Politics

The Standards vs. Who Gets Defended

The bar a member must clear to enter the temple, set beside the conduct many members came to defend. Including one Utah senator, in his own words.

The argument

This is not a page about how anyone votes. Voting is a choice between two options, and choosing the less bad one is an honest position. This page is about something narrower.

The Church holds its own members to a specific, enforced standard of honesty and chastity. In 2016 the Church’s own newspaper, and Utah Senator Mike Lee, said one candidate failed that standard so badly he should quit. The conduct did not change. The defending did.

1. The standard, in the Church’s own words

Every adult who wants to enter the temple sits with a bishop and answers the same published questions. Two of them:

Youth are taught the same thing in For the Strength of Youth: “Do not steal, lie, cheat, or deceive in any way” and “Be the same faithful follower of Jesus Christ in public and in private.” And the thirteenth Article of Faith begins: “We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous …”

This standard is not decoration. It is enforced. A member can lose temple access, and miss a child’s wedding, over coffee or an unpaid tithe.

2. In 2016, Utah held him to it

On October 7, 2016, a 2005 recording surfaced of Donald Trump describing how he approached women: “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. I just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it.” He apologized: “I said it, I was wrong and I apologize.”

The next day, the Church-owned Deseret News, a paper that had stayed out of presidential endorsements for 80 years, called on him to quit.

Hours before that editorial, in the first hour of October 8, Utah Senator Mike Lee, a Latter-day Saint and returned missionary, posted a video from his home.

Utah’s vote that November reflected it. Trump won the state with 45.5%, to 27.5% for Hillary Clinton and 21.5% for Evan McMullin, a Latter-day Saint independent. Nationally, exit polls found Latter-day Saints far less enthusiastic for Trump than they had been for Mitt Romney four years earlier.

3. What the record became

Here it matters to use the right words. A criminal conviction and a civil finding are different things, and this page keeps them apart.

4. The same senator, in order

The texts came out in 2022 through the House January 6 committee’s records, first reported by CNN. Lee’s defense was that he was asking questions, not advocating: “At no point in any of those was I engaging in advocacy.” He did vote to certify, and that deserves to be said.

Captain Moroni, for anyone who did not grow up with him, is the Book of Mormon’s model of a righteous military leader, the man of whom it says that if all men were like him, “the very powers of hell would have been shaken forever” (Alma 48:17).

What is true on the other side

• Utah resisted more than most. Utah’s Latter-day Saints were notably cooler on Trump in 2016 than white evangelicals were. Mitt Romney became the first senator in U.S. history to vote to convict a president of his own party, and he did it twice.
• The Church is officially neutral. It states that it does not “endorse, promote or oppose political parties and their platforms or candidates for political office,” and it does not tell members how to vote.
• Voting is not endorsing. Many members voted for him reluctantly, on policy, because the alternative seemed worse to them. That is a real and honorable reason, and nothing here questions it.

The common rebuttals

“We are electing a president, not a bishop.”

Agreed. But this page is not about the ballot. It is about the defending: calling the tape locker-room talk, disputing what juries found, holding him up as Captain Moroni. The temple recommend does not ask whom you voted for. It asks whether you are honest, and whether you call evil good.

“Everyone in politics lies.”

Then the honesty question would rule out everyone, and members would hold all of them at arm’s length. Instead, one man got called Captain Moroni. The standard was not applied evenly. It was applied, and then suspended for one person.

“He has repented. People change.”

Repentance, as the Church teaches it, includes confessing, making restitution, and forsaking the sin. A man who still calls the accusation a hoax after a jury found him liable has not done the first step. A bishop would not accept that from a member, and it would be strange to accept less from a president than from a priest.

What this means

Every member has watched the standard applied to someone they love: a teenager who confessed, a parent who sat outside the temple at a child’s wedding. It is real, and it is enforced.

So it is fair to ask what it means when the same community, and the same senator, stop applying it the moment the person in question is powerful and useful.

A standard that bends for the powerful is not a standard. It is a rule for the people who cannot help you.