After going back through Bishop Bill’s recent post on Elder David Bednar’s recent General Conference talk, I wanted to look further into moral agency. The shift to this term mostly happened after I stopped attending. (I’m not ready to try to figure out all the “covenant path” stuff…maybe a different day?) So, it’s something I’ve only been vaguely aware of through online discourse. But when I went back to source talks like Bednar’s “They Are Their Own Judges,” something struck me.
What struck me was that the talk just seemed utterly unobjectionable. This was especially true with all that I have learned and read from various non-LDS Christian traditions since stepping away from active participation in Mormonism.
I’m going to start with this paragraph from his talk:
God’s creations include both “things to act and things to be acted upon.” And moral agency is the divinely designed “power of independent action” that empowers us as God’s children to become agents to act and not simply objects to be acted upon.
When I think of a major foundation of most if not all non-LDS Christian traditions, it’s an observation that people seem to sin habitually. In the 7th chapter to his epistle to the Romans, Paul puts it like this:
14 We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. 15 I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. 17 As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. 18 For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
(You can read more about the bad stuff that Paul thinks people enslaved to sin do in chapter 1 of Romans — you may have heard of it, since it’s one of the “clobber verses” used against LGBT people.) While LDS folks probably have a different understanding of where sin nature originates (because of a different understanding of the implications of the Fall), this description from Paul of being “sold as a slave to sin” certainly sounds like being a “thing to be acted upon.”
I don’t necessarily like the equivocation in Bednar’s breakdown of the term moral agency, but I see what he is doing. He is playing off the fact that “moral” can mean first the broad sense of being about matters of right and wrong. For example, “this is a moral question.” But it can also mean the narrow sense of describing the right option. For instance, “telling the truth is the moral choice.” Bednar just idiosyncratically defines moral agency in the narrower sense. But I find the comparison to Paul interesting. In the scenario Paul presents, his lack of agency reflects only his inability to choose to do good things. When Paul describes God enabling moral agency in humanity, God is literally providing humanity the ability to take virtuous actions. Before this, we could only have taken vicious actions.
When Paul describes the freedom from sin that Christians should experience, he directly anticipates and addresses similar things as Bednar. In the same way Bednar says, “We have not been blessed with moral agency to do whatever we want whenever we will. Rather, according to the Father’s plan, we have received moral agency to seek after and act in accordance with eternal truth,” Paul writes in chapter 6:
15 What then? Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? By no means! 16 Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? 17 But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you have come to obey from your heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance. 18 You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.
Guys. How is this not the exact same message?
Alternative Early Christianities
As I did this comparison, I wondered if the disconnect is due to the similarity between Bednar’s message and the Bible. After all, Mormonism is supposed to restore lost truths that were allegedly lost after early apostasy. Much has been said and written about the de-emphasis of Mormon distinctives in favor of sounding or becoming more generically Christian. Could this be the issue here?
The guest post on Redemption by Todd Smithson seems to align with this conceptually. So much of Paul’s narrative depends on a global inheritance of a sin nature from a catastrophic fall from grace. We have to accept that humans are utterly incapable of choosing the right. Our will must be freed enough to give us the real choice.
But does Mormonism actually believe that?
I don’t know if I can answer that for anyone, much less every Mormon, but it did make me think to what I learned about the alternative early Christianities that could have been. Probably most relevant to Mormonism is the thought system that mainstream Christianity declared heresy called Pelagianism.
Where Pelagius differed from the narrative described earlier is that he didn’t believe the fall irreparably broke human nature. You could say that Pelagius agreed that man must be punished for his own sins, and not for Adam’s transgressions.
But does Pelagianism get us to the broad neutral definition of moral agency? Can we do whatever we want (acknowledging that we must bear the consequences)?
I don’t think so. Pelagius believed Christians should all live ascetic, exemplary, rigorously flawless lives.
So, I am actually wondering: why is there such pushback against Bednar’s pre-occupation with defining moral agency in the narrower sense? Even if we define it in the broader sense, wouldn’t we still expect that church leaders would preach that we should only use it in the narrow sense?
Wheat & Tares 
So… is moral agency just free agency 2.0? I can’t say the term ever stood out to me before. Then again, I stopped paying close attention before Bednar became an apostle and thought leader in the Church. Is moral agency just a rhetorical way to make Mormons’ understanding of agency sound prophetic (exceptional)?
If we are born to sinful nature, how is it sin at all? If we’re born inclined to something, how is that not just nature? If God creates us sinful, and it’s still our fault, then isn’t God just a jerk who sets his creation up for failure?
Perhaps, we should phase out churches harnessing sin to secure loyalty (funding), and dig into a more practical pursuit of expressing our natures in healthy, sustainable, non-harmful ways.
At least from the non-LDS Christian pov, sin nature came about through the fall. Since the fall was human choice, we are responsible for it, not God.
One analogy I’ve seen is something like: let’s say you jump off a cliff, and while you were at it, you pulled your family along with you. No one forced you to do it, you are responsible for this choice.
The main thing here is that what it also does is it limits what you can choose to do next. You can still choose to do a lot of things in the air, but one thing that you probably might want to do but can’t is to turn off gravity. And your family members who are coming along for the ride also do not have the power to turn off gravity.
Being in the air might seem very freeing. You might feel pretty good with the weightlessness. And maybe you can’t even see the ground coming. This is all you have known. It ain’t so bad.
But without some sort of intervention, you will eventually hit the ground… And then *splat*. Not good.
For you to have different options, someone else needs to intervene and save you.
I think the big question between the “fortunate fall” approach of Mormonism and the traditional approach of other Christian denominations is the question of whether a person can do something so bad that they can’t fix it on their own. Todd Smithson’s guest post on redemption sounds great as long as we think in terms of relatively “good faith” choices… Mistakes that don’t cause too much damage. Choices that people survive long enough to learn from and change.
But the other view is to say that some choices are more like jumping off a cliff… Even if you regret your choice, even if you didn’t understand what the implications were when you were making it, there’s nothing you can do on your own to fix it. And the consequences are dire.
I personally agree with you that choices made due to a particular nature seem problematic if you could have been made with a different nature. This does not apply so much to all of us (again, we are *already* in the air. Our sin nature is not what God put in, but the result of Adam and Eve jumping off.)
But for Adam and Eve, why couldn’t they be created with an aversion to cliffs? So no matter how tempting it might look, they would stay far from the edge… Is it less of a life lived if we are pathological afraid of cliffs?
Free agency seems pretty clear in a simple sense; it’s free to choose for yourself, good or bad, and to be held accountable for that choice. Moral agency, though, seems much murkier.
Most choices in life aren’t clear-cut choices between right and wrong, but are choices between right and more right or wrong and more wrong. They also don’t have immediate consequences. Using the term moral agency at least covers many, if not most, choices we have to make. But, it also gives us an excuse to make a choice and to ignore all the other choices that could be made because we are so conditioned to having our choices defined as right and wrong.
Free agency also seems to me to be an individual thing, whereas moral agency can be much more collective. A person has individual choices about smoking, alcohol, drugs, or sexual desires. A moral choice, though, can be much more complicated. For example, abortion could be looked at as a simple free agency kind of choice, but in reality, it involves a lot of moral agency choices, like the health of the mother, family situation, ability to raise a child, mental health, support environment, and so on and so on. I realize with this example, many will just say it’s a simple solution, but since half of us (the men) don’t have to be impacted, and the other half carry the child and are the primary caregivers, at least there should be a discussion, hence a reason to make a moral decision and demonstrate moral agency.
Another example could be “Social Justice” or DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Both require thought and discussion, but today it seems some want to boil it down to a simple choice and hold others to their free agency instead of opening it up to moral agency.
Life it not all one kind of agency or the other. It’s a mixture of both, and we need to start thinking that way. We need to talk more and judge less.
Imagine that the veil is lifted and we can see who we really are (and were) in the grand scheme of things. That degree of knowledge would be so great that it would work upon us coercively–so much so that we’d feel, for all practical purposes, that we had no agency at all. Or at the very least that we had no power to act upon the desires of our own hearts.
Now let’s imagine that instead of our eyes being opened to the cosmos in one fell swoop we gain that knowledge incrementally–line upon line as it were. Now it becomes bearable–not only in our being able to comprehend it but also in terms of the weight of our moral culpability.
Revealed knowledge adds moral weight to our agency. The more light and truth we receive the greater the weight of responsibility to live up to it.
I recently gave a talk on the Sermon on the Mount, so parts of this response draw from ideas I shared in that message. Where I find strong agreement with Elder Bednar and Andrew S. is in the idea that moral agency begins with recognizing our dependence. And this isn’t just a religious idea—it’s a human one. By the very nature of having a body, we are dependent beings. We rely on air, food, water, sleep, and the care of others to survive. This embodied dependence is not a flaw—it’s a feature of our existence.
King Benjamin captures this principle beautifully in Mosiah 3:19, distilling the Savior’s teachings into a single, transformative word: yield. He writes, “the natural man is an enemy to God… unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, … and becometh as a child.” Yielding here is not weakness or passive surrender—it is a deliberate act of faith. It marks the shift from the self-reliant, defensive “natural man” to the trusting, receptive “child.” In this light, yielding becomes a way we exercise moral agency—choosing to trust God, to act in faith rather than react in fear.
To become as a child is not to pretend innocence, but to acknowledge our true condition: we are dependent. The illusion of self-sufficiency is what we must yield. Moral agency, then, is not about asserting independence, but about choosing dependence on divine grace.
Think of a child who doesn’t wake up wondering if they’ve earned breakfast—they simply receive it, trusting the hands that provide. Or the lilies of the field, which Jesus uses as a metaphor in the Sermon on the Mount: they don’t strive or worry, they simply grow, open to the sun and rain. They act by receiving. In the same way, we exercise our agency when we choose to trust, to open ourselves to what God freely gives.
The Sermon on the Mount ends with a call to act—not by grasping for control, but by yielding in faith. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God,” Jesus says. This is the essence of moral agency: choosing to trust the God who already knows our needs, letting go of the illusion that our worth is earned, and living as children of a loving Father.
Yet here is where my understanding begins to diverge from Elder Bednar’s emphasis. He often stresses acting with power and initiative—choosing to obey, to serve, to become. His view of moral agency centers on active obedience, on stepping forward with purpose and determination. In contrast, I see yielding as a kind of spiritual receptivity—like a child receiving breakfast or lilies opening to the sun. Jesus’ metaphors in the Sermon on the Mount seem to emphasize trust and openness more than striving or achievement.
In Elder Bednar’s view, moral agency is exercised most fully when we act in alignment with divine law. In my understanding, moral agency is exercised when we yield to grace, acknowledging our dependence and choosing trust over self-sufficiency.
Ultimately, I believe moral agency is not just about doing, but also about receiving. It’s not only about choosing righteousness, but about yielding to the Spirit.
Jack,
In your first paragraph, you describe what the Calvinists/Reformed call irresistible grace. It does not necessarily work simply on revelation of knowledge (most of Christianity again believes that sin nature is strong enough that a person will not properly respond to facts and knowledge alone), but definitely the sense that grace is a gift so persuasive that it is not resistible.
Switching over to a different tradition but still the concept of gradual/incremental exposure being better for humanity, I’m thinking of analogies of the refiner’s fire and of sunlight from the Orthodox tradition. The way this one goes is to say that being in God’s presence is like being in direct sunlight (and their view if I understand it correctly is that everyone will be in God’s presence after death) If you’ve lived all of your life in the darkness and cold, then this presence will be unbearable to you — you’ll burn, you’ll scorch. Hence, hell isn’t a different place that you’re sent to. Instead, it’s a different reaction to not being prepared, not being ready for the intensity.
But if you’ve lived your life to gradually become more and more comfortable to the light and the heat, then as you’re changed, you become better able to enjoy more of it. Which definitely fits some LDS talks/ideas extremely well (thinking of Brad Wilcox’s line: “we’re not earning heaven; we’re learning Heaven”
Concupiscence IS THE WORDOF THE DAY.
I looked at the idea of “moral agency” that was in use in the early 1800s while I was doing research for my book, “The Agency Discussions” (available through Amazon). Moral agency was defined in the broad sense of the term, meaning that a moral agent was capable of doing either good or evil. Discussions of that time also assume that moral agents had an obligation to God or society to do that which was good, but they didn’t use the idea of moral agency to say that it only applied to doing what’s right. Elder Bednar uses a narrow definition of moral agency which assumes that “moral” only refers to that which is good, but that’s not what moral agency originally meant. I think that people who assume that “moral” in moral agency only refers to that which is right miss the meaning of the historical concept.
From Webster’s 1828 Dictionary, Moral means “Relating to the practice, manners or conduct of men as social beings in relation to each other, and with reference to right and wrong. The word moral is applicable to actions that are good or evil, virtuous or vicious, and has reference to the law of God as the standard by which their character is to be determined.”
— MORAL, a., definition #1 (Even though Webster has this as the primary definition of his time, we would assume that the main meaning today is synonymous with good or right, and we would miss the mark.)
Jack, and yet in our own theology, a third part of Heavenly Father’s children were in possession of such knowledge and somehow elected to make a choice of eternal implication without coercion, electing to forfeit the opportunity to come to earth and receive a body.
Sorry, I think this argument you put forth is a dog that won’t hunt.
it’s a series of tubes,
The situation that we’re in now is especially tailored to those who keep their first estate. All we who come into this fallen world have agreed to take upon ourselves the second estate and to live God’s law at it’s most basic level–the Law of Sacrifice–while carrying the added weight and dimness of view that is a natural consequence of being clothed in the flesh. And that means we will be challenged in ways that the adversary and his followers may never know.
vajra2,
YOU ARE CORRECT!
Carey F,
Your comment made me think a little bit of what I’ve read/heard from Quakers about proceeding “as Way Opens”. Deliberate waiting or deliberate yielding is not a muscle we are often encouraged to practice
Jack,
I actually think that it’s a series of tubes raises a good point. There’s often this idea that knowledge or awareness would limit choice — if someone knew for a fact that God exists, then of course they would follow him.
But this doesn’t necessarily seem to be a case. I think this is where the Calvinist/reformed tradition point out that to the reprobate, the ways of the spirit are utterly undesirable and foreign.
Andrew S.,
I agree that we would still have the ability to reject God even if our knowledge of him were absolute. But being in the situation that we are now affords us the opportunity to learn how to love God without being intimidated or “wowed” by his presence. Or in other words, to learn how to love God out of the genuine desires of our own hearts.
Of course, there would always be some folks who would choose God regardless of the circumstances they find themselves in. Even so, when the Lord spoke to his noble and great ones in the beginning about building an earth he said, “where upon these may dwell,” suggesting in my mind his concern for the larger circle of God’s children, “and we will try them and prove them to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them.”
And so here we are being tried by being set at a distance from God. And if that distance were suddenly collapsed then it would frustrate our purpose for being here–or at least one of the primary purposes for our being here.
That said, I give it to you as my opinion that a similar problem occurred in the Garden of Eden. When we (Adam and Eve) partook of the fruit it caused us to remember who we were. And so we were set at an even greater distance from God and in a situation where the roof could not come off the world so to speak.
“And so we were set at an even greater distance from God and in a situation where the roof could not come off the world so to speak.”
By coming into mortality, I mean to say.
Bednar defines moral agency as “moral agency” as “the ability and privilege to choose and act for ourselves in ways that are good, honest, virtuous, and true.”
With all due respect, his defintion is the antithesis of agency, which involves freedom to choose. His “agency” requires us to choose that which is “good, honest, virtuous, and true,” which are defined by #LDS Church leaders as obeying them (not necessarily following Jesus’ example, who reached out to the marginalized and treated women with great respect.)
Bednar further says is GC, “We have not been blessed with moral agency to do whatever we want whenever we will.” If so, what is the point of agency? This appears to be Satan’s plan: that all would be assured of glory by being forced to obey.
Isn’t that what Bednar is preaching?
Rose,
What do you think about the setup as Paul describes in Romans, where humans are bound to sin, and grace frees them to make choices other than sinning? (With the metaphor explicitly being that people are freed from being slaves to sin so that they can be slaves to righteousness?)
Or did you see my comment where I analogized it to jumping off a cliff. Once you’ve done that, your choices are limited. If someone saves you with your inevitable fate, wouldn’t it make sense to say that you have a responsibility not to jump off another cliff?
Andrew S.,
You’ve got a really good way of putting things. I like how you make moral agency an effect of God’s grace–in that his grace expands the range of our agency by opening up, as it were, a larger playing field to us
Andrew, I appreciate that you’ve challenged us to think more deeply about Bednar’s rhetoric on “moral agency.” That said, the only part of his definition that seems redeemable to me is the single word “ability.” At least that word leaves open the process of learning—of discerning what is truly good, honest, virtuous, and true—rather than presuming we already know.
I understand your “jumping off the cliff” analogy in a simple sense, but I struggle with the implication that an innocent or inexperienced soul should have known better from the start, and that such an act ought to be seen as deliberate defiance. I’m also uneasy with the idea of being rescued from my own ignorance or folly, only to have that rescue used as leverage for lifelong submission. Gratitude, yes—but gratitude is not the same thing as unquestioning compliance.
And just because I’ve learned not to jump off cliffs, does that mean I now know every other danger to avoid? It seems the point of the rhetoric around “moral agency” is to surrender one’s will to a higher authority, as though that surrender was the ultimate virtue. But how am I to know that Bednar—simply because he is older or holds a particular office—has attained infallible insight, or that I should cede my own moral discernment to him or to the institution?
Something still doesn’t sit right in Salt Lake City. If agency truly is central to Latter-day Saint theology, then it feels paradoxical—even troubling—that the final and most exalted expression of it would be to relinquish it entirely.
This whole line of reasoning perpetuates what I’d call the “covenant-by-transaction” model—and I detest it. It might create a tidy business relationship, but it suffocates intimacy.
For the past four and a half years, I’ve sat in 12-step circles listening to stories of real pain—the pain of spouses who have been deeply betrayed, most often by men. That pain and harm are real and must be acknowledged. But I’ve also witnessed another pattern: spouses who, after forgiving in word, continue to wield that harm like a club. It becomes a relationship of permanent imbalance—a game of “forever unequal’s,” where one partner bears the weight of an unpayable debt.
Gratitude may arise naturally at first, but when the debt is never allowed to be released, gratitude turns sour. It festers into resentment.
I can’t believe that God, through Jesus Christ, intends to build that kind of forever “one-up” dynamic with His children. The relationship He invites us into isn’t transactional or hierarchical — it’s cooperative, transformative, a synergistic partnership.
test
todd,
I see your comments (if that was what the test was for?)
Firstly, I wanted to say again that I like your guest post. I think that grappling with that was and still is a good exercise for me to see how I feel about what I’ve written in this post and in these comments.
My main fear/concern/hesitation about the orientation that your post has is that it seems to only work in a “safe” world where there are no choices that are perilous. My post comes from asking the question: what if there are some choices that are perilous?
I don’t think that someone needs to have known better from the start. (In fact, lacking knowledge of peril makes it all the more tragic!) The main purpose of the analogy is to point out that there are certain actions with consequences that are dire and not humanly reversible (what I’m calling “perilous” here for short). It doesn’t matter if you were informed or ignorant, if you were intending to be deliberately defiant or whatever. When you’ve jumped off the cliff, regardless of why you did this, you have crossed a threshold that you cannot save yourself from.
I’ll also just point out that regardless of why you did it, it was your fault. You weren’t pushed. You weren’t coerced. You chose to jump. (I DO sympathize with the reaction that people choose things for reasons, and are unlikely to choose to do something that they have no reasons for doing, so it would be possible for humans to live in a perilous world safely if we all were born with reasons to avoid all perilous things. This doesn’t seem to be the reality, though.)
I think the difference between the traditional Christian understanding of inherited sin nature and alternative models might be that in traditional Christianity, because Adam and Eve jumped, all of their children are “born in the air” as it were. But even someone who rejects inherited guilt of the fall still would need to acknowledge that each person individually can “jump” by failing to live with perfection. E.g., even if someone can theoretically be sinless and is only judged by their own actions and not Adam’s transgression, who will achieve that?
I don’t see the action of saving someone from their ignorance or folly as making “leverage for lifelong submission.” The alternate framework I would put is: if you’re ignorant, then your own judgment on these matters is unlikely to have you avoid perils. If there is someone else who insists that you should do x, y, and z to avoid peril, it would seem strange to regard this as “lifelong submission” when the other option (imperiling yourself) will shorten your life and require your submission (to “gravity”.)
I think that ignorance makes us see the calculus differently than it is. Ignorance may make us not see the peril, even when we’ve crossed the threshold. So, admonishments to avoid doing a, b, and c or to do x, y, and z might seem arbitrary and capricious.
I think that if there are perilous things where there is little or no margin for error, then it might look like harshness to request unquestioning compliance, but like…again, I’m thinking of scenarios that are (spiritual) life or death. this isn’t something where we can just have a little oopsy woopsy and laugh about it later.
I think that’s what faith, revelation, etc., are for? I mean, I’d replace Bednar with Jesus, but it’s the same basic problem, right? Look, i’m an exmo, i’m not saying I think church leaders are infallible. but I also have to acknowledge that I have the sort of temperament that would be more OK with suffering an untimely demise than taking things on faith. And I get why lots of people wouldn’t want that.
And again, I don’t see it as surrendering one’s will to a higher authority as if surrender is the ultimate virtue. These things are in service of another thing: the ability to survive and thrive in a perilous world. This is literally Matthew 16:25! It’s basic Bible, not a unique teaching of the modern church.
See above. Literally basic Bible. I don’t understand why this is so objectionable (I mean, I do, as an exmo atheist. But I don’t understand why someone who is still a Christian would find it objectionable.)
I like this. I see lots of faithful folks who do see themselves as able to do this (or claim so). I am still trying to ask: how does this work in a perilous world where there is no margin for error?
I think that a better answer probably needs to be that we are all stumbling through it together, but I think jumping off a cliff is a major bootstrapping problem. You *have* to be saved by some outside party. You can’t just group together with all the other people who jumped to save yourselves.
Everyone (except maybe a few with neurological disorders and so forth) gets moral agency, right? Every human born in this world, wherever, whenever…
But very, very few are born within the LDS community, or an earlier “chosen” community such as Old Testament children of Israel…
Sometimes, I have to wonder what portions or messages of the gospel are universal and what portions or messages are only for the chosen. We teach that God intends to save all of his children who will accept covenants, whether while alive or vicariously after death. And we teach that God wants a people — a small people, just the salt of the earth — to be ready to receive him at his second coming. Perhaps some of the messaging within the chosen community is only applicable to the chosen, while other parts of the message are for universal application?
It seems to me that God has given moral agency to everyone born on this earth, wherever, whenever (except maybe a few with neurological disorders and so forth). It is simply a fact. If so, addressing that topic in a way that only fits within the chosen community seems to be myopic and potentially erroneous. If so, Elder Bednar is not the only one who does this.
It seems to me that Isaac and Ishmael each got a different message from Abraham, and the children of Keturah and others got still another message — Abraham (and Abraham’s God) had (has) different expectations for those different persons. For those within the LDS community, maybe part of the message we get from God is just for us and we err if we impose it on others. But still, it seems to me that God gave moral agency to everyone, and that moral agency cannot be taught as being peculiar or special to us.