In the business of making gods and monsters

A harrowing tale.

(Please enjoy my scary ipad doodle. Been in bed, sick with covid, all day.)

I woke up today thinking about monsters.

This week, I posted an instagram story about how weird it was to watch the video of Utah’s beloved anti-trafficking leader, Tim Ballard, process his denunciation from LDS Church leader, President M. Russell Ballard. With the growing number of accusations and trailing evidence, it was undeniably the right decision for the Church to distance themselves from Tim and organization, Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.). And in some odd way it felt like we were watching a cold, pixelated snapshot of the aftermath of Victor Frankenstein denouncing his creation:

There can be no community between you and me; we are enemies.

It’d be naive to think those in church leadership are learning about Tim’s misconduct for the first time alongside the rest of the public via these bomb-dropping Vice articles. The controversy around Tim’s anti-trafficking efforts are not new. There have been ample articles written criticizing the effectiveness of OUR’s approach, their exaggerated claims, fundraising, and relationship with QAnon and conspiratorial thinking over the years.

Rather, Tim has been continually propped up by the LDS Church through ward firesides, website endorsements (since been scrubbed), and most notably the book shelves at Deseret Book, where Tim’s unprecedented and scholarly-refuted ideas about American Presidents like Abraham Lincoln and George Washington finding inspiration from LDS literature and angels are still being sold. There is understandable confusion. How could the Church publicly condemn an established conservative, right-winged leader in the community?

This summer, my family went to a monster truck show in Draper. It was the first I had ever attended. At the entrance of the stadium was a large, sponsored poster of “Operation Underground Railroad”. If you missed it, there were a dozen reminders over the loud speaker. At one point, the trailer of Sound of Freedom, played. I wondered how they couldn’t try to make the small clip feel less gimmicky and exploitative, but as I looked around the stadium full of cowboys and rowdy young children, I could see, that they truly believed in O.U.R.’s mission. In their heart of hearts, Tim was their guy.

He looked like them. Spoke like them. Shared the same spiritual origin story of white-washed colonization that still has us unquestionably sending our children around the world to proselytize their compulsions about god.

Many remember Meg Conley’s brilliant piece in 2021 about the time she accompanied Ballard on a raid. I imagine Meg called on a lot of bravery to publish this essay as the pushback came swiftly from many who could not separate their passion for child safety from Ballard’s charisma. She laid out, dressed and prepared the body of warranted criticism unlike any I had seen before. And then, for me, it was Kristi Boyce who nailed the coffin. To summarize her 13-min read of a Slack article:

“You cannot go hard on Operation Underground Railroad while going soft on what lay the tracks. These systems of power are enmeshed.”

Kristi was the first person, I saw, actively grounding Tim Ballard back to his mormon roots. And I remember exactly where I was when I read her essay for the first time, because in talking about Tim, Kristi was simultaneously grounding all other patriarchal leaders in our community. It’s a disorienting awakening navigating the cultish fog, and her article helped put language to some of the steamy shit.

Deep down, even if we can’t name it, many of us can feel it.

Following the initial Vice article detailing Ballard’s sexual misconduct, DM’s came pouring in comparing him with LDS founder, Joseph Smith. For me, the line when Tim allegedly asked a woman “how far she was willing to go” in an effort to save children felt like it could’ve been ripped straight out of an LDS prophet’s playbook. The whole hunger for notoriety in the name of fulfilling god’s work here on earth that leaves traumatized women and children in it’s wake is pretty on brand for us.

My friend said, “I call it “Joseph’s Shadow” energy being passed down generation to generation by the Mormon men. Literally the actualization of power and sex. This is so gross and we all could smell it a mile away. The church has been playing with some bad apples because it is rotten.”

It’d be disingenuous to pin this all on Joseph’s head. But, to completely ignore the influence of insulating mormon boys in a patriarchal hierarchy, devoid of women and global-majority voices, and telling them they will one day become gods is definitely short-sighted. While we as a community may not drink, we seem to have crafted an adequate concoction for a savior complex.

In the LDS Church, prophets—living or dead, real or invented—hold the most authority. We reference passages from ancient text as casually as a conversation from our living, breathing neighbors. It’s easy to point fingers and laugh at the prospect of Ballard soliciting a psychic, Janet Russon, to communicate with a dead, mormon leader, but aren’t we the ones still sending our children to baptize dead people in the morning before school? He is one of us, and watching the church—an organization that whittled Tim’s religious cradle and helped build his empire—wash their hands of him without any accountability or community care will never not feel gross.

In promoting his book “Slave Stealers”, Tim said, talking about two of his children who were rescued and later adopted, "To go into the temple after that (speaking of baptizing his daughter earlier that day) and participate in the sealing was by far the crowning event of this entire narrative. It was the most unbelievable experience maybe I've ever had, to have them sealed to us, knowing the trajectory of their lives was anything but ending up in the temple being sealed to a family."

Tim’s faith and stories of spiritual origins are integral to his life mission. Like many, he’s been shaped and emboldened by a theology that powers this state. Whether he goes for the open senate seat or disappears into the noise, the rot in our religion’s foundation of patriarchal order, intergenerational abuse and persecution complex still remains unaccounted.

It’s easy to forget that in the harrowing tale of Dr. Frankenstein, Victor was the creator of two monsters, not one. While his pursuit of creation amounted to something quite extraordinary, playing god ultimately caused more harm than good.

In the words of a monster:

Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life?