"Honoring and Sustaining the Law"

The twelfth Article of Faith of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reads, “We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.”

My familiarity with the Articles of Faith began many, many years ago while I was a Primary student. Of course like everyone else, my graduation from that Auxiliary was in part dependent upon my being able to quote all thirteen of them to my leaders from memory.

For an eleven year old in 1951, the twelfth one seemed benign to me. Why would I or anyone in my restricted circle of friends and relatives seriously think about doing anything contrary to the laws and interests of the United States government? Most of the other Articles of Faith were gospel centered, and their subject matter was intended to motivate the believer to pursue further study of the topic. Other Articles made reference to personal behavior that would require many years or possibly a lifetime to realize. However, sustaining our various levels of government and obeying their dictates only seemed like the natural thing to do. At that age, I knew almost nothing about the reality of other members of the Church who lived in foreign countries, and of the practical and at times life-threatening difficulties they faced while struggling to live by the dictates of this pattern of belief.

At that age, I also had not made the connection between the era in which the Articles of Faith had been penned and the realities with which those Saints were in fact contending. In 1842, the horrors of mob violence that had succeeded in driving them from their homes, businesses, and lands in Ohio and Missouri were still very fresh in their minds as they gathered to Nauvoo. The Prophet and his fellow prisoners had made their way to Illinois after their escape from Liberty jail, where they had been held unlawfully for months in very inhumane conditions. Appeals to their governmental leaders in the Nation’s capital for redress of their many injuries stemming from unconstitutional and illegal persecutions fell on deaf ears and not understanding minds. In spite of being so rebuffed, the Saints were accepting of their condition and thanked God for the forms of government that had treated them so wretchedly. In human terms, such behavior is amazing and normally unexpected.

What are our circumstances as Saints today? Given that our membership in some numbers has spread into almost all areas of the globe, the dictates of the twelfth Article of Faith provide varying challenges to its adherents. One of the hallmarks of the value systems that dominate in socially stable and economically advanced nations is the attempt to enumerate and protect personal or civil liberties. In such lands, supporting the established governments and obeying existing laws is relatively easy and almost always results in an absence of personal threats. At the other end of the social and political continuums are systems that are incapable of maintaining stability or in fact seek to further ends that are chaotic. These seem hardly worthy of the public’s support. Into such areas generally, the gospel is not taken in any organized fashion, and in such where the Church has been established, missionary and temple activities are at times curtailed. While the substance and expectations of the Articles of Faith in such conditions remain the same as otherwise, the resulting conduct of the members most likely will need to be appropriate to their circumstances.

A brief consideration of the experiences of the Saints living in the communist German Democratic Republic may be instructive here. As a rule, what we as a Church consider normal missionary proselytizing activities were very seriously limited by the laws of that nation. Yet full-time missionary work continued with many young members accepting calls to serve. As one of them, Sister Linford served for twenty-six months. Church meetings were often observed by members of the Stasi, the East German secret police, who sat among the congregations. Teaching manuals and other printed materials from the Church that we take for granted were not allowed into the country for many years. Through all of this, the members remained respectful of the communist government and its suppressive laws. Because the government of the GDR came to realize that the Saints living within its borders were not carrying on subversive activities, indeed, they were obedient citizens, the government invited the Church to build a temple. In fact, the temple in Freiberg is the only temple the Church has constructed inside of a communist nation. Had the Saints not conducted themselves in a manner consistent with the twelfth Article of Faith, it is highly unlikely that miracle would have happened.

As the end draws closer, wickedness in the world will increase. That is a given. It is thus reasonable to assume that the world’s populated areas will experience in numbers and intensity an increase in civil disobedience. Organized government’s natural response to such depreciating conditions will be to exert more and more authority. Both the increase of civil disobedience and the expansion of governmental authority in the hopes of restoring and maintaining order will have the effect of limiting ever more the personal liberties of the denizens of these societies. In such instances, attempting to live in accordance with the tenets of the twelfth Article of Faith will become more and more trying and dangerous. The fallback position for those caught in such circumstances and who seek to obey these increasingly authoritarian governments may well be the dictum that social order maintained by even autocratic governments is generally a better course of action than attempting to live within a society marked by chaos and anarchy.