Freedom has become the rallying
cry of the Republican Party, the one banner they hoist above all others. But
this single-minded devotion to liberty, ironically, can actually lead to the
loss of freedom, because when freedom becomes divorced from any context that
gives it meaning and balance, it can become a form of tyranny. Freedom rightly
understood is but one of many principles that must work in concert to create a
happy and just society. If personal freedom, for instance, outweighs compassion
or love of truth, suffering will inevitably follow.
In Latter-day Saint circles, personal freedom, particularly personal freedom in political and economic arenas, is often conflated with free agency, which is actually a much narrower concept. Let’s examine how this confusion arose and what some of the consequences are.
Free Agency and Freedom from Government
In “The Cold War and the Invention
of Free Agency,” one chapter in a compilation of essays on Ezra Taft Benson’s
politics, historian Matthew Bowman lays out an intellectual history of
the LDS notion of free agency. Initially, writes Bowman, “Joseph Smith rejected
original sin, and instead emphasized an expansive notion of human liberty in
which all had the ability to choose between good and evil.”1 And
“early Mormon leaders emphasized the importance of moral decision making
regardless of context, downplaying the importance of political or economic
circumstance.”2 Indeed, early Latter-day Saints were not even capitalists,
those who favored the so-called free market. Free agency and free enterprise
were not even distant cousins in early LDS thought. Instead, the Saints were
engaged in various versions of communitarian economics, which sought to create
economic equality through cooperative effort, not through competition. Their
concept of free agency was also disconnected from the notion of political
freedom. But over the Church’s first century, the world around it began to
change dramatically. “By the middle of the twentieth century,” says Bowman, “shaken
by the rise of the officially atheist Soviet Union, . . . many American
Christians blanched, and began to conflate religious ideas of freedom with
political and economic freedom in ways more explicit than they ever had
before.”3 Into this shifting social context stepped Ezra Taft
Benson, the LDS Apostle who had been selected by President Dwight D. Eisenhower
as his secretary of agriculture. Benson was ultraconservative, and he tended to
see his religion through a distinctly political lens. “More than any other
Mormon leader, Benson developed language that linked the religious and moral
concerns of Mormon theology to the political and economic status of American
society.”4
Not only was Benson convinced of
the dangers of communism, but he also argued that even big government was more
than just “an inconvenience or inefficiency”—it was “a genuine spiritual pathology that
spiritually sickened humanity and inhibited the possibility of salvation.”5
“Communism was not a perversion of righteous society; rather, all
government was inherently pathological. Thus, Benson . . . began the process of
reinterpreting free agency in a way that bound Mormon theology to libertarian
politics.”6
Benson was in many ways a precursor to Ronald Reagan, who, with his famous quip about the nine most terrifying words in the English language—“I’m from the government, and I’m here to help”—launched the Republican Party on the path it has followed for the past 35 to 40 years: from distrust of government to the idea that the government is the enemy to outright hatred of government. Rather than seeing government as our tool to help create a more just and prosperous society, Republicans view government as something to oppose at all times and in all ways, even when it is doing everything possible to protect us from danger and devastating sickness and death. Instead of seeing government as a vehicle for making our freedoms possible and protecting them, Republicans have come to see freedom from government as the only kind of freedom worth the name. This was not always the case. Abraham Lincoln, for instance, certainly had a different view of our republic and its possibilities than his RINO descendants have today.
Civic
Virtue and the Rise of Selfishness
Historian Gordon Wood reminds us that citizens in a Republic
shoulder a much greater burden than subjects in a monarchy or any other
authoritarian regime. Ironically, the freer we are, the greater duty we
as individual citizens must assume in creating a society of order and generosity
and justice. In other words, freedom does not free us from responsibility; it
drastically increases our obligations to others. Republicanism, succeeding
monarchy as the dominant political system, “put an enormous burden on
individuals,” says Wood. “They were expected to suppress their private wants
and interests and develop disinterestedness—the term the eighteenth century
most often used as a synonym for civic virtue. . . . Dr. Johnson defined
disinterest as being ‘superior to regard of private advantage; not influenced
by private profit.’ We today have lost most of this older meaning. Even some
educated people now use ‘disinterested’ as a synonym for ‘uninterested,’
meaning indifferent or unconcerned.”7
“Republics,” Wood continues,
“demanded far more morally from their citizens than monarchies did of their
subjects. In monarchies each man’s desire to do what was right in his own eyes
could be restrained by fear or force.” In republics, by contrast, the only
effective restraint on self-interest is the sense among citizens that they must
often sacrifice personal advantage or convenience for the public welfare.
Today, such restraint is in short supply.
What the ongoing pandemic has
revealed to us, about us, is discouraging. What we see is not a sense of
civic virtue, or what Wood calls disinterest. Many of us are very much
self-interested. Largely, this decaying of civic virtue has occurred on the
right where individual freedom (my convenience) outweighs the public good, and this
narcissistic turn has unfortunately infected many Christians, including Latter-day
Saints, who have been unwilling to take actions to protect their fellow
citizens, even to the point of ignoring a plea from the First Presidency. This
attitude has confirmed to me what I have claimed for years now, that many
Latter-day Saints are more Republican than they are Mormon.
When I look at the percentage of
Democrats who have been vaccinated (91%) compared to the percentage of
Republicans (60%) and then look at the abysmal vaccination statistics for the
corner of Utah County where I live, attending church makes me very
uncomfortable. I’ve written in this space before about the unwillingness to
mask in my ward, even after the First Presidency’s plea. This is nothing other
than an overt politicizing of a public health crisis. This past week, Utah hit
two new low points. We are currently third in the nation in COVID cases per
100,000 population. Our hospitals are overflowing. Scores of schoolteachers are
infected and quarantining. In this environment, the Utah legislature struck
down two local mask mandates (in Salt Lake and Summit counties), leaving our
students and teachers and health-care workers at the mercy of the rampant
omicron variant. Our elected leaders wanted to make a political statement, so
they took decision-making power out of the hands of local public health
professionals. The sad thing about this is that many of my fellow Latter-day
Saints are happy about all this.
In this deadly viral war, the Republican Party has planted its battle flag on the hill they think represents personal freedom. Self-interest—selfishness, if you will—has carried the day. Personal convenience has totally eclipsed any sense of civic duty, of sacrificing for the public good, for the health and well-being of other people. As Gordon Wood suggests, this does not bode well for the survival of our republic. I honestly wonder what Ezra Taft Benson, were he alive today, would say about this unfortunate offspring of his political philosophy. Who knows? Perhaps he would be totally on board with the Republican enshrinement of personal freedom and their abandonment of Christian charity.
Satan’s Methodology
Let me bring this discussion full
circle, back to the Mormon notion of free agency and Ezra Taft Benson’s attempt
to paint it a political hue. A fundamental point of LDS doctrine is that God
granted us agency in this mortal probation, the ability to choose between good
and evil, right and wrong, and Satan is irrevocably committed to destroying
this ability. In a recent issue of BYU Studies Quarterly, we published a
fascinating essay by Philip Barlow on the question of how exactly Satan
intended to destroy our free agency.8 After covering the two most popular
theories—Satan’s coercing
us to choose right or his simply removing the penalty for bad choices—Barlow introduces a
couple of possibilities I had never considered before. And these options
actually bridge the same gap Ezra Taft Benson attempted to span by placing free
agency in a political context. “Might such deceit,” writes Barlow, “take the
form not only of delusion about responsibility, but of confusion over sheer
facts—a profound problem reflected in the modern world’s discounting of a free,
independent, and competent press, for example, and of professional expertise
generally? ‘What better way has history taught us to control the actions of men
and women than to limit the information available to them so that the need to
choose never enters their minds, or in the event that it does, [proceeds] so as
to obscure all but the desired option?’”9
What he is talking about here is
the sort of disinformation barrage we are seeing from Donald Trump’s Republican
Party. If you can feed people false information, including “alternative facts,”
and get them to accept the falsehoods, it renders people incapable of making
good choices. In essence, it short-circuits their free agency. Unfortunately, there
have been so many lies that it is hard to keep them straight, and the right has
created a media bubble that is difficult to escape from once you’re sucked in.
But of all the lies, three seem to stand out in my mind in their potential to
destroy our republic (or even the world in which it exists).
First is the so-called Big Lie,
the claim that the previous election was “stolen” from Trump by the Democrats.
Of course, there is no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud, and the few
cases of fraud that have been uncovered are split pretty much evenly between random
individual Republicans and Democrats. And yet, according to recent polling,
around 80 percent of Republicans have bought into this lie to one degree or
another,10 which would also include a large percentage of Latter-day
Saints. The danger of this degree of gullibility extends beyond the obvious
damage it will do to people’s trust in the foundation of our government: free
and fair elections. As Barlow points out, it can also destroy our free agency.
In other words, those who are most devoted to the notion of “personal freedom”
are also those who are undermining that very freedom by restricting their own
ability to make rational and well-informed choices. By listening to dubious
sources of information, they are destroying their own agency. And Satan laughs.
The second category of lie that is
being spread primarily on the right is the lie about the efficacy of both
vaccines and masks. Against all credible expertise, many people, including some
who are very influential, are spreading both misinformation and disinformation
about vaccines and masks. In an ideal republic, citizens would understand civic
virtue and willingly sacrifice personal convenience and even potentially their
health (in very rare cases) for the greater good. But when civic virtue fails,
government has a responsibility to step in and enforce public health measures
with mandates. The position the Republican Party has taken on mandates,
however, has turned the GOP into the pro-virus, pro-death, pro-selfishness
party. And again, as Barlow reminds us, the misinformation being used to
justify civic selfishness (my freedom is all that matters) has the effect of
undermining our agency, our ability to make wise choices. And in this context,
the cost is unnecessary sickness, disability, and death on a massive scale.
The third lie, which has perhaps
even more grave consequences than the other two, if that is possible, is the
continuing disinformation storm that dismisses human-caused global warming as a
hoax, or least a nonproblem. Here, we are talking not just about the survival
of our republic, but about the survival of the human race and of many other
species. A few lonely voices on the right are finally admitting that global
warming is a serious problem, but overall the Republican Party is still doing
all it can to obstruct any changes that might preserve our overheating planet. Donald
Trump by himself set us back at least a decade in our efforts to combat this
crisis. In this case, disinformation can destroy our freedom to live in a
healthy environment. The tools the GOP uses in this program of deception are
denial and deflection. Some, like Trump, simply deny the reality of global
warming. Others use specious arguments to deflect us from taking action. “It’s
too expensive” is a favorite talking point. But how could addressing this
problem now possibly be more expensive in the long run than ignoring it? This
is another example of selfishness—prioritizing
fears of short-term pain over long-term health and well-being.
In summary, what we are seeing today
is an all-out assault on free agency by those who claim “personal freedom” as
their banner. The irony here is both perplexing and maddening. If you are so
determined to grasp personal freedom that you will discount all other
considerations, even truth, then the very freedom you pursue will become as a
mirage in the desert. You may think you are drawing close to it, but it will be
forever beyond your reach. Or perhaps if you do finally lay hold of it, you may
find that it is not freedom at all, but a perversion of freedom that enthralls
you and everyone you have trampled in your myopic pursuit.
_______________
1. Matthew
Bowman, “The Cold War and the Invention of Free Agency,” in Thunder on the
Right: Ezra Taft Benson in Mormonism and Politics (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2019), 160.
2. Bowman,
“Cold War,” 161.
3. Bowman,
“Cold War,” 165.
4. Bowman,
“Cold War,” 165–66.
5. Bowman,
“Cold War,” 166.
6. Bowman,
“Cold War,” 167–68, emphasis added.
7. Gordon S.
Wood, The Radicalism of the American
Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1991), 104–5.
8. Philip L.
Barlow, “Shards of Conflict: How Did Satan Seek to Destroy the Agency of Man?” BYU
Studies Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2021): 113–25, https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/shards-of-combat/.
9. Barlow,
“Shards of Conflict,” 123.
10. “In our
most recent University of Massachusetts at Amherst poll, fielded online Dec.
14-20 by YouGov among a nationally representative sample of the U.S. voting-age
population, only 21 percent of Republicans say Joe Biden’s victory
was legitimate. This is nearly identical to what we found in our April poll, in
which just 19 percent of Republicans said Biden was legitimately elected. Other universities, media outlets and polling
firms have found nearly identical results.” Lane Cuthbert and
Alexander Theodoridis, “Do Republicans Really Believe Trump Won the 2020
Election? Our Research Suggests That They Do,” Washington Post, January
7, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/07/republicans-big-lie-trump/.
