Abortion, Agency, and two lies Latter-day Saints are believing.

Satan is the father of lies, and therefore it should come as no shock that he takes truths and spreads lies about them. When it comes to agency, there are two lies Satan is telling members of the church, and unfortunately, many are believing his lies: First, he wants us to believe that laws prohibiting sin are immoral and destroy the agency of others. Second, he wants us to believe that when the prophet speaks out on a topic we can use agency and personal revelation as a justification when we disobey. I will address both of these lies.

Lie #1: Laws prohibiting sin are immoral and destroy the agency of others.

We see this lie in full force within the abortion debate. Multiple prophets have made it crystal clear that the Church is unequivocally against elective abortion, and that it is a sin of the gravest nature. Not only is abortion a sin, but those who advocate it also stand under condemnation. At least according to the Prophet President Russell M. Nelson:

Despite these statements, many members will still support abortion. To justify their disobedience to God, and His prophets they parrot a line that “I don’t agree with abortion, but I don’t want to infringe on someone agency.” But this is a fallacy! Satan wants us to believe that any law legislating morality is evil, immoral, and destroys agency. He wants us to legalize everything from drugs to abortion. Saying that if we don’t legalize everything we are infringing on the agency of others. The problem with this lie is two-fold:

1. Satan’s end goal has nothing to do with morality or agency. That is just a facade. His goal is to get us to sin. He does this by legalizing and normalizing sin.
2. It discredits the commandments. God, the sovereign of the Universe, has decreed universal laws that punish people for immoral behavior. Satan’s teachings that civic laws are immortal must also be applied to mean the commandments are immoral.

If Satan had his way, he would do away with all civic laws and commandments. Legalizing drugs, immorality, abortion, alcohol and more. But if we followed God, our Civic laws would reflect the commandments. The more righteous a people the closer their civic laws will reflect eternal laws. This is why the church spends time and money promoting legislation that would criminalize sins. The problem for many members is that the notion of legislating morality is against their political views, sadly they often choose their politics over their prophet. (For more on this topic see Five Major Mistakes That Latter-day Saints Make With Politics.)

Lie #2. We are justified in disobeying because of our agency.

The next lie Satan tells members of the church is that they are justified in using their agency to disobey the prophets. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a member say something like “I know the prophets say that we don’t support abortion, but I prayed about it and I got the confirmation that it is ok to support it.”

The problem with this train of thought is using agency that way is the start of personal apostasy. Agency is so that we can choose to follow God. So that we can choose to be baptized, we have agency so that we can choose to enter into covenants in the temple of our own free will and choice. And then willingly choose to obey those covenants. But when we choose to not to obey we are choosing to disobey, we are choosing something other than our covenants, and we are dangerously on the road to apostasy.

“No child in this Church should be left with uncertainty about his or her parents’ devotion to the Lord Jesus Christ, the Restoration of His Church, and the reality of living prophets and apostles who, now as in earlier days, lead that Church according to “the will of the Lord, … the mind of the Lord, … the word of the Lord, … and the power of God unto salvation.” In such basic matters of faith, prophets do not apologize for requesting unity, indeed conformity, in the eloquent sense that the Prophet Joseph Smith used that latter word. In any case, as Elder Neal Maxwell once said to me in a hallway conversation, “There didn’t seem to be any problem with conformity the day the Red Sea opened.”

So are we to blindly follow?

Am I suggesting that we blindly follow the prophet? Heavens, no. I am suggesting that choose to keep our covenants to follow the prophet with our eyes open. This concept is often called faith obedience. We have the right to personal revelation to gain a witness that the prophet is a prophet. But we covenant to follow in the interim. Satan is the one tries to discourage you from following the prophet.

“One of the sneaky ploys of the adversary is to have us believe that unquestioning obedience to the principles and commandments of God is blind obedience. His goal is to have us believe that we should be following our own worldly ways and selfish ambitions. This he does by persuading us that “blindly” following the prophets and obeying the commandments is not thinking for ourselves. He teaches that it is not intelligent to do something just because we are told to do so by a living prophet or by prophets who speak to us from the scriptures.

Our unquestioning obedience to the Lord’s commandments is not blind obedience. President Boyd K. Packer in the April conference of 1983 taught us about this: “Latter-day Saints are not obedient because they are compelled to be obedient. They are obedient because they know certain spiritual truths and have decided, as an expression of their own individual agency, to obey the commandments of God. … We are not obedient because we are blind, we are obedient because we can see” (“Agency and Control,” Ensign, May 1983, 66).
We might call this ‘faith obedience.'”

Elder R. Conrad Schultz, April 2002, Faith Obedience.