If Mormons correctly understand their theology, Connor Boyack writes, they will “be proponents of the philosophy of liberty, or libertarians.” Boyack has given up on Republicans and Democrats as advocates of liberty and limited government, recognizing the former as big government proponents for central banking, deficit spending, economic and foreign intervention and the latter as only differing in the objects and uses for this bloated government. Only libertarianism, he argues, is consistent and principled in its defense of liberty as the highest political good.

In his debut book, Latter-day Liberty: A Gospel Approach to Government and Politics (Cedar Fort), Boyack dedicates the first half of his work to defining liberty and attempting a rational and theological foundation to make this liberty the end of Mormon politics. Let me first say that I agree with William F. Buckley’s sentiment that every conservative has a great deal of libertarianism in them. Conservatives and libertarians both cherish individual liberty and are dedicated to its protection. The very unique coalition that Buckley helped forge enlisted conservatives and libertarians in the same fight against advancing statism. That being said, libertarianism is crippled by blind spots that Boyack seems to fully embrace. I do not intend to here give a full critique of libertarianism or Latter-day Liberty. Instead, I’ve chosen to address what I see as the most fatal flaws in Boyack’s unique brand of Mormon libertarianism that is characterized by 1) a misreading of the war in heaven, 2) the related placement of a shallow sense of liberty as the highest political good, and 3) a radical fusion of theory and practice in relation to natural law that forces him to underestimate the goods at stake in the command given in the LDS Church’s 12th Article of Faith to sustain the laws of the land.

The War in Heaven

In a recent interview with JAC, Mormon scholar Terryl Givens said, in relation to the war in heaven, “If we’re going to make theology the basis of our political positions, we have to make sure we get our theology right.” As is the case at several junctures in Latter-day Liberty, Boyack’s reading into LDS principles distorts the potential applicable principle at hand. Boyack paints the caricature that Satan’s plan was essentially to turn the hosts of heaven into mindless drones who were forced to do what was right so that they might be saved. Christ, on the other hand, weighed in on the side of liberty. With this understanding, the war in heaven becomes a powerful lesson against coercion and force. We learn that the ultimate being of the cosmos, God Almighty, is pro-choice on the weightiest issue imaginable, the eternal salvation of His children. If God would rather lose a substantial portion of His children than force them to be good, surely our governments should allow even great amounts of license for the sake of liberty. So Boyack’s argument goes.

The main problem with this formulation is that it is a misreading from the beginning. Nowhere in scripture do we read that Satan planned to coerce or force God’s children into obedience. Scripture only states that he sought to “destroy the agency of man.” Surely, forcing individuals to do what is right is one way to destroy this agency, but, as Givens points out, this is a “rather brute and certainly not the most sophisticated or effective way to deny people their agency.” Willfully submitting to such extreme coercion is inimical to man’s nature, and libertarians, perhaps more than all others, should know that such a strategy is doubtful to have been appealing to a third of the host of heaven. The natural man, in his most debased form, rather is drawn by the doctrine of Nehor that “all mankind should be saved at the last day,” regardless of covenants or living up to any other standard of righteousness. The natural man wants to stay up all night drinking, partying and having sex and then wake up the next morning refreshed, free of hangover or any risk of child or STD. Eat, drink and be merry and nevertheless be saved in the kingdom of our God. In short, he wants to divorce choices from consequences. He wants to indulge his basest passions without ever having to face the consequences. He wants wickedness to be happiness.

Ironically then, Satan’s plan sought to deny man his agency by giving him exactly what he wanted: to choose a life of wickedness and nevertheless be happy in the kingdom of God. He sought to destroy agency by refusing to respect the natural tie linking choices and consequences. While it is impossible to know with certainty the exact plan of Satan’s destruction, this seems at once more enticing to man’s nature and more in line with the Satanic strategy deployed by the anti-Christs of the Book of Mormon. Couple this with the knowledge that Satan’s “plan” was never a plan in the sense that it would have been enacted had the votes lined up differently, and we reach a much different reading of the political principles at stake in the war in heaven. Instead of revealing a libertarian God, it reveals a God who respects man’s agency by refusing to divorce choices from their consequences. Where the former reading of the war in heaven might lend one to see unilateral divorce as the government’s respecting the choice of an unhappy spouse to back out of a marriage, the latter reading helps us realize that marriage is a most sacred contract that cannot be broken by one party except in the most serious circumstances such as infidelity or abuse.

Liberty as the Highest Political End

“If Mormons are to be supporters of the cause of liberty,” Boyack writes, “the argument then follows that they should be libertarian.” If it sounds like Boyack is drawing a hard line that’s because he is. According to him, conservatives and liberals have given up on liberty and are more interested in furthering their own power. While they might trot out the word “liberty” during campaigns, at the end of the day, they are all its enemies, even if they attack from different angles.

Boyack bombards the reader with a litany of quotes from philosophers and church leadership to show that liberty is the chief political good. While conservatives might be inclined to agree with Boyack on this point, it soon becomes apparent that he does not use the word the way the American Founders did. For the Founders, as Matthew Spalding writes, liberty was “the rightful exercise of freedom, the balancing of rights and responsibilities.”

The Founders did not use the words “liberty” and “freedom” synonymously. While all animals can be considered to have freedom, true liberty is reserved for human beings who are able to deliberate upon and act in accordance with moral truths and responsibilities. In other words, they are able to act with relation to higher ends. Boyack, on the other hand, renders the far less rich definition that liberty is simply “unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.” Liberty, then, is the right to act as one chooses as long as one does not harm others or their rights. Liberty is defined in purely negative terms and is void of any moral meaning. For LDS who have recently been reminded by its leaders that “free agency” properly understood is scripturally “moral agency,” this is surely problematic.

But, perhaps this is already too abstract. The shortcomings of Boyack’s approach are obvious from the commonsensical wisdom that future freedom is dependent on the merit of previous decisions. Consider the familiar story from the LDS Church’s Gospel Principles manual in which a couple is walking along the beach and sees a sign that says “Danger—whirlpool. No swimming allowed here.” At that point the couple could make many choices.

We might think [the sign’s prohibition] is a restriction. But is it? We still have many choices. We are free to swim somewhere else. We are free to walk along the beach and pick up seashells. We are free to watch the sunset. We are free to go home. We are also free to ignore the sign and swim in the dangerous place. But once the whirlpool has us in its grasp and we are pulled under, we have very few choices. We can try to escape, or we can call for help, but we may drown.

As it is in the private sphere, so it is in the public. Aristotle wrote that unrestrained or unguided freedom cannot preserve liberty. Surely libertarians (but not only them) concerned with mounting debt can see how previous choices limit our future choices and even the choices of others. The question then is what government is to do about this truth. Is it to operate as if all choices were equal, acting as if it did not have to bear the consequences of license? This is a large question, and I do not pretend to offer a more finely tuned republican formula that better situates our regime between licentiousness and torpor than the one the Founders gave us. We must remember, however, that it is the basic problem of government to maintain rule of law (order) without devolving into tyranny and maintain the maximum amount of freedom without crossing into license, which creates its own — perhaps more subtle — form of tyranny. Having just escaped the grasp of despotism, the genius of the Founders is that they insisted not on the other extreme but on situating government at the proper mean between liberty, tyranny, torpor and license. They knew it was not enough to think of freedom in the short-term. Those who truly love liberty will likewise take actions that sustain and strengthen liberty, not merely exercise it.

Aristotle taught that it is impossible to separate the purpose of the individual life from the ends of the regime. In the most general terms, Aristotle wrote, individuals want to be happy. He was not speaking of the kind of thrift store happiness that is so often trumpeted today where everyone wishes not only to make their own choices but to also choose their consequences. It was a happiness that was directly related to how well individuals used their freedom. As individual happiness is irrevocably tied to an individual’s virtue, so we would be naive to think that the happiness or well-being of the political community was not also the end of politics.

This may seem like a departure from the Founding’s liberal roots, but I believe this reaction is largely due to a misreading of the Founders. In Federalist No. 14 James Madison writes that the American experiment is about obtaining “private rights and public happiness,” as if indicating that private rights were the key contributor to public happiness. Later, however, in Federalist No. 45, Madison argues that the public good, or public happiness, “is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object.” Madison made this argument as part of his larger point that it was the Constitution that established the government that would best facilitate and secure the conditions of (not provide) this happiness. How could it be otherwise, recognizing, as Madison would write, that good government is simply “the greatest of all reflections on human nature?”

Some contemporary Americans may be uncomfortable making happiness the highest end of politics rather than freedom. They fear that one version of happiness would be imposed upon them at the expense of their liberty and their happiness. This is a legitimate concern and one of which Madison and the Founders were also aware. But, isn’t it also a threat to liberty to pretend that license does not bear consequences that enslave and degrade man?  Again, I do not claim to have the perfect formula that calculates the precise meeting spot of free actions and virtue, but I know enough to be certain that it is unwise to pretend that their proper balance is not a requisite for a prospering political community. It would seem then to be the duty of every responsible citizen to use liberalism’s institutions to strengthen virtuous causes and, in turn, strengthen liberty and provide the conditions for man’s happiness. In short, it is the duty of far-sighted Americans to not only preach the gospel of liberty but to preach the gospel of liberty well understood, or, that is to say, a sustaining, nourishing and virtuous liberty that will foster instead of decay man’s freedoms.

In Boyack’s parade of quotes showing that liberty should be the highest end of LDS politics, he includes a quote in which Elder Charles Didier says “Our most important need as defenders of liberty is to know what true liberty is, to teach it, to profess it, and to testify of it.” Perhaps it is ironic that this quote is lifted from a talk that argues that LDS should fight against “pornography or obscenity in bookstores, on television or radio, or in places of entertainment” as well as against “those who would make more easily available to the young and inexperienced alcohol and its attendant evils, including drunken driving, highway fatalities, broken homes” and other “laws which violate the commandments of God.” Didier also includes this following quote from President N. Eldon Tanner: “People who argue that they have constitutional rights and want to use what they call their free agency to accomplish unrighteous ends abuse the idea of free agency and deprive others of their constitutional rights.”

Reading the entirety of the address, it becomes clear that Didier is not arguing for Boyack’s libertarian ideal. Rather, he is making the argument that such a short-sighted definition fails to “know what true liberty is.”

Natural Law and the Fusion of Theory and Practice

Boyack gives his reader a primer on natural law theory, pointing to sources such as Cicero, Locke and the Founders. “Natural law theory holds that there already exists a set of laws which we should both understand and obey, and which should serve as the basis of government. … Natural laws have an inherent supremacy clause to morally invalidate and delegitimize any conflicting man-made law.”

Fair enough. Boyack goes on to argue that “an advocate of natural law points either upward to God or inward to his own humanity for moral authority” while advocates for positive laws (laws by man) must back these by force. Perhaps it is too easy a point to call attention to the fact that natural law must also be reinforced by man-made laws and institutions even if their moral authority exists outside these constructs.  It is not clear, however, that Boyack has given this most basic point consideration. While these laws are found in nature, they are weak without government, and, yes, government’s force. Consider the government’s protection of property. Yes, it is an essential natural right, but at the end of the day it is protected at the barrel of the gun. It is absurd, therefore, to judge the merits of governments or their laws by whether they are backed by force. The better measuring stick is whether it protects man’s liberties, is based on the consent of the governed, and contributes to the public good.

Boyack’s more dangerous point, however, is that LDS should use the principle of nullification to resist laws that violate “the true, supreme, constitutional law of the land.” Boyack recognizes that such a teaching risks violating the 12th Article of Faith, which teaches “We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.” Boyack insists, however, that nullification is different than civil disobedience because it does not preach the violation of the law but the sustaining of the higher law. Of course, Boyack is forced to make this distinction because the Brethren were unequivocal in their denunciation of civil disobedience. President James E. Faust taught, “Even when causes are meritorious, if civil disobedience were to be practiced by everyone with a cause our democracy would unravel and be destroyed. Civil disobedience is an abuse of political process in a democracy.”

To believe there is a substantive difference between the civil disobedience Faust was referring to with the Civil Rights Movement and the kind of nullification Boyack is preaching, one would have to accept that blacks in the 1960s had no basis for equal protection under the Constitution, or natural law.

While it is true that positive laws that violate natural and constitutional law lack moral authority, this does not mean we should, or that it is wise to, break these laws. Boyack does his readers a service in bringing to light excerpts from early Church leaders such as Joseph Smith, John Taylor and Wilford Woodruff suggesting that LDS are not bound by unconstitutional laws and even have the duty to resist them. I fear, however, that Boyack oversimplifies the complexity of the factors that go into the decision of whether Saints should be in the business of violating the laws of the land. Even more, he suggests that LDS have the duty to resist such laws, saying “To comply with [governments’] mandates on issues for which they have not been delegated authority is to justify those and yet additional abuses that will surely follow.”

Using the example of abortion, President Faust taught that “even though we disagreed with the law … we are still obliged to recognize the law of the land until it is changed. … Rather than resort to civil disobedience or violence, we are obliged to exercise our right to seek its repeal or change by peaceful and lawful means.” The abortion example should be illustrative for Mormons, who believe abortion is the taking of an innocent life (murder or something like unto it). If ever there were an issue that required the saints to nullify the law of the land, wouldn’t this be it? For those who believe that the embryo and fetus form just as an important part of the species homo sapien as anyone of its post-birth canal counterparts, abortion tears at the heart of the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.

In 1937, President Heber J. Grant went to Nazi Germany and counseled the Saints to not cause trouble with the Nazis. Why would he do this in the face of such atrocities? We cannot be absolutely sure, but there appear to be many more considerations involved than whether natural law or constitutional principles are being violated. Such considerations very well may have included the implications of such disobedience on those violating the law and their families, long-term impact on the Church, effects on the political regime, etc. The list goes on, and we cannot always see why the Lord’s anointed give the counsel they do. But, perhaps this is why they are given. Where there are not hard and fast rules discernible by reason to let us know when we might break the laws of the land, I think it prudent to follow Elders James E. Talmage and Bruce R. McConkie in recognizing that while there are situations where we might be morally justified to do so, “there is no sure way of knowing the course we should pursue in each instance except by revelation.”

Like so many libertarians, Boyack is a valuable advocate for getting the most burdensome aspects of government off our backs. I have no doubts that he is sincere in his love of liberty, but I wonder whether his libertarianism has blinded him from a richer liberty that is often present in the very LDS sources he marshals for his cause. Boyack loves freedom, but his liberty risks being, at its core, an amoral one that is left without direction or purpose. Freedom, yes, but not the moral agency fought for in the war in heaven or one capable of facilitating man’s happiness. As much as conservatives and libertarians disdain government largesse, they must not run to the opposite extreme but recognize the indispensable role limited government plays in creating the conditions of happiness. Liberty’s perpetuation and flourishing will always be contingent upon a public sphere that does not ridicule virtue but instead sustains institutions such as churches and families where individuals learn to use their agency toward their own happiness and that of the republic. Only with these things secure will we reap the blessings of true liberty.

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