With the primaries just a month away, I was visited at the front door by a politician for the first time. A local candidate who has run once before. He's been to the door before, and didn't recall it.
It's interesting in part because he doesn't remember me, pretty clearly, but I know him. He was in my high school graduating class and was one of those guys who was on the periphery of my circle of friends. Indeed, he was one of those odd very nice people you know that aren't quite within anyone's circle of friends, but almost are, so they're like satellites, sort of. Something that I recall about him from back then is that he was in amazingly good shape and was the only male gymnast I knew. He still appears to be in amazingly good shape.
What I also recall about him is that he was one of the very few far right Evangelical Christians that I knew in those days. Wyoming is the least religious state in the United States and Evangelicalism, as the time, was very rare. In my actual circle of friends everyone was either Catholic, Mormon, or Mainline Protestant, but I'd also note that the Mainline Protestants were not very observant, if you will. Or, more properly, they weren't very church going, with some exceptions, of course.
That was typical for Wyoming at the time.
Anyhow, I've had a belly full of the far right in this state and last time anyone campaign related showed up, young people paid, most likely, to distribute WFC propaganda, I gave one of them such a blistering that I could tell he was scared.
He deserved it, punk.
Anyhow, I was nice this time. Can't be harsh to an old classmate.
On the change here, at this point my old classmate has more company, really One of the things about the the last large oil boom is it brought in a flood of people. Usually, in the past, when oil booms ended those people went home, which was often home to Texas and Oklahoma. This time lots of them didn't, for a variety of reasons I suspect. One is that the landing of the economic crash was softer. Another was that winters have been much warmer. Winter used to drive a lot of people flat out away.
Anyhow, many of these people were Bible Belt protestants and they often appear not to realize that they're a tiny minority of the world's Christians. Indeed, not only are they are minority, but they often hold views that in early eras of Christianity would have been regarded as heretical. Heretics, we might note, were often extremely aggressive about spreading heresy, and often these folks are pretty aggressive about their views, which of course is their right.
One such example shows up in an editorial by Campbell County legislator John Bear. Bear is a member of the WFC and a member of a tiny Evangelical denomination. He's a carpetbagger from Missouri. He wrote an editorial to the Cowboy State Daily complaining that on the county's 4th of July parade his organization, whatever that was, had been precluded from handing out copies of the Constitution and the Bible. People from up there, in seeing his post, wrote back that 1) the parade was dedicated to the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution or Christianity, 2) that they in fact did pass out New Testaments and copies of the Constitution.
I don't know what actually happened but I'll admit that if I'd been there and somebody handed me out copies of either, and of course I am an Christian, I'd be uneasy. Partially I'd be uneasy as this group of people have a low regard for the real Constitution and have a view of Christianity that is minoritarian and aggressive. Their Bibles, additionally, omit part of the Canon of the Bible, and they tend not to even know that.
I also am cautious here as frankly this group gives Christianity a bad name, in my view. One of their members, since voted out of office, but trying to get back in, asserted during a legislative session that we are not our brother's keeper. A pastor associated with the movement was one of the primary opponents of the bill to raise the marriage age to something rational, and you couldn't help but feel really uneasy about that. There's nothing in Christianity that says it's nifty for girls younger than 16 years of age to get married.
On that, I've recently been amused by some editorials, and I'll be vague on them, by the same protestant pastor heaping praise on somebody he probably doesn't know lost his family due to screwing his secretary and then trying to claim that his children understood in a public setting they were at.
They didn't.
Anyhow, the changing religious landscape here has had an impact on politics, and not in a good way, even if I'm glad that people are attending some church.
One regional politician who I'm sure attends not a church, but a stake center, is Deseret Mike Lee. Lee is a radical right wing populist. He posts constantly about the SAVE act and stuff like that, but I really wonder how much people really know about him.
John D. Lee.
Lee is a direct descendant of John D. Lee, one of the key figures of the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857. Mike Lee even bears a pretty close resemblance to his ancestor facially.
John D. Lee was a Mormon zealot in the LDS's early days. He was also a central figure in the early LDS of that day. He was not just some LDS immigrant to Utah. We've discussed Mountain Meadows elsewhere, but it was a flat out murderous slaughter in the name of religion of a type that you very rarely actually see. People often claim that occurs, but reality, it's phenomenally rare. Here's an actual example.
Lee was eventually charged with murder in 1874. He was executed at Mountain Meadows for his crimes in 1877. The LDS have always maintained that they were not responsible for the murders in an organized way. I.e., they've always maintained that the church didn't sanction or commend the killings to occur. They may very well not have, and given the factors of time and distance of the 19th Century, they likely did not. Still, it took two decades for the cries of the murdered to be addressed and there's always been some lingering suspicion that Lee was a scapegoat. That's more or less the view taken by the Netflix series American Primeval, which while a historical drama doesn't pretend to be strict history. Brigham Young is portrayed as a really bad guy in it.
John D. Lee nineteen wives and fifty six children, which is flat out absurd. Eleven of Lee's wives left him during the course of their marriages.
One of those fifty six children was John Doyle Lee, born in 1851, before Mountain Meadows. His mother was Lovina Lee who had married John D. in 1847. That same year, John D. married Mary Lee, her sister. Both Lovina and Mary are buried in a the same plot in Arizona, where the John D. family ultimately located.
John Doyle Lee was one of eleven children by two wives. His first wife died at age 31. He was an Arizona rancher. One of those children was Rex Lee, who died in 1934 in a hunting accident, leaving his second wife (his first had died) pregnant. She would name their son Rex Lee. She would remarry and have three more children.
Rex Lee, the younger, became a prominent Republican politician, lawyer and BYU academic. He served as United States Solicitor under Ronald Reagan. Mike Lee, his son, has sort of followed his path in that he's also an academic, lawyer and Republican politician.
Mike Lee, while it's been nearly 150 years since his great, great grandfather's death, appears to have acquired not only his facial appearance, but a certain type of zealotry.
It's hard to say this without instantly being accused of being bigoted. The truth is, however, that the LDS are a much more diverse religion than people think they are. Many Mormon "beliefs" aren't canon at all, and are more in the nature of theological opinions. It's not really the case, for instance, that all Mormons are polytheists. Even regular common practices, like abstaining from caffeinated beverages, aren't really church law.As a result, you can have fairly devout Mormons who don't hold those views. You can also have those who very strictly hold the traditional views. The deeper you go into the Jello Belt the more common the really traditional views, save for Salt Lake City, ironically, which has a majority non Mormon population.
I don't know Mike Lee personally, but there's every sign that he holds the very traditional views, one of which is that there's a finite number of souls that were created at the bigging of the creation of our world, and that the sooner they all get on the Earth, the second coming will arrive.
Now, Mike Lee has only three children, so that cuts against this argument somewhat. But he also is a pro development zealot that is sort of explained by this. Lee would rape every square inch of the West if allowed to. Houses, mines, whatever, you name it, he's for it.
And he holds sort of a pan West view of this, which fits into his heritage. Originally the LDS hoped for their own state, the State of Deseret, which would have included a much greater expanse of the West than Utah.
Lee had a fit recently went the Pentagon didn't include the LDS as a Christian religion, which it isn't, in the list of Christian religions. It was pretty clear that Lee felt betrayed, which he wasn't. The Pentagon went back and fibbed for him, the GOP rewarding him for his loyalty, but changing that.
The views Lee holds about public lands and the West aren't really limited to the LDS by any means, we should note. James Watt, Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, believed that the Second Coming was going to come extremely soon so there should be no holding back on using every resource immediately. No need to conserve anything.
We're still here, of course, and Watt is dead.
Watt received a fair amount of portrayal as a weirdo. That must have pained other Evangelicals who didn't hold his views and I suspect there's a fair number of LDS who feel the same way about Lee. Likewise, there's probably a fair number of Christians up in Campbell County who feel that John Bear doesn't speak for them.
Indeed, this raises the interesting point of outliers defining a group to outsiders. Mitt Romney is probably more representative of the views of most Mormons than Mike Lee, but most Americans don't know anything about the LDS and by 2028 Mike Lee is going to seem like the definition of a Mormon to many people.
I get stuff like this in regard to being a Catholic, often by people who really hate Catholics. "You must be one of ten children". Nope, I'm of one. Just yesterday a colleague I've worked with for nearly 40 years, and who has asked me about grade school before, was in a conversation with another colleague who is moving their children out of the local Catholic school. She and her husband are not Catholic. My old colleague turned to me and said "you went to St. A's"
No, I didn't. Neither did any of my numerous Catholic cousins. I'm a practicing Catholics and, therefore, I guess it must be the case that I went to Catholic school.
A minor example.
I'm not going to vote for my old colleague. He doesn't appear to fit into the WFC, but I can't really tell what he's for. He's for jobs, which everyone says.
And I like our serving representative, who is definitely not a WFC member.
The candidate visiting got me to thinking about another person who sort of was in the orbit of my circle of friends back in those days. She was a quiet and mousy friend of the sister of one of my friends. I had a crush on the sister. Later she reappeared in the orbit in law school, as she was the friend of a girl I was dating and just somebody in the class behind me. I got to know here somewhat better then. The very definition of a preppy, people in her circle called her "muffy" as sort of derogative nickname.
After law school she came back to Casper and practiced here for awhile. Something happened, I don't know what, and she not only left the practice of law, but actually took the extraordinary step of contacting the bar and having her name removed from the list of those barred. I.e., she not only was a practicing lawyer who wanted on the inactive list, she wanted off the list entirely. She's the only person I've ever know to do that.
After she left, she went back to Kansas where she'd graduated as an undergrad and worked in basically a clerical job. I lost track of her, but looked her up sometime last year. Too late, she'd died of cancer at age 58. She'd never married. Her obituary states she "will be remembered for her commitment to 4-H and her love of rabbits." I actually hadn't known she was in 4-H, or that she loved rabbits.
