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It was Father’s Day morning, but Mike Lee was still hard at work on social media.
Just before 11 o’clock, Lee posted an image of Vance Boelter, the man charged with murdering two Minnesota lawmakers a day earlier. “This is what happens,” Lee captioned it, “when Marxists don’t get their way.” Ten minutes later, he posted again. “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” he wrote, suggesting that Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz was to blame for the grisly murders.
Lee’s posts generated near-instant national backlash. His mentions filled with people calling on him to resign. Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith, a Democrat, cornered Lee at the U.S. Capitol the next night and gave him an earful. So did Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, another Minnesotan. A top aide in Smith’s office wrote a letter to Lee’s staffers rebuking them for “making jokes” to “compound people’s grief.”
It wasn’t just Washington that was buzzing over Lee’s response to the tragedy. It also set off a debate in Salt Lake City. At the global headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a discussion over how to respond — if at all — began in earnest, according to two people granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. Several of the church’s senior leaders saw the posts and were concerned. Lee is a prominent Latter-day Saint, arguably the best-known elected Church member in the nation. His insensitive words were reflecting poorly on the faith at large. One church official estimated the backlash from Lee’s posts would have severe repercussions for the church’s public image, the first person said.
As extreme as the situation was, the issue at the center of the firestorm was nothing new. For two-and-a-half years, Lee has been sliding deeper and deeper into a hyper-online echo chamber. Posts pepper his timeline during nearly every waking hour, and some at night.
While staffers run his official accounts, Lee himself is the primary author behind the @BasedMikeLee account, according to two former advisers granted anonymity to speak openly, where he feeds conspiracy theories and attacks against the political left. It has become one of the more prolific pages on X, the site formerly known as Twitter: Last year, he posted about 36 times a day, a Salt Lake Tribune investigation found; in the first four months of this year, he was posting 100 times a day, or once every 15 minutes.
Along the way, Lee has become a cult hero in some corners of the online political right. Last year, Lee’s account had just over 200,000 followers; now, it’s surpassed 600,000. He finds a wide range of uses for his online megaphone: criticizing “leftists,” disparaging fellow Republicans, theologizing, philosophizing, conspiracizing. On occasion, he uses the account as a tool to communicate to constituents, as he did last month while trying to save face when his public lands proposal faced wide backlash. But more often, the account is something entirely different: In 2023, his posts threatening the Japanese prime minister were so outlandish that his account was flagged and temporarily suspended for “impersonation.”
Those who know Lee suggest the account isn’t a new persona, but rather the senator in his natural state. “I think it's definitely the same Mike Lee that I know,” said Ryan McCoy, a longtime friend and adviser. One of the two former advisers suggested it is “Mike Lee unfiltered.”
Lee and his office did not respond to several requests for comment on this story.
The more his online following cheers, the more Lee seems to dig in. “There’s the human-nature side of it,” said the former adviser. “All of a sudden, you have 600,000 people caring about what you have to say. How can you resist that?”
But for Lee’s church, that bellicose online alter ego poses a problem. Even as some Christian denominations have delved into Christian nationalism or partisan politics during the Trump era, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (commonly referred to as the Mormon Church) has consistently called on members to do the opposite: to be “peacemakers” in the civic square.
Russell M. Nelson, the church’s president and prophet since 2018, has portrayed it as an assignment from God, encouraging members not to retreat from public discourse, but to enter and build “bridges of understanding.” There is no partisan undertone — leaders are explicit that Latter-day Saints can belong to any political party. Regardless of political affiliation, the church is calling on its members to be on the frontlines of finding common ground. It has arguably become the central message of Nelson’s tenure as the church’s president.
Lee, both as a keyboard warrior and flesh-and-bones legislator, is consistently getting in the way. For the first time in recent memory, the church has a high-ranking member in Washington not just failing to cooperate on some of its key priorities, but sometimes actively impeding them. While larger, more established faiths may not pay much heed to the antics of a single member, Latter-day Saints have a different challenge: They make up just two percent of the national population, and nearly half of Americans say they don’t know a single church member. The actions and reputation of the church’s faithful in public spaces — Congress, perhaps, being the most influential — plays a significant role in the public’s perception of the church itself.
The church declined to comment for this story.
Lee eventually removed the two posts about the Minnesota assassinations. But he never publicly apologized. The Deseret News, the Salt Lake City-based paper owned by the church, rebuked Lee in an editorial, calling on him to apologize and recognize his mistake. “The tweets were unacceptable for anyone, let alone from a member of the Senate,” the editorial board wrote. “It revealed a lack of compassion for both victims and their loved ones and cast a poor light on Utah, the state Sen. Lee represents.”
The church, however, made the decision to stay quiet. Top-down, public rebukes of individual members are very rare in the faith, much less when action could be seen as a partisan exercise and further exacerbate tensions. The church, as an institution, has a strict political neutrality policy; its members, while encouraged to be Christ-like, are to act as they wish. But the incident brought to a boil something that had been simmering in Salt Lake City for some time. “Mike Lee is far-right,” said one emeritus general authority, a former high-ranking church official, granted anonymity to speak openly. “The church is not far-right.”
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is, by many metrics, a traditionally conservative institution. It promotes the nuclear family as the core unit of healthy societies. Women are unable to hold top leadership positions. Members of the LGBTQ+ community are welcome to participate in church life, but may not marry or have sex. Its members have largely followed the same conservative tack: Though the share of Latter-day Saints who identify as Republicans has plummeted during the Trump era, a majority still hold conservative social views. Trump carried Utah all three times he was on the ballot.
But in recent years, as other conservative Christian denominations wade headlong into the culture war, the church has charted a countercultural direction. Instead of doubling down on the hot-button topics — race relations, LGBTQ+ issues and the like — leaders have attempted formal engagement with groups others might see as hostile to the church. It formed a partnership with the NAACP to fund education and employment programs. It worked with advocacy groups to negotiate state and federal legislation codifying rights for the LGBTQ+ community while protecting religious liberty. The result was “an effective truce on gay-rights issues nationwide,” Sasha Issenberg wrote in POLITICO Magazine.
Some might see these efforts as minimal. But for a church that was a leading supporter of Proposition 8 in California less than two decades ago, it is a marked shift. Instead of leaning into far-right pseudo-Christianity, the church is paving a way “antithetical to Christian nationalism,” the author and Brookings Institution scholar Jonathan Rauch wrote in his new book, Cross Purposes. It’s more than just being “nice” — it’s actively working to partner with would-be enemies to find common ground.
“At the risk of exaggerating or oversimplifying (but only a little), one could put what [the church] is saying this way: Never dominate, always negotiate — because that is God’s plan,” Rauch wrote.
At the frontlines of this push is Dallin H. Oaks, a member of the church’s highest governing body, the First Presidency. (He is the second-in-command to Nelson, the church’s president.) A lawyer by trade, Oaks enjoyed an impressive career — as law professor at the University of Chicago, president of Brigham Young University and justice on the Utah Supreme Court — before entering ecclesiastical service. If Nelson is the chief architect on peacemaking, Oaks is its biggest proponent.
Oaks has enunciated the theory in sermons and speeches. At the University of Virginia in 2021, Oaks taught that defending the Constitution requires us to honor the “moral and political imperative of reconciling existing conflicts and avoiding new ones.” Oaks was clear that Latter-day Saints must not compromise their values or beliefs, but should be less forceful toward those who disagree. In a pair of sermons in the church’s General Conference — the keynote semiannual event for church members — Oaks denounced rabid partisanship. “On contested issues,” he said in April 2021, “we should seek to moderate and unify.”
Oaks’ counsel received mixed reactions. Latter-day Saints view their leaders as literal prophets who receive guidance from God. But among some church members, the call to “moderate” was a step too far. “Don’t get me wrong, we love our church leaders,” said Layne Bangerter, a former Trump administration official. “They can share their opinions. But don’t tell us to moderate.”
Being a “fence-sitter,” Bangerter added, “is against everything we’ve been taught to do.” (Oaks, in another speech, said Latter-day Saints should not “compromise our principles and priorities,” but “cease harshly attacking others for theirs.”)
Lee, for many of these disgruntled Latter-day Saints, has become their political standard-bearer. On social media, he’s forceful and brash, often cloaking his attacks in religious language. “Which of your favorite scriptural and historical heroes could have succeeded had they treated ‘suburban niceness at all costs’ as their first article of faith?” Lee posted last year.
Where some see Lee as an obstructionist, more willing to vote “no” than engage in debate, his allies see him as unapologetically tethered to principle. “He’s an absolute bulldog,” said Don Peay, a friend and the former “Utahns for Trump” chair. “He didn’t compromise, and what did he get us? Three conservative Supreme Court justices.”
Lee was initially perturbed by Donald Trump. He was offended that Trump would push a conspiracy theory about the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Lee’s friend. He was irked by Trump’s “religiously intolerant” statements. He recognized that Trump, at the time, was “wildly unpopular” in Utah, thanks in part to the state’s history of religious persecution. And, in a true Lee sense, he wanted “some assurances” that Trump would be “a vigorous defender for the U.S. Constitution.”
At the 2016 Republican National Convention, Lee led a protest on the opening day to change the rules — that could have, in theory, allowed for a vote to block Trump from getting the nomination. And in October, when Access Hollywood leaked a video of Trump bragging about sexually harassing women, Lee called on the Republican nominee to drop out.
“If anyone spoke to my wife, or my daughter, or my mother, or any of my five sisters, the way Mr. Trump has spoken to women, I wouldn’t hire that person,” Lee said in a Facebook video. “And I certainly don’t think I’d feel comfortable hiring that person to be the leader of the free world.”
Trump won, and Lee eventually came around. Lee told The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta he gave Trump an ultimatum shortly after the 2016 election: Adopt my priorities — fiscal responsibility, individual liberty, constitutional government — and we’ll be friends. “I got to know him as a person,” Lee told Alberta. “I realized that there’s a lot more to him than people realize. He has deep empathy for Americans. You find him to be a genuinely likable person.” Others maintain a more cynical view: That Lee was gearing for a seat on the Supreme Court — a position Trump dangled in front of Lee, albeit briefly, when the seat eventually filled by Justice Brett Kavanaugh opened up in 2018.
It was an awkward position for the church. U.S. Latter-day Saints, though overwhelmingly conservative, were less enthusiastic about Trump than any Republican presidential nominee in decades. The faith’s leadership — which pride themselves as strictly nonpartisan — nonetheless issued public statements critical of the travel ban on Muslim countries. In some instances, Lee’s allegiance was helpful — he collaborated with the White House to retrieve foreign missionaries at the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic and a Latter-day Saint imprisoned in Venezuela. But the church seemed to keep Lee at arm’s length.
Months before the 2020 election, Mitt Romney, Utah’s junior senator at the time, was invited to the church’s headquarters in Salt Lake City to brief the 15 senior leaders about the race. (He told them it was a choice between “an awful person” or “awful policies,” according to McKay Coppins’ 2023 biography Romney: A Reckoning, which I helped research.) Lee, meanwhile, was invited to Arizona to campaign with Trump. Lee wasn’t expecting to speak, but midway through the rally, Trump’s team handed him a microphone and told him to deliver a short speech. Frazzled and sweaty, Lee stumbled through a plea to evangelicals and to his Spanish-speaking “hermanos.” “And to my Mormon friends, my Latter-day Saint friends,” he said, “think of him” — pointing to Trump — “as Captain Moroni.”
The reference to a hero from the Book of Mormon, considered sacred scripture by Latter-day Saints, was jarring to many church members. Lee continued the analogy, paraphrasing scripture: “He seeks not power, but to pull it down. He seeks not the praise of the world — or the fake news — but he seeks the well-being and the peace of the American people.”
The comparison was deeply embarrassing to top church leaders and widely unpopular among Latter-day Saints in Utah. Lee wrote a long-winded Facebook post explaining his thinking, evading an apology. But Utahns kept a long memory. Former Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, a fellow Latter-day Saint, is still perplexed by the statement. “It was like, seriously, he didn't say that, right?” Herbert said. “That’s a joke, right?”
After Trump lost the election, Lee aided Trump’s legal teams contesting the result. He eventually voted to certify the election, however, and said what occurred on January 6 was a “very bad thing.” But as the January 6 Commission later pieced together evidence about the attack on the Capitol, a series of text messages between Lee and then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows surfaced, which made clear Lee was far more involved in exploring legal avenues to overturn the 2020 election than he let on. Lee denied any wrongdoing. Not everyone believed him: When friends would ask Romney about his relationship with Lee, Romney would pointedly remind them that Lee, “a supposedly strict constitutionalist, had spent months trying to help a president remain in power despite losing his election,” Coppins wrote.
Romney was the Mormon golden child, the most prominent Latter-day Saint politician in history, a true posterchild for the church. He was not universally loved by Latter-day Saints, but his influence on the church is unquestionable: He saved the scandal-ridden 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City; his two presidential campaigns brought more attention to the church than perhaps any other political events in U.S. history. Shortly after his 2012 loss, when it appeared his political career was over, a Latter-day Saint apostle gave him a blessing and promised that “this is just the beginning” of his career in government.
The prophecy came to fruition less than a decade later. When Romney was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2019, Lee, technically, was the senior senator from Utah. But that designation appeared to be in name only, given Romney’s national stature. Lee quickly grew to hate being in Romney’s shadow, according to the two former advisers. The two senators had conflicting perspectives on governing: Lee, the ex-lawyer, was a staunch conservative, prone to opposing legislation if it didn’t fully match his worldview, while Romney, the former business executive, was a pragmatist first and a conservative second. Lee had spent eight years in the Senate, but few recognized him outside Washington or Utah. Romney was the most recognizable Latter-day Saint alive.
It didn’t help that Lee had a shaky relationship with Sen. Orrin Hatch, Romney’s predecessor. Hatch, the Senate president pro tempore, was a titan — his four decades of service made him the longest-serving senator alive at the time of his retirement. But he and Lee frequently butted heads, and Lee refused to endorse Hatch’s final reelection campaign. Six years later, Hatch handpicked Romney as his successor.
Romney, for his part, tried to make amends. Surprised that his predecessor and Lee rarely met with one another, Romney in 2019 pitched Lee on a weekly breakfast meeting, an opportunity to synchronize their work and build camaraderie. Sometimes, the hour-long meetings were productive: early on, the two senators agreed to combine their constituent services staff to allow for streamlined help on issues from passports to veterans' benefits. The arrangement was believed to be the first of its kind in the Senate.
In 2022, an opportunity to engage in religious liberty legislation arose. It was a pet topic for both senators, and a key priority for the church. The Respect for Marriage Act, which passed the Democratic-controlled House that July, was a way to codify the same-sex marriage rights the Supreme Court granted in Obergefell, and to prevent the Court from reversing course in the future (as Justice Clarence Thomas opened the door to in his concurring opinion in Dobbs).
But some religious groups — the church included — were concerned it contained no religious liberty protections. They faced a choice: Wage a contentious fight against same-sex marriage, akin to the church’s 2008 opposition to Proposition 8 in California, or find a way to strike a well-intentioned compromise. Top church leaders settled on the latter, seeing the opportunity in a similar light to the so-called “Utah Compromise,” a 2015 package passed by the Utah state legislature that provided nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ individuals in housing and employment while safeguarding religious liberty. “It gave neither position all that it sought,” Oaks said of that compromise, but granted both positions “benefits that probably could not have been obtained” otherwise.
That the church was willing to wade into a national legislative battle was evidence of just how important it was to church leaders, who often exercise extreme prudence on such matters. “They're fully aware of the charge of theocracy that's oftentimes leveled against the church and its leaders,” said Patrick Mason, chair of Mormon Studies at Utah State University. “Mormons and Catholics have always had that albatross around our necks.”
As negotiations on the Respect for Marriage Act began in Washington, a bipartisan group of senators, including Romney, settled on an amendment that would prevent religious institutions from being forced to host same-sex marriages and protect religious tax exemptions. Oaks himself was involved, approving the amendment’s early language, said one person with direct knowledge who was granted anonymity to speak freely.
But it wasn’t enough for Lee. He pushed his own amendment, including a preemptive blanket ban on the federal government retaliating against any person or group for adhering to a “sincerely held religious belief” about marriage.
A dozen of his Republican colleagues cosponsored the amendment. But a motley coalition of LGBTQ+ advocates and religious groups feared it would alienate Democrats and effectively tank the bill. Romney’s coalition tried to engage with Lee, telling him their amendment would provide similar protections for religious groups, including religious universities’ tax-exempt status, while maintaining broad support across coalitions. They noted the amendment explicitly called for “proper respect” for “reasonable and sincere” religious people. But Lee proved unwilling to negotiate at all — not with those fellow Republicans who had drawn up the other amendment, and not even with his own church which had signaled support. “This bill pays lip service to protecting religious liberty, but does not even begin to address the most serious, egregious and likely threats,” Lee said in a floor speech. His amendment failed, while the other one — and the bill — passed.
For the first time, the church had waded directly into a legislative issue Lee was working on — and had landed on the opposite side. The church felt Lee’s amendment was unnecessary. “As signed into law, the Respect for Marriage Act included valuable provisions to assure that no federal or state laws could be used to harm the religious or conscience rights of faith-based institutions or their members,” Oaks said. “And it specifically provides that its own provisions cannot be used to violate anyone’s rights to religious freedom.”
To Lee, Oaks is more than a religious leader, the next in line to lead the global faith: He is a close family friend. Oaks recruited Lee’s father to Chicago and taught him there. The two served together in volunteer church assignments. When Oaks, then president of Brigham Young University, spearheaded the formation of the J. Reuben Clark Law School, he hired Rex Lee as its first dean. In 1991, when cancer prematurely cut the elder Lee’s life short, Oaks spoke at the funeral. "Rex Lee sought first to build up the kingdom of God," Oaks said in his eulogy. Mike Lee has told friends that there’s “probably not someone on earth that's more close to his father — in philosophy, in the way that he thinks — than President Oaks,” said McCoy, Lee’s longtime friend.
The relationship between Lee and Romney didn’t get much better, either. The incident laid bare differences in legislative styles between Romney, a former executive, and Lee, a trained lawyer. “Mitt looks for reasons to say yes to legislation,” one ex-Romney staffer noted. “Mike looks for reasons to say no.”
But Lee seemed to hold another grudge. A month earlier, he’d successfully defeated Evan McMullin, a former independent presidential candidate, in what was the most expensive Senate race in Utah history. Lee had run a careful, buttoned-up campaign, with multiple advisers greenlighting every social media post. Romney withheld an endorsement, claiming that both Lee and McMullin were his “friends.” Lee’s campaign cut their losses and decided not to push for Romney’s backing. When Lee booked an interview on Fox News with Tucker Carlson weeks before the election, the campaign specifically asked Carlson’s producers not to ask about Romney, the two former Lee advisors recalled. But Carlson, who has publicly signaled his distaste for Romney, "couldn’t help himself,” a former adviser said. Lee ended up taking the bait and begging for Romney’s endorsement on live television — and for donations from each of Romney’s five sons. (Carlson did not respond to a request for comment.)
The stunt was more embarrassing for Lee than it was productive. Romney never endorsed, nor did his family donate. Lee seemed to maintain a grudge, and shortly after the election, his office notified Romney’s that their joint constituent service agreement would end. “We were determined to not let electoral politics get in the way of it,” recalled Liz Johnson, Romney’s chief of staff at the time. Lee didn’t seem to feel the same way: two former Romney staffers said they were notified the decision was made because Romney didn’t endorse. Lee’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment on the decision, nor did Romney.
In late April, Oaks returned to Brigham Young University for a campus-wide commencement ceremony. At 92 years old, Oaks has dedicated the final chapter of his life to the work of peacemaking and bridgebuilding. He is cognizant his work is not always popular — he and other church leaders are “well aware that you can't just command people to believe something,” Rauch, the Brookings scholar, said in an interview — but that doesn’t stop him from speaking of the Constitution’s divine mandate for unity whenever possible.
Dressed in his old Chicago doctoral gown, Oaks hobbled to the podium and offered a brief discourse. His comments were short, focused on the ceremony’s honorary degree recipient. But he closed with an impassioned plea: to commit to “the divinely inspired principles of the United States Constitution.”
Lee was in attendance. It was his first public visit to BYU, the private religious institution, since Trump had retaken office. During the first three months of the Trump administration, Lee had been one of the chief cheerleaders, praising DOGE’s overhaul of the federal government and Trump’s efforts to strip Harvard University of federal funding. It was one of Lee’s most frequent arguments in recent months: Any university that taught “anti-God” and “anti-American” ideology should be stripped of their tax-exempt status.
BYU showed the courtesy of recognizing Lee, an alumnus, at the beginning of the service; Lee offered the courtesy of spending the duration of the ceremony glued to his phone. Sitting with his legs crossed, Lee sent out a flurry of tweets. Two were related to the speeches — praising a mention of families and jabbing liberal universities. Others were completely unrelated, denouncing “leftist misinformation campaigns” and retweeting CNN personality Scott Jennings.
When Oaks arose to speak, Lee’s face was illuminated by his phone’s soft glow.
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