Personal Agency

The eleventh Article of Faith of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reads, “We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.”

Agency is an eternal principle. It is through the exercise of agency that personal progression in the gospel sense is possible. It was the Prophet Abraham who reported God’s purpose concerning the exercise of personal agency: “And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them;” (Abraham 3:25). So integral is agency to God’s eternal plan for us, that the presentation of a counter proposal that would have subverted the agency of God’s spirit children while they were living in mortality was in and of itself an important factor in Lucifer’s fall.

Only in an environment that permits mankind to exercise the requisite degree of freedom of thought and action is each individual able to work out their salvation. Given its importance, the use or misuse of agency at times gives rise to effects of enduring consequence. Among the rebellious are those who believe that the exercise of their agency gives them the right to obey or not to obey the commandments of God, seemingly without personally harmful consequences. If by this they mean to suggest that agency provides them the right to determine what is right or wrong, they are seriously mistaken. As Elder Charles Didier taught in one of our stake conferences, “Agency is given to us to choose between right and wrong and not to decide what is right and what is wrong” (April 28, 2002).

The most defining moments in an individual’s life are those wherein substantive choices are presented, and a decision is made that has the potential to alter the person’s subsequent course through not only mortality but also throughout eternity. President David O. McKay spoke to this point when he said, “There are three great epochs in a man’s [or woman’s] earthly life, upon which his happiness here and in eternity may depend, his birth, his marriage, and his choice of vocation.” However in reality, the potential effects of the defining decisions made by a single individual in mortality will be perhaps limitless. For whether the course followed is consistent or contrary to the will of God, future generations will tend to reap either the blessings or the heartaches inherent in the course of life upon which their feet are set. This says nothing about the nature of the multitudinous relationships in which each of us is involved with non-family members and in consequence the potential we have to effect them for good or for ill.

Given our understanding of the centrally-important role agency should play in each individual’s life, we ought to support those institutions, actions, and beliefs both domestic and foreign that possess the power to provide, protect, and further the exercise of personal agency among the largest possible number of God’s children. In so doing, we encourage the realization of an environment wherein as many as possible will be free to live and worship “according to the dictates of [their] own conscience.”