A few years back, I read\u00a0some advice on a writing blog that said you should never, ever, ever blog publicly about religion or politics, because that would alienate\u00a0your potential readership. Well, it’s an election year and I’ve already blogged quite a bit about politics, so I might as well go all the way and\u00a0throw some religion in there too.<\/p>\n
I am a devout Mormon. That means\u00a0that I attend three hours of church on Sunday,\u00a0strive to make personal prayer and scriptures study a part of my daily routine, hold a priesthood, and worship at an\u00a0LDS temple<\/a> as often as I can (about every week or so). It also means that I don’t smoke, do drugs, or drink alcohol, coffee, or tea, and that I practice strict abstinence before marriage and fidelity within.\u00a0Without getting too deeply into the doctrine, faith in Jesus Christ is at the center of everything I believe and practice.<\/p>\n So why would I say that God is a Libertarian? Aren’t the Libertarians those crazy political fringe guys who\u00a0like to smoke weed and get the government out of everything? What\u00a0does\u00a0a straight-laced Mormon have in common with any of them?<\/p>\n Quite a lot, as it turns out.<\/p>\n Libertarians basically believe that individuals should be free to govern themselves with as little interference from the government as possible. All of the different schools of libertarian thought basically revolve around the proper role of government in society and where the line should be drawn, but they all agree that the power of the State should\u00a0be minimal.<\/p>\n Because actions have consequences, however,\u00a0the only way we can all be free is for everyone to be responsible for their own actions. For example, if a worker does a poor job, his boss should be free to fire him. If he refuses to work at all, he shouldn’t get a welfare check, because that’s forcing other people to support his lifestyle. If a woman decides to be promiscuous, she should pay for her own birth control, because the only other alternative is to force other people to pay for it, infringing on their freedom.<\/p>\n This is why the flipside of the coin of Liberty is Responsibility. If Liberty is the freedom to act without being acted upon, then Responsibility (or the ability to respond) is an essential part of that.<\/p>\n One of the ways that governments take away our liberty is by enticing us to give up individual\u00a0responsibility for our own life decisions. Gun control?\u00a0Don’t take responsibility for your own self-defense, just trust the government to take care of it. Mass surveillance? You’re innocent\u00a0and don’t have anything to hide, so just let those government agencies police themselves.\u00a0Socialized health care? No matter your lifestyle decisions, health care is a right (never mind that everyone else is going to have to pay for it)!<\/p>\n The LDS church is very opposed to all of this. It teaches that we should all strive to be self-sufficient, or in other words, responsible for ourselves. We believe in charitable giving, but not in the form of handouts. The church welfare system<\/a> revolves entirely around teaching people how to provide for themselves and, through one-on-one help, bringing them to a point where they can accomplish that.<\/p>\n But the Mormon-Libertarian connection is more than just a practical one: it’s a doctrinal one as well.<\/p>\n According to LDS theology, God is our Father in Heaven, literally. If you call up the Mormon missionaries and start taking the lessons, one of the first things they will teach you is that every human being is a child of God\u2014that God is the father of our spirits, and that therefore we are all spiritually brothers and sisters.<\/p>\n Before we were born, we lived as spirits in the presence of God. As His sons and daughters, He wanted us to grow up to become like Him and inherit everything that He has. But there was a problem. Evil cannot exist in the presence of God, and without experiencing evil, we could never understand or know how to choose the good.<\/p>\n So God proposed a plan. He would create a place called Earth,\u00a0where we could experience good and evil and learn how to choose between the two. He would make us forget everything from our life in his presence, so we would have to walk by faith. That way, when we did choose good,\u00a0it would all be on us. We would learn through our own experience.<\/p>\n Inevitably, though, we would make evil choices that would make it impossible for us to return and live with Him. But God promised He would send us a Savior, who would\u00a0pay the price for our sins and cleanse us of them. This Savior was our elder brother, Jesus Christ. All we had to do was accept His gospel and follow His teachings.<\/p>\n Most of us rejoiced at this plan. It gave all of us\u00a0an equal chance to learn and grow and become like our Heavenly Father.<\/p>\n But equality of opportunity is not the same thing as equality of outcome. When our brother Lucifer looked at the plan, he saw that\u00a0those who rejected Jesus Christ would be damned, or unable to return to the presence of Heavenly Father.<\/p>\n So he proposed a different plan: that God would make him the Savior instead, and that he would save everyone. In order to do that, though, he would have to take away our ability to choose between good and evil. Instead, he would make all the choices for us, and we would never be able to learn from our own experience. He would take all the glory.<\/p>\n God rejected Lucifer’s proposal, because He knew that\u00a0without the freedom to choose between good and evil, we would never be able to learn and grow and become like Him. So\u00a0Lucifer rebelled against God, and decided that if he couldn’t have the glory, then no one could. He convinced a third of our brothers and sisters to reject\u00a0Jesus Christ and follow him instead. That is how Lucifer fell and became Satan.<\/p>\n According to Mormon\u00a0theology, Satan’s downfall was that he tried\u00a0to create a perfect world by destroying individual liberty. Sound familiar? It should, because the war in heaven never actually ended. When Satan was cast out of heaven, he took his followers down here to Earth. Each one of us faces that war every day.<\/p>\n Satan doesn’t just want to spread evil all over the world. Evil, by itself, does not defeat God’s plan. No matter how horrible our suffering may be in this life, it will all eventually come to an end, and turn to our glory if we are faithful. Satan knows that the way to destroy God’s plan is to destroy our Liberty, and\u00a0he seeks relentlessly to do just that.<\/p>\n This is why I believe that God is a Libertarian. He wants us to have the freedom to govern ourselves, because that is principle at the very core of His plan\u2014the Plan of Salvation.\u00a0He wants us to stand fast in that Liberty wherewith Christ has made us free<\/a>.<\/p>\n So does that mean that\u00a0President Jesus would legalize marijuana?\u00a0Yes, I think he would. Remember, Jesus spent a lot of time among publicans and sinners. He didn’t condone their stupid decisions, but he didn’t condemn them to prison either. Why should we?<\/p>\n Would President Jesus legalize the death penalty? The man who said “let he who is without sin cast the first stone”? No\u2014not because capital punishment is morally wrong, but because the State shouldn’t have the power to exercise it. After all, just look at the corruption of the Sanhedrin.<\/p>\n Would President Jesus legalize abortion? Here, I’m going to depart from mainstream Libertarianism and argue that He wouldn’t, except in cases\u00a0that threaten the health (including mental health) of the mother. By legalizing abortion, we have effectively granted the State to arbitrarily define what is and is not human life. Jesus had a profound respect for human life, suffering even the little children to come to him. I cannot believe that this same Jesus would\u00a0grant the State that power.<\/p>\n (That said,\u00a0there are cases where the taking of human life is morally justified. That’s why I believe a President Jesus would make exceptions for cases threatening the health (including mental health) of the mother. But for people who use abortion as a birth control method, who think they should have the right just because they made a bad decision and forgot to wear a condom? No.)<\/p>\n What about taxes?\u00a0If the man who admonished\u00a0us to render unto Caesar Himself became Caesar, would He raise our taxes?\u00a0Remember, this is also the man who said that His yoke was easy, and His burden light. Would He want any of us to be yoked to the State? Even the wealthiest one-percent? I don’t think He would.<\/p>\n Would President Jesus build a wall and make Mexico pay for it? Well, apparently even Trump isn’t going to\u00a0do that anymore, so enough said.<\/p>\n But you get the picture. If\u00a0Jesus Christ reigned in power and glory on this Earth (and as a Mormon, I believe that He will someday), His government would look a hell of a lot more libertarian than the\u00a0government we have today. In fact,\u00a0it might even be so libertarian that people wonder if His\u00a0government even exists, leaving room for the unbelievers well into the Millennium (and that, too, agrees with Mormon theology).<\/p>\n So there you have it.\u00a0The book is blue, the church is true, and God is a Libertarian (just don’t go one-star all my books, please).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A few years back, I read\u00a0some advice on a writing blog that said you should never, ever, ever blog publicly about religion or politics, because that would alienate\u00a0your potential readership. Well, it’s an election year and I’ve already blogged quite a bit about politics, so I might as well go all the way and\u00a0throw some… Continue reading The book is blue, the church is true, and God is a Libertarian.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-2Mn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10687"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10689,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10687\/revisions\/10689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}