Chapter 29 of the book of Mosiah, in which the people of Zarahemla transform their government from a monarchy to a rule of judges, is a crucial—indeed, pivotal—chapter in the Book of Mormon. Modern readers of the book, particularly those of us raised in Western nations, are prone to react very positively to this story, viewing it as the creation of a free, democratic system, and we are inclined to read this account with something of the same thrill with which we observed the freedom-loving, democratic urges of peoples worldwide, most notably in Eastern Europe in 1989 and in more recent years during the so-called Arab Spring.

But this natural modern reaction is entirely out of place as a response to an ancient text. Most ancient peoples had a very different view of democracy, to the extent that they considered it at all. We usually think of democracy as the crowning creation of the ancient Greeks, but many Greeks did not admire it as a political system. Plato and Aristotle, among many others, saw it as a highly problematic form of governance. Indeed, we can speculate that if the ancient Greeks had possessed the Book of Mormon, many of them would have found its account of the Nephite decline clear evidence of the inferiority of democracy, or “popular rule,” as a form of government. It can be argued that the change from kingship to a weaker government of “judges” was a key contributor to the ultimate corruption and disintegration of the Nephite state.

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The Ancient Law of Liberty

One of the great tragic ironies of the Book of Mormon, as already noted, is the failure of King Mosiah’s hopes for peace and stability through a change in governments. From this perspective, his experiment was an abject failure. The historical record shows clearly that instead of leading to an absence of contention, the new government seemingly spawned an endless series of political dissensions, rebellions, assassinations, and civil wars. Many Nephites longed for the good old days of the kingship, but instead they ended up with an utterly broken government, a fragmented society reduced to tribalism.

So, with this array of weaknesses and failures, are we to conclude that the experiment with “free government” was a failure? Not necessarily. Despite Mosiah’s hope that contentions could be avoided, he had more substantial reasons for persuading the people to give up their beloved kingship. At the end of his proclamation to the people, he declared:

And I command you to do these things in the fear of the Lord; and I command you to do these things, and that ye have no king; that if these people commit sins and iniquities they shall be answered upon their own heads. For behold I say unto you, the sins of many people have been caused by the iniquities of their kings; therefore their iniquities are answered upon the heads of their kings. And now I desire that this inequality should be no more in this land, especially among this my people; but I desire that this land be a land of liberty, and every man may enjoy his rights and privileges alike, so long as the Lord sees fit that we may live and inherit the land. . . . And he told them that . . . the burden should come upon all the people, that every man might bear his part. (Mosiah 29:30–32, 34)

The people clearly understood what Mosiah was telling them, for they echoed these sentiments in their response. “And now it came to pass, after king Mosiah had sent these things forth among the people they were convinced of the truth of his words. Therefore they relinquished their desires for a king, and became exceedingly anxious that every man should have an equal chance throughout all the land; yea, and every man expressed a willingness to answer for his own sins” (Mosiah 29:37–38).

What is going on here? Clearly, Mosiah and the people were working from the basis of the sacral kingship. Because the king was both the representative of God to the people, and of the people before God, he was typically held responsible for the acts of the people, and effectively got the principal “credit” for both the good and bad that happened in his kingdom and to his people. As we already observed in the Old Testament, “Because King Manasseh Judah has committed these abominations, has done things more wicked than all that the Amorites did, who were before him, and has caused Judah also to sin with his idols; therefore thus saith the Lord, God of Israel, I am bringing upon Jerusalem and Judah such evil that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle” (2 Kgs. 21:11–12).

Under such circumstances, Judah is going to be punished for its sins, but they are the sins that the king had caused them to commit, for which the people were not truly responsible. In contrast, under Mosiah’s judgeship, because there would be no royal intercessor, each person would be held responsible by God for his own sins. Thus, whatever evil was committed by the people would be “answered upon their own heads” (Mosiah 29:30) rather than upon the head of the king (v. 31).

Note that there is never any mention of freedom, or the pursuit of happiness, as the natural right of a people. These are modern doctrines that would be out of place in an ancient document. Liberty, to the Book of Mormon writers, is not the right to act however one wishes, let alone the right to seek self-fulfillment, but the freedom to be righteous, particularly the right to worship God and his truths. More broadly, it is the right to choose for oneself between good and evil and to be held responsible for that choice.

This doctrine is comparable to what the early Christians called the Ancient Law of Liberty, which is the freedom God has given mankind so that they can be judged for both their righteousness and their wickedness. The early bishop Irenaeus taught that if some men had been made evil by nature, and some good, the latter could not be rightly praised for their righteousness, and the former could not be justly condemned, for they were simply following their God-given nature. Similarly, if the Nephites were merely following the commands of a wicked monarch, they could scarcely be held guilty by God. (A righteous king, by contrast, would not force men to be good, but rather guide them to righteousness.)

As a general rule, then, good kings are the best, but in light of the tendency of kings to turn wicked (especially from one generation to the next), Mosiah endorses a system of liberty, that is, democracy. The value of freedom is not, however, because it necessarily leads to greater individual self-fulfillment, as moderns would have it. Rather, it is because freedom permits mankind to be held responsible for their actions—even when, on occasion, it leads to utter disaster. As the Lord declared in 1833: “[I have suffered the U.S. Constitution to be established] that every man may act . . . according to the moral agency which I have given unto him, that every man may be accountable for his own sins in the day of judgment. Therefore, it is not right that any man should be in bondage one to another. And for this purpose have I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose, and redeemed the land by the shedding of blood” (D&C 101:78–80; see also D&C 134:1).

The Book of Mormon was given to us today, specifically to the United States, the mother of modern democracies, as a warning. Is the book predicting the failure of modern democracies, specifically the American democracy? Yes and no. The story of the Book of Mormon, as we have seen, is hardly a tract for the efficacy of democracy or “free government” in achieving a stable society. As if making a prophecy, Mosiah observes specifically that “if the time comes that the voice of the people doth choose iniquity, then is the time that the judgments of God will come upon you; yea, then is the time he will visit you with great destruction even as he has hitherto visited this land” (Mosiah 29:27).

The last phrase, of course, is an allusion to the fate of the Jaredites, whose history had been translated by Mosiah himself. The Jaredites had disintegrated even though they had not a hint of democratic governance. Although there “never could be a people more blessed than they” (Ether 10:28), their civilization perished, instead, because of their “wars and contentions” (Ether 11:7), their bloodthirstiness, and above all their desire to “get power and gain” (Ether 11:15). And yet it is notable that the book of Ether is entirely a story about kings. We know virtually nothing about the righteousness or unrighteousness of the Jaredite people. This may be a factor of the abbreviated nature of Moroni’s account, but it is more likely because the Jaredite kings were the only moral actors in the story. As noted above, the anointing of kings, and thus the sacral nature of the Jaredite kingship, is particularly prominent in the book of Ether. Hence, as I have argued repeatedly, the kings bore the ultimate responsibility for everything that took place.

So, to be sure, the Book of Mormon is not a political tract for any particular form of governance. The Jaredites collapsed under kingship, the Nephites under a more democratic type of government. The crucial point for Mormon is not that democracy is unstable or that kingship is evil, but that it is only under a “free government”—or, alternatively, a righteous kingship—that individual men and women can exercise their free agency to be righteous. As my mission president once said, to allow a missionary to be a great missionary, you have to give him enough freedom to be a lousy one. Freedom necessarily comes with risks. But it is only when we undertake those risks that we will have the ability to show who we really are.