During last week’s General Conference, Apostle Dallin H. Oaks delivered an address about the Constitution of the United States which s in theory is about why members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints should respect the U.S. Constitution. This talk, titled Defending Our Divinely Inspired Constitution, is in fact a rehash of an earlier Ensign article that Elder Oaks wrote in 1992 titled The Divinely Inspired Constitution. The difference between the two is mostly the framing parts. In the earlier version Elder Oaks spends the introductory part explaining a basic history of the writing of the U.S. Constitution and he wraps up with an argument about what he thinks a citizen’s duties are (including a bizarre argument that compulsory military service, that is citizens being forced into the military against their will and being forced to kill and murder at the command of those in power, is somehow a principle of “limited government” and “liberty” even though it violates the Constitution). In the newer version of the talk President Oaks spends the introductory portion talking about what a constitution is and why they are important and his concluding remarks talking about how members of the church should support the inspired principles upon which the Constitution is founded.
The core of both talks though are the same. In both versions he says that he sees no inspiration in the majority of the provisions contained in the Constitution and gives the provisions protecting slavery, allocating representatives, or establishing at what age people can be elected to office as examples. This I find important as he says in both cases that the inclination among some members to treat the Constitution as if it were entirely scripture or divinely revealed by God is false and he sees nothing in the majority of it that is inspired. Likewise, he says that “not every” Supreme Court decision interpreting the Constitution is inspired.
In both talks, President Oaks lays out five different principles which he teaches are inspired by God and are what make the U.S. Constitution a divinely inspired document. What is remarkable about this is the way it strips the Constitution of most everything that make it “American” as these are universal principles that can and do apply to any form of government with antecedents that stretch back over centuries of English Common Law and before.
What is even more remarkable is that if we accept these five principles as being inspired by God and evaluate how well the Constitution actually fulfills these principles we are forced to admit that it doesn’t do a very good job at them at all and that there are better forms of government – namely voluntarist, libertarian, and anarchist forms of government – which better fulfill these inspired, God given principles than the State-centered for of government created by the U.S. Constitution. In short, these are the principles of anarchist, libertarian, and voluntaryist government, not the principles of Statism (state-sim).
This article will evaluate each of the five principles that President Oaks discusses, show how they apply better to voluntaryist, anarchist, and libertarian governments, and argue that if we are supposed to do all we can to support these God-inspired principles in the function of government, then we can only conclude that what we need to do is not to focus on obeying the Constitution, but rather push for those forms of government which best follow these divinely inspired principles – namely libertarian, anarchist, and voluntaryist governments.
Note: In order to avoid clunky repetition, from here on out I will group voluntaryism, libertarianism, and anarchism under the phrase consensual governments. I understand that there are shades of differences between all of these and some dramatic differences between the sub-types, but they all share in common the idea that all human interactions, including government, should be strictly based upon the consent of the individual who has the power to agree to or refuse all government action because all people are equal. For governments which rely upon the ability of those in political authority to use violence to force individuals and groups to comply with government orders, like that one formed under the US Constitution, I will use the terms the State or statist. For more on the different forms of government, read here. With this out of the way, let us continue
The Inspired Principles of Government
Principle 1: Origins of Government Power
The first principle in his General Conference address (and principle four in his Ensign article) “is the principle that the source of government power is the people,” which he explains this way:
In a time when sovereign power was universally assumed to come from the divine right of kings or from military power, attributing sovereign power to the people was revolutionary. Philosophers had advocated this, but the United States Constitution was the first to apply it. Sovereign power in the people does not mean that mobs or other groups of people can intervene to intimidate or force government action. The Constitution established a constitutional democratic republic, where the people exercise their power through their elected representatives.
First, let’s knockdown the historical problem here. The United States wasn’t the first country to say that power rested with the people and to form a government with elected officials whose authority was supposedly based on the power of the people electing them. For example, the Dutch Republic, from whom the American revolutionaries borrowed the monies needed to wage war against the British, had been founded in 1588. It even had a federal structure like the later American system in the Constitution. So this idea that America was the first government to elect representatives to government office, and the implication that this is evidence for its inspired founding, is false. Now, let us look at what President Oaks says about with where the authority of governments come from.
Sovereignty, the right to reign and rule, comes from the “people” not because the masses hold some collective authority but because individuals have sole authority over their life, liberty, and property based on their self-ownership. The individual owns his or her mind and body (aka the “Self”) and therefore has the authority to make all decisions regarding what it does or does not do. As a function of that authority the individual can authorize some other person or group to act in his or her name to do things to his or her Self that the individual could legitimately do on his or her own.
Therefore, you can either choose to secure your own home and try to defend it yourself or you can hire a security agency to do it on your behalf. But what you cannot do is hire an agency to go to your neighbor’s house and take his or her money by force while promising to protect the neighbor’s home. That is violent theft and extortion which is a violation of the person and property of another. Because no individual has this authority they cannot authorize others to do it for them. When a group of people come together to form an agency and authorize it to act on their behalf, to do the legitimate things for them that they could do for their selves, this is the basis of government. Governments then are, in essence, no different than any other business formed. The members agree to pay certain fees in exchange for certain services.
The problems arise when you say that political governments are some special sort of organization unlike any other. When you say that the government has the right to extract labor, money, goods, products, services, or time from the people under the threat of violence and that people no longer have the right to grant or withdraw their consent to membership in such an organization you are no longer saying that the individual is sovereign. A sovereign has the authority to act as he or she chooses. Someone who must obey and allow someone else to extort their money and property from them or face violent and even death if they resist is not a sovereign but a servant, even a slave. And yet, this is the very system established by the U.S. Constitution.
If you do not obey the political orders of those in power, even when they command you to do something immoral or evil, then those in power will order you to be beaten, kidnapped, robbed, and caged, even killed (arrested, imprisoned, fined, and killed by cops and federal agents.) You are not a sovereign if these things can be done to you even though you have not violated the rights of any other person. Thus, the U.S. Constitution (like all statist governments) does not respect the sovereign right of the people to determine their own laws, rules, and governments. It asserts sovereignty over them and demands subservience from them.
The only form of government which does respect the sovereign authority of the individual to choose what form of government her or she will participate in are the consensual governments as they are based on obtaining and respecting the consent of the person who is part of the organization and form whom the authority of the government flows.
Principle 2: Division of Government Power
The second principle in his General Conference address (and principle three in his Ensign article) “is the division of delegated power between the nation and its subsidiary states,” which he explains this way:
In our federal system, this unprecedented principle has sometimes been altered by inspired amendments, such as those abolishing slavery and extending voting rights to women, mentioned earlier. Significantly, the United States Constitution limits the national government to the exercise of powers granted expressly or by implication, and it reserves all other government powers “to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Again, historically, he is wrong about the idea that a division of power was unprecedented. The Roman Republic divided executive power between two consuls and legislative power between the Senate and the people of Rome itself, who could come together and form their own laws and even override the laws passed by the Senate and Consuls. The aforementioned Dutch Republic divided power between the stadtholder, the States General, and the local provinces. President Oaks is correct that the U.S. Constitution contains language that in theory is supposed to limit the authority of the federal government to those powers which are outlined within the Constitution. He does gloss over the fact that this was done not in the original Constitution but was added in the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1791, a full four years after the original document was written.
Now that we have the inspired principle – the division of delegated power – does the Constitution truly established and maintained a division of power among the federal branches of government and between the federal and state governments? In a word – No.
The ways that the federal government violate the limits placed upon it in the Constitution are so numerous that they are impossible to count. A few of the more well-known ones over the last few presidencies include Obamacare (no provision of the Constitution authorizes the government to seize control over the healthcare of everyone in the country and dictate to them and companies what they can and cannot do), the PATRIOT Act (nothing in the Constitution authorizes the government to spy on American citizens, violate their privacy, track their movements, record their phone calls and text messages, or to enter their homes and take their property without their notice), federal immigration regulation (nothing in the Constitution authorizes the government to regulate immigration to and from the country in any form and for the first century of America’s existence the US had completely open borders as a result), marriage regulation (nothing in the Constitution allows the federal government to regulate laws regarding marriage in any form), abortion legislation (nothing in the Constitution allows the federal government to regulate abortion), the Federal Reserve system (nothing in the Constitution allows the government to force a singular paper fiat currency on the public nor the central bank needed to do so), and the President ordering drone bombings against civilians, military strikes on foreign nations, or assassinations (nothing in the Constitution gives the President the authority to carry out military actions without specific congressional approval in the form of a declaration of war). Yet all these things and more happen. Power is continuously gathered to the central government over ever aspect of human life, most often into the hands of a single individual, the President, and the divisions of power are most often merely a mirage created by partisan squabbling as opposed to actual limits on power.
I am sure that some Constitutionalists would respond that these happen despite of what the Constitution says, not because of it. To them I respond by saying that the cthonic monster that does all these evils is formed, empowered, and maintained by the U.S. Constitution and what it says matters less than what it actually allows. In the words of constitutional legal theorist and abolitionist Lysander Spooner:
Whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or bas been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.
No Treason: The Constitution Of No Authority, pg. 59
Consensual governments, on the other hand, hold no power at all. Because their function is based on the consent of those who participate within their systems which can be withdrawn at any time they have no authority or power to compel people in ways that will violate their rights. People and groups only work as long as those who are part of them feel that their lives, liberty, and property are respected and protected by the political organization to which they belong. The presence of governmental competition means that organizations are compelled to continue to provide the best services for the lowest prices without violating the rights of their members because if they do then those members will simply hire a different government agency to do the job or jobs he or she (or they when speaking about a group of dissatisfied people) want done.
This model actually represents the greatest division of powers. I might hire Program A to provide security for my property but hire Program B to help build the roads I will need in order to conduct business and invest in Program C to build local schools. Not only is power divided amongst these three groups but there is no danger of it ever being otherwise as they are all separate, disconnected, competing organizations. Indeed, within the same territory Program A and Programs D, E, and F may all provide the same services which must compete to provide the best services for the lowest costs and from which I can freely choose. Hence the division of power is fully realized in the consensual governments while statist governments, like that established by the U.S. Constitution, are all about the centralization of power into the hands of a few in political power.
Principle 3: The Separation of Powers
The third principle in President Oak’s General Conference address (and principle one in his Ensign article) “is the separation of powers,” which he explains this way:
The inspiration in the American convention was to delegate independent executive, legislative, and judicial powers so these three branches could exercise checks upon one another.
It is certainly true that the U.S. Constitution establishes clear powers to each branch of government while establishing checks on the function of each. At least on paper, anyway. The problem is that these checks and balances have only every functioned in part, From Washington’s very first term it became clear that these limits wouldn’t be followed when Washington signed the first national Bank of the United States into existence, something which the Constitution did not authorize either Congress or the President to form and which infringed upon Congress’s sole authority to regulate money by placing that power under the authority of the Secretary of the Treasury, a part of the Executive Branch. Then during the so-called Whiskey Rebellion, a series of poorly organized protests and riots against federal tax collectors by poor farmers who were being crippled by federal taxes, Washington, without any authorization from Congress as the Constitution demands, ordered 12,950 militia men to accompany him in an invasion of western Pennsylvania to put don’t the riots using government force. The history student may respond that Washington was acting within the law as the Militia Act of 1792 authorized the President to call forth the militia of any state where, “combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings,” were occurring. But that is exactly my point. The U.S. Constitution says that only Congress
shall have Power To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions [and] To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States
Yet here as early as 1792 we see the supposed separation of powers begin to breakdown as the powers of the Presidency expanded and Congress abrogated and its duty of controlling the militia to the Executive Branch and abdicateD its authority over the militia to the President. This degradation only accelerated after Washington and has come to the point today where it has broken down to such a degree that the entire separation of powers has almost collapsed entirely. Each branch of government has usurped power and authority beyond those delegated to them with Congress asserting the power to control the execution of law, with the President asserting the singular authority to create law, and the Supreme Court often issues rulings that are less about what the law says and more about using the powers of the Courts to create new laws whole cloth and impose them on the nation according to what the judges on the court believe the laws should be.
Consensual governments work completely differently though. Because, as explained above in Principal 2, in consensual government the powers we think of as belonging to the government are widely dispersed among specialized organizations that depend on the voluntary membership of individuals for the support and cash flow the organizations need to function and thrive there is no need to worry about the separation of powers. Such powers are by their natures separated and divided among competing organizations.
Absent statist government policies designed to grant special privileges to one organization over another or to enforce regulations which grant de facto economic benefits and protections to one organization over another, monopolies are impossible in consensual governments. This means that consensual governments are the only forms of government in which the powers of government will remain permanently separated.
Principle 4: Legal Protections For Specific Rights
The fourth principle in President Oak’s General Conference address (and principle two in his Ensign article) “is in the cluster of vital guarantees of individual rights and specific limits on government authority in the Bill of Rights, adopted by amendment just three years after the Constitution went into force.”
Here he addresses the fact that the Bill of Rights was passed years after the Constitution went into force, but ignores the implication of what this means. If these five principles are what make the Constitution an inspired document then surely missing such an important aspect must mean that the original document and its authors were less inspired than is often attributed to them by members of the Church in the United States. They missed a major aspect and inspired principle that took years, and an almost entirely different set of people in political power, to correct. Surely this must undermine the status of the Constitution as originally created, at least to some degree as it took such a major revision as the Bill of Rights in order to correct it and lessen the powers and authorities of government, at least theoretically as we have seen already those limitations almost immediately began to degrade.
President Oaks goes on to assert that the Bill of Rights and its protections for religious liberty helped to make the Restoration possible. This topic deserves an entire article all its own explaining why it isn’t true, but the simplest answer I can give her out of respect for space is that before 1865 the Constitution’s protections of religious freedom applied solely to the federal government’s actions and the states were free to make whatever laws they wanted abridging religious freedom. The Constitution gave no protection to the Saints during the Restoration and had nothing to do with helping make the US a place where the Restoration could occur.
The core principle here is that in governments following the inspired direction of the Lord there are protections for the rights of the individual written into the very operating rules of the government. Here again we see that the consensual governments more fully realize this principle than statist governments do. Since the organizations in consensual governments have no authority to compel obedience to their edicts to non-consenting parties and everyone involved has voluntarily reviewed the rules of operation for the organization and chosen to join it or not the individual has already determined that his or her natural rights are not violated by the operating rules of the organization(s) in question.
Thanks to the superior separation of powers these organizations have over statist governments if such an organization does try and assert power and authority that violate the rights of the individual, or re-write its operation laws to give it the authority to do so, the individual can easily and voluntarily withdraw from said organization and join another which performs the same function but which does not violate the individual’s rights. There is no need of a singular Bill of Rights because there is no singular Leviathan with the power to grind the masses under its heel. Instead, respect for the rights of the individual is built directly into the way the organization functions.
Principle 5: Who or What Rules
The fifth principle in President Oak’s General Conference address (also principle five in his Ensign article) we are “governed by law and not by individuals.” This, as Elder Oaks accurately describes in his Ensign article, is most commonly known as the rule of law. The idea behind the rule of law is that by subjecting the powers of government to a well-established set of laws, such as a constitution which outlines the structure, authority, and powers of government, you then protect society from the arbitrary exercise of power by politicians as they can only do what the law authorizes them to do. This whole concept sounds wonderful. The problem is that it is about as realistic as fairies, unicorns, and mermaids. As Dr. John Hasnas, professor of law at Georgetown University, explains in his legal paper, The Myth of the Rule of Law:
The law human beings create to regulate their conduct is made up of incompatible, contradictory rules and principles; and, as anyone who has studied a little logic can demonstrate, any conclusion can be validly derived from a set of contradictory premises. This means that a logically sound argument can be found for any legal conclusion.
…Because the law is made up of contradictory rules that can generate any conclusion, what conclusion one finds will be determined by what conclusion one looks for, i.e., by the hypothesis one decides to test. This will invariably be the one that intuitively “feels” right, the one that is most congruent with one’s antecedent, underlying political and moral beliefs …the law is never neutral and objective.
The Myth of the Rule of Law, pgs. 8 and 10-11,
What determines the way laws are written and interpreted is not some politically neutral objective body of rules and regulations. The laws and rulings of the courts are contradictory, conflicting, and indeterminate, able to be twisted to say and justify whatever those in authority want them to say at any given time. As Dr. Hasnas notes, this happens everyday in the way that laws are judged in the court system established by the Constitution and, I would add, in the very writing and passage of laws themselves. Dr. Hasnas explains that the only reason the law seems to have any stability or continuity at all is because it has been historically dominated by men of the same economic and social classes who have largely shared the same religious and political opinions and therefore all largely had a shared cultural background that informed their thought process, assumptions, and decisions. (Myth, pg. 23)
The rule of law provides no firm basis and exerts no actual limitation over those in power. They merely right it and interpret it according to their own inherent political and personal biases, assembling and dismissing whatever legal language they need to in order to justify foisting their beliefs on society under color of the rule of law. Dr. Hasnas goes on to quote evidence that this has been known by Supreme Court judges since at least 1897 and then asks why if this has been known for at least over a century, why then do people still believe in the idea of the rule of law so fervently. He answers that question thusly:
The answer is implicit in the question itself, for the question recognizes that the rule of law is a myth and like all myths, it is designed to serve an emotive, rather than cognitive, function. The purpose of a myth is not to persuade one’s reason, but to enlist one’s emotions in support of an idea. And this is precisely the case for the myth of the rule of law; its purpose is to enlist the emotions of the public in support of society’s political power structure.
People are more willing to support the exercise of authority over themselves when they believe it to be an objective, neutral feature of the natural world. This was the idea behind the concept of the divine right of kings. By making the king appear to be an integral part of God’s plan for the world rather than an ordinary human being dominating his fellows by brute force, the public could be more easily persuaded to bow to his authority. However, when the doctrine of divine right became discredited, a replacement was needed to ensure that the public did not view political authority as merely the exercise of naked power. That replacement is the concept of the rule of law.
…Once they [the general public] believe that they are being commanded by an impersonal law rather than other human beings, they view their obedience to political authority as a public-spirited acceptance of the requirements of social life rather than mere acquiescence to superior power.
The Myth of the Rule of Law, pgs. 25-26
In other words, the myth of the rule of law causes people to forgo logical assessment of the exercise of political power and to emotionally connect to the idea of obedience as following some natural necessity of life and civilization without realizing what they are truly doing is merely subjecting themselves to the exercise of naked power, raw force, and pure violence meant to dominate and control them. It convinces people to value, defend, and even praise their own oppression and allows the statist system to continue unthreatened even though it continually violates, threats, abuses, and destroys the rights and lives of hundreds of millions of people, if not more. As Dr. Hasnas says, the rule law myth “is the most effective means of social control available to the state,” (Myth, pg. 28) which is why it has been and will continue to be indoctrinated into every person as one of the most important social beliefs by the apparatus of the state public education. People are being taught one of the most fundamental doctrines of the Cult of the State and don’t even realize it.
So, if this whole thing is a myth then how can it be a principle of government inspired by God? Here we must recognize that there is a way in which to produce social order which does not depend on the myth that law is produced objectively by the apparatus statist edicts and violence. In the consensual governments law is created without the need for a central planner using the power of statist violence to force his/her rule upon the masses in the name of “order.” On pages 38 through 40 of The Myth of the Rule of Law, Dr. Hasnas gives numerous examples of the way that people have formed non-state based legal systems that maintained good social order without violating the rights of those involved within them. One example I found particularly enlightening was the example of African-American communities in the segregated South at the birth of the 20th century.
Because racism and segregation cut black communities off from the normal policing system and denied them basic protections for their lives, liberties, and property in the normal court system, African-Americans in these communities had to invent their own systems of policing and obtaining justice that respected and protected their rights. What was the result of this, did they dissolve into a mass of chaos with rival gangs masquerading as “police” murdering each other in the streets? No, the exact opposite occurred! Through the creation of their own consensual systems, these communities “were able to privately supply themselves with the rules of behavior and dispute-settlement procedures necessary to maintain peaceful, stable, and highly structured communities.” (Myth, pg. 39)
In the consensual governments you would likely see a rejection of the adversarial, winner takes everything system we have now in favor of a more arbitration based system something like what had existed in Europe (and in similar forms everywhere across the planet at differing times) before the rise of the State system of government we have now. This system based on mutual arbitration, which Dr. Hasnas labels “judicial procedure,” was a “set of complex negotiations between the parties mediated by the members of the local community in an effort to reestablish a harmonious relationship. Essentially, public pressure was brought upon the parties to settle their dispute peacefully through negotiation and compromise [that] favored cooperation and conciliation rather than defeating one’s opponent.” (Myth, pgs. 44-45) And does this not fit better with the Gospel of Jesus Christ and its central doctrines of reconciliation between man and God through the Atonement of Jesus Christ?
It is what I think President Oaks believes the rule of law is supposed to be, a focus on obtaining justice as peacefully as possible and maintaining social harmony without the arbitrary exercise of violence and power upon the public by those in power, as opposed to what the rule of law actually is – a collection of contradicting and incompatible rules and regulations which allow for any interpretation possible to be foisted upon the public as the operation of law which allows for the exercise of arbitrary power on the public by those in power. Therefore the consensual governments better fulfill this inspired principle of government far better than the statist forms of government do, including the U.S. Constitution.
What Then of the U.S. Constitution?
With all this evidence that consensual forms of government better fulfill the inspired and God-given principles of government that President Oaks teaches gives the U.S. Constitution any value, what should we then think of the U.S. Constitution? I think the basic assertion that the Lord inspired the American Founding Fathers to include these five principles into the U.S. Constitution is correct, but I fail to see this as a justification for treating the document as anything more than a tool. It is not an end in and of itself. It was the best that could be developed by that generation of people living in that era of time in that part of the world. They contributed developed ideas in political theory, government function, economic development, and human liberty that were essential in helping us to understand what we know now. But time has moved on.
Our understanding of liberty and society has allowed us to developed forms of consensual government that make the U.S. Constitution obsolete and our study of history has shown that many of these forms have functioned very successfully throughout the past and present. To maintain a dogmatic loyalty to the Constitution and other statist forms of government throughout the world therefore serves to do little more than retard the development of human society. Just as the steam engine was the stepping stone to the diesel train which in turn was the stepping stone for the electric train, which was in turn the steeping stone for the friction-less maglev train, so too was the Constitution never meant to be anything more than a stepping stone to greater ideals and developments in what would then be American society.
I know some argue that humans simply aren’t ready en masse to accept consensual government and there has to be some progress towards that over time that people can feel confident in which will allow they to ultimately accept consensual government completely and in the United States the most effective way to do that would be to first return to the system laid down by the U.S. Constitution. That way people could see that modern society would be able to function more successfully with greater liberty and prosperity for all through the reduction of state power and be more easily convinced that reducing it even more would render even greater benefits. This is an argument that is familiar and makes a lot of sense. It seems to be the underlying intellectual belief that Dr. Ron Paul operates under and which motivated his Presidential campaigns, for example.
While I recognize the logic of it and do recognize that it has some success, I still find it unconvincing. Those in power wield too much control and they’ll never surrender it, which is what such a reduction in power would require. The only way that we are therefore going to be able to establish consensual governments which better fulfill and enact the Lord’s inspired principles of government is by dissolving the State entirely. If we leave the apparatus of power in place it will only build and rebuild itself, as we can see from American history as illustrated above. The only way to prevent that from happening is by removing the power structure entirely, dissolving it right out from under those in power through our noncooperation and noncompliance to their orders and demands. When people refuse listen to those in power they have no power and are no different than any other mad man or woman roaming the streets and ranting on street corners.
This is the place where it seems obvious to me that President Oaks makes his most meaningful mistake. (And if you think it is wrong to point out that Apostles make mistakes, read here to see what the church teaches on the topic.) Steeped in American culture President Oaks makes various historical assertions that are simply not true, as illustrated above, but which do not ultimately impact the validity of his teachings about the five inspired principles of government. The problem comes when he asserts in his General Conference address that Latter-day Saints have “a unique responsibility to uphold and defend the United States Constitution,” and then goes on to engage in apologetics about the failures for democracy that boil down to telling people that they should “moderate” their views and that it is fine to accept corrupt, lying politicians as long we think the corrupt liar isn’t as much of one as the competition.
Really?
God wants you to vote for evil people as long as they’re the lesser evil?
So don’t vote for Cain, but Nehor is fine?
Moderating your views on what the best flavors of ice cream are or what you’ll have for lunch with your friends is fine. Accepting anything less than fullness when issues of peace, justice, goodness, liberty, prosperity, equality, morality, and life are all on the line is to value the appearance of order and the reality of oppression over righteousness and virtue. That is immoral and wrong. Moderation is exactly how we got to the mess we are in now which President Oaks decries in his address.
Why on Earth do Latter-day Saints have any special loyalty to defend the U.S. Constitution? Just because God inspired five principles that went in to creating it? Do other Latter-day Saints imagine that God didn’t do this for other nations and peoples as well? Or maybe we should follow the kings of Israel since God actually appointed them directly by revelation as opposed to merely inspiring some people with some of the principles that were incorporated as part of a document. Like the Israelites of old whose light and truth were so limited that they rejected God’s direct rule in exchange for a king so they could be like everyone else because that was all they could understand, (see 1 Samuel 8 & 9) the Constitution was all the light and truth the people of that time could accept.
We have greater light and greater truth today and should embrace it instead of depending on the lesser light of the past. The idea that we have some loyalty or duty to defend the U.S. Constitution has everything to do with the worldly American culture most Latter-day Saints have historically grown up in and little to nothing to do with the actual revelations of God, which are a lot more ambivalent on the Constitution than many Saints want to recognize.
Conclusions
General Conference was a weekend of powerful spiritual uplifting and feeding, inspired and revelatory preparation for the coming months and the trials and tribulations sure to be contained in them. President Oaks’s talk about the five divinely inspired principles of government was fantastic for numerous reasons.
- First, it clearly explains exactly what we mean when we say the Constitution was inspired. Now when we say that we should understand that it isn’t actually the Constitution itself which was inspired but these principles which were included in the Constitution which are inspired and which, by their inclusion, make the document itself inspired.
- Second, the five inspired principles of government are incredible exactly because they don’t really point to the Constitution itself as being inspired, rather they are the general principles upon which great and noble forms of government are organized upon. The more which a form of government realizes these principles the closer that form of government approaches to being a godly form of government, if such a thing can truly exist upon the Earth. In any case, it seems to be clear that those governments which better fulfill these principles are better governments than those which do not.
- Third, consensual governments -whether libertarian, voluntaryist, and anarchist – better fulfill these principles of government than statist forms of government do, including the U.S. Constitution, and are therefore superior forms of government.
- Fourth, we should recognize this and do all that we can to teach these principles of inspired government to all and insist that all forms of government strictly fulfill these principles in their most complete meanings and all obsolete forms be left behind.
- Fifth, we must recognize that our loyalty as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is to the Kingdom of God and its principles alone, not to the governments and doctrines of men.
Instead of dogmatic adherence to obsolete forms of government we should embrace consensual forms of government which not only will increase the peace, liberty, and prosperity of the people of any such society, but which will allow for the preaching of the Gospel, the expansion of the Church, and the foundation of the City of Zion more easily and more completely than any form of statist government ever would. In religious liberty, as in everything else, these principles of inspired government are more fully and completely realized in libertarian, voluntaryist, and anarchist societies than in statist societies, including that one formed by the U.S. Constitution.