Free Agency, Ezra Taft Benson, and the Republican Perversion of Freedom

 

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.

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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/.