Helaman 13-16: Free to choose

My reading for this week was the prophecies of Samuel the Lamanite. It's tempting to liken Samuel to myself as I try to speak out against injustice here in my apartment complex—in fact, you know what, let me do that for just a moment. My reluctance to do it is due to my knowing how self-serving the comparison is: Look at me, I'm raising a prophetic voice, God is on my side. But the fact is, I do believe that I'm speaking up for what's just; I believe that God stands with those who stand against injustice (which isn't quite the same as saying God is "on our side"); I believe that speaking against injustice is a prophetic act, i.e., an act of witnessing for truth. And while "self-serving" is the negatively spun way to put it, I do find encouragement and strength in latching onto the image of Samuel standing on the wall as an icon for the work I and others are trying to accomplish here. And I thank God for that encouragement and strength; I thank God that the Spirit lifts me through the scriptures in that way.

Enough said about that. Here's what I want to talk about today: In Helaman 14:30-31, we get one of the classic statements of what we used to call the doctrine of free agency (until Boyd K. Packer convinced Correlation that talking about freedom gave people the wrong idea). My modernized rendering:

You are free; you are permitted to act for yourselves; for God has given you a knowledge and has made you free. He has given to you that you might know good from evil, and he has given you that you might choose life or death; and you can do good and be restored to that which is good, or have that which is good restored to you; or you can do evil and have that which is evil restored to you.

There's a powerful message here, and there's a powerful potential for abuse.

Analogy: You're walking alone in a dark place. Suddenly you're seized from behind, and someone says, "Do what I tell you, or I'll kill you."

Are you, in that moment, free? Are you free to choose what you will do? In a philosophical sense—absolutely. You've been presented with a choice: life or death, options and consequences. Whether you live or die is up to you. But no one (except the most audacious, impenitent intellectual jock/lawyer type who sees where I'm going with this and wants to preempt my going there) would deny that this is clearly a case of coercion.

Certain understandings of freedom of choice (or moral agency, or whatever Correlation wants us to call it these days) that I've encountered among Latter-day Saints try to pass coercion off as freedom. For example, whenever the Church gets negative press for disciplining a dissident member, apologists rush to insist that members are free, that Church leaders don't coerce anyone: but choices bear consequences, and members who take certain actions must expect the consequences to follow.

That sounds perfectly reasonable, as it's intended to. But how is the threat, "Do what we tell you, or we'll excommunicate you," any different in kind from the threat, "Do what I tell you, or I'll kill you"? Obviously there's a difference of degree in terms of the level of violence being threatened (loss of life versus loss of membership). But it seems perfectly obvious to me that both are attempts at coercion.

I should clarify here that I've read enough Foucault, and I've read him in such a way, that I'm not necessarily opposed to coercive uses of power. Forms of coercion are inevitable and can be salutary: coercive power is necessary for societies or organizations to enforce the norms necessary to ensure their survival and the well-being, including the rights, of their members. But I also believe that the use of coercive power is very, very risky—here plug in D&C 121:39—and I think it's very, very, very dangerous to package coercion as freedom. It blinds the eyes and keeps you from recognizing when you're being led carefully down into captivity.

To bring this back to a more theological level: Although his wording speaks truths beyond what I suspect he intends (more on that in a few moments), Samuel's conception of freedom of choice seems largely coercive. In Samuel's depiction, God is a stern Puritan father who says, "Do what I tell you, or I'll take a rod to your backside." (By the way, I have a hunch that whether or not you approve of corporal punishment for children says a lot about your conception of God and God's justice.) Actually, Samuel's God threatens to do worse than just take a rod to your backside. Samuel's God threatens to destroy you (15:17). Samuel's God hates people who don't do what he wants—not just what they do, but the people themselves. That's what Samuel says; look it up if you don't believe me (15:4). And of course Samuel isn't unique in any of this: he's echoing claims you'll find in the Hebrew prophets—and the Christian Bible, too (so no smugness, please, about the so-called "loving God of the New Testament"). As depicted here, and as in many, many other places in the texts we use as scripture, God is the assailant who says, "Do what I tell you, or I'll kill you."

But while it's clear from things he says elsewhere that Samuel imagines God himself as the agent of destruction, his words in 14:30-31 point us toward a different way of understanding choice and consequence, one that gets elaborated in parts of the D&C as well (especially D&C 88). This understanding works something more like the concept of karma. Choices have natural consequences: actions produce natural results, results that can be beneficial or hurtful. Good produces good; evil produces evil, not because of divine fiat but simply because of the natural order of things.

If you follow through on this vision, then God ceases to be the stern Puritan father threatening corporal punishment or, worse, the assailant threatening to kill you. Instead, "judgment" becomes a matter of consequences unfolding from choices according to natural laws to which even God is subject; and God becomes, not a ruler threatening to lock you up, or flagellate you, or execute you for breaking his laws, but a counselor, someone who foresees the consequences of our choices and tries to guide us to make choices that will be beneficial for us and others. God becomes himself a kind of prophet, I suppose: someone pleading with us to do the right things in order to avoid negative consequences—not because he himself is threatening to rain down negative consequences but simply because he knows negative consequences are inevitable if we pursue a certain path.

This vision makes the most sense to me as a way of reconciling, on the one hand, what the scriptures and my own experience tell me about God's love with, on the other hand, the need for justice and the reality of living in a world where people's choices can hurt them. I would even go so far as to say that this vision is probably operative in the minds of most Latter-day Saints when they sit down and really think about how divine judgment works. But the rhetoric of God-as-punisher is alive and well in LDS discourse as well. And it's that rhetoric, I suspect, that facilitates the self-deception of calling coercion "freedom."