Establishing Zion

Will Zion need civil government? The question might seem obvious — of course it will — but the reasoning behind the answer matters enormously for how Zion communities should think about governance today. Joseph Smith drew the distinction with precision in the Council of Fifty: the Church of God and the civil kingdom of God are two distinct things. The Church has authority over spiritual salvation. Civil government has authority over the relations between citizens — protecting rights, enforcing contracts, providing the infrastructure voluntary associations cannot. These are different institutions with different purposes, and confusing them has caused serious harm every time it has been attempted.

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Religious liberty itself requires a civil structure separate from the Church. Not all members of a Zion community will be Latter-day Saints. And some sanctions — imprisonment, seizure of property — require civil rather than ecclesiastical authority. The question is not whether Zion needs civil government but what kind. That question is not merely theoretical. The principles that should guide Zion's governance are needed now, in the communities covenant people actually inhabit, not only in some distant millennial future.

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Two of the most careful Latter-day Saint minds to wrestle with that question — J. Reuben Clark and Dallin H. Oaks — both concluded that the inspired principles for structuring civil government are already embedded in the United States Constitution. Five structural fundamentals bear the hand of God: the separation of powers, the division of authority between national and sub-national governments, popular sovereignty, the rule of law, and the Bill of Rights. These are not merely American political preferences. They are the governmental expression of agency and accountability — the same foundation stones the book has traced through families, organizations, and communities.

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D&C 134 identifies the irreducible rights any government must protect: free exercise of conscience, right and control of property, and protection of life. The chapter reads each of these more broadly than their most obvious meaning. Free exercise of conscience is not just religious tolerance — it is the protection of the inner life from compulsion of any kind. Right and control of property is not just protection from theft — it is the material foundation of agency, the condition that makes it possible for people to act independently and take genuine responsibility for their circumstances. Protection of life is not just physical safety — it is the protection of everything that makes a life worth living.

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President Oaks reads D&C 101:78-80 as establishing that popular sovereignty is the governmental expression of agency and accountability. Citizens are not subjects. They are accountable agents who collectively hold authority over their government and are responsible for how it exercises that authority. This is the same accountability the book has been tracing through every other domain — the same insistence that membership in a community carries genuine responsibility for how that community functions, not just passive participation in its benefits.

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The chapter also confronts an uncomfortable tension. Government action, even when it relieves genuine suffering, can crowd out the voluntary cooperative action that is itself morally formative. When the government feeds the poor, the individual act of consecration that would have fed them does not occur — and with it, the growth in charity, accountability, and unity that the act would have produced. This does not mean government should do nothing. It means that covenant people should be wary of defaulting to government solutions for problems that cooperative community action could address — because the process of addressing them together is part of what builds Zion.

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Judge Learned Hand's vision of the spirit of liberty offers the chapter's most resonant closing image. Liberty, he argued, lies in the hearts of men and women — and when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it. John Taylor made the same point from the other direction in 1879: unless you can get the United Order in the hearts of the people, you can never plant it anywhere else. Both men understood that institutions cannot substitute for the values that must live in citizens' hearts. That convergence — between a federal judge and a Latter-day Saint apostle, separated by seventy years — crystallizes the book's central claim about the relationship between transformed hearts and the institutions they inhabit.