“Wherefore, because that Satan rebelled against me, and sought to destroy the agency of man, which I, the Lord God, had given him, and also, that I should give unto him mine own power, by the power of mine Only Begotten, I caused that he should be cast down” (Pearl of Great Price, Moses 4:3).

CS Lewis argued that to be capable of great good, one must also be capable of great evil (St. Paul was his lead example); the flip-side is expressed by Friedrich Nietzsche, who said, “Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws,” for if you are incapable of real evil, then you are incapable of real goodness, too. 

During a Sunday School lesson once upon a time, I cited how Satan’s plan was to force all of us to be good, everywhere, all the time, taking away our agency and ability to choose, which must have been a seductive plan indeed for it meant no one would be lost (which perhaps explains why a third the hosts of heaven followed him), even though his plan of course totally missed the point, because forced virtue is no virtue at all; and I cited the many, many dictatorships that permeate human history who justified their bloody brutality through their professed desire to enforce conformity to the One True God, destroying the agency of man, just as Satan tried.

But then a friend cited a counter-reading of Satan’s plan he once heard from some BYU religion professor, who said that Satan’s plan wasn’t to, say, make sure everyone drove exactly 55mph (as I long assumed), but to get rid of speed-limits altogether, so that there would be no laws to break in the first place; we would have no agency because there would be no real choice to make, since there would be no real right or wrong to choose to obey.  Satan’s plan in this reading wasn’t total control, but total anarchy.

Initially I was willing to go along with that reading, remembering how Korihor (one of the Anti-Christs in the Book of Mormon) preached that “every man fared in this life according to the management of the creature; therefore every man prospered according to his genius, and that every man conquered according to his strength; and whatsoever a man did was no crime” (Alma 30:17; emphasis added), like some sort of Ayn Randian caricature, governing his morals solely by some will-to-power misreading of Nietzsche, existing without law and thus without real choice.

But the more I thought about it later, the more that alternate reading really started to irritate me; I revisited the Moses scripture cited above, to reassure myself I wasn’t misremembering it, that Satan’s plan really was to “destroy the agency of man.”  I double checked “agency” in the OED^[1]Oxford English Dictionary–a descriptivist, as opposed to prescriptivist, dictionary–which is a useful resource for tracing how the meanings of various words have changed and shifted over … Continue reading, which explicitly informs me that “agency” means “capacity to act” and “ability or capacity to act or exert power.”  In fact, in 1830, the same year Joseph Smith was either writing or translating the Book of Moses (depending on which way you swing on that all-important question), the OED cites the arch-Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge on religious liberty (of all topics) to demonstrate the meaning of agency: “The State shall leave the largest portion of personal free agency to each of its citizens, that is compatible with the free agency of all.”

That is, the word “Agency,” as used in 1830 by one of the English language’s most preeminent poets, refers explicitly to religious liberty; and moreover means to be able to act for one’s self, free from enforced State coercion. Hence we can safely assume that Joseph Smith during this time period meant the same when he chose that word. In this historical context, when we read that “Satan sought to destroy the agency of man,” it means he tried to destroy our ability to act free from constraint.

Moreover, I’m confused by what strange logic one can conclude that absence of law signifies absence of agency; plants and animals live without law as we understand it, but since they are living things with an “ability or capacity to act or exert power,” they still behave with agency.  Beyond that, Christ’s Atonement as taught in LDS doctrine makes special provision for those who “died without law” (cf. Romans 2:12 and D&C 76:72), clearly demonstrating that 1) many today already exist as though there is no law, 2) but they still possess agency, and 3) this arrangement is not Satanic.  Thus, to equate living without law to living without agency–that is, to make living without law a condition of utter depravity (a very Calvinist notion by the way, not Mormon)–is to commit the same fallacy as condemning unbaptized children for dying “without law”, which idea and practice are both explicitly proscribed by The Book of Mormon (Moroni 8:14-15).

The Book of Mormon likewise states in 2 Nephi 2:13: “And if ye shall say there is no law, ye shall also say there is no sin. If ye shall say there is no sin, ye shall also say there is no righteousness. And if there be no righteousness there be no happiness. And if there be no righteousness nor happiness there be no punishment nor misery. And if these things are not there is no God. And if there is no God we are not, neither the earth; for there could have been no creation of things, neither to act nor to be acted upon; wherefore, all things must have vanished away.”  According to the chain-of-logic of this passage, if there was no law (as this prof. claims would have been Satan’s plan), then all things would cease to exist; and since we presumably would have existed under Satan’s plan, that means that the law would have to have existed for us to likewise exist under Satan. Thus the law would have to be totally enforced, like some Orwellian nightmare, and not repealed, for him to destroy our agency.

Furthermore, the other reason God rejected Satan’s plan is, according to the above passage, because Satan wanted God to “give unto him mine own power,” explicitly telling us that what Satan wanted more than anything was absolute power to enforce his will upon others.  That is, the plan of Satan was to brandish his god-like power to impose “goodness” upon us all, as countless tyrants and false priests have tried to do throughout history–including the aforementioned Korihor, who straight-up murdered a man when he couldn’t control him–beating the war-hero Gideon to death–like the fascist he always was!  (Thus, even Korihor undermines the anarchy-reading of Satan’s plan.)  It takes a convoluted, tortured reading to get from “destroy agency” to “let everyone do what they want.”  Let us not misread a rather straight-forward scripture: the brunt of the textual evidence favors the “total, tyrannical control” reading of Satan’s plan.

But why does this misreading matter, anyways?  Because if one can re-construe Satan’s plan to mean lack of control, then one can of course justify the use of force and coercion to enforce conformity.^[2]I will let you draw your own conclusions about the fact that this was a BYU religion professor making this argument in the first place.  Let us be wary of misreadings that give ourselves silent permission to force our morality upon others without their choice or consent, for such was the plan of Satan.  Try and persuade people yes, try to influence them for good and win their hearts and use love and kindness and respect, but don’t ever try to destroy the agency of man.