Church governance "by the voice of the people"

My scripture reading for this week was Mosiah 29-Alma 4. The Sunday School study guide invites me, as I study Mosiah 29, to “consider what King Mosiah’s words teach about the kind of leaders who will help ‘make for the peace of the people.’” I hadn’t read those words until just now, but as it happens, my reflections this week have been running along that general line, i.e., I’ve been thinking about what Mosiah 29 teaches about leadership and authority. In today’s post, I want to articulate some ideas I’ve had—a kind of “studying things out in my mind”—about how Mosiah’s warnings against kingship could apply to the way authority functions in the LDS Church. I want to try out a proposal: the same reasons that lead Mosiah to urge his people to “make it your law—to do your business by the voice of the people” also offer a case for implementing greater democracy within LDS church governance.

(An aside: When I decided earlier this week that this was where I felt inspired to go with today’s post, I worried that perhaps I’m obsessing about issues of Church leadership—a number of my posts have been about that—rather than focusing in my reading on listening for what the Spirit may be trying to tell me about my own personal shortcomings. It’s a valid concern, I think, and next week’s reading will give me a chance to focus on taking stock of my own spiritual state. At the same time, questions of authority in the Church are very much relevant to how Latter-day Saints organize our common life together, and so those questions are certainly important subjects for reflection.)

Mosiah gives several reasons why democracy is preferable to kingship. Now—why do I think this discussion is even relevant to questions of ecclesiastical governance? Isn’t Mosiah talking about political government? Well, yes . . . except that kingship isn’t a strictly “political” form of government in the sense that church-state separation has accustomed us moderns to thinking. Kingship is a sacred office. The king represents God (or the gods, depending on the kind of society we’re talking about). The king is appointed by God—anointed by God, in Jewish and Christian monarchic traditions, which makes the king, literally, a “messiah” or “christ”—an “anointed one.” Kings in ancient societies have been expected by their peoples to maintain the cosmos in good order by protecting them from their enemies and interceding with the gods as necessary to avert disaster. In some traditions, kings are thought of as divine or at least as having divine powers. The kings of England, for instance, were thought to have powers of divine healing.

We see this mingling of “political” and “sacred” roles in kingship as described in the Book of Mormon. Nephi’s kingship (2 Ne. 6:2, Jacob 1:11) is presented as a fulfillment of God’s promise to make him a ruler and teacher over his brethren (2 Ne. 5:18-19). As king, Nephi is also a prophet, who receives visions and other kinds of revelations; he also exercises the authority to ordain priests (2 Ne. 5:26). Benjamin is another king who also functions as a prophet, i.e., he is the recipient of an angelic revelation intended for his entire people (Mosiah 3). Like Nephi, Benjamin also exercises the authority to appoint priests (Mosiah 6:3). Mosiah functions explicitly as king, prophet, seer, and revelator (Mosiah 8:13-16). Joseph Smith exercised a similar combination of roles during the Nauvoo period: political head (mayor), military head (the Nauvoo Legion), head of the priesthood, and, of course, prophet, seer, and revelator. Not coincidentally, perhaps, this was the same period when, according to some sources, Joseph had himself secretly crowned king over Israel on earth.

This is the model of leadership that Mosiah urges his people to abandon. And here are the reasons he gives:

1. There is too much danger that this kind of authority will be exercised unrighteously (Mosiah 29:12-24). Mosiah grants that strong authority in the hands of a righteous person, i.e., a person committed to justice (Mosiah 29:13), can accomplish wonderful things, including peace and the curtailing of crime (Mosiah 29:14). King Benjamin had been beloved among his people for his egalitarianism, i.e., working for his own support, and for abolishing slavery and imprisonment (Mosiah 2:12-14). Benjamin, we are told, was a “holy man” (WofM 1:17). The problem, Mosiah points out, is that you can’t trust that you will always have a holy man as king. And in the absence of democratic means of legitimizing authority, a king who abuses his power can only be overthrown by violence (Mosiah 29:21). Mosiah’s solution is to abolish kingship and make the voice of the people sovereign instead, i.e., those who lead are appointed by the people (Mosiah 29:25-26).

It should be noted, by the way, that kings are also said in the Book of Mormon to have been “chosen” by the people as well as having their reign legitimated by God (see Mosiah 2:11). It’s also interesting to me that the office of chief judge seems to become, like kingship, hereditary. See Helaman 1:2, where it’s assumed that the office of a recently deceased chief judge will pass to one of his sons. The difference, though, seems to be that the people have a voice in deciding which son the office will go to via a multi-party election (Helaman 1:3-5). The office doesn’t pass on automatically. That makes sense, of course, if your concern is that you don’t want authority passing into the hands of someone you don’t trust to exercise it well.

How does this apply to the LDS Church? The LDS hierarchy exercises a strong, non-democratic authority with the highest office being transferred automatically rather than by election. (The sustaining of officers is not a democratic election; Church teaching has been perfectly clear on this point.) That is, the LDS hierarchy is a leadership system of the kind that Mosiah warns against. Of course, the vast majority of Latter-day Saints aren’t concerned about that because they trust that the General Authorities are, like King Benjamin, righteous men. There’s even a notion that God would never allow an unrighteous man to gain, or at least to retain, high church office, based on statements like Wilford Woodruff’s assertion that the Lord will never allow the president of the Church to lead us astray. How people imagine that God is supposed to prevent that from happening has never been clear to me. I’m much less sanguine about this. I place greater stock in the warning that virtually all people are prone to abuse authority (D&C 121:39), and I’m inclined to agree with Mosiah that instituting more democratic forms of government is the best option (though not a foolproof one) for trying to prevent abuse.

One argument I’ve seen against democratic church governance is that the church is a kingdom led by living prophets, seers, and revelators. To that, I would respond: Mosiah’s society was a kingdom headed by a living prophet, seer, and revelator (Mosiah 8:13-16). But that didn’t prevent Mosiah from championing a democratic system instead. It’s a huge shift, yes. It would be equivalent to the president of the Church announcing that henceforth General Authorities would be chosen by democratic vote of the membership. But that is the shift that Mosiah championed.

That’s the major thrust of Mosiah’s argument for democracy. There are two secondary arguments I want to look at, too.

2. Everyone should be responsible for their own sins. One of Mosiah’s arguments against kingship is that kings, because of the influence they exercise by virtue of their strong authority, are responsible for many of the sins of their people. This Mosiah calls an “inequality,” which ought not to exist. If the voice of the people is sovereign, then people become responsible for their own sins (Mosiah 29:30-32).

This is relevant to church governance because the Book of Mormon describes the responsibility of church leaders—priests and teachers—in the same way that Mosiah describes the responsibility of kings. Just as the king is responsible for the sins of his subjects, Jacob says that as a priest, he is responsible for the sins of those he is called to teach if he fails to teach them adequately (Jacob 2:2). This makes sense if the relationship between priest and people is understood in hierarchical terms, with the priest responsible to teach the word of God and the people responsible to listen and obey. But the scriptures offer an alternative way of understanding teaching authority in the Church, one that is more democratic and that redistributes responsibility along the lines Mosiah talks about. In this alternative model, the Saints are expected to teach one another, i.e., everyone takes turns teaching and listening, so that all are edified by all (D&C 43:8; 88:77, 122). Like Mosiah, the D&C presents this model in terms of everyone having an equal privilege (Mosiah 29:32; D&C 88:122). This, of course, is the model we use in local church classes; but elsewhere in the Church, a more hierarchical model of teaching prevails—a model based, as Mosiah says, on “inequality.”

Mosiah’s argument about everyone being responsible for their own sins is also relevant to discussions I’ve heard about dissent in the Church where people have argued that you should do what a Church leader tells you even if you believe it’s wrong. The logic is that if what you’ve been told to do was wrong, the sin will be on the leader’s head, not yours. That’s precisely the logic Mosiah rejects.

3. Democracy prevents violent contention. One of Mosiah’s arguments for abolishing kingship after Aaron rejects being king is that if Mosiah appoints someone else and then Aaron changes his mind and asserts his claim to the throne, the result will be civil war (Mosiah 29:5-10).

One argument I’ve heard against democracy in the Church is that people shouldn’t campaign for ecclesiastical office—that would be unseemly. Often the suggestion is that democracy would breed contention. Mosiah’s argument about democracy preventing violent contention is useful for pointing out that the rejection of democratic church governance prevents one kind of contention but produces different kinds of violence instead. Because the hierarchy treats democratic debate about Church leaders’ teachings and policies as an illegitimate mode of discourse (I’m thinking, for instance, of James E. Faust’s insistence that there can be no loyal opposition in the Church), dissent always becomes, by definition, rebellion and apostasy. And as such, dissent becomes grounds for disciplinary actions like disfellowshipment and excommunication which, however cloaked they are in rhetoric about love (and however sincerely that rhetoric may be believed), are nevertheless a kind of spiritual violence. The violence is evident from the metaphors used in scripture: people are cut off, their names are blotted out, they’re turned over to the buffetings of Satan. The situation would be different if there existed in the Church an expectation that teachings and policies could be the subject of legitimate disagreement and debate, with the understanding, of course, that the voice of the people would prevail. (If the losing side refused to accept that arrangement, then you would see schism, akin to the dissent we see recounted in Alma 2.)

This has been a long post, but a final thought: What if a question like the black priesthood ban had been resolved not by action of the hierarchy but by laying the issue before the membership so that it could decided by the voice of the people? (Incidentally, the fact that the lifting of the priesthood ban was put into effect before Official Declaration 2 was sustained at General Conference is one sign that the Church is not governed by the voice of the people, despite the contrary appearance that “sustaining” may create.) In other words, what if the ban had been openly debated in the Ensign and other Church magazines, and then had been put to a vote either by Church-wide referendum or by a convention of delegates (such as D&C 20:61-62 points to)? Would the ban have been lifted sooner? Later? I have no idea. But it would have been a revealing test of our faith community: a test of how, exactly, we employ scripture and prophetic teaching to guide us; a test of how we go about distinguishing gospel principles from false traditions of our forebears; a test of how we discern the voice of the Spirit, or the voice of continuing revelation. It would have made us all, collectively, much more obviously and directly accountable for perpetuating or ending the priesthood ban than we actually were. It would have made all of us, not just church leaders, responsible for seeking revelation. In Mosiah’s words, it would have made our sins and iniquities—or, alternatively, our faithfulness, repentance, and maturation as a people—answerable on our own heads. Instead, we deferred accountability to the prophet as a way of foisting accountability onto God.