The Leopards Have Finally Come for the Mormon Face of Sen. Mike Lee
MAGA warriors are angry at each other again, this time over Christian semantics.
Photo via Getty Images, Kevin Dietsch Splinter mike lee
In the grand tradition of those who threw their support behind the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party, only to later find that their own faces had somehow ended up on the leopard menu, you may have noticed Utah Senator Mike Lee–not to mention his fellow Utah Senator John Curtis–having a very long, very protracted freak out across social media this weekend after feeling betrayed by the Christian ethnostate movement they’ve both assisted the Trump administration in trying to craft. Turns out that assisting MAGA’s evangelical base in their white-nationalist agenda doesn’t actually earn you many brownie points, when that base arbitrarily decides one day that despite your church having “Jesus Christ” in the name, that you’re not a real Christian.
Not that we should feel bad for the likes of Mr. Lee. The Utah Senator, in office since 2011 and currently serving as the Chair of the Senate Energy Committee and the Joint Economic Committee, has been one of Donald Trump’s most ardent soldiers and truth deniers since the day he decided to hitch his wagon to MAGA’s star. In addition to attempting to sell off millions of acres of public land in his home state, he was one of the most vociferous election deniers in the build-up to Jan. 6, 2021, and reported that he was working “14 hour” days in his efforts before the certification of the 2020 election to undo the results by any means necessary. In the process, he advocated for blue states to send in “alternative slates of delegates,” backing the fraudulent false electors scheme that could have resulted in an immediate constitutional crisis.
Sen Mike Lee R-UT whose brand has become hate, division & oppression gets all up in his little feelings because White Christian National SecDef Hegseth rejected his faith as worthy of recognition by the US military. I love this for Senator Lee.
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What thanks does he now receive from his benefactor the POTUS, and the Pentagon? How about having his faith lumped outside the denominations recognized by the Pentagon as “Christian”? That’s what Lee perceives as having happened to himself and Utah’s Mormon residents, at least, after the Defense Department this week changed the way it lists and categorizes the religious affiliation of service members. It was, in effect, a huge condensation, taking the number of overall “religious affiliation codes” from more than 200 to only 31, which involved lumping many different traditions of faith and worship into broader categories. Or in other words: The kind of boring clerical changes meant to increase “efficiency” that seem tailor-made to upset people of faiths that are recategorized. Senator Mike Lee ended up being the loudest and most clearly angry of these people, particularly at the assertion that his Mormon faith–the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints–did not fall in the broader “Christian” category and instead has an exception of its own. Or as Lee put it in an irate video he posted:
“I find this offensive, not just because that happens to be my faith, not just because it happens to the faith of tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel, but it’s also just repugnant to any sense of decency, any sense of our common heritage and our common belief that the government needs to not weigh in on doctrinal disputes between various religious denominations. I’m imploring people at the Pentagon to reconsider this, not just reconsider it but undo it. Secretary Hegseth, tear down that wall. This is not cool. Get rid of it. Get rid of it now!”
Lee ended up spending pretty much the entire weekend having a moan about this on Twitter, despite some of the more diplomatic right-wingers in his replies attempting to explain that the Pentagon had always technically categorized the LDS (which does indeed believe in Jesus) outside of the “Christian” category. Indeed, if the Trump administration is going to discriminate against some particular Christian sect–and they no doubt will, if and when it suits them–it probably wouldn’t be to intentionally piss off a group that typically votes in the neighborhood of 75% for Republicans, although Trump has always been a somewhat weaker candidate here.
Regardless, surely the MAGA evangelical faithful rallied to the defense of Sen. Lee, standing up for the Mormon residents of Utah, right? Surely they put dogma aside and embraced their fellow Christians, right?
Hah, no, of course they didn’t. The saddest/funniest thing on any given one of the dozens of tweets that Mike Lee spent on the subject this weekend is the parade of blue-checked Christian reply guys, calling Lee a traitor for criticizing some small aspect of the administration, while vowing that he and all the Mormon adherents of Utah are going to hell. Love thy neighbor, etc. I do love the guy below, proclaiming that the people telling Lee he’s “not a Christian” are doing it in love, because they want to convert him to the real Christianity in order to save his eternal soul.
I wonder if Lee was genuinely delusional enough to believe that MAGA was going to be on his side on this one, and is somehow actually surprised that he’s being met with a sea of right-wing accounts that are all channeling the energy of Jesse Plemons in Civil War‘s “What kind of American are you?” scene. If his seat was available during November’s upcoming midterm elections, I’d think it was a savvy way to shore up support among Utah Mormons while demonstrating distance from a historically unpopular Trump presidency, but his current term isn’t up until 2029, so who knows? I guess he just gets to find out the same lesson that so many others in his orbit have learned, that none of them can seemingly pass on to each other: No one gets to criticize any aspect of the administration without MAGA immediately turning on you, no matter how slavish you’ve been toward Trump in the past.
Other faith leaders, meanwhile, have naturally worried that the Pentagon’s attempts at reclassification are part of an effort to codify which faiths the country and its armed forces see as legitimate, and which it does not. As Rev. Paul Raushenbush, a Baptist minister and head of the Interfaith Alliance told the Associated Press: “Secretary Hegseth is not ‘streamlining’ anything. He is elevating one narrow religious worldview from the top of the chain of command. The First Amendment does not allow the government to create a hierarchy of faiths, and it certainly does not allow the Pentagon to decide which beliefs are worthy of recognition.”
I would wager that the Pentagon’s potential oversight of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as “Christian” is more likely to be the result of clumsy bureaucracy than a Mormon suppression campaign. Ironically, however, in responding to what he perceives as an attack against his state and his heritage, Sen. Mike Lee reveals just how ready his MAGA allies are to proclaim him a fake Christian after all. It’s tough to slip a face past those leopards.
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