A New Political Theology of “Agency”

Editors’ Note: This is Part II of a two-part essay on Jonathan Rauch’s Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy.

Rauch presents his proposal of his “Gospel of Compromise,” we have noted, as a recovery of a “thick Christianity,” as opposed to the “sharp,” that is, conservatively accented version. He regards his favored version as “thick” because he thinks it offers a way of reconciling human and divine law, a way of seeing liberalism’s “permanent process of public negotiation” as a core value of Christianity. It is in this context that Rauch offers his surprising proposal, namely that the teachings of the LDS Church offer the most perfect specimen of the “thick theology” he is looking for.  

The “thick” theology that thrilled Rauch comes down essentially to placing “good-faith negotiation at the very center of the Constitution’s meaning.” This approach, Rauch argues, goes far beyond mere mechanical difference-splitting to foster a “creative, generative, pro-social endeavor,” one that allows the parties to develop “peaceful habits of collaboration, and feelings of goodwill and fellowship.” At the same time, Rauch observes, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continues to make rigorous demands on the personal lives of its members, thus “combining high personal investment with high communal returns.” Thus, although Rauch recognizes that Latter-day Saints continue to affirm a teaching on homosexuality that is “repugnant and harmful,” as well as a view of gender roles that is “discriminatory and archaic,” he finds the church’s ideas about “pluralism” “compelling.”

Rauch’s proposal of an LDS–liberal alliance does not address only immediate and practical concerns. The author ventures briefly but suggestively into a properly theological engagement with LDS beliefs. This engagement centers on the idea of “agency,” which he rightly understands to be a central idea of LDS theology and anthropology. Rauch highlights the distinctive interpretation of Adam’s fall, certainly a very unorthodox or heretical doctrine from the standpoint of the mainstream Augustinian tradition of Western Christianity, namely, that Adam’s “transgression” was gloriously good news. Rauch cites LDS scholars Terryl and Fiona Givens: “Instead of deploring Eve’s and Adam’s transgression, one might find in it a cause for rejoicing.” 

This is not the place for a full or even adequate account of LDS doctrine, which is surely no more free of paradox and mystery (how can it be good to transgress God’s law?) than the traditional Augustinian view.  But Rauch is certainly right that there is something distinctive in the foundations of LDS belief that grounds the goodness of human choice and practical action in an understanding of ultimate reality and a “great plan of happiness” laid down before the foundation of the world. Rauch writes that, for the Latter-day Saints, “[l]ife is not a process of moral repair or atonement under the oppressive curse of original sin; it is a process of moral development under the tutelage of experience.”  

To be sure, Rauch is mistaken to sever “moral repair” from “moral development,” and his argument approaches self-refutation when he extends it to claim that, for the LDS, “we cannot develop morally unless we confront all kinds of choices.” From this he thinks there is “but a short step to Madisonian pluralism.” If what Rauch calls Madisonian pluralism is equivalent to the view that a political community can somehow be morally neutral and boundlessly pluralist, yet based on materialistic science, then this small step is in fact a gigantic leap across an unseen abyss. Let us grant, all the same, that Rauch has put his finger on a distinctive feature of LDS belief that is relevant to the question of Christianity and liberalism.

Rauch skillfully, though in the end preposterously, appeals to Latter-day Saints with the heady possibility that they might provide the model of a new interpretation of Christianity centered on those teachings or dispositions he elevates as truly Christian (as well as “Madisonian”): the disposition to forgive and to have no fear of secularism, and the readiness to “negotiate” all the way down to our very understanding of the human good. The effectual truth of this appeal to his truncated version of LDS belief is that the acceptance of political exile and complacency in negotiation on liberal terms will continue to rise to ascendancy over those substantive LDS beliefs that he regards as “discriminatory and archaic.” This is the hand of friendship that Jonathan Rauch has extended, no doubt in all sincerity, to American members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Certainly it does more credit to the obliging good will of his LDS audience than to their intellectual discretion that not a few seem inclined to accept the invitation, or, at least, to praise the gesture.

Rauch is not wrong to place “agency” at the heart of LDS belief.  But he distorts it beyond recognition by reducing this rich concept, deeply embedded in a moral and cosmological vision, to the idea that the best social framework for the development of our humanity is one with the least encumbrance of moral authority, that more “choice” is always better, and, finally that the act of choosing can be considered the essence of human meaning, without reference to the reality of good and evil that is thought to guide our choices. Rauch does not even pause to consider the question whether the ideal of limitless choice is in any way practicable, or even thinkable as an ethical principle. His understanding of “agency” is neither a remotely adequate phenomenology of human choice nor a serious rendering of LDS belief. In fact, LDS leaders have generally qualified the word “agency” with the word “moral,” precisely to avoid the nonsensical proposition that more freedom, a freedom divorced from moral accountability, is always better.  

LDS agency is very clearly a moral and lawful agency, an understanding of active human choice as central to man’s eternal vocation, but emphatically within a divine plan and a morally meaningful cosmos. Inconveniently for Rauch, this divine plan affirms the centrality of the procreative family. This is the great irony in Rauch’s attempt to cement a deep alliance with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in forging a liberal future unimpeded by any enduring moral contents that cannot be generated from within the purely scientific-constitutional framework that he proposes: Latter-day Saints are arguably the most fundamentally irreconcilable of all religious groupings to his post-Obergefell liberal settlement. Latter-day Saints believe, not only that the highest meaning of marriage is both natural (heterosexual) and sacramental, but also, and perhaps uniquely, that the marriage between man and woman is eternal and grounded in the eternal significance of sexual difference and complementarity. 

More generally, the LDS concept of agency is inseparable from a belief in eternal standards of righteousness and in a rigorously normative “plan of salvation.” That said, Rauch is not wrong to point to a distinct break in LDS teachings with the anthropology of creedal Christianity. The second of our thirteen “Articles of Faith” (formulated by Joseph Smith in response to a Chicago newspaper reporter) is as plain as can be about the rupture with all things Augustinian: “We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s transgression.” Thus, the LDS idea of “agency” is bound up with a Christian concept of “sin,” or the recognition of the orientation of human freedom by permanent principles of right and wrong, good and evil. 

To be clear, this is not to say that the LDS understanding of human freedom falls into the category of a Pelagian reliance on works as opposed to grace. The Third Article of Faith makes clear the dependence of human agency on divine redemption: “We believe that, through the Atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel.” Agency, for Latter-day Saints, is inseparable from the “infinite atonement” effected by the Savior’s ultimate sacrifice.

A Time for Compromise?

It is precisely in order to guard against the potential antinomian tendencies of the concept of “agency” when elevated to the status of a leading principle that LDS authorities routinely favor the expression “moral agency” to indicate the profound difference with a purely secular and liberal understanding of individual freedom. Rauch’s appropriation of the LDS term “agency” is thus tendentious at best. This is not to deny that Rauch’s spin on agency has found some resonance among Latter-day Saints eager to make peace with mainstream liberalism. This readiness to entertain Rauch’s liberal politics of negotiation must be understood against the background of recent LDS experience in the political realm. Some church leaders were apparently surprised by the negative publicity and violent acts of discrimination and anti-religious hatred that resulted from its institutional support in 2008 for California’s Proposition 8 against homosexual marriage. It might be argued as well that some LDS church members have been insufficiently appreciative of the positive cultural and evangelical effects of the church’s alliance in this cause with Roman Catholics and others committed to the defense of marriage. The Church’s outward-facing posture since the struggle in California and the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell has been to look for opportunities to make peace with advocates of homosexual rights and to participate in the fashioning of legislative compromises.  

The trade-offs of these compromises and their long-term effects are certainly debatable, but it is important to note that the church has made very clear in the case of every political compromise that no changes are intended to its fundamental moral and religious doctrines. The church’s position has clearly been that the religious meaning of “marriage” has not changed, even though we must learn the uses of political pragmatism, so it is argued, in order to secure the protection of our religious freedom. To be sure, the path of pragmatism can prove to be a slippery slope, and this slipperiness appears in the very rhetoric that seems necessary to justify compromise.  

Rather than simply acknowledging the necessity to accommodate political circumstances unfavorable to certain basic teachings of the church, defenders of compromise almost irresistibly slip into a vocabulary of “fairness” and “respect” that all but explicitly concedes moral equivalence to opinions fundamentally opposed to what are held to be sacred truths. In a democratic system, it is hard to address pragmatic political necessities without adopting language that goes well beyond the strictly pragmatic. The “respect” inherent in the process of coming to terms with a political rival is almost irresistibly defended, in the relativistic language of equal respect for all opinions (which of course does not follow from respect for persons as such). It is hard to make a democratic bargain on the basis of a rhetoric that says: “You are profoundly and disastrously wrong, but I see for now that your view must to some degree prevail.”  

Even more concerning is the apparently irresistible temptation to cover political necessity with the Christian language of love: I compromise with you because I have been commanded to love you. Here the bond between the first part of the Great Commandment, to love God absolutely, is at risk of being absorbed by the second part, the love of fellow human beings. The Christian commitment to “peacemaking” comes perilously close to endorsing not only the fundamental dignity of all God’s children, but even the ideological self-understanding of those with whom we find that we must compromise. Christian love thus risks losing its vertical orientation, its moral and religious substance, as it embraces the rhetoric inherent in democratic political compromise. It is one thing to submit obediently to a post-Obergefell political and legal regime; it is another step, a fateful one, to deny that at some fundamental level the new regime is based on a mistaken view of reality, not to say on a lie, and thus can only have disastrous consequences in the long term. If the metaphysical demand for human autonomy that underlies the radical redefinition of marriage is wrong, even evil, then it would be wrong to “respect” it, even when we must accommodate it legally and politically.

It is precisely the audacity of the secular liberal project, the imprudence of a liberalism that declares its independence from all traditional and religious morality, that is apparently inaudible to Jonathan Rauch and those who celebrate his proposed “Christian”–liberal alliance. The secular prophets of a pure and autonomous liberalism simply assume as true the false liberal proposition that opinions may be regarded as equally worthy of “respect,” and thus as equally subject to negotiation and compromise, regardless of their bearing on the realities of human nature and the human condition. When truth is defined in terms of democratic negotiation, then propositions of the public good that appeal to natural or divine truths not subject to human mastery are disqualified in principle. Democratic process is no longer the negotiation of serious, substantive truth-claims, but itself advanced as a substitute for truth. In Rauch’s view of liberalism, “love” no longer implies concern for the natural happiness or the eternal soul of one’s neighbor, but equal “respect” for all opinions, lifestyles, and identities.

But again, although some LDS advocates of “Fairness for All” have shown a weakness for rhetoric that tends to slip toward progressive relativism, the substance of LDS teaching is very clearly on the side of permanent moral and anthropological truths, especially where sexuality and procreation are concerned. Rauch and others who hopefully await the LDS church’s renegotiating of the religious understanding of marriage to include a same-sex version will be disappointed. The church’s authoritative (and not at all innovative) 1995 statement on the matter, its Proclamation to the World on the Family, clearly states: “We [the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles] warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.” This bold and clear proclamation, which church leaders have emphatically endorsed throughout the recent period of political pragmatism, is hardly compatible with the rhetoric of “equal respect” for all politically powerful viewpoints. 

Moral Agency and Sustainable Liberalism

More characteristic of LDS social teaching addressed to the faithful as religious teaching (as opposed to pragmatic accommodation) is an official General Conference address by Elder D. Todd Christofferson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles on “Sustainable Societies” (2020). The question of sustainability necessarily points beyond the immediate necessities of negotiation and compromise to the deeper problem of the enduring parameters of human nature and thus to the ineluctable preconditions of a healthy society. Christofferson plainly states: “when people turn from a sense of accountability to God and begin to trust instead in the ‘arm of flesh,’ disaster lurks. Trusting in the arm of flesh is to ignore the divine Author of human rights and human dignity and to give highest priority to riches, power, and the praise of the world (while often mocking and persecuting those who follow a different standard).” 

He continues:

A society . . . in which individual consent is the only constraint on sexual activity is a society in decay . . . Follow-on consequences that work against sustainability of a healthy society include growing numbers of children raised in poverty and without the positive influence of fathers, sometimes through multiple generations; women bearing alone what should be shared responsibilities; and seriously deficient education as schools, like other institutions, are tasked to compensate for failure in the home.

These reflections and authoritative teachings are in a register wholly unlike the view of religion at work in Rauch’s search for a religion that might provide a moral backstop for his autonomous liberalism. The point is not so much that Christofferson gives answers to social and political problems that are different from Rauch’s. What we cannot fail to notice is that he asks questions that Rauch (and his temporarily enthralled LDS audience) have altogether forgotten to ask. Beginning from a pseudo-Madisonian perspective of individual rights as the most fundamental concept of political theory, Rauch is not even aware of the problem of sustainability, or, therefore, of the question of the human good or of the common good of the political body. 

We may choose, or not, like Rauch, to consider all rights as, at bottom, assertions of our autonomous humanity and thus ultimately matters of social and political compromise, but the natural conditions of happiness and sustainability, including the essential role of the natural reproductive family, will not be subject to our negotiation. Rauch would do well to consult, on the question of compromise and its limits, a classic address by Elder Dallin Oaks:

Our tolerance and respect for others and their beliefs does not cause us to abandon our commitment to the truths we understand and the covenants we have made. . . .  We are cast as combatants in the war between truth and error.  There is no middle ground.  We must stand up for truth, even while we practice tolerance and respect for beliefs and ideas different from our own and for the people who hold them.

If moral principle is not only an accident of religious belief but grounded in the truth of human nature and the human vocation, it follows that any peace based on Rauch’s violent stretching of the LDS theology of “agency” must be ill-founded and by nature unsustainable. Without undertaking a presentation of this theology, let me conclude with a suggestion of its real value and bearing on our present political circumstances, that is, on the present stage of the crisis of liberalism. If there is a contemporary political lesson to be drawn from the LDS idea of the eternal significance of moral agency, this insight would not at all be aligned with Rauch’s fundamentally secular and ostensibly neutral and pseudo-scientific liberalism.  

Instead, one might find in a certain “moral agency” the outlines of a view of humanity and eternity that would resonate with a kind of conservative liberalism, a practical yet deeply moral liberalism equipped to avoid the pitfalls of integralism, both left and right. The LDS understanding of moral agency is in the spirit of Tocqueville’s praise of “liberty under God and the laws”; it weaves together eternal law and personal choice in a practically meaningful way that resonates at the deepest, ontological level. The touchstone of this moral agency is neither the supposedly pre-modern attitude of “heteronomy,” nor the chimera of liberal “autonomy,” but the reality of productive, creative action under a personal God and Savior within an orderly and meaningful cosmos.  

Image by Seadog81 and licensed via Adobe Stock.