# Liberty

Liberty as release and return: from the jubilee trumpet to messianic fulfillment, how faith frames freedom as restoration, not mere absence of restraint.

Liberty is release from bondage and restoration to one’s rightful place, and in the Law of Moses it was announced by the sound of a trumpet. On the Day of Atonement in every fiftieth year, the ram’s horn passed through the land, and Israel was commanded to “proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof,” so that “ye shall return every man unto his possession” (Leviticus 25:10). The Hebrew *deror* corresponds to the Akkadian *andurāru*, the edicts by which Mesopotamian kings cancelled debts and freed those sold into servitude, and the same Hebrew word names the swallow, a bird that cannot be kept caged. Modern usage tends to define liberty as the mere absence of restraint, yet the jubilee joins release to return, and freedom to the recovery of an inheritance.

## The Acceptable Year of the Lord

The prophet Isaiah took the jubilee’s vocabulary and made it messianic. The anointed servant is sent “to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound,” and “to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord” (Isaiah 61:1-2). Isaiah’s oracle employs the same Hebrew word for liberty that sounded with the trumpet in Leviticus, and when the Savior read this passage in the synagogue at Nazareth and announced its fulfillment, He identified His own ministry as the great jubilee toward which the Law had pointed. The release once granted to debtors and bondservants every fifty years became, in His person, a release offered to all humanity from every form of captivity, including the captivities of sin and death.

The Apostle Paul located that liberty in the presence of God. Contrasting the veil that covered the face of Moses with the open vision granted to believers, he wrote: “Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Corinthians 3:17). Yet Paul also warned that liberty could be squandered by those who confused it with indulgence: “ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another” (Galatians 5:13). In Paul’s account, liberty finds its proper use in service, and a freedom exercised only for appetite returns believers to the very bondage from which Christ had freed them.

## Free to Choose Liberty

The Book of Mormon distinguishes agency from liberty with unusual precision. Lehi teaches that men “are free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and death, according to the captivity and power of the devil” (2 Nephi 2:27). The sentence separates two things that ordinary speech conflates. Agency, the capacity to choose, belongs to every person as a gift of God, whereas liberty is one of the conditions that agency may choose or forfeit. A person can therefore exercise agency in a manner that diminishes liberty, and the captivity Lehi describes is a captivity freely entered. Liberty in this framework is an achievement sustained over time.

The revelations given to Joseph Smith extend this principle to law and government. “I, the Lord God, make you free, therefore ye are free indeed; and the law also maketh you free” (D&C 98:8). The same revelation commends the constitutional principle of “freedom in maintaining rights and privileges” as belonging to all mankind, and Latter-day Saints have long regarded the American founding as an act of divine providence for that reason. In Restoration teaching, just law and divine liberty work in concert. Law protects the conditions under which persons may choose, and the Lord’s freedom gives those choices their eternal consequence, so that a society’s legal order becomes part of the moral environment in which agency matures.

## The Title of Liberty

When Amalickiah sought to make himself king over the Nephites, the chief captain Moroni “rent his coat; and he took a piece thereof, and wrote upon it—In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children,” and he called the banner “the title of liberty” (Alma 46:12-13). Moroni then drew a typological parallel that his people would have recognized immediately. The torn garment recalled the coat of Joseph, rent by his brothers yet preserved in part, and Moroni invoked it as a figure of the remnant of Joseph whom God would preserve. Those who rallied to the banner rent their own garments as a covenant, binding themselves to keep the commandments.

The episode presents liberty as a possession held in common and defended by covenant. The Nephite “freemen” who later opposed the “king-men” understood that freedom could be lost through a people’s consent as surely as through foreign conquest, and Mormon records how often pride and the love of riches prepared the way for its surrender. Indeed, the threat to Nephite liberty arose more often from within than from without. A people secures its liberty by remembering the God who granted it and by sustaining the institutions that protect the weak against those who would rule them, and Moroni’s banner made that remembrance the first article of its inscription.

## Liberty of Mind

The legal scholar Nita Farahany has argued that the right to “cognitive liberty,” freedom of thought extended to the neural data from which thoughts may be inferred, now requires explicit protection. Her concern is concrete. Consumer devices already record brain activity, Neuralink implanted its first brain-computer interface in a human patient in 2024, and in 2021 Chile amended its constitution to safeguard mental integrity, followed in 2024 by a Colorado statute protecting neural data. Transhumanists have generally championed such interfaces as instruments of liberation, enabling the paralyzed to communicate and promising eventual enhancement of memory and attention. The same channels that allow a mind to act upon the world, however, may allow the world to read and shape the mind.

Lehi’s distinction becomes urgent in this setting. Systems engineered to capture attention and anticipate desire need not abolish agency in order to diminish liberty, for they work by inducing persons to choose captivity freely and repeatedly, one convenience at a time. Every neural technology accordingly proclaims a jubilee of some kind, and its makers bear responsibility for which kind. Liberty in the Levitical sense was release joined to restoration, the return of every man unto his possession, and the mind is the most intimate possession God has entrusted to any person. Technologies of the mind honor that liberty when they return the mind to its owner strengthened, and when the law, in the Lord’s phrase, makes its users free.

*See also*: [Agency](/topical-guide/agency), [Common Consent](/topical-guide/common-consent), [Consent](/topical-guide/consent), [Decentralization](/topical-guide/decentralization), [Justice](/topical-guide/justice), [Law](/topical-guide/law), [Oppression](/topical-guide/oppression), [Peace](/topical-guide/peace), [Prayer](/topical-guide/prayer), [Responsibility](/topical-guide/responsibility)