I especially appreciate the opportunity to share a few thoughts about freedom of religion. As a Church and as individual Church members, we face difficult challenges to our funda- mental right to live according to the dictates of our faith. Our basic understanding of moral- ity, marriage, family, and the purpose of life is becoming foreign to the secular cultures in which we live. As President Thomas S. Monson has noted, “Where once the standards of the Church and the standards of society were mostly compatible, now there is a wide chasm between us, and it’s growing ever wider.”2 Values we once shared with the great majority of our fellow citizens are now often considered outdated, naïve, and sometimes even bigoted. Because a society’s deepest values drive law and public policy, and because those values in many Western nations are now almost entirely secular, government is increasingly enforcing secular values at the expense of religious ones. And society itself—even without the force of government—can ostracize, stigmatize, and discriminate against religious believers in overt and subtle ways, leaving people of faith marginalized and sometimes even despised. As this happens—and it is happening more rapidly in some countries than others—the space for us to freely and openly live out our deepest beliefs will tend to shrink and our ability to participate in civic life as free and equal citizens will tend to diminish. We indeed face challenging times.