The counsel of the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on the subject is perfectly clear:
Citizens of the United States have the privilege and duty of electing office holders and influencing public policy. Participation in the political process affects their communities and nation today and in the future. We urge Latter-day Saints to be active citizens by registering, exercising their right to vote, and engaging in civic affairs.
We also urge you to spend the time needed to become informed about the issues and candidates you will be considering. Along with the options available to you through the Internet, debates, and other sources, the Church occasionally posts information about particular moral issues on which it has taken a position at www.Newsroom.ChurchofJesusChrist.org.
Principles compatible with the gospel may be found in various political parties, and members should seek candidates who best embody those principles.
While the Church affirms its institutional neutrality regarding political parties and candidates, individual members should participate in the political process. Please strive to live the gospel in your own life by demonstrating Christlike love and civility in political discourse.
Given this open support for voting, why would any Latter-day Saint argue that we shouldn’t’ vote? First, we should understand that it is counsel and not a commandment or a revelation. These are men who are in a position of social leadership encouraging the people over whom they have influence to do something they believe is meaningful. It is not a commandment or revelation from God, nor is it a declaration of doctrine. Therefore after having undergone a study of the subject if we come to the opposite conclusion than they we are not defying the leadership of the Church in its just exercise of priesthood authority, we are but coming to different conclusions than they have based on their own human wisdom. To the end of explaining why it is that we should conclude differently than they, why we should not vote, this past week I have been sharing different articles on the topic of voting. The first was an article about how voting is unethical. I followed that article with another about how ineffective and meaningless voting is as anything other than a means of social control. Having laid this groundwork I now hope to explain why it violates our religious principles to engage in voting, especially in a statist (“state-ist”) form of government.
The State as Infernal
I have written extensively on this topic previously, so I will not spend a lot of space rehashing it here. The simplified version is this: One of the deepest themes of LDS theology is that human agency is one of the holiest and most important aspects of reality. It is so important that God cast out Lucifer and all his followers because they wanted to use the Father’s power to extract obedience from the masses in order to save them from suffering and the potential of failure – in exchange for his absolute dominion and the extinguishing of agency (or “free will”) Lucifer promised total safety. After his fall, Satan continued to enact this plan upon the Earth, promising to use the wealth of the world to creates armies and navies through which he could reign with blood and horror upon the Earth. This connection between Satan and the kingdoms and nations of the world is no accident nor is it a singular instance.
Satan is always connected to the gaining and usage of political power. To Christ Himself, Satan showed “all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them” and declared “All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.” (Matthew 4:8-9) The Book of Mormon warns repeatedly about wicked “combinations” which worship Satan and who exercise political power (2 Nephi 2:26, Helaman 6:26-29, and Ether 8:18-20, to start with) that ultimately destroy two civilizations. In Revelation, John sees a dragon, which is identified in Revelation 12:9 as the Devil. The dragon is described as having seven heads, seven crowns, and ten horns. Dr. Alonzo Gaskill explains in his book The Lost Language of Symbolism that crowns represent authority and political power (pgs. 69-70) and that the horns represent the imperfect power of the Devil (pgs. 49-50). Then in Revelation 13, John sees a great seven-headed beast arise which is empowered by and and which serves the Devil. According to the revelations of the Prophet Joseph Smith, the Beast is, “the likeness of the kingdoms of the earth.”(See Revelation 13:1, footnote a.) Note that “likeness” means not just looking like something, but being a representation of it. Revelation 13:2 explicitly says that this beast which represents the kingdoms of the world gets “his power, and his seat, and great authority” from the dragon- the Devil. Revelation 13:7 says the Beast has the power to make war and has power “over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.”
I don’t know how it could be clearer – the powers of the world draw their power not from God Himself, but from Satan. Can any pledge their loyalty, love, or service to something of such infernal origins, can they encourage it and empower it through their consent, actual or assumed, and still claim to serve Christ?
The State as Idol
William Lloyd Garrison, then denouncing Northerners in the USA for loving national unity over God’s commandments but making a point that applies to those who worship the modern idol of government and country today, said:
With the North, the preservation of the Union is placed above all other things—above honour, justice, freedom, integrity of soul, the Decalogue and the Golden Rule—the Infinite God himself. All these she is ready to discard for the Union. Her devotion to it is the latest and the most terrible form of idolatry.
Your devotion to your country, your nation, your government, is idolatry in its most terrible form, masquerading as virtue in the same way a whore masquerades as a lady. It convinces you to disobey the commandments of God as if that were a virtue to be celebrated and in turn seeks to attack, humiliate, or destroy any who would place God and His commandments first. There are multiple examples of this to demonstrate the point, but for brevity’s sake I will cite but two: first, military and police violence and, second, taxation.
In modern revelation, Christ has forbidden His Saints from stealing and killing, as can be seen in D&C 59:6, which reads:
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Thou shalt not steal; neither commit adultery, nor kill, nor do anything like unto it.
All killing is forbidden by the Gospel of Jesus Christ, without exception. If you are a Latter-day Saint the voice of the Lord is clear and He has forbidden you to kill another human being. And yet the government continues to urge us to kill in its name, for its power, to assert its dominance, and according to its glory. Its militaries murder millions and call this a thing of glory and honor. Its police murder people in the streets and call this justice and law. Idolatry encourages wickedness as righteousness and teaches us to obey it and disobey God. In its schools we are indoctrinated from childhood into this death cult and conditioned to think of killing in its name absolves us from God’s commandments that forbid killing. The hallmark of idolatrous cults is that they teach us to disobey the one true God in favor of ideologies that promote and profit the cult leaders and its idol(s). The Death Cult of the State teaches us that its murders are just and that there is no greater honor than to kill or die in its name and for its power in direct opposition to the commandments of Christ.
This same truth extends to supporting the system of taxation. Taxation is theft. There is no getting around this fact. Your money is your own property. When the government demands part of your money from you otherwise it will take it from you and imprison you, possibly until your dying day, as they did to Irwin Schiff, how could that be anything other than extortion and theft? That, of course, is if you don’t “resist” kidnapping and imprisonment and they don’t just outright kill you in the first place. When a person on the street puts a gun to your face and demands your money on your life we call him a mugger. When a group gets together and does the same we call that a gang or a cartel. That doesn’t change just because the thugs wear suits and say John across the street and Billy two doors down said they could come over and take your property. It is all still extortion; it is all still theft. As the great Lysander Spooner wrote:
If taxation without consent is not robbery, then any band of robbers have only to declare themselves a government, and all their robberies are legalized.
If any man’s money can be taken by a so-called government, without his own personal consent, all his other rights are taken with it; for with his money the government can, and will, hire soldiers to stand over him, compel him to submit to its arbitrary will, and kill him if he resists.
We Latter-day Saints are commanded not to steal. Yet the government can only exist by extortion, stealing, and carrying out mass and destructive violence against those who protect their inviolable rights to life, liberty, and property. Further, the government actively teaches that this theft is good and noble and that only the insane who would think otherwise. In this it actively misleads people, teaches ways in opposition to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and convince people to enforce these violations of God’s commandments through terror and violence. As said before, it is the hallmark of an idolatrous organization that it teaches you to fear it instead of God and to believe and obey its commandments even though they violate God’s commandments.
In addition to the way that the State teaches people ideologies that are antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, there is the way that the governments of the world encourage people to treat them as God. When there is a threat of crime, the government promises to protect you. When there is a threat of war the government promises to protect you. If you lose your job the government promises to provide for you. If you’re homeless the government promises to house you. If you’re poor the government promises to give you money. If you’re hungry the government promises to give you food. When you’re sick the government promises to heal you. The government actively promises to feed, cloth, shelter, educate, heal, and enrich the lives of all people if they would but submit to the powers and authorities those in political position claim they need to construct this utopia of safety. In exchange for your liberty the Political Messiah will lead us all to the Secular Zion where all negative aspects of human existence have been eliminated through the omniscience and omnipotence of the State. Politics, in short, convinces us to see the Government as God.
Can you serve Satan or his agents and still claim to follow God? Can you take part in a system of idolization, that promotes the ideals of the State as the savior of the people and still claim to be acting in Christ’s true faith? Can you legitimize such an artifice by your vote, by your apparent consent to it, and still claim to be following the Gospel of God? From the pinnacle of the Mount comes Christ answer:
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.
You can serve in and empower an organization that claims to be able to do what God alone can – solve the problems of the world – and which teaches us to disobey the commandments of God or your can serve in the Kingdom of God and empower its program for transforming the world, the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But, according to the words of Christ Himself, you cannot choose both.
The Time to Choose Is Now
The Prophet Elijah once denounced the Israelites for wanting to claim to worship the Lord God while also engaging in the rites of Baal, saying:
How long halt ye between two opinions? if the Lord be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him.
1 Kings 18:21
That is really the choice laid before all of us. We cannot halt between two opinions. We cannot claim to love and worship God while still taking part in the corrupt, violent, and idolatrous customs of the world. I know how hard it is to think of voting as anything other than a “sacred right” or “duty and privilege;” we’ve been mentally conditioned from childhood in this false tradition of our fathers and changing something that goes that deep into our past can be like an earthquake that shakes everything else in our lives at a foundational level. But the time to make that choice is now if we want to actually make things better. Perhaps it would be different in a voluntaryist society where people had the actual ability to give or retract consent to the government they belong to and the actions its takes, but we do not. We live in statist societies and both purpose, form, and function statist governments are set in opposition to God and His Kingdom. We cannot keep a foot in Babylon and a foot in Zion. We cannot keep a mansion in the New Jerusalem and a summer home in Hell. We cannot keep alternating between warm and cold in our dedication to God for He demands all or nothing from us. As Christ warned His people through the Revelator:
I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.
Revelation 3:16
We can be cold to Christ, against Him or merely indifferent to Him, or we can be hot to Christ, in open and dedicated support of Him. But when we try to do neither, when we try and mix our dedication to Him with dedication to the methods and systems of the world, that we become lukewarm and He spews, us, vomits us, from His mouth. I cannot think of a much more frightful image than being so disgusting to God that He would rather vomit you up than bring you into His Body.
Now, is voting going to be the one thing, that singular instance of cold dedication to the powers of the world mixing with the our hot dedication to Christ’s kingdom, that will cause Him to vomit us out like so much filth and poison? Maybe, maybe not. But it certainly is one more thing cooling down our dedication for the Lord by mixing it with dedication of and service to the means and powers of the Earth. We cannot keep jumping between the two positions – Zion or Babylon – and think that it will save us. The Lord our God is a jealous god, so much so that Jealous is one of His names (see Exodus 20:5 and Exodus 34:14), and only will withstand our adulterating our dedication to Him with our dedication to any thing else for so long before He casts us off altogether for such adultery. Whether that thing we go whoring after be Baal, Moloch, or the Nation is irrelevant. They’re all false gods, idols which will eventually be consumed by God’s judgment during the Second Coming. (see D&C 87:6)
Thus our efforts should always be bent towards refining our dedication and service to Him, to more fully consecrating everything we have – time, talent, love, trust, loyalty, possessions, service, love, everything – to His Kingdom and not to the kingdoms of this world and the god which leads them (see 2 Corinthians 4:4 verse and footnotes for Satan being called the “god of this world). And in that effort, to fully live our faith in an ever truer manner, jettisoning something as unethical, ineffective, meaningless, and corruptive as voting should be a no-brainer, something easy we all can do. By doing so we stop legitimizing the violence, brutality, and corruption of those we vote for – something often ignored is that while it may be true you can find principles compatible with the gospel in various political parties, you also find within them means and ends absolutely antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ which are also given the appearance of our consent and support when we vote for those in the various parties. Instead, by not voting we deprive those in power the illusion of our support and legitimization of their corruption and thus reveal the government for what it truly is – a system of violence, compulsion, extortion, and oppression. Christ once taught that the truth would set us free (see John 8:32) and it is still true today. The more we expose the truth of the State the more we expose people to the truth, expose enough people to the truth and the whole façade the State depends on will crumble, exposing the State for what it truly is when all the false traditions and propaganda has been stripped away, and liberating people to achieve a life of greater freedom, liberty, faith, and prosperity than ever before.
So, on Election Day this year, and all other years to come, go out and do something meaningful, something that could bring real change to society. Serve God, not Mammon. Serve Christ, not Satan. Serve the Kingdom, not the State. Vote by refusing to vote, by refusing to give the appearance of your consent and legitimization of wicked and sinful people, reject the call to participate in a corrupt, infernal, and idolatrous system. Instead, take the time you would normally waste on voting and go do something good for your community. Go on splits with the missionaries. Pass out church tracts in a busy public square. Volunteer to help in a service project. Donate time to a soup kitchen. Sleep in. Play video games. Go out to dinner. Read a book. Watch a movie. Don’t promulgate the great fiction of the State. Do anything else but participate in the corrupt and corrupting system of government. Said simply: Do something good for society. Don’t vote.