I'd like to add a thought to the discussion of the gospel view of legislating moral standards that may not be widely shared by everyone subject to that law.

e.g. "u can't legislate about abortion. we all don't believe in ur god."

Have a buddy who quoted Alma 1:32 at me to say (I think),

"Look, here. Everyone lived according to established law. It applied to believers and nonbelievers alike. Maybe it allowed for some immoral behavior, but it applied to everyone, equally."

I don't think that's what it says. It says (I think),

"Look, here. The unbelievers were not living right. They did all kinds of bad stuff. Still, where it applied, the law was used to punish some of this immoral behavior."

In short, I think it makes the *exact opposite* point.

If you wanna use Nephites, let's use Nephites.

In Mosiah 2, King Benjamin mentions, for the first time in the text, laws against five specific crimes - murdering, plundering, stealing, adultery, and any manner of wickedness.

Sounds, uh, pretty officially legislative.

And then after Benjamin, this list is all over the place!

Mosiah 29:36

Alma 23:3

Alma 30:10

Helaman 3:14

Helaman 6:23

Helaman 7:21 (almost)

Ether 8:16 (almost)

In some of these scriptures we can clearly see that these behaviors are obviously against the law.

Alma prosecutes these behaviors.

Secret combinations are formed to avoid that prosecution under the law.

So... the laws that my buddy was talking about, referenced in Alma 1 and made by Mosiah - there were probably quite a few of them that prohibited inappropriate behavior as defined by believers.

And they applied to everyone, believers and nonbelievers alike.

Maybe that's why we have the cautions from Mosiah 29 about increasingly wicked law borne from an increasingly wicked democracy.

Once we are no longer able to legislate based on gospel standards of morality, then comes the time that we're ripe for "the judgments of God."

Yikes.

tl;dr - We can't in good faith use the Nephites as an example of a "tolerant" society that permitted degeneracy because "muh agency."

The Book of Mormon actually makes a compelling argument for the alternative: legislating based on our understanding of morality.