The Handshake Between the Church and Babylon

Our church should recognize that essential individual religious freedoms are gone. It should prepare in the short term to voluntarily forfeit its tax-exempt status, with the long-term goal of purposely abandoning it, to better bless the lives of faithful Saints.

I have argued that primary rights of individual religious conscience are long gone in the United States of America, and what has been lost never will be granted. Religious freedoms for the institutional church remain – its legal abilities to open its doors, educate and worship within those doors, and sell its merchandise through those doors. Unfortunately, those existing freedoms present an illusion of personal value as the exercise of those rights only trickles down to individual members. As a matter of constitutional law, when the brethren speak of religious freedom, they are addressing only those freedoms that Babylon permits. They are not speaking about reclaiming freedoms lost. As John Adams declared, “Liberty once lost is lost forever.”

Lost fundamentally throughout the American judicial system is a Latter-day Saint’s right of individual religious conscience. This right is an individual right, not an institutional right. To regain that right in terms of law and policy, the old Reynolds decision would need to be overturned. Of course, overturning Reynolds will never happen – the devil at the heart of secularism would never allow it. The church responded to the Reynolds decision by banning polygamy, but Brother Reynolds still went to jail – the institution differentiated from the individual.

Do Latter-day Saints want the right to live peaceably according to the dictates of their individual religious consciences or don’t they? What did Joseph Smith fight and die for? Why did Joseph and Brigham Young scramble to make plans to leave the United States of America? Because of their politics? Because of their views on slavery? Because they built successful communities? Hardly. Our church founders fought and died for their personal right of individual religious consciences. Americans accused Joseph and the Saints that followed him of being traitors, and for that treason against Babylon’s secular forces, they assassinated Joseph and ran the Saints out of the United States.

Today, the institutional church is unable to care anymore about or even recognize our personal right of conscience. But we Saints need to care. Only the Saints individually can respond to this loss and decide to seize this right that will never be granted in its fullness.

We need to overcome our strong secular desires. We must not settle. We need to transcend secularization and, regardless of culture and law, peacefully but assertively claim the one thing we have lost: our right of individual religious conscience.

Living peaceably is the key to reclaiming this God-given right. Living peaceably defined: not being a burden on society, working to be a good citizen, influencing your community and your immediate neighbors positively, exuding true faith, not judging others, giving grace and being kind and charitable, a strong marriage and, most importantly, ensuring your children are well-behaved and showing an example for every other family in your surroundings.

Living peaceably is headquartered in your home, and in Zion, home is both your domicile and the holy temple. Your home and the Lord’s house are the only two safe spaces on earth where faithful Saints can find celestial peace. So, get your home in order and your life square with God to enter his holy temple.

Your right of individual religious conscience exists for one purpose and one purpose alone: to allow you to live peaceably at home and in the Lord’s house – meaning your whole lives, your work, your civic existence, your marriage, and your children must be consecrated to and by the Lord. Playing in secularism’s sandbox is the opposite of living peaceably. Living by secularism’s rules is subjugation and an offense to the Lord. How much more simply can I say this? Serve the Lord, not the devil. Remove yourselves from the clutches of secularism. It’s a decision only you make.

You must seize your right of individual religious conscience to live peaceably because it will not be granted by secular culture and law.

A good example of seizing this right is when my wife, Sally, and I chose to home-school our children in 1988. Home schooling was illegal in Virginia in 1988. We just did it. We broke the law and did it. We lived according to the dictates of our individual religious conscience. That was our argument with the Commonwealth of Virginia – we were exercising our “bona fide religious beliefs.” We let the Lord fight our fight, the devil punted, and we won.

That boldness today is difficult to imagine, I suspect. A huge irony of the ever-present secular culture is that anything goes, except for people living peaceably according to the dictates of their individual religious consciences. In a twisted world where “love is love” and now anything goes both culturally and legally, faithful Latter-day Saints too ought to be allowed to live autonomous lives. So – do it regardless of opposition from secular culture and law.

Am I advocating that faithful Latter-day Saints should break the law? Maybe, if breaking the law (malum prohibitum) means living peaceably according to the dictates of your individual religious conscience. Florists have broken the law. Cake bakers too, as well as website designers. Sally and I did so by home-schooling – and, by the way, we did not call upon our church to defend us. We remained independent and took care of our own business. We called upon the Lord. We were pioneers in that moment. We made choices. We were prudent while willing to live with the consequences.

Practically speaking, “breaking the law” today (again, malum prohibitum) would more likely mean breaking with a culture that creates societal rules pretending to be laws, much like when parents seek exemptions from ridiculous or offensive public school policies seen as harmful to their children (e.g., drag queen story hour).

Speaking of living a Zion life, the Lord explained,

There has been a day of calling, but the time has come for a day of choosing; and let those be chosen that are worthy. (Doctrine and Covenants 105:35)

We get to worship at church on Sunday, meet together in the local park for fun, and otherwise go to work where we please. You might ask, What more do we need? What freedom is missing from our lives that a right of individual religious conscience would provide? Zion. We’re missing Zion.

In other words, we wear Babylon’s shackles by compromising with secularism. Even beyond the florist, cake baker, and website designer, even beyond a myriad of federal laws tied to funding of all sorts (not just education) that entice and extort us to stay secular, faithful Latter-day Saints approaching Zion would choose not to participate in many social settings and cultures if our full religious freedoms were intact.

Zion and Babylon do not mix. Only proactively seizing a right of individual religious conscience allows us to separate. Secular culture and law are so ubiquitous, imbedded, and ingrained throughout the lives of Americans and our institutions that separation means primarily choosing not to participate – we would be choosing not to be secular. Hence, the need to strategically disengage.

We should stop fighting a lost culture war because not only is a lost cause futile but our desire to live our lives peaceably is more important than fighting against or serving Babylon. Yes, secular culture will always knock on our door asking for our papers. But we will not answer that door. The Lord will answer for us. Believing the Lord will fight our battles – believing that He will be our forward and rearward – is a large part of living our lives in Zion.

For behold, I do not require at their hands to fight the battles of Zion; for, as I said in a former commandment, even so will I fulfil – I will fight your battles. (Doctrine and Covenants 105:14)

I know firsthand that what I am advocating is a scary proposition, and you might wish that you won’t have to face this decision or that the church, the institution, would be there to rescue you or protect you when you do. It seems like the least it could do, right? Our church consumes or tries to consume every minute of our lives. Rescuing and protecting us when in need only seems fair when we try to live authentic Zion lives. But don’t count on it. More importantly, don’t ask for it.

When living an authentic Zion life, we should not expect the church to aid us. Individual religious conscience is made up of personal choices, not institutional choices, just the fruits of our individual moral agency. The church should not do anything to compromise that nor should we ask it to.

Today’s church structure, its relationship with members, is not built to defend us or protect us when we choose to separate from Babylon. The church’s organizational architecture has been crafted over decades of forced secularism. The church has chosen to accept the religious freedoms that secularism grants it and that choice has affected the church’s relationship with its members. Even as President Russell M. Nelson and the brethren try to rightly and boldly move the Saints toward a home-centered and church-supported experience – a small precursor to the necessary divine autonomy to live a Zion life – alas, the church today serves the Lord and its members serve the church, in that order.

But that interfering architecture was not Joseph’s idea. Joseph saw flesh-and-blood people coming to Zion. There was no church without Saints willing to freely sacrifice everything for the promise of Zion. Joseph’s architectural blueprint directed the Saints individually to serve the Lord and give all glory to God. The Lord’s church – the only true church on the face of the earth – is organizational order. But there is no organization and no order without individual Saints.

Behold, this is the preparation wherewith I prepare you, and the foundation, and the ensample which I give unto you, whereby you may accomplish the commandments which are given you;

That through my providence, notwithstanding the tribulation which shall descend upon you, that the church may stand independent above all other creatures beneath the celestial world. …

For ye are the church of the Firstborn, and he will take you up in a cloud, and appoint every man his portion.

And he that is a faithful and wise steward shall inherit all things. Amen. (Doctrine and Covenants, Section 78: 13-14, 21-22)

“Ye are the church.” The church stands only as independent as the Saints do.

For Joseph, serving the Lord willingly and exercising individual moral agency – with every bit of heart, might, mind, and strength – was real “church service.” Members were not serving a church that, in turn, served God. No, they were serving God directly.

Quoting President Oaks, “President Russell M. Nelson has reminded us, ‘In God’s eternal plan, salvation is an individual matter; [but] exaltation is a family matter.’” (Dallin H. Oaks, “The Plan and the Proclamation,” General Conference, October 2017; Russell M. Nelson, “Salvation and Exaltation,” General Conference, April 2008.) Notice neither salvation nor exaltation are matters of administration, bureaucracy or management. They are matters for us personally – between us, our God, and his priesthood – for our generations past, present, and future.

I am not saying that institutional church service as we most often refer to it today is not important. It is, for a variety of reasons. I am saying that what we think of as institutional church service is only a small piece of serving God. The bigger, more important parts of church membership rest on holy ordinances such as baptism, worthily partaking of the sacrament, and covenants made in the House of the Lord. I do not discount the psychological benefits of meeting together oft, but meeting together oft, as important as that is, has very little to do with my or your exaltation.

I also am saying that current church architecture – its relationship with members – distorts our service to God by permitting broad cultural notions of church service to flourish as long-held traditions among the Saints – typically the pressures of a “ward family” or the acceptability of being assigned to love people (i.e., home teaching/ministering), or even a social expectation to attend a ward Christmas party “to support the people assigned to organize it.”

These empty definitions of institutional church service are cultural, not doctrinal. Furthermore, these preferential definitions of “activity” are largely the result of how beholden the church is to secular pressures. Babylon encourages Saints to pretend to be Zion, and we accept the delusion because Babylon is easy while Zion is hard.

And others will he pacify, and lull them away into carnal security, that they will say: All is well in Zion; yea, Zion prospereth, all is well – and thus the devil cheateth their souls, and leadeth them away carefully down to hell. … Therefore, wo be unto him that is at ease in Zion! Wo be unto him that crieth: All is well! (Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 28: 21, 24-25)

Today’s church architecture is a strong reason why freedom of individual religious conscience cannot be a priority for the church, nor should it be. The church takes what secularism gives it, and secularism only gives the church a comfy institutional right to worship and chances to be respected through educational attainments and commercial transactions. Just saying, don’t count on today’s church going to bat for you against Babylon in bringing your family unto Zion peaceably.

The church is naturally and innocently indifferent about such matters in practice, an indifference which leads to its tax-exempt status. Its tax-exempt status is the ultimate right of religious freedom granted to the church by Babylon. Tax-exempt status is the handshake between the church and Babylon. Maintaining this status now seems near sacred. Hence, the pervasive neutrality of the church over rights of individual conscience – well, neutral unless the church decides to condemn a practice of individual religious conscience, as when it spoke publicly of the Kentucky clerk who refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses.

Babylon reminds the church every second of every day that losing tax exemption would be the price paid if it directly engaged, supported, and legally pursued the last religious freedom: a right of individual religious conscience.

Under the terms of this relationship between the church and Babylon, I do not see how the church and its Saints “may stand independent above all other creatures beneath the celestial world.” Relying upon its tax-exempt status must necessarily hinder the church’s independent stand – it certainly hinders the celestial progress of the Saints.

Regardless of its seemingly sacred status, tax exemption is not an existential good. The church can do everything it does currently without its tax-exempt status. I am not arguing for the church to pay more taxes or for tithe-payers to lose a tax write-off. I am arguing that the tradeoff is something to seriously consider. What tradeoff? The tradeoff between worrying about paying more taxes and losing perceived legal protections, or continuing to impede the real gospel progress of church members.

Wait, what?

Am I saying that specific corporate and political decisions the church makes to preserve its tax-exempt status often serve to burden the spiritual progress of members? Yes, I am! You don’t believe me?

Think back to the church’s decision to appease Supreme Court Justice Kennedy over the issue of same-sex marriage. That single decision to appease him threw the lives of every Latter-day Saint at the nonexistent mercy of gay rights. Members had to live with that legal decision, not the institutional church. The church put us in a position to accommodate “sexual orientations” and “gender identities” simply to preserve its tax-exempt status, regardless of its public relations spins. We were fine living our lives opposed to Babylon’s sexual revolution, but “around the corner,” the church thought it (not us) wouldn’t be fine.

The legal effects of the 2015 “Utah Compromise” burdened individual members’ lives in Utah simply to protect the church’s tax-exempt status – and not just burdens in terms of Utah’s laws surrounding employment and housing provisions, but more so, endless other obscenities Utahns will come to experience as a result of placing the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” in the law. That was its true effect, whether you agree with the compromise or not.

Come to grips with this point. The true effect of the 2015 “Utah Compromise” has been that Utah Saints do the “accommodating,” not the church – belying the church’s well-crafted image of blessing homosexuality with a promise of institutional love, outreach, and acceptance. The perversion of that effort! People love – not institutions. Does the Lord want us to love every neighbor? Yes! We do that personally. Those signs of personal love are the only meaningful signs of honest caring and empathy. Institutions cannot love others as itself. Only flesh-and-blood people exercise the moral agency to do that. At most, institutions can only encourage certain behaviors (and, in some sacred spaces, demand it).

“The church extends its heartfelt love for people with same-sex attraction” – a nearly meaningless gesture, the same as secularists wishing some serious accident victim their “thoughts and prayers,” without real concrete expressions of heartfelt love for that person – expressions dependent upon someone’s personal moral agency.

To protect the church’s tax-exempt status, LDS Utahns were “volunteered” in 2015 to accommodate homosexuality, not the church, only its people. Do you see homosexuals working for the church and wandering throughout the Church Office Building on Temple Square? Of course not. The 2015 “Utah Compromise” allowed the church to discriminate against homosexuals while its Utah Saints were forced to accommodate them, all out of institutional fears of losing the Obergefell decision and, ultimately, to prevent losing its tax-exempt status.

If you still need convincing that specific corporate and political decisions the church makes to retain its tax-exempt status often serve to burden the spiritual progress of members, please carefully ponder this often-overlooked point of doctrine from D&C 134:9,

We do not believe it just to mingle religious influence with civil government, whereby one religious society is fostered and another proscribed in its spiritual privileges, and the individual rights of its members, as citizens, denied.

Not only does mingling religious influence with civil government defy church doctrine, to doing so is unjust. It is unjust not only regarding the “establishment of religion,” it is unjust regarding the individual rights of “its [church] members, as citizens.” Why? Because to do so often burdens the spiritual progress of church members to live their faith according to the dictates of their individual religious consciences.

To do so burdens the righteous efforts of faithful Saints to remove themselves from Babylon. The sweaty and unseemly handshake between the church and Babylon over tax-exempt status can create damning circumstances for church members. The handshake might liberate temporal resources, but it often serves to stop spiritual progress. If church members are burdened in their efforts to separate from Babylon to join Zion’s caravan, those efforts may be not only arduous – but damned.

Where would secular threats to the church emanate were it to shed its tax exemption? From mere words? From the nipping of apostate dogs? Imagine its freedom to “stand independent above all other creatures beneath the celestial world,” and imagine as a member not having our spiritual lives burdened by the church’s encumbrances dictated by Babylon.

I understand the financial and legal arguments in favor of tax exemption. I see how tax exemption benefits the church and its Saints in temporal dealings with Babylon. I do not, however, see a single spiritual benefit. I only see spiritual burdens on the Saints. In that respect alone, the church clinging to its tax-exempt status is perhaps the best modern example of selling a birthright for a mess of pottage.

Paul Mero is the author of Defeated: A Latter-day Saints Witness and Warning from 40 Years Deep Inside the Modern American Culture War. This article is an edited version of Chapter 57 from the book.

About The Author

Paul Mero, began his career as press secretary to Congressman William E. Dannemeyer in 1987 and ended his time on Capitol Hill as chief of staff to Congressman Robert K. Dornan in 1997.

Mero moved into the world of conservative think tanks starting first with The Howard Center for Family Religion & Society (now the International Organization for the Family) in Rockford, Illinois, and then, in 2000, with Sutherland Institute in Salt Lake City, Utah, until 2014.

Mero has worked on numerous public policy issues from immigration to the definition of marriage to intergenerational poverty. In 2015, Mero ran the Leadership Project for America, a c3, c4, and PAC, to influence politics by promoting leadership skills and civility. A year later, he pulled the trigger on a new public policy group in Utah, Next Generation Freedom Fund(now Transcend Together) focused on poverty-related issues and advocating for poor, disadvantaged, and disenfranchised Utahns.

Mero co-authored a book called The Natural Family: A Manifesto, with Allan C. Carlson, published in 2007. In it, they espouse traditional family values for a more stable American future. He has been published in numerous national and state newspapers and journals such as The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Times, and his work has been cited in several books including Kiss and Tell, There Goes the Neighborhood, and The New Know-Nothings.

In 2018, Mero published Unworthy: An Autobiography of the Imposter, available on Amazon. His latest book, Defeated: A Latter-day Saint’s Witness and Warning from 40 Years Inside the Modern American Culture War, is also available on Amazon.

Mero received a B.A. in Public Policy in 1984 from Brigham Young University — where he co-founded a conservative student newspaper, The Western Scholar in 1982 — and a Master’s Degree in the Masters of Management and Leadership (MSML) program in 2022 from Western Governors University.