How Music Reflects our Values
By Loran Howard Blood

For generations now, the Brethren have spoken with the utmost seriousness regarding the nature of the media we allow into our minds and homes.  For quite some time, they have spoken in earnest against the excesses of the popular culture and warned us against the effects of certain kinds of entertainment (or, perhaps more appropriately, against certain things that we may find entertaining) on our souls.  They have spoken about many kinds of media and the potential of each for both good and ill.

The reason for this emphasis is quite clear.  Over this period of time, music — perhaps the most psychologically and emotionally powerful form of expression we may experience in the mortal sphere — has been, as have all other forms of media, brought to bear Satan as a tool to by destroy the souls and prevent the salvation and exaltation of our Father’s sons and daughters.

Music has been pressed into service with other media as a means of dimming and, if possible, extinguishing the higher, refined feelings and sensibilities that are both the fruit of and the soil within which gospel values and attitudes are nurtured.  The coarseness, vulgarity, anger, disdain and contempt for sacred things — as well as the best and most worthy aspects of human culture — are all a measure and proverbial canary in the mine for what is driving much of our present popular culture.  

Many youth of the Church, including myself at one time, recoiled from the words of the Lord’s servants in this area.  We obeyed the Word of Wisdom, followed the Lord’s laws of sexual conduct, and in general, tried to live the gospel to the degree we understood its fundamental principles.  But now the Brethren were telling us that our musical entertainment was, in many cases, inharmonious with gospel principles and standards. 

This was hard, because many of us had poured a lot of money into our music collections.  Even more important, we believed our music defined who we were.

In time, however, I realized that it is precisely in those areas in which we have the heaviest personal investment in Babylon, even if we do not realize at the time that the investment has been made, that the most serious changes need to be made and vigilance maintained.

That’s Entertainment

What does it mean to be entertained?  Normally we think of it as little more than being pleased or amused by something, and think little further beyond this.  But to be entertained by something has far deeper implications.  To entertain is, in a very broad sense, quite simply to make certain things a part of us; it is to integrate those things into our own experience. 

One definition of entertaining is to consider, or to give consideration to something and, even closer to our point, to hold in mind.  It is to contemplate and concentrate our minds upon something. It is to receive, to give admittance to, and to harbor (and, for our purposes, it is to admit and harbor various perceptions and their influences within our minds).  A much older definition is to continue with.  To entertain then, is to be in a relationship; it is to enter into a relationship with the subject or object of our entertainment.

But more than this, given these definitions, that which entertains us must also then reflect, at some level, that which we value.  Would people actually listen on a consistent basis to music that overtly promotes and glorifies mindless, hedonistic sexuality, drug use, disrespect and contempt for woman, the romanticizing of sadistic violence, the idealization of rebellion, the relaxation of moral law, and cultural novelty for their own sakes?  Would they embrace music that seethes with hatred and disdain for most of the higher values and principles upon which the best aspects of human civilization have been constructed?

The answer is no — unless, at some level, these attitudes and feelings held some kind of value or significance to the listener.

We should ask — which comes first, values or valuing?  At the very least, because of the Fall, all of us have the potential embrace that which is evil.  The danger here is, of course, that once we become accustomed to particular forms of entertainment, the values embedded within that entertainment begin to become enmeshed with our own; we begin to integrate those values into our own personal value system. 

We don’t notice this for the most part of course because the spiritual and psychological process is one of cultural osmosis.  Over time, there is a gradual assimilation and absorption of the values, attitudes, and spiritual orientation embedded within and transmitted by such media, much of it below our conscious awareness.  This is especially true when we have been born and grown up in a culture in which these values and the media that transmit them have already matured.

Our popular media transmit to us, to a great extent, the values of Babylon; the values of spiritual Rome.  They are ideas, attitudes, concepts, slogans, and catchphrases, many of which come laden with philosophies, ideologies, and standards deeply in conflict with those of Zion. 

Of all these, music is the most powerful, the most moving, the most deeply affective means by which human beings express the content of their souls.  As Eliot said, “You are the music while the music lasts”, ¹ and Nietzsche wrote that “in music the passions enjoy themselves”. ²

It has been noted by many that music manifests that which is inexpressible in language.  Music allows us to move beyond the chatter and analytic boundaries of our rational minds and feel acutely and poignantly that which we can only make, in many cases, feeble attempt to articulate through language.

A Messenger and Advocate

Music, like art, literature, and many other forms of media, is a vehicle or means by which we express our values.  It is particularly persuasive because it can bypass the rational, discerning mind and implant ideas or attitudes at deeper levels of emotion and feeling.  Ideas that are embedded in stirring, deeply felt, profoundly passionate music, carry their message and their advocacy into the inner recesses of the soul many times without the discriminating inspection of either the Spirit or our rational intelligence.

Lyrics may be ravenously explicit in their imagery or connotation, or they may use symbolism or double entendre to disguise their meaning.  In either case, it is the pairing of attitudes, concepts, and messages with music as the medium through which those messages are transmitted that is forms the basis of LDS understandings of music and its potential as a means through which we are assisted toward our exaltation — or influenced to move in another direction. 

Here are some of the words of the Brethren regarding the power and persuasive force of music will substantiate our concerns here (all italics mine).

President Boyd K. Packer, who has long been associated with such concerns, said that certain forms of music can “smother your spiritual senses.”³  In another place he comments that, “Music can, by its tempo, by its beat, by its intensity, dull the spiritual sensitivity of men.” He goes onto say that we degrade ourselves when we “identify with all of those things which seem now to surround such extremes in music: the shabbiness, the irreverence, the immorality, and the addictions.”⁴

President Thomas S. Monson taught that, “Music can help you draw closer to your Heavenly Father. It can be used to educate, edify, inspire, and unite. However, music can, by its tempo, beat, intensity, and lyrics, dull your spiritual sensitivity” — and that it is a feature of our cultural environment, association with which we “cannot afford.” ⁵

H. Burke Peterson warned us to “Avoid pornographic magazines or pictures or music — and I plead with you, be careful of the music.”  He further added:

Ezra Taft Benson, in quoting a letter he had received from a concerned church member, said that “music creates atmosphere.  Atmosphere creates environment.  Environment influences behavior.”  To this he added:

Then in a statement that would most certainly send many members of my generation who are deeply invested in modern popular culture into very literal paroxysms, he says, “The famed Woodstock festival was a gigantic manifestation of a sick nation.”

Many of us of the Baby Boom generation, including many in the Church, may react to this with jaw hanging and eyes wide.  My wife was there, as were some other people I have known.  That particular late-sixties festival marked an iconic event in the truly shattering Cultural Revolution then underway. 

To those outside Zion, as well as to the spiritually immature or inexperienced within the Church, the pop culture can appear benign if only because of the sheer pervasiveness of its values and symbols.  How many of us have heard our teenage sons or daughters say defensively, when presented with the lyrical or symbolic visual content of some of their music, “But it’s only a show.”  

Of course, the Nuremburg rallies were only a show as well, but those who contrived and organized those propagandistic spectacles knew very well the power of music as a mediator and solvent of values⁸.  It is to circumvent both the critical scrutiny of the mind and the quite, penetrating whisperings of the spirit that the music of Babylon is what it is and serves the purposes it serves.

Opposites in All Things

We should pay close attention to the language used by the Brethren when describing the effects music may have upon us.  President Monson mentions that it can “educate, edify, inspire, and unite.”  It can draw us closer to our Father in Heaven.  Indeed, music can polish and refine our personalities and souls in a manner that no other form of expression can accomplish in precisely the same way.

However, music as a medium can also generate a “mist of darkness” that induces us, like the those pitiable figures in Nephi’s dream of the iron rod, to let go of that fixed and unvarying spiritual instrument so that it will be said of us as of them that they, “did lose their way, that they wandered off and were lost”. (1 Ne. 8: 23-24)

Hence, the Lord’s servants speak of certain kinds of music’s ability to “smother your spiritual senses” and to “dull the spiritual sensitivity of man.”  President Monson uses similar language, saying it can “dull your spiritual sensitivity.”  Bishop Peterson describes our minds as “cluttered” by the imagery and thoughts generated by such material, and President Benson speaks of such music having the effect, not only of dulling and smothering our spiritual sensitivities, but of crushing them. 

Around us and within us is a din — a loud, insistent, tumultuous noise that tends to glorification of the physical, the effect of which is the “debasement of the spirit.”  In a spiritual context, we could also say that it is to trivialize and ignore that which is profound and of really lasting importance.  As Elder Neal A. Maxwell said, whether or not we choose to care for “the life of the soul” (D&C 101: 37) is “the unchanging mortal agendum from generation to generation”.⁸

Music’s power to smother, dull, debase, and crush the spirit and its higher perceptions and sympathies is balanced by its ability to “educate, edify, inspire, and unite.”  Marshall McLuhan may have been right in a limited sense that “the medium is the messege,”⁹ but from a gospel standpoint, it is the message; it is whether or not the content of any medium draws us closer to, or pulls us farther from, Jesus Christ, that is of primary importance.

Values and Valuing

Everything we’ve said so far has been to establish that music is unparalleled in its ability to transmit ideas, doctrines, attitudes, and values to us in such a manner that, in many cases the contents or messages embedded in such music may, without our even being consciously aware of it, become a subtle part of our own value system and begin to influence our larger perceptions of the world and our identity within it.  This is true of all media of course, from film, television, and other visual media to music and literature. 

Music, however, can be an emotional and psychological force that, like a powerful river carrying leaves, twigs, and other materials downstream with the current, can carry us along with it even when our rational minds, experience, and the spirit are trying to tell us that the spiritual and mental environment we are in is inconsistent with the things of God.  The music carries us along, while we entertain (consider, hold in mind, receive, give admittance to, harbor) the values embedded within and themselves carried through the musical medium to us as listeners. 

To be entertained is to be a participant in a form of human communication and the contents of that communication.  We can no more be in a relationship with a piece of music while avoiding the messages contained in that music — whether they be in the form of very definite doctrines or assertions, an implied ideology, innuendos, similes, metaphors, chanted slogans or screaming expletives — than we can relative to any other kind of media, from works of art to video games.

I have long been convinced that all of us surround ourselves with that which both reflects and sustains our self concept and value system.  This can be complex, because all of us are at any given time a mixture of the higher and lower aspects of the human condition.  We strive to be more like our Father in Heaven and our Elder Brother, Jesus Christ, but fall short on many occasions because of the inherent tendencies engendered in us by the Fall. 

The Brethren, therefore, have always counseled us to surround ourselves, as much as possible, with the higher things of both the spirit and of human civilization.  We are counseled to avoid that which will influence and move us away from Christ and his gospel. 

Our environment, whether it be the environment external to us in our homes and among our friends and associates, or the spiritual, psychological, and intellectual environment that exists within us (and each of these are mirror images of the other), will ultimately coalesce into a life lived, and finally become a destiny achieved. 

As Alma tells us, “For every man receiveth wages of him whom he listeth to obey (Alma 3: 26), and Paul remarks that “Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness (Romans  6: 16)?

It is not then that listening to a few songs with inappropriate lyrics, attitudes, or themes will destroy our faith and send us plummeting into the darkness.  Just as a cigarette or alcoholic beverage now and then will do us little physical harm, a few inappropriate songs here and there in our lives will not pull us from the gospel at a stroke.  But this, of course, is not the point of either the Word of Wisdom or the Lord’s counsel as to our mental environment. 

No cliché has been more overworked than that of the frog in the boiling water, and yet no truth is as pertinent to our discussion as this.  At the same time, another cliché, that familiarity breeds contempt, could not be farther from the truth.  Indeed, what familiarity breeds is more familiarity, and the more familiar we are with something, the less alien and foreign that thing comes to seem over time.  This is even true when it may have began as something deeply disturbing, and even shocking. 

Satan leads most of us by flaxen cords, not flailing chains, and it is as we list; as we develop a tendency to be entertained by the things of the world and the values contained in and carried to us by those things, that we move ever so imperceptibly away from our Father in Heaven and may, in time, find ourselves “wandering in strange roads.” ¹⁰

It is that we list to obey influences that are not of God, not that we will immediately run gladly into the arms of personal apostasy that is the important point to make.  We must follow the counsel of the Lord’s anointed servants in our age.  If we do so, our spiritual senses and awareness will not be dull, smothered,  subdued, or crushed, but will be clear, acute, and finely tuned to the things of eternity.

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[1]  T.S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages”, Four Quartets,

Reproduced at http://www.allspirit.co.uk/salvages.html

[2]  Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 8 May, 2003,

Reproduced at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4363

[3]  Boyd K. Packer, “Personal Revelation: The Gift, the Test, and the Promise,” Ensign, Nov 1994, 59

[4]  Boyd K. Packer, “Inspiring Music—Worthy Thoughts,” Ensign, Jan. 1974, 25

[5]  Thomas S. Monson, “The Lighthouse of the Lord,” Ensign, Nov. 1990, 95

[6]  H. Burke Peterson, “Clean Thoughts, Pure Lives,” Ensign, Sep 1984,  70

[7]  Ezra Taft Benson, “Satan’s Thrust—Youth,” Ensign, Dec 1971,  53

[8]  Propagandistic, sometimes extravagant mass demonstrations held annually between 1923 and 1938 by the Nazi Party involving torchlight parades, the use of vivid flags, banners, and other props, and stirring music, including, after 1935, the playing of Wagner’s Meistersinger, on the first night of the rally.

[9]  Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media the Extensions of Man. 2d ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964, p. 19-35.

[10]  1 Ne. 8: 32