartache, unhappiness, and pain. You know what is right and what is wrong, and no disguise, however appealing, can change that truth. The character of transgression remains the same. If your so called friends urge you to do anything you know to be wrong, you be the one to make a stand for right, even if you stand alone. Have the moral courage to be a light for others to follow. There’s no friendship more valuable than your own clear conscience, your own moral cleanliness…”

President Thomas S. Monson
Priesthood Session, April 2008 Conference
In his first address as President of the LDS Church

Over the last few years in both public and private discussions about apostasy from the church, I have encountered an increasingly frequent complaint. It goes something like this:

“Practicing Mormons incorrectly attribute all apostasy to sin. There are many, many sinners in the church who do not leave. People leave the church for a variety of reasons, but it is not because they are sinners.”

In their own minds, they leave the church because they have discovered apparent incongruities that lead them to believe the Church is not true.

Of course everyone within and without the church sins. But when members say that people “leave the church because of sin” it is an idiomatic shorthand. What they mean is that people leave the church because they are unrepentant for their sin. We are all sinners, but we are not all penitent. Justification of sin eventually leads the unrepentant to leave the church.

The notion that those who reject the Gospel do so because of sin is not a just a cultural invention, it comes from the scriptures.

First of all let me say that I think that Richard Dutcher is a very talented filmmaker and I have been impressed with his films. I disagreed with some of the ideas introduced in his movie “States of Grace,” but the storytelling was powerful, and I thought that “Brigham City” was great. I was sincerely disappointed, though not completely surprised, when he announced last January that he had ceased to be a practicing Latter-day Saint.

Long ago I signed up for the email list to receive announcements about Dutcher’s films. Today I received an email advertising “States of Grace” that rubbed me the wrong way. Here is the text:

According to this article from BusinessWeek Online , BestBuy has decided to implement what they call “results-only work environment” or ROWE. Various technology companies have had similar policies in the past, but BestBuy is trying ROWE to an extreme that has probaly never been seen in a company of its size and in its industry. They wont have any schedules or mandatory meetings. Employees will be free to work wherever they want, whenever they want, as long as they get their work done.