There is no agency in the Church of Jesus Christ. It’s been stripped away. Slowly. Cunningly. Imperceptibly. It is gone, and the first to lose it are the Church’s most loyal servants.
Agency, we believe, is the foundation of God’s Plan of Salvation.
“Wherefore, men are free according to the flesh… And they are free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and death, according to the captivity and power of the devil; for he seeketh that all men might be miserable like unto himself.” [1]
It is a principle oft repeated. We are free. God made us free; free to choose His way, or the way of the Adversary. Agency was the essence of His plan. The lack of agency, then, was the essence of Satan’s plan.
But what is Agency? What is it not?
To make a choice—to have the freedom to do so at will—is only a work of agency if the choice can be reasonably decided upon. I mean, for agency to work, one must have the ability to choose. One must have all the necessary information, at hand and available, to make a wise decision. For agency to work, it must be the choice of the chooser to use the information. They may, or they may not. But, if the information is hidden away, absconded from the chooser, it is no longer agency. It is coercion.
I cannot ask a friend, for example, to choose either the item in my left hand or my right, giving them information only about the item in my right, and call it a choice of agency. I could not list the benefits of the items in my right hand, the joys and wonders of it, and say nothing of the item in my left, expecting my friend to make a wise and even choice. Even more so, I cannot tell the truth of the wonderful blessings of the item in my right hand, while lying of the harms of choosing the item in my left hand, and consider it a free choice.
For agency to exist, all information must be available equally, with no bias or persuasion in either direction.
If the Church is led by the Lord Jesus Christ, it must be honest and it must be open. It must be completely transparent. The Lord, it being His Church, would not allow it to hide things from its members—things that might lead its members to a different choice. If the Church is a Church of agency, as it claims to be, it would provide all information, good or bad, supportive or destructive, to its members, and allow them to make the educated choice. It must not preach a false, fool’s gold story, with whitewashed details to convince members to believe.
An innocent man does not need to hide evidence of his guilt to prove his innocence. If the man is innocent, the clues of innocence should prove him so.
It is a guilty man—a liar—who hides evidence of his guilt to prove his innocence.
The Church, like a guilty man, keeps many secrets.
We’ll spend the next few sections learning about the many times the Church has lied, or covered up its mistakes.
