Recently, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released a document underlining its policies on how to administer essential ordinances during this time of pandemics and state-mandated lockdowns. Most of this document was not innocuous in any manner. It mostly contained needed guidance to local church leaders on how to proceed with church rites such as the sacrament and baptisms. But there was one interesting part that many statist members of the church have seized upon as being a justification for obeying the state-mandated lockdown procedures without question as well as a weapon against those who would question the wisdom of policies that are threatening the lives of millions with starvation, disease, and ruin, demanding the hesitant submit to those in power.
The relevant portion of the church release is as follows:
Global Citizen Responsibility
Members of the Church are grateful for the laws of many nations around the world that protect religious freedom and respect the sacred freedom of conscience.
The Church teaches that its members should sustain and uphold the laws where they reside. These governments enact such laws as in their own judgments are best calculated to secure the public interest. We acknowledge that in exceptional circumstances all individual rights may be reasonably restricted, for a time to protect the safety of the general public.
On the surface it seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? In order to be good global citizens the members of the church will honor and obey laws restricting their freedoms which are designed to prevent the spread of the disease, therefore anyone encouraging people to disobey or question state mandated lockdowns, emergency orders, and governors/Presidential directives is violating, at very least, the counsels of the church and going against inspired Apostolic leadership. Right? Well, not so much. There are some fairly important caveats in this statement that suggest it gives far less support to state lockdowns and emergency mandates than the statists believe.
Caveat #1: Reasonability
We acknowledge that in exceptional circumstances all individual rights may be reasonably restricted…
So, not all restrictions are supported by this statement. Only “reasonable” restrictions are supported by this statement. Well, I ask you, what is a reasonable restriction on individual freedom? In which cases is it reasonable to crush the humanity of another child of God by denying them basic liberties? When is it okay to beat, cage, crush the dreams of, even kill another human being for the base wickedness of going outside? From the position of pure principle, this caveat alone destroys much of the power of the rest of the statement. It is obviously the case that it is never reasonable to inflict violence and harm on the lives of another person for merely going outside, visiting with friends, looking to purchase groceries, or trying to provide for their family by working. If the government wants to shutdown its “services” and deny me the “right” to go to the DMV, or some other such state institution, that is fine and reasonable, but the moment you begin attacking the lives of others it goes from reasonable to tyranny. At that point it becomes unreasonable to obey.
It is equally important to ask what rights the government can reasonably restrict. Not all rights are of the same kind. The most fundamental rights are natural rights, rights which exist inherently and universally within every human. In the United States the most famous description of these rights and the powers of the state regarding these rights comes from the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
The Declaration states that among the unalienable -today we would say inalienable– rights, that is rights which can never be taken from you or given up by you, are the rights to Life, to Liberty, and to pursue Happiness. That term “pursue Happiness” is quite expansive, including in it all the things you choose to do because they increase your enjoyment of your life and would certainly apply to such things as walking outside, going to work, or visiting with friends. Further, the only purpose for which governments exist is to secure these rights to you and that their just powers to do so come from the consent of those whom are governed. To explore just how radical of an idea this is will take an entirely separate article, here it will merely suffice to say this: As your natural rights preexist the government which is formed to protect them, your natural rights supersede the government itself, which can only rule over you by your explicit consent otherwise it engages in injustice. As this is the case it would not just be unreasonable to suggest that the government, whose sole job is to secure your rights, can at any time justly violate these rights it would be completely oxymoronic nonsense. You cannot secure rights by violating them.
The other type of right that people have are civil rights. Civil rights “are the rights that constitute free and equal citizenship and include personal, political, and economic rights.” If you think of a nation as a club, civil rights are the benefits of being a member of the club that only belong to the formal club members. Those who are not members of the club or who are only provisional members do not have access to full club privileges, if any at all. Likewise, in the case of a nation people who are not full citizens of the nation -immigrants, refugees, resident aliens, etc.- do not have the full benefits of citizenship, they do not have the full list of civil rights that a citizen does. Voting is the archetypal example of a civil right. All American citizens have the civil right to vote. Immigrants, on the other hand, do not have the right to vote because they are not citizens. Few consider this a crime, immoral, or a violation of the basic human rights of the immigrant because all understand civil rights to apply differently to non-citizens than they do to citizens.
The thing about civil rights though is that they aren’t truly rights. Rather they are the privileges of citizenship that extend equally to every person who is a member of the political body, which is why most people are okay with non-citizens not having the same civil rights as citizens. We instinctively acknowledge that civil rights are actually legal privileges and not true rights at all. And as they are privileges granted by the government it is theoretically possible that they could also be rescinded by the government. As these grants of privilege are the only rights the state has power over, that exist proceeding from the state unlike natural rights which preexist the state, it is only these “civil rights” that the state could reasonably restrict without it being either a violation of natural rights or a fundamental injustice. Even then though, the law often strictly regulates what the government can and cannot do in regards to the privileges it grants citizens in the form of “civil rights.” This brings us to our second caveat.
Caveat #2: The Law
The Church teaches that its members should sustain and uphold the laws where they reside.
There is a very important term we need to define here before we can decide exactly on what this line means. Before we go any further, we have to define what exactly the definition is for “law.” This is important to understand especially in a time of state mandates and government emergency orders so that we can determine if we are bound to obey them or not.
Judge Andrew Napolitano, a former New Jersey State Superior Court Justice and graduate of Princeton and Notre Dame, was interviewed about the legal status of the state mandated mass quarantines in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. In this interview, the Judge made some insightful and important distinctions. Laws must originate in legislatures as part of their regular function. This makes sense when you understand the meaning of the word legislature, which is “the body of lawmakers.” Further, the definition of legislate is literally “to make laws.” The state or national legislature is the portion of government which makes laws, and the only portion of the three branches of government which create laws. Laws start off as bills in legislatures and are debated and passed by both houses of the legislature in question. Then the bill is signed by the executive at which time it becomes a law. A governor’s order is not a law as it does not originate in the legislature as legislation.
The only powers that a governor has to use his position and public influence to try and cajole or apply social pressure on the public so that it will conform with state guidelines. But without a specific law passed by the relevant legislature the governor has no legal authority to compel obedience to his or her orders. Any governor doing so is actually breaking the law and acting dictatorial- that is declaring that whatever the governor dictates is law and those who do not obey will suffer violence, imprisonment, or worse. That said, a governor may find a way to use existing laws to go after those who refuse to comply with his or her orders. The example the Judge used was a restaurant who opens during quarantine. The owners and workers of said restaurant could not be justly fined or imprisoned for violating quarantine, but they could be fined for not having the correct health inspections as required by preexisting law because all the state health inspectors are at home under quarantine.
The US President has even less power to order national shutdowns than governors have to order state shutdowns. The President only has power over interstate commerce, meaning he could shutdown all trade between states, though enforcing such an edict would be near impossible, but even then he could only do so at the order of Congress, which is the body authorized to regulate commerce in the US Constitution. Over intra-state commerce, commerce within a state, he has no power whatsoever.
So, if we as Saints are bound to be subject to the law that does not mean we are subject to all orders of any government official. State mandated lockdowns and quarantines enforced by the violent power of the state executive are not by any definition laws. State mandated lockdowns and quarantines are dictatorial commands originating with a single authority -the Executive- who uses his or her military and policing power to threaten the populace and terrify them into compliance. They are not laws passed by those elected by the population to the branch of government -the legislative branch- to do so. As such we are neither morally or logically bound to support, defend, be subject to, or obey state mandated lockdowns and quarantines simply because we are ordered to do so by a government official.
Even in states where the state has passed a law supposedly giving the governor emergency powers – such as New Jersey, which passed a law making the governorship into a dictatorship by giving the Governor “control over such resources of the State Government and of each and every political subdivision thereof [and]….all other power convenient or necessary to effectuate such purpose”- does it follow that you have to obey the governor’s mandate? No, and the reason for this is simple. The government is formed and empowered by the people. Each branch has the powers it does because it has been endowed with those powers by the political body of the people. Because its powers are entirely dependent on the will of the people and delegated to it, because the legislatures powers are not self-existent and dependent on the will of the legislators- the legislature does not have the authority to then give up that authority to or delegate that authority to another branch, such as the executive.
Think of it this way: If I loan you my hammer or give you permission to use my hammer you do not then get to give my hammer to someone else to use no matter how much you or the other party agree to it. It is my hammer and my grant of permission to use it was solely to you alone. Without my permission you have no authority to lend or give it to another party. The powers of the state are the same. In constitutional theory, the people loan a particular branch of government a specific power through the instrumentality of a written constitution- essentially a legally binding contract. That branch cannot give that power to a separate branch without first gaining permission to do from the people to whom the power actually belongs, which would take altering the very constitution of the state or nation to do so. As no constitution of any state, nor the national Constitution, authorize any President or governor with “emergency powers” they do not have such powers and they cannot be granted such powers by the legislature because that is a violation of the entire theory under which the constitutional system of the United States rests. Any claims to such powers by a governor is a usurpation of power and unjust, literally unrighteous dominion, regardless of what the legislature has or has not supposedly authorized. Only the grant of such power by the people through the constitution could give the governor or President such powers.
What If I’m Not An American?
This is obviously a fair question. The church is international and across the world there are many forms of government. Most of them are some style of a democratic-republican form of government, and thus the arguments about the creation of law would apply, but a few absolute monarchies still exist throughout the world and places like China are absolute dictatorships in every manners. What about these places where the law does place into the hands of those in power unlimited ability to legally beat, cage, and kill the populace on the whims of those in power?
The pragmatic may argue that in such a situation the wisest course, or at least the less dangerous one, is to simply obey. And I do not think that anyone looking upon someone living in such a situation could look down upon them for taking a course of action that would minimize the amount of direct violence his or her family would be subjected to by obeying state mandated lockdown orders. But it is important to understand that the reasons to do so are entirely pragmatic, not moralistic and certainly not sacerdotal.
The reasons for this are multiple, but here I will only name two.
The first is that the principles I named above are not American ideals. When Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” he was making a universal argument. All people are equal. All people -regardless of race, creed, culture, sex, orientation, religion, ethnicity, nation, et. al.– have the same rights and the violation of those rights by any system is a great evil no matter how such a system is constructed or upon what justification it founds its existence. What is more, you can find these same ideas in every society. The ideals of liberty have manifested in every society, from the Tao of ancient China, to Islamic thought in the Middle East, to Africa, and more than there is room here to recount. But this should be enough to show most people in the world that the ideals of liberty, freedom, peace, and prosperity are not only “Christian” or “European ideals.” They’re universal truths appearing in every culture and belonging to every people.
These truths lead to one inescapable conclusion: The violation of the inalienable and universal rights of man negates the authority of the law responsible for the violation. As The noble English republican Algernon Sydney said while arguing against the power of King Charles II:
That which is not just, is not Law; and that which is not Law, ought not to be obeyed.
Or, as the heroic Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a prison cell where he was incarcerated for spekaing the truth against the evils of racism and racist laws:
One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”
Resistance to authoritarian commands and dictatorship in action may be illegal according to human law, but it is in accordance with Natural Law. If one chooses to resist state-mandated lockdowns in authoritarian, dictatorial, or monarchical regimes they are not breaking the laws of justice or the Law of God, which are ultimately the same.
What if one ends up imprisoned because of their actions? This leads me to the second principle: In order to enact change you have to take risks and those risks will not always work out for us individually. In prison we can find guidance from Elder George Reynolds, who was imprisoned for his willingness to challenge the unconstitutional and immoral laws enacted by the US government against plural marriage as a measure to destroy the Saints. While sitting in jail for his refusal to obey such unjust laws, he wrote:
“Be assured there are many worse places in the world than in prison for conscience’s sake. It cannot take away the peace which reigns in my heart.”
But, what about torture, mass punishment, and death? Certainly these will take away our “peace” in or out of prison, you argue. To that I can only agree. And if that is a reason for shrinking form the cause, you’ll find no judgment from me for your doing so. But if you do so, nothing will change and your generations after you will always be exposed to such dictatorship from the state, far beyond the reaction to this pandemic. If not here and now with you then when will it begin? Who will stand up for the cause of justice?
In this we have a great scriptural example with the prophet Abinadi, which can be read in detail in Mosiah 11-17 in the Book of Mormon. Despite it being illegal, Abinadi valued his and the people’s natural rights to freedom of speech and conscience so greatly that he chose to break the law to teach the word of God and call the wicked King Noah to repent for his violation of the inalienable rights of the men and women he ruled. In response the king had Abinadi dragged before the throne where he was given a stark choice- recant or die. (An artist rendering can be seen as the leading picture of the article.) Far from recanting, Abinadi launched into one of the greatest sermons in the scriptures about justice, mercy, the law, the Messiah, and obedience to God. In response, the wicked king and corrupt priests had Abinadi tied up and beaten to death with flaming bundles of sticks.
From Abinadi’s perspective his mission must have seemed stark and perhaps even empty. But the heart of Alma (later called the Elder), one of the wicked priests, was touched. His repentance and dedication would spark a spiritual, social, and political revolution that Abinadi could never have foreseen or never knew about, yet that revolution would never have occurred without Abinadi’s actions. His example is one that demonstrates both the power of standing up for the cause of human rights and the long term effects such a stance can have, even when taken by a single individual who never is able to see the results of his or her courage.
Conclusions
No government in the world can reasonably enact laws which violate fundamental inalienable human or natural rights. If an enacted law does so then it is unreasonable and falls beyond the purview of the authority of the government and we do not have to obey it. The only rights that the state could theoretically violate are therefore civil rights, which are merely the privileges of citizenship extended by the state as long as such a violation does not also violate your human or natural rights. It can shutdown the schools and the voting booths, but it cannot mandate lockdowns for people into their homes nor can it prevent you from working or traveling. As voluntaryists we have no problem with this- indeed I wish the state would shutdown more of itself so that we can see more and more that we do not need it or its rules to run our lives. One of the silver linings of the whole pandemic is that it is showing just how worthless most government rules really are for anything except enrich politicians and their cronies.
State mandated lockdowns and governor’s executive orders are not laws because laws originate in the legislative branch. Because these state mandates and governor’s orders are not laws we are not bound by the direction of the First Presidency to obey them. Even in places where monarchs or other absolute authoritarians rules the laws passed are still restricted by the universally acknowledged rights of man which restrict the just power of state officials to act and limit what kinds of laws can be justly created. Just as one would not run afoul of the First Presidency’s direction to obey the law for not obeying a state mandate or governor’s order you likewise would not for refusing to obey an unjust “law” because a law which violates the rights of the individual is no law at all.