Is the Law of Consecration Communism or Socialism?

It is a fair question, and it keeps coming back. Socialism is having a moment again, the old argument about fairness and who has too much is loud once more, and somewhere in a Sunday School class or a comment thread someone says it out loud. Isn't the law of consecration just a religious version of communism? Doesn't the Church teach a kind of socialism?

The short answer is no. Not communism, not socialism. If anything, consecration sits closer to capitalism than to either of those. But the truest answer is that it is none of the three, because it is not really an economic system at all. And the relationship runs the opposite direction from what people assume. Communism is not the original that consecration imitates. Communism is the counterfeit, and consecration is the original.

The leaders of the Church have said this plainly. President J. Reuben Clark called communism "Satan's counterfeit for the United Order." President Harold B. Lee taught that the united order would be "more capitalistic in nature than either socialism or communism," because private ownership and individual responsibility are kept intact. And President Ezra Taft Benson drew the boundary in one line: "The law of consecration is a celestial law, not an economic experiment."

Hold those three statements in mind, because everything below explains why they are exactly right.

The argument older than any economy

Start where the real disagreement starts, which is before this world began.

The deepest appeal of communism is fairness. Why should anyone have more than anyone else? Why should some succeed while others fail? Remove the gap by force, guarantee an equal outcome for everyone, and no one gets left behind. It sounds compassionate. It has always sounded compassionate.

It is also the oldest argument in existence. In the premortal council, Lucifer proposed his own version of guaranteed outcomes. He would remove the freedom to fail. He would force everyone to do right, force the result, and bring everyone back regardless of their choices. It was equality bought at the price of agency, and a third of the host of heaven found it persuasive enough to follow him.

That is the DNA of every forced-equality system that has appeared since. The promise is fairness. The mechanism is compulsion. And the cost, every single time, is freedom. Communism is not a new idea. It is the oldest rejected one, wearing an economic suit.

What capitalism gets right, and where it fails

Capitalism deserves credit honestly. The freedom to own, to build, to keep the fruit of your work, to compete and create, has lifted more people out of poverty than every other system combined. That is simply true, and consecration does not throw it away. Consecration keeps the very things that make it work: private property, personal responsibility, and the incentive to build something and improve it.

But capitalism has a real flaw. It rewards ambition without requiring conscience. It will let one person accumulate more than entire nations while others who work themselves to exhaustion cannot afford a doctor. It runs on self-interest, and self-interest with no higher law eventually grinds people down.

Here is the part most critics miss, though. What we actually live under is not a free market. It is a managed one, where the powerful buy influence, write the rules in their own favor, and hand contracts to friends. That is crony capitalism, not the free enterprise people think they are rejecting. When someone looks at the rigged version and concludes that markets themselves are evil, they are condemning a thing they have never actually seen. The hunger for fairness underneath the complaint is real. The diagnosis is half wrong, and the cure they reach for next is the old counterfeit.

And God's own word sits underneath all of it:

But it is not given that one man should possess that which is above another, wherefore the world lieth in sin.

Doctrine and Covenants 49:20

That sounds, at first, like an endorsement of forced equality. It is not. It is the setup for something no government has ever managed to produce.

Why consecration is neither

Lay consecration next to communism and the differences are not small. They are total.

Communism is compulsory. Consecration is voluntary. You give what you own freely, as a covenant, or you do not give it at all. Force is the whole engine of one and has no place in the other.

Communism abolishes private property. Consecration is built on it. You consecrate what is yours, and you receive back a stewardship that becomes your own property, your responsibility, something you manage and grow and cannot have taken from you. President Benson taught that the united order is built on private ownership and individual responsibility, the exact opposite of a system where the state owns everything and assigns you a place.

Communism kills incentive. When nothing is yours and effort changes nothing, people stop trying, and the whole society sinks to the same low level. Consecration keeps the incentive and adds a better one. You still build, still improve, still benefit from your work, but now the whole community benefits with you, and you with them. The man who takes out the trash and the man who owns the company stand on equal ground, not because everyone was leveled down by force, but because everyone was lifted by covenant.

And then there is the difference no economic system can copy, because it is not economic at all. Consecration is a covenant made with God. Every endowed member of the Church promises to live it, dedicating everything the Lord has given them to building His kingdom. And the Lord attaches a promise to it that no market and no state can offer:

...and there you shall be endowed with power from on high.

Doctrine and Covenants 38:32

Capitalism can bless you with wealth if you succeed. Communism claims it will make everyone equal and instead makes them equally miserable. Only consecration is wired to draw a person closer to God and to clothe them with His power. That is why it works where the others cannot. It does not run on force, and it does not run on self-interest. It runs on conversion. Take the conversion out and consecration collapses into just another scheme. Leave it in, and it becomes the only system in history that ever produced a people with no poor among them.

The real test is the heart

This is why consecration has always failed when people tried to install it like a policy. It cannot be installed. It has to be lived by changed people, and the change it requires is the hardest one there is. It asks you to stop measuring yourself against your neighbor. It asks you to hold what you own as a steward, not an owner. It asks you to want the things of eternity more than the things on the screen in your hand. Almost everything in the modern world is engineered to make that impossible.

Scripture keeps returning to one complaint, the complaint of people who serve God and then look around and decide it was not worth it. Malachi heard it directly:

Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings. Ye are cursed with a curse: for ye have robbed me, even this whole nation. Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.

Malachi 3:8–10

And then the heart of it, the grumble God answers:

Ye have said, It is vain to serve God: and what profit is it that we have kept his ordinance, and that we have walked mournfully before the Lord of hosts? And now we call the proud happy; yea, they that work wickedness are set up; yea, they that tempt God are even delivered.

Malachi 3:14–15

That is the whole problem in two verses. We call the proud happy. We look at the people who grabbed the most and we call them the winners. We measure blessing by what shows up in this life, and when obedience does not pay out in cars and houses, we decide that serving God is vanity. But we are not living on a celestial earth, or even a terrestrial one. This is a telestial world, where success is built on strength, leverage, management, and sometimes deception and control. God does not measure by those things. He measures by obedience, and the blessings He cares most about are not the ones that rust.

Then shall ye return, and discern between the righteous and the wicked, between him that serveth God and him that serveth him not.

Malachi 3:18

The day comes when the difference is finally visible. Until then it is a matter of vision, of whether you can see past what is in front of you to what lasts. Consecration requires the long view. It is the economy of people who have stopped serving Mammon and started serving God, and you cannot fake that at the cash register.

Two roads, and only two

One more thing, and I will keep it brief, because the full picture is a longer story I have told elsewhere. The world's commercial system, the thing Revelation calls Babylon, is not permanent. When it falls, and it will, the free market most people have always known goes with it. What rises in its place is not freedom. It is the most controlling system the world has ever seen, a system where no one can buy or sell without submitting to it.

When that day comes, there are only two economies left to choose between. One is that total control. The other is the law of consecration, administered not by a party or a state but by the Lord through His prophets. People who have decided that capitalism failed them will be told the answer is the first road, because nothing else looks like it could possibly work. But there has always been another road, and it is the one that actually does.

It is not communism. It is not socialism. It is not even capitalism, though it keeps what capitalism got right. It is the original that all of them were reaching for and none of them could reach, because the one ingredient it requires is the one no government can hand out: a heart turned to God.

This is my own study of scripture, not the official teaching of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and not a substitute for the living prophets. I am not asking you to pray about my book. I am asking you to open the passages I cite, read them carefully, and take them to the Lord.