Last week Connor released a video making the excellent point that Latter-day Saints believe Joseph Smith faced all sorts of false charges and accusations throughout his life, and in all cases rightly and truthfully defended himself — except one. In every other area we defend Joseph and say he was telling the truth, but when it comes to polygamy we side with his accusers and claim Joseph constantly lied to protect himself. If you haven’t yet watched it, I highly recommend it. Watch it Here
Several weeks ago I had the opportunity to talk to Connor about his history with polygamy and becoming Utah’s top advocate for freedom, and how the two are related. We discussed Connor’s surprising and painful experiences of finding himself in opposition to his church in political matters. He explains the church’s troubling involvement in Utah politics and his challenging yet rewarding role of loyal opposition.
This was a great conversation.
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Links:
Connor on Joseph Smith’s polygamy: Link 1 | Link 2
Connor’s Books
Libertas Institute
Sunday Musings
Rolling Stone article
Tuttle Twins book series, by Connor Boyack
Latter-day Liberty, by Connor Boyack:
Audiobook
Paperback
Latter-day Responsibility, by Connor Boyack:
Paperback
Kindle
Moroni and the Swastika:
Soft cover
ebook
First Presidency letter urges vaccines
Episode 69 Tonia Tewell – Ongoing Abuses of Polygamy
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
4:45 Role of government re polygamy
24:30 Early foundations: live and let live
36:30 Navigating differences with the church
45:25 Renouncing war, proclaiming peace
50:00 The battle for medical cannabis
1:00:35 The Flu That Shall Not Be Named
1:03:50 Opposition to church policy
1:27:40 On the island of libertarianism
1:34:25 Inspiration v personal opinions
1:48:00 Reality of secret combinations
1:54:20 Treating lightly The Book of Mormon
2:02:00 Leadership & raising thoughtful children
2:08:40 Connor’s position on abortion
2:15:30 The church’s new director of comms
2:22:30 2020 and the loss of liberties
2:39:45 Seduced by secret combinations
2:46:20 Choosing to stay in the church
Transcript:
[00:00] Michelle: Welcome to 132 problems revisiting Mormon polygamy, where we explore the scriptural theological and historical case for plural marriage. I am excited to bring to you this episode, this conversation with my friend Connor Boyack, who I hold in very high regard. I was excited to be able to engage with him a few weeks ago and I’m excited to be able to bring that conversation to you. A couple of housekeeping things. I do again, want to thank all of those who are new subscribers. I want to invite people to please subscribe if you haven’t yet and please share this podcast. I think it, it’s a helpful information for people to at least be aware of. And again, as always, thank you so much to those of you who have donated and who continue to donate to support this podcast. I’m so excited about our website. I’m so excited about all of the new things that we have going on and that we’re trying to build and your donations help make that possible. So please continue to support us. And thank you again for joining us on this journey as we gaze into these Murky Waters of Mormon Polygamy. Welcome to this episode of 132 Problems. I am so excited to be here with an old friend Connor Boyack who, I guess I’m better friends with your wife, but I sure have appreciated our association as well. So I have to tell, I have to say Connor and Connor’s wife and I homeschooled together for several years. We were in similar co ops and I just think the world of her and she really was there for me in some difficult times. So please pass my love along to her. She’s awesome. And then Connor, I should give you all the introduction of who he is for anyone who doesn’t know Connor Boyack, he is the founder I believe, and president of Libertis foundation.
[01:58] Connor Boyack: You got it.
[02:00] Michelle: And he has really just taken The World By Storm. I know he’s written several books which I hope everybody has because they are excellent. His TuttleTwin series really seemed to take off. I know that you kind of did the rounds on all of the big shows, which was kind of exciting to see. And so I think they’re basically a political think tank. Connor is kind of the big Libertarian presence in Utah, which I’m certainly grateful for. I think it’s awesome. he has his podcast Sunday Musings. We, we’re laughing that we both have been going about the same amount of time. And between the two of us, we fill all of your content needs for every Sunday we both release on Sundays. And then he also, I believe is a beekeeper, at least I know your wife is a homesteader. You guys do all kinds of awesome things to be as self reliant as possible. And homeschooling their two kids. What did I miss Connor?
[03:05] Connor Boyack: you, you pretty well covered it. Yeah. Now they called me as the preparedness specialist in our world because I guess other people need to be self reliant too. So just, teaching as best as I can.
[03:16] Michelle: Perfect. Perfect. And my family has been blessed by Connor. My four oldest got to take his classes in our co op which were phenomenal. They still talk about them. They were so good. He was so good at getting the kids to think. And that’s exactly like the critical thinking is just the goal of good parenting, I think good education. Definitely good home homeschooling and my kids wouldn’t even know what Connor thought on issues. They would just come home and be discussing them and, and you did such a good job of that.
[03:53] Connor Boyack: Tell them I say Hello
[03:54] Michelle: I will do it. I will. Thanks. So, anyway, thank you for coming and talking to me. I thought we probably had a lot of things to talk about because it’s been interesting to watch. I know you did a Sunday musings on Joseph’s polygamy several months back when you talked about Whitney’s book and a couple of other sources that changed your mind on that. And so I don’t know why I haven’t had you on sooner, but I’ve just thought it would be great to have a conversation about. Well, many of the things that you have been navigating for many years. So, so do you want
[04:29] Connor Boyack: in?
[04:30] Michelle: Perfect.
[04:31] Connor Boyack: Sounds good. Where do we start? Well, maybe, maybe I’ll start here. This being a podcast that has a lot to do with polygamy. My, you know, I’m a very political guy. I run this think tank. We’ve changed 100 laws, you know, trying to fight for freedom and, and whatnot. I actually got my start because of polygamy. So, I was newly married to my wife. This is 2007 and we’re sitting in our condo watching, I think the news, the local news and the story broke that the FLDS compound in Texas had been raided. They called it the yearning for Zion Ranch and so on TV, I watched this spectacle unfold. There’s, you know, armored vehicles and guns and the helicopter or two or three and I just all this law enforcement presence and this was kind of, you know, wild to watch in real time. And then they proceeded to talk about how the government had taken over 400 Children away from their parents, mostly their moms, this being a polygamous community and put them all in the foster care system in Texas, which at the time and and frankly, still like most foster care systems is rife with sexual abuse, physical abuse, drugs and otherwise, so this was effectively a legal kidnapping of all these Children whose parents, whose moms at least, were not individually suspected of committing any crime. You know, they weren’t releasing them to grandparents or anyone else. It was just straight into the foster care system. Of course, it was later revealed that that the tip that law enforcement had received was a crank call. It was from a fraudster, someone who had done this before. So it was based on a faulty tip. Now, obviously Warren Jeffs is a sleezy guy. He was doing horrible things, but many people do horrible things and yet we still have to follow due process. We still have to protect fundamental constitutional rights, especially parental rights. And, and I was not political at all at the time, I was just watching this on TV, horrified that that this was happening. So I was blogging at the time, I had this blog called Connor’s Conundrums. And, and this was where I was first kind of getting my start sharing ideas and talking about things. And so I wrote this blog post saying what a problem I thought it was. I started an online petition again in 2007. This was kind of a novel idea and it quickly took off. I got my first local news interview on KSL. I got national coverage. I was writing congressman before long. And all these people flooded in my blog into the comments section to say, thank you for standing up for these kids and their moms because no one else was standing because you know, I mean the polygamous community has always been kind of swept under the rug. They’re the awkward cousin at the family reunion. No one wants to talk to him. And so all these people were, were just appreciative that I was speaking up for them not to defend any of the abusive stuff or the crazy whatever. But just to say hey, this is wrong and that shouldn’t be done because no one else was standing up for them. That was my first taste of being kind of a voice for the voiceless people who didn’t know how to navigate the political system, how to get media, how to push back. And so that gave me kind of the bug. I kinda realized like, hey, I’m actually kind of good at this. I’m good at writing. I’m good at speaking. I’m good at research. I’m good at legal stuff, even though I have no formal background in any of it. And so I just slowly started working, you know, building from there, it took me about four or five years to launch our nonprofit and kind of formalize what I was doing.
[08:05] Michelle: I remember that that’s when I first became aware of Connor’s conundrums and I was definitely on the front lines watching that nightmare unfold. And you know, I think as a homeschooler, many of us just are like DCFS or , they’re just anathema because, because they take our kids away, you know, and they, and we feel like the lack of due process. And so it’s interesting because I remember that, and I read your blog then, but I did not know that’s where you got your start. That’s fascinating to know. I want to know. I have a tricky question for you now because it’s bizarre, like my mind has really learning what I have learned since my mind has really changed about what happened there. I don’t know what was good or what was bad. I talked to Flora Jessup and she knew the woman who made the call, who reported it and it wasn’t her, but she was speaking on behalf of other people in her group. You know what I mean? She knew of the problem and wanted to fix it. And then we came to find out that those actually weren’t their parents, they had been taken from other parents. There was massive abuse going on. So, what do we do in those kinds of situations? Because due process is so important and protecting kids is so important. It’s given me a little bit more, I don’t see it quite as black and white as I used to, I guess.
[09:28] Connor Boyack: Well, and it’s very interesting that you point out that especially in the homeschool community, DCFS or CPS, these, these child service agencies are anathema. And yet the very issue that you’re describing is what they grapple with. When I started libertas, we worked on a number of DCFS laws to protect parental rights to make sure that you can’t just barge into someone’s home without a warrant without, due process. And what was very interesting is we would write blog posts on our website about these bills. We were working on these issues we were working on. And so we started ranking high in the Google search results for like Utah DCFS. So ever since then, gosh, it’s been almost a decade every other week or so on average, consistently for a decade, We get an email solicitation on our website from someone with a total sob story. Hey, DCFS took my kids. Hey, this horrible thing happened, and in the early years we would get all fired up like, oh my gosh, this sounds horrible, you know, lit just to the rescue. Let’s go do something about this. And then we would meet with the head of DCFS and they’d be like, hey, look, there’s a lot we can’t share. Here’s what we can share, take a look and then I’m like, oh dang, ok, there’s the other side of the story. So it is tough, right? Initially when we were watching this unfold on the news, yeah, it was, you know, uh that they were taken from their moms as I was kind of describing it, but you’re not wrong that it was more tricky than that
[10:58] Michelle: the women that were allowed on camera were lying and were acting and were hand picked to their sob story. They utilized the press dishonestly. So they fooled me. I was totally like, how could this be happening in America?
[11:17] Connor Boyack: for sure? And it’s tough like even in the worst of situations, yes, there was abuse but you know, fourth amendment when you really understand particularity. My issue was never that, hey, if there was any actual abuse, if Children had bruises or if they were malnourished or whatever, then sure, let’s remove the child. Other than that, it’s like, let’s place it with a grandma, let’s find the family member next of kin that we can entrust the Children with my whole objection to. It was really the collective response. And you can imagine from law enforcement’s perspective, it’s like, what do we do with this many kids? We need a short term solution to just process them and then we’ll figure it out later. But, my objection like there’s always the one off, like abuse situations where you do want DCFS to step in and protect the kids from an abusive parent and no one really objects in those circumstances. It just sat wrong with me that an entire community was being branded a certain way because of the actions of a few. When, as you look throughout our country’s history over time and our church’s history, there are a number of instances in which that happens and it doesn’t sit well with us. It’s wrong and so it was wrong here and I felt that someone needed to stand up.
[12:27] Michelle: Yeah. Thanks for talking to me about that. I didn’t mean to do I it’s just such, there’s such hard problems. And in some ways this polygamy is a big problem. It causes bigger, you know, because these kids, you couldn’t get their birth certificates, they didn’t have them, you couldn’t find the next of kin. They wouldn’t, they weren’t cooperating, they wouldn’t tell you who they were, they want to bleed the beast and they don’t want to. I’m using like the FLDS in particular, but also the Kingstons and a lot of these fundamentalist communities are just impossible to know what to do with them. And so abuse continues because they work the system. So they create, I guess that’s like, John Adams America’s great above is only for a holy moral and religious people, but we have to have traditional morals, not the twisted abominations like polygamy that ruins free society in a way.
[13:25] Connor Boyack: It’s rather interesting for us where, you know, a decade into doing libertas. We did a bill just a few years ago in Utah. We worked with now Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson, she was a senator at the time where we decriminalized polygamy and the issue that we are running into like, you know, you get the FLDS, the Kingstons, the closed communities where you do get a lot more of these issues and especially if you look at the FLDS. What Warren was able to do for so long was to push the entire society into the shadows. For fear. Right? Fear that that you would behauled off to jail, fear that you’d lose your job, fear that you’d face recriminations of some kind. And so we went on a listening tour, we met with a ton of former FLDS people, current FLDS people, Kingston’s independence, Apostolic United brethren and everybody. And in our office, we held this big meeting with a lot of the kind of leaders from the different sects and so forth. It was a prickly meeting as you might imagine. And we wanted to listen, like what are the problems? What’s at the root of all this, and at the root of all of it was the fact that for decades and decades and decades, Utah law had classified bigamy or polygamy as a felony. And that allowed the Warren Jeffs of the world to get away with a lot of misdeeds and misconduct because he could hold the felony over people’s heads and say if you go to law enforcement, if you report this, then they’re gonna come after your husband. Sure, they’ll come after me. But they’re gonna, and he was able to use the raids from decades past as a precedent, right? This wasn’t without precedent. And so we said, look, we felt it was proper in the absence of any of the, like, clearly, if there’s any other abuse, if there’s any problems, then the decriminalize, what the way we set it up is. It’s only decriminalized if there’s no abuse of any kind or other violations of law. But if you’re polygamist and abusive, then the polygamy is still a felony on top of the abuse. But the idea was, hey, if everyone is kind of abiding by the law, otherwise, then let’s not felony this, let’s take it down to, I think we got it down to an infraction if I remember, right? It might be a class c misdemeanor but we took it way, way down to basically try and bring these people out of the shadows, encourage them to get support, to seek support from local government agencies, community organizations, step out of the shadows. And talking with a lot of the kind of boots on the ground that help these people, It’s been helping quite a bit just to help these people reintegrate into society and be willing to transition out of these closed communities. So it’s not a silver bullet, but it’s very interesting for me personally to have this political arc where that’s what got me started. We were able to have some, some resolution there. Uh Perhaps for the topic of this podcast I can plant a little seed here. That as you might imagine, the LDS church was not a big fan of that law. And in fact, pushed back on our efforts, they didn’t want this bill to even happen at all. They didn’t want the press, they didn’t want the embarrassment, they didn’t want anything and were hoping that we would just make the bill go away and not do it. And so that’s been kind of an overarching theme of my political work that every year, every other year or so, we end up doing some battle with the church in some respect. And so I’ve got a lot of scars to prove it, but solid faith nonetheless. So here we are.
[16:44] Michelle: Yes. OK. So that’s really the theme that we want to talk about. But I kind of derailed you from your story just because I was like, wait, what are you talking about? I have to ask these questions. So can I ask one more kind of derailing question so we can get back to kind of your story because I do want people to be able to understand your interactions with the church and how you have navigated those because you’ve been in a tough spot many times, but with the decriminalization, So I remember when that was happening as well and I have spoken to Tanya Toole who has become a friend and she’s fabulous. I assume, you know, Tanya and she and others that I’ve spoken to have actually voiced their concern over how the decriminalization has actually kind of served to do some different things. It seems to them that it empowers the polygamists and things like child trafficking have just exponentially grown and it’s way harder to resolve, and the fear hasn’t decreased because these communities need the fear in order to control. So they still can say to their people, you’ll go to hell or they’re your enemies. They’re scary. Right? So how have you, have you seen that be like, like I know that we have the big problem now of people’s Children just being taken and, and shipped, who knows where? And the moms can’t find their kids if moms leave the group or, you know. So what have you seen as the outcome and the results of this? Because it sounds to me like it made things for a lot worse for a lot of people.
[18:18] Connor Boyack: Yeah. I mean, we had some of these folks opposing our efforts during the legislation, painting this picture of, you know, it’ll be horrible. You’ll have more abuse and so forth and, at least the data that I’ve seen and admittedly there’s not a lot because it’s hard to get data from some of these communities, but overall, I think it’s trending positive again like I said a moment ago. Is it perfect? No. Is it a silver bullet? No. I liken it to this. As a libertarian, you might understand that my position is that the war on drugs is completely immoral. I think it’s not the proper role of government to lock people in a cage because they choose to ingest something as long as they’re not harming others or giving it to kids or whatever. Now the opposition to that argument is if you legalize drugs that sends a message, right? It implicitly encourages other people to utilize those substances because you’re taking away this penalty. And, you know, you can debate that point. I think it doesn’t justify a flawed policy because of apr issue or AAA sentiment around the law. To me, it always boils down to what is the proper role of government. Well, when I look at the law and when the government decrees that, uh you know, that the awkward Michelle was that, I think it was the year prior or maybe two or three years prior, we had worked on a bill to completely eliminate, to repeal the laws having to do with like adultery and sodomy, fornication. There were these laws on the books dealing with those issues and I think they were all low class felonies, we got them repealed there was a, a big repeal bill working on a bunch of criminal stuff and we got them put in the bill, they’ve now been repealed. And so now Utah was in the position of saying, look, if you’re Hugh Hefner and you sleep around with a whole bunch of women and you impregnate them and you have all these kids and it’s just your lifestyle go nuts. Right? Like more power to you. The law won’t touch you. But the moment that you claim that someone is your spiritual wife or that you love them or that you’re in this union with more than one person which, I don’t agree with and I object to, but if someone chooses that lifestyle and wants to commit to the women involved and be a father for those Children, that’s a felony. But it’s not if you’re just, you know, so it’s just this weird incongruency where the government was in the position of decreeing that, yes, there are the FLDS and the Kingstons and these different communities where you have these struggles you’re describing. But there are a ton of independent polygamists as you know, I know many of them and they don’t really have those same community issues and yet they were still being harmed in their professional lives. You know, going to the hospital, custody issues, all this stuff because they had this felony hanging over their heads. So I don’t think it’s fair to look at this only as the F LDS community or others where you have clearly a bunch of issues that need to be addressed. You have to look at this more holistically and say if you got some guy out in Ephram, Utah who takes a second wife, and now he should be a felon, he should lose his job and his gun rights and his kids and everything just because he wants to commit to another woman rather than commit adultery with her and abandon her. So yes, I’m sure there are justified criticism that there have been some issues with implementation of this law and what I’ve learned from a decade plus of dealing with changing the laws is there’s always issues that you have to then run an amendment, you have to fix it. So I’m sure there’s room for improvement that we can do even more, but I’m glad we did it. And I think overall it’s helped
[21:53] Michelle: thank you for responding to that. It’s good to have a different, it’s good to get some push back and some more perspective. I agree with you on. I think polygamy has been an interesting issue for me because it sort of like child abuse. It’s one of those really difficult things where I’m a libertarian, you know, I just want small government and government out of it and I want communities to handle things and then at the same time when you see something so atrocious, what’s the solution? Is it like in America, are we allowed to enslave people? Are we allowed to kidnap people? Are we allowed to? Right. And, and is it government’s job to make sure that isn’t happening to people? But how many freedoms do we have to infringe upon in order to make sure that that can be enforceable? So they’re difficult, difficult problems, so thanks for responding to that. Do you want to go back to your story? I love that. It’s that you started your path on.jIt’s just fascinating that you have come full circle with polygamy in that way. That’s really fascinating.
[22:56] Connor Boyack: It’s kind of bizarre to me. Yeah. In fact, I went back a few months ago and watched that first interview on KSL, Little Baby Face Connor. And,you know, to me it’s very gratifying, like there’s the cliche quote that, if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life, right? And so for over a decade in my position now having all these political relationships, helping various elected officials get elected, having a lot of like political capital to push for different bills and issues and things. And it’s been so gratifying to use all of that to help people to try and clear these government burdens and obstacles away from people so that they can just be free and go live their lives. And it’s so fascinating to me doing all this in Utah where like I get asked a lot from my counterparts in other states, CEO s of other think tanks or media in other states. And they’re always wondering, what is it like working with a predominantly modern population? They should all be, you know, conservative, right? Or they should all be like rugged individualists, libertarians because, you know, the government wouldn’t protect them and they fled the government and, and went out into the wilderness and gave the proverbial middle finger to, you know, the, the federal government for, for not protecting them. And it’s in
[24:22] Michelle: our scriptures, like, like liberty is in our, in Mormon scripture more than anywhere else
[24:27] Connor Boyack: for sure. And, and, uh and you know, uh this being again, kind of a polygamy oriented, you know, podcast, of course, when the Saints were out west, uh or the, the brim mis or whatever we wanna call them and uh and they’re practicing polygamy and the federal government is coming after him and sending soldiers and they’re burying the foundations of the Salt Lake temple. John Taylor is literally hiding in members homes. They called it being on the underground, you know, much like slaves hiding in the antebellum south. And, and so these church leaders would just abscond and for weeks at a time, go into hiding. And there was this sentiment at the time, in fact, it was on the mast head of the Desert News. It was turned into a stained glass window in uh gosh, I don’t remember one of the temples uh for several decades. It was Manti or somewhere else. But it was this, this quote that said um uh Saints will mind their own business. All others ought to. And it was this very like, don’t ask, don’t tell sentiment where they didn’t want anyone snitching on anyone else because the feds were coming against us. And so the, the culture at the time, the zeitgeist uh was very much like, leave me alone. You might uh analogize it to the Gadsden flag. Don’t tread on me, right? The yellow flag with the Rattlesnake. Leave me alone. Very kind of libertarian position. Do I love that? It originated with them, you know, doing all their polygamy shenanigans, not really. Uh but nevertheless, that was the culture of Utah. That was kind of the, the foundational roots. It was kind of tainted, you might say because you had this theocratic kind of heavy uh government on top of it. But there were these seeds in this foundation certainly, as you point out the scriptures and the doctrine supporting this more liberty oriented view, Joseph Smith, right? Teach them correct principles, let them govern themselves. And so as I get asked these questions from people in other states, what is it like? I’m like, well, the foundations are there like there’s, there’s something like innate or ingrained in our, that I can appeal to and I can remind people of and I can try and extract that out or, or make comparisons like, hey, you know, just like the saints experience this or whatever, but it’s not at the forefront of people’s minds. It’s not something most saints think about. It’s not, it doesn’t inform their political views or, or activities. Um And so you have to almost like pull it out of them to get them to be like, oh yeah, maybe I shouldn’t act this. It’s like a Mitt Romney, right? Like here’s a guy who’s just a pragmatic person that looks at every given issue and which way the political winds are going and just makes a decision, but he’s not informed by kind of any of these theological doctrinal uh foundations that would inform his view. I call myself a libertarian. We’ve been using that term, you know, I often just call myself a Christian because I think if you’re truly living Christianity, it’s not a religious framework. It’s a societal framework. It’s an economic framework. It’s, it’s how to behave around and with other people. So I, I think when we do live the gospel of Jesus Christ to its fullest expression, we do have a more politically libertarian approach to other people because it’s the golden rule. It’s trying to do other, you know, I would never, if my neighbor were using marijuana, I would never punch him in the head and steal his wallet and throw him in my basement. Like I would never do that. So why would I want him or a law enforcement officer on his behalf to do that to me? Uh We don’t typically think about things this way. And so a large part of what I do is try and take those foundational ideas and then connect them to modern political circumstances and say, how do we bridge the gap? How do we apply the, the principle to this issue so that we can be consistent with the gospel rather than just putting the gospel in our Sunday? And we go to church and we sing our songs and then we go home and then we act and vote and think however we want Monday through Saturday only to go back and, and repeat it again. I want the gospel to infuse everything including our political structures and, and activities. Um And so that’s just become a large part of, of what I kind of preach and share and talk about.
[28:31] Michelle: Oh, Ok. OK. I love how you explain that. That’s so interesting. It’s like, you know, I’m thinking of all of the, um, analogies throughout the book of Mormon of the Olive Trees and that, you know, the roots are good. Some of the branches got a little wonky. So some of the fruits kind of yucky, you know. And, um, I, so I’ve gone the rounds with my husband. He’s much more of a strident libertarian than I am. I’m sort of a soft libertarian, you know, and, and one thing I find is interesting and I guess I just ask you this because it’s something we’ve talked about. But it’s kind of like if we really want to be libertarians, then we have to take it upon ourselves to almost put the government out of business in terms of because it’s, it is Christian to leave people alone, but it’s also Christian to care for the poor to visit that, you know, to do the things that government has stepped in and started doing, taking away. So, so for me that goes hand in hand, like we can, can’t just focus on libertarianism in terms of don’t tread on me. We also have to be like, we don’t need you. We’re good. Like I loved when we had forest fires in Payson. I, I love when we had forest fires when we had forest fires in Payson. I love that the Big Red Cross things that they set up weren’t even utilized. Nobody went to them because everyone, everyone stepped up and took care of their neighbors. Right. That’s kind of the model that I see as Libertarian is that we, we’ve got each other and so we, we are going so far out of our way to care for one another that, that we don’t need government to step in and do it. Right. Does that make sense? It
[29:58] Connor Boyack: does make sense. And I think I agree with both you and your husband. I don’t, I don’t know that you guys are, are far apart. It really just becomes like, do we, do we, you know, reduce those government programs first or do we build up, you know, society and, and these uh charitable, you know, actions so that we can then kind of put the state out of business. What you talk about is spot on in this sense, early America was full of what Alexis de Tocqueville called mediating institutions. So here’s, he wrote Democracy in America. Very famous. He’s commissioned by the French to come over and look at the penal system in America. But he uses that as an excuse to do a broader study about um the American government culture. So he writes democracy in America and in there, he says he was blown away that whereas in Europe, whenever someone was in need, people would raise their hand to the local, you know, government minister and, and they, they’d solicit taxpayer support for, you know, whatever they needed. Whereas in America, he said anytime there is a need, anytime there’s a problem, people voluntarily join together in societies uh to administer whatever relief is needed. And when you look at early America, there, uh there was this just proliferation of what we’re called fraternal organizations. Oftentimes these were oriented around uh ethnicity or, or country of origin. So you’d have like an Irish fraternal society where kind of like we had the perpetual immigration fund, right? Saints who had made it to the west would then help other Saints. Very similar. Uh And these fraternal organizations would uh provide insurance, uh various types of health insurance, death benefits, orphan care. You know, it was a great way for these people to pool their resources together and help one another and they were everywhere and they were affordable. No one was dying in the streets, you know, you, you just didn’t have the problems that a lot of people perceive we did before the welfare state. Well, when the Welfare State was being proposed and the war on poverty and all these things, all those fraternal societies very quickly went out of business because they couldn’t compete against the government. Uh think of it. If, if, why would you pay, you know, today, what might be the equivalent of like $1000 a year if you’re already being taxed for those same purported benefits for, you know, health care benefits or orphan care or, or whatever. And so these organizations that the state literally put these mediating institutions out of business. And so it’s this weird duality of like, OK, do we need to build up society and, and compete against the state or do we just need to go like rail against the state and say, hey, knock it off. Uh But then if you do that like John Adams, uh you know, when the French revolution was happening, he was really worried about all the spill over into an America. And on three separate occasions, he told once his wife Abigail and other people in these letters, he was criticizing um what was happening because he said these people are really good at tearing down, they’re tearing down all these institutions, they’re tearing down the monarchy. But what’s going to be built up in its place who are, who understands the, I think you call them the principles of political archi architecture. So I’ll end my, my response this way. The first books I’ve written 44 books. Now, the first book that I wrote uh was Latter Day Liberty. I had been doing my blog for a number of years. My readership had grown and I was like, hey, I think it’s time to, to write a book. And Latter Day Liberty is all about liberty from an LDS perspective. What are the scriptures and church leaders all say about the philosophy of liberty? So I did that book it’s pretty successful. Uh And uh and I’m driving on the freeway one day, I think it was going to like a book launch event. And I’m, I pull off the off ramp of 800 North and Orm and I get downloaded into my brain. The structure of the sequel for that book. The first book was Latter Day Liberty. This sequel that I received was uh I called it Latter Day Responsibility. And so it was the flip side of the coin. Hey, in this first book, here’s why liberty is important and we should be free and agency and all these things. And in the second book, it was uh hey, here’s how we need to do these things. We need to proactively step up and do all these different things if we want liberty. Well, I don’t need to tell you, you can probably imagine what the uh the response was in terms of sales of that second book compared to the first, I sold a whole bunch of the first because people were like, give me my freedom. And then I sold hardly any of the second book because no one wants to be told. Like here’s all these extra things you need to do. Uh But, but you and your husband, I think are both right. And uh and I, I don’t know that there’s any one answer like tear down the state first or build it up. I think we need to kind of both. Throw mud against the wall, see what sticks? Uh It’s, it’s a tough, yeah, we, we, we do have to step up is what all I was gonna say. Yeah,
[34:34] Michelle: I think, and, and I have to, first before I respond, I have to shout out to my editor. Who, my producer. She was your editor for your first book for that?
[34:43] Connor Boyack: Yeah, that’s right. So I have to
[34:44] Michelle: shout out to Karen. She’s awesome. Doing good work all around. Yeah.
[34:48] Connor Boyack: She had a lot of my stuff in the early years.
[34:51] Michelle: Oh Cool. OK. So more than just that. So um so, so I think my husband resonates more with your first book and I resonate more with your second book. I think that’s, and I, and, and that’s the, that’s the conundrum, the conundrum, that’s your word. But that I see happening is people are really excited about that first message and not as excited about the second message. And I don’t think we can have the first without the second. Like when the kind of how I, I came to this, I was driving years and years ago and I saw like uh um what was it called? Head start a head start. But, and you know, just my libertarian like uh stupid welfare. Oh Yeah. You know, like, like that instinct you kind of have when you see, you know, I just remember it’s not that I had to think, get head start more than anything else. It’s just that instinct that I had and, and I just so clearly the Lord was like, what are you doing to make it unnecessary? You know, like that answer came so clearly. And so I think that’s why I take that really seriously. It’s like we can’t just say leave us alone. We have it. It’s not about, it’s not about freedom from, um caring for needs, it’s about responsibility and if we’re not willing to accept the responsibility, we won’t get the freedom. Like, like, like that, I guess that’s how I see it. So I’m glad you, I’m glad you described that with your second book. And I want to tell everyone go by the second book, not just the first one, you need to take it one too
[36:05] Connor Boyack: and I read them together. So they had to buy book together and rather than, you know,
[36:10] Michelle: and go chapter by chapter. So they can’t just read the first half either. If you want to send me the links, I, I’ll link to um whatever, you know, and I’ll, I’ll put it in the descriptions for anyone listening. So, OK, this is, I, I’m, I’m just loving talking to you. I’m sorry, we’re going everywhere. Not maybe in a specific order, but it’s really great. Um If you have anything else you want to talk about on your journey and then, and then I did want to ask you about sort of, if you can share your interactions with the church because I know that back in our co op, that was something I really wanted to talk to you about. And I really, you know, I was like, how do you do this? How do you navigate it and what do you see happening? So, so first fill us up in, in on anything else we need to get on, we need to, you need to fill in on your story and then we can kind of go to that.
[36:54] Connor Boyack: Yeah. You know. Well, I mean, I started Latus uh late 2011, but I, I didn’t really like. So I quit my job and started full time towards the end of 2012, which means that 2013 was like my first full year. It was just me like it literally, it was me in a website that I built because I used to be a web developer. So I built us a whole website. Uh I, I liken it to those. Uh you ever see those prey in like national geographic channels where when confronted by a predator, they kind of puff up really big to make themselves look bigger than there. So that was me in the early days, I had all these things on the website, look at all these programs and it was just me. And so it took me a while to like, you know, gain momentum, raise money, hire people. And so it was about 2015 that we really started kind of making a name for ourselves and things started taking off. That was the year that I found myself for the first time, publicly opposing my church. The bill that they were pushing at the time in Utah was the anti discrimination bill. They were having these negotiations, you know, all the same sex marriage stuff was blown up, had been for years. And, uh, and the, the latest push was for this compromise whereby the church could uh get legal protections from discrimination. In other words, the church and BYU and it’s, you know, uh different organizations were all exempt from the anti discrimination laws so that they could expel people from housing for uh you know, gender related issues, whatever. Um And then also employment uh anti discrimination as it pertains to firing people based on their, you know, sexual orientation or conduct. So the church negotiated this big thing. They had their lawyers there, Kurt mcconkie, they literally wrote the bill uh and had this big press conference. There were multiple church leaders there saying what a wonderful thing this was. And yeah, we’ve all compromised. Well, we opposed the bill and uh and for property rights reasons, everyone should be able to discriminate. Do I endorse, you know, uh harsh discrimination without a reasonable basis? Of course not. But the market should decide these things. And if, you know, Chick Fil A decided they wanted to no longer serve anyone who’s gay. Like, if they made that decision, then go boycott them, do a march in front of chick fil. A hold up signs, you know, leave negative reviews on Yelp, do whatever you want. But use the market, let’s not go to the government to compel someone to associate with someone they don’t want to because I believe in the freedom of association. Go ahead.
[39:21] Michelle: Yeah. Ok. So I just wanna, I wanna, um, pause on this for a second and let you kind of clarify because I know that these are radioactive topics which I don’t need to tell you. And so, um, so I just wanted to clarify, like, and this is the trick about libertarianism, right? Because if you, if you say you can’t pass a law about that all of a sudden you’re supporting the thing that we’re wanting to pass a law. So all of a sudden if you’re saying I don’t support this law that says you can’t discriminate gay people, then all of a sudden you’re for discriminating gay people, right? And so I just want to clarify that it’s not, you would, you would oppose this law for anything for like, like for you, the issue is freedom of association, not who is being discriminated against. And, and I guess my problem with the bill was, um, I, I didn’t, well, anyway, but this is hard, these are hard topics, but it seemed to me like a political stunt. There weren’t a lot, there wasn’t a lot of active discrimination happening there in Utah, in general that I was, you know, I, I mean, I was pretty involved in the LGBT community and I didn’t see people being kicked out of there. It was all, it’s legal to do this and it’s like, well, it’s, but it’s not happening. Why do we need this law?
[40:32] Connor Boyack: Right. It was a win for the church. Yeah. No, it was, it was kind of a stunt. It was a way for the church to look good after they’ve been beat up for years. Uh you know, fighting the LGBT community. Uh they were desperate for uh boosting their image, which will be a theme that will explore throughout this conversation that motivates a lot of the church’s political activities and, and you’re right. I appreciate the clarification. This, I would feel the same exact way if the predominantly Mormon legislature said you can’t discriminate against Mormon people, you can’t fire someone because they’re Mormon or you can’t, you know, deny them housing. For me. It’s not about the, the issue whether it’s, you know, you’re gay or you’re Mormon or you’re white or you’re, you know, whatever your, your issue is, I just believe that the fundamental right that underlies freedom of religion and so many other things is property rights. It’s my property. I should be able to do what I want with it and then suffer the consequences if I’m a racist jerk or a homophobic, you know, landlord or a bigoted anti Mormon employer, then, like, if I’m a, if I’m a Mormon, why do I want the government to compel my boss to allow me to keep working there in an environment that I know this guy hates me. Like I would want to go find another job elsewhere. Not be associating with people who don’t like me. Right. So that was the whole basis that, yeah.
[41:51] Michelle: Yeah. It introduces the problems of how do you prove it right? Anyone who gets kicked out of the home can claim or anyone who doesn’t get hired because it just, it just gets government involved in places the government doesn’t need to be. And it was really troubling that it was this political stunt that the church was exempting itself from no one in Utah can discriminate except us on this basis. Right. Right.
[42:11] Connor Boyack: And, and that was, that was so frustrating to me that here’s an opportunity for the church to stand up to the extent that there was any doctrinal basis to do any of this, then it should apply to everybody. The, the church doesn’t have institutional, religious freedom, religious freedom is an individual thing. We organized together into a church to give expression and community to our worship. But why are we giving magical powers to an institution that we as, and, and so the church did not go to bat for any of us if, if there’s a, a Mormon individual who feels like they wanted to deny housing to a gay couple because they don’t support gay marriage. I believe they have that right. You know, that you can do that poorly. You can do it gracefully. There’s all kinds of ways that you can do it. But, but I believe if that individual believes that they’re, you know, doctrinal, whatever cultural, whatever informs their desire to not provide, you know, not rent out their basement to a gay couple. I think they have that right. The church’s position was no, we’re gonna have all these anti discrimination laws enforced against anyone who claims a religious basis for housing or employment as a reason to discriminate. Uh but we’re gonna take our ball and go home. We’re gonna fight for the church as an institution and then you’re all on your own. I’m like, what the heck? Like, what’s the point?
[43:32] Michelle: Ok. There are so many things I have to respond to quickly. I, I’m loving. So I wanna, I wanna also just add in because I, because it is so tricky for people in the LGBT community who or who have loved ones to hear these things. But I think we, we could switch it on its head and say, look, if you are uh uh a landlord of color and you don’t want to rent to a member of the Ku Klux Klan, you have the right to do that right? We’re not going to pass a law that says you have to, like, it’s, it’s, it’s kind of like if something goes against my values, do I have to let them live next to me in, in my home that I own, I own and, and, and, and while all of the public sentiment is, you know, I, I hate seeing discrimination, I hate seeing any of it. But if you have, if you have gay landlords and they don’t want to rent to Mormons, they can do that. They hate them and say they’re, you know, if, if that’s how they view it, right? It’s just this idea of freedom of association and property rights. So, so I wanted to pause on that and then I love what you explained and you did it really briefly. So I want you to expand on it a little bit more because it’s so good. I love how you worded it that we don’t have freedom of religion as institutions. We do as individual people. So for the church to be taking away our in, to supporting us as individuals, losing freedoms while claiming freedoms for themselves as an institution is a complete inversion. That’s bizarre. Like, did I understand that correctly?
[44:54] Connor Boyack: You did. And it’s even worse, the church is doubling down on it. They are promoting at a federal level, the same compromise that they pushed in Utah. They’ve been lauding themselves, patting themselves on the back for this grand compromise in Utah. Um they’ve, they’ve tried to do it in other states as well, but they’re really heavy in lobbying and pushing uh uh the federal, the federal delegation from Utah and otherwise to, to go push this. So, uh it, it, it’s not an issue that, you know, in 2015 this happened, the church is still very much involved in kind of pushing this agenda. And um and, and, you know, a lot of the concerns that I’ve expressed on, on my podcast kind of are related to this in the sense that uh I, I think the church as an institution has fumbled the football a few times when it comes to opportunities to stand up boldly for our doctrine. I’ll give you an example that I, I like to share from time to time on my podcast in the wake of 911. The war fever is, you know, at an all time high. It’s, it’s let’s go get him revenge justice and all the rest, right. Uh The American electorate very pro going to war including Mormons. And it was, uh so it was about a year after 911, we had general conference and then elder Nelson Russell Nelson. Uh one of my quirks is I don’t use middle initials because I think it’s this weird cultural thing. So he’s, to me, he’s Russell Nelson. Um uh he gave this amazing address on foreign policy on war and peace and he basically lays out this scriptural exposition about how uh the, the golden rule applies as much to individuals as it does to institutions and governments that our foreign policy should be, you know, an expression of the golden rule. We shouldn’t do unto countries, what they should do unto us. How would we like it uh that we need to renounce war and proclaim peace, which again is straight from the doctrine, covenants. Uh we as a church don’t really like to think about that that much, but he said it in this general conference address. And yeah, and uh it was this amazing talk the next morning Associated Press has this headline picked up by all the major media saying something to the effect of Mormon church uh against the Bush agenda, uh et cetera, et cetera, right? Basically pitting the church against the prevailing narrative of what to do. The church’s pr department goes into overdrive. They issue this reactionary statement that highlighted this one sentence of Elder Nelson’s address where he basically says, like, look, we’re all subjects of different governments. And so we have to, you know, do what the governments require. It was like this throwaway concession almost uh in his, his talk compared to the overarching powerful renounced war proclaimed peace framework that he was using. And uh so the pr department latched on to this little thing. Oh, look, no, we, we support uh President Bush, we support the government and completely cut off at the knees any of the, the potent principles and doctrine that he was talking about. It was an opportunity for the church to stand up and say, yes, we do renounce war. Yes, we do proclaim peace. We follow the prince of peace. You know, all these wars and all these issues and, and oh man, I, I get fired up about this one because to me, it’s emblematic of what we have so much of a struggle with, with the kind of corporate institutional church is there’s all these concerns that seep in, in terms of pr and appeasing other governments because you want the missionaries to be able to, you know, have an open door and so forth. Uh There’s all kinds of stories I could share, but I like sharing that one. just because it’s a fairly recent one that uses our current, you know, president of the church as an example. Uh But to me, it is representative of much bro broader problem like we see with the anti discrimination issue where I just see missed opportunities for the church to be such a, a bold uh not just leader, but teacher of these issues in the public square and say even when it’s difficult, even when the prevailing narrative is against us, even when the cultural tides are not going in our direction, we are going to stand firm on these issues. Uh you know, no matter the cost, do what is right, let the consequence follow and unfortunately, I think we, we see some missteps from time to time.
[49:09] Michelle: I love that so much. That is, that is a powerful example. It’s painful how, uh you know what it reminds me of, I can’t help but think of Jacob chapter two and three where Jacob is giving this profound sermon that is giving this one. And we’re like, oh, look, there’s a loophole. Verse 30 is a loophole. Just only look at verse 30 which is exactly what they did with. Um Russell Nelson’s. Look, there’s a little loophole to sent it so we can, we can use it to undermine everything else that’s being said. So we have a long history of doing this just out of our fear of not being popular is how it feels to me, you know, like we like, like us, like us, please like us. We’ll give you whatever you will you want just like us. And it’s painful when we could stand up and proclaim, proclaim truth that that would really attract a lot of people and be and to help the saints. I have a, I have a more a greater love for truth. So that’s a great example. OK. So, so you went up against the church on this?
[50:05] Connor Boyack: Really? That was number one. N, number two was the big kicker. Uh And that’s when it, it kind of ballooned. So 2016 is when we did our bill with Senator Madon who is Ezra T Benson’s grandson, he was in the State Senate and uh and we did a bill with him to try and legalize medical cannabis. Uh and uh a as you might, you know, appreciate your viewers might appreciate in Utah. This was at the time an uphill battle. Uh We did not succeed, but before we failed, uh we met with the church, uh what were called at the time and still kind of are called the Home Teachers, uh which is kind of a pejorative nickname given to the church’s lobbyists that come up to the Capitol Hill to uh basically communicate the church’s position. And uh and so I was in Senator Mason’s office uh with him, his intern and then the two church lobbyists. Uh I uh I recorded uh this meeting so I, I still have the audio file of it. Uh It’s been a few years since I listened to it, but I was, I was, I was very unsettled by the meeting. I was like, why, you know, this is a medicine for people, people have cancer and arthritis and, you know, seizures and stuff. Like why is the church here? Why do they care? And uh so they came and they communicated that they had just met with the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House. Uh Both of whom, of course, are Mormon and communicated the church’s position and that they like the bill to not advance. Uh Well as you can imagine once that was communicated down the chain of command, uh our bill was dead. Uh The way the church operates politically isn’t so much to be so overt and saying, thou shalt do this and hey, vote this way or whatever. But look when you have a legislature that’s like three quarters or 80 or 90% Mormon, whatever it is. Uh They, they think that these ambassadors from the church are, you know, representing the uh the will of the Lord. I, I asked these individuals point blank. I was, I was near crying. I was sharing stories of these people who were suffering. Like will you meet with them? We had this whole thick binder, this green binder full of studies, you know, showing that this was safe and effective and all these things. And I’m like, here’s all this research, here’s all these stories. Can we please just have a meeting with uh you know, some church leader to talk about this issue. The verbatim words in response were that won’t be happening. And, and I, I found myself just so frustrated with the indifference to uh to the suffering, to the the challenges these people were going through members of the church. Uh We had all these stories of members of the church who were uh you know, going to another state and using it with great success or suffering here in Utah because they wanted to be good law abiding citizens to have their temple recommend. And so they denied themselves uh use of this, this medicine because it was illegal. So it’s a very frustrating meeting. I, I did not have good vibes at all. I mean, I, I kind of feel bad for these guys. They, they probably don’t love that part of their job to like, you know, go have to meet with these people and be like your bill is dead. Like it, it was a, it was an awkward meeting. Maybe
[53:28] Michelle: some do power can be, perhaps
[53:31] Connor Boyack: perhaps Senator Mason was peppering them with, with questions. And so was I and, and there was no budging. There was no, I said, where is this coming from? Like sometimes you get these allegations that some church department is going rogue, right? Like the pr department. Like it, it’s not true though, those accusations do sometimes percolate. Uh but I, I took occasion asked them, I said, where is this coming from? Is this, you know, the, the kind of government affairs, church affairs department? And they said it’s coming from the very top. And I said, well, what does that mean? You know, is this uh who was 2016? Was that Monson at the time? I said, is this, you know, from the president of the church? Uh is this the uh an apostle like a lone apostle or like who is this? Oh, it, it’s from the very top. Like they wouldn’t even, they, they benefited from the obfuscation, right? Like the, the just implicit, like, you know, uh I don’t know the whatever they’re conveying by saying that without having to be specific, it’s like a lawyer, you know, speaking in double speak to have plausible deniability because you kind of want to wiggle out of whatever circumstances you’re in. I was, I was furious. Um
[54:40] Michelle: I was sitting here hearing it second hand, I’m like having to breathe like, oh I, I, oh and I, and I knew I, I watched, you know, I was involved in all of that and, and seeing the stories and hearing the people because here you have a free safe, non addictive, highly effective medication that you know, it, it was, it was mind boggling. It was, it was very painful. And
[55:09] Connor Boyack: what’s the, what’s the doctrinal issue here? I mean, you could get a little creative and say like it says in the doctrine covenants every wholesome or herb hath got ordained for the constitution of man. And you’re, you’re probably being a little bit uh flexible with, with uh that particular revelation if you want to apply it to cannabis. And yet studying the science of this, I was blown away. Our bodies literally have an endocannabinoid system. They are wired with receptors for the cannabinoids inside cannabis, that cannabis is really just providing your body a kind of a supplement to what it itself is producing. And so that’s why at least based on my understanding cannabis can help with so many different issues because a lot of these are just kind of manifestations of lack of homeostasis. And when you’re providing kind of that supplement, when you’re regulating your body with this, this way, it it’s I was just fascinated like God has created our bodies, we have endocannabinoid system. I never even heard of that before. And, and that cannabis kind of binds with those receptors and and can help you with your, like, I, I was just floored and so I’m, I’m appreciating just the divinity of all this, that God has prepared this plant that uh you know, should be used with respect and prudence and Thanksgiving and so forth. Uh But nonetheless, like God has given us this, oh no, we’re just so wrapped up in the war on drugs and the 19 fifties, Mormon clean cut version that we just can’t have anything to do with all of that. And uh and so I don’t know, it was, it was just very
[56:33] Michelle: frustrating. Well, let me ask you two questions on that. So, first of all, well, and I always wanted, this is the libertarian thing. It’s like, yes, we want this for medication, but we don’t want to be pushing use of cannabis for, you know, like, like recreational purposes, at least I don’t. So, so, you know, but, but um I, I get the impression from what you’re saying that the home teachers actually were highly influential when the home teachers speak, the thinking had been done is kind of what I’m hearing. Did you like, they have the
[57:00] Connor Boyack: messengers? I mean, they’re the
[57:03] Michelle: right. But I guess I’m saying that they weren’t ineffective when the church sent them with, with the, this is what the church would like to see. That’s generally what
[57:11] Connor Boyack: happens. Oh, they’re extremely effective because again, the, the, the, what is impregnated in their position and in their communication is this is what God wants. Like what Mormon legislator in good standing is gonna go against that. You know, they don’t need to be told. We might say that slothful servant has to be commanded in all things. So the legislature doesn’t wait to be commanded. They just, oh, I’m, this is the president of my church. And so I guess we should do, I should say not, not every Mormon legislators that way many uh LDS legislators are, are, you know, not supportive of uh of uh how the church lobbies, I should say that this uh this brother Shanan fellow who’s been hired most recently, who now oversees the church’s lobbying efforts has given even more legislators pause because this guy is a flaming leftist uh individual in a lot of political economic ways, world economic forum and all globalist and all this stuff. And so there’s a lot of uh uh chatter uh in the legislature now being like, well, how is this gonna change the church’s dynamic? So, there’s a lot of, uh Mormon and uh legislators who kind of are, are not on board with, uh what the church has done and, and certainly the way that the church handled itself with like prop two and some of these issues has given a lot of legislators pause in terms of how the church uses its, um, you know, it, it, it’s political power. So, so here we have in 2016, a direct meeting with the home teachers. Well, we, we failed in the legislature, we failed again. And so we said, you know, we, we have to take this to the people like the legislatures are gonna go for it. The church basically is commanded thou shalt not. It’s like alcohol policy, like good luck getting the government out of the alcohol business and privatizing liquor stores. Do you know right now that as taxpayers in Utah, we are shareholders in the liquor business, right? Like we all directly own and operate a liquor company and uh and kids directly benefit from it. The kids school lunch program benefits from the sale of liquor, like what a perverse incentive. And so, you know, you want to privatize that and just say, you know, let the market handle that. Sure have your du I laws and you know, all your, you know, you can’t purchase it, obviously. Uh But if you want to privatize it, good luck because the church has declared thou shalt not touch alcohol policy unless we bless it. I mean, you can’t budge an inch good. So
[59:34] Michelle: let me ask you a couple of questions with and then I want you to continue with your story, but with the cannabis or the like, like it’s interesting, you said how there are these perverse incentives, right? Do you know if, does the church either indirectly, probably not directly but even indirectly um donate to people’s campaigns? Like, like are there legislators that feel beholden to the church in other way, in any way other than religious? Do you know?
[1:00:00] Connor Boyack: No, uh there’s no donation uh at all. In fact, when Uf’s family donated to, I think it was Biden, that was a big brew ha ha. Right. Like, oh my, you know, because for a long time, the church is at a policy that the upper leaders can’t engage, that’s just a function of them being called. Uh It’s funny, you know, decades before. Of course, you had Benson and Jay Ruben Clark and all these guys who are, you know, in the government, which
[1:00:23] Michelle: is probably why they made the policy.
[1:00:25] Connor Boyack: That’s exactly, that’s exactly why they made the policy. So, uh so UF was kind of an anomaly but no other than that, there’s no donations
[1:00:32] Michelle: to. Ok. And then my other question is I, I really feel like, um well, I mean, you know, there’s influence going both ways and quid pro quo and who knows? But, and the church seems to be pretty involved with medicine. Right. And a lot of pharma and M DS and, and, you know, so it seemed to me that that was playing into it as well. Do you, and maybe you would just be speculating, like I’m speculating about that. But did you see any, um, like, like, kind of, you know, foretelling the church’s reaction during the flu that shall not be named. You know, it seems to me that the church is pretty um hand in glove with big medicine often either in the state or beyond. And, and I heard those things coming through the channel.
[1:01:17] Connor Boyack: I see two ways to answer your question. Uh One way is I’ve heard a lot of allegations that, oh, the church and it’s many billions of dollars is invested in all these pharmaceutical companies. They have stock and, you know, Pfizer and blah, blah, blah. Therefore, they’re financially incentivized to, you know, whatever. Like I, I don’t, everything I know from kind of behind the scenes and, and talking to people in all these meetings with, with church leadership, they don’t operate that way. They’re not looking at their balance sheets. And I, I don’t think it’s, it’s for that reason, the other thing about kind of the, the big medicine, big pharma thing that you’re talking about. I think the other way to interpret that isn’t the financial side of their investments. It’s just the culture uh President Nelson, you know, used to be a physician trained as a, you know, very kind of typical conservative doctor. He was the president of the Utah Medical Association. So when, when the church got involved in prop two, which will I, I imagine next get to, uh when the church got involved, it was initially at the behest of the Utah Medical Association who is very pro big Pharma FDA. Kiss the ring of Anthony Fauci. Like these guys just, they’re, they’re part of the system and they can’t even fathom anything other than what has been prescribed. And so they went to President Nelson who lo and behold is not just president of the church, he’s also the former president of the Utah Medical Association. So they have a direct in with this guy and because he’s kind of trained that oh, drugs are bad and not like just that’s the way all these medical doctors have been trained in this very pro pill pushing Pharma perspective. Why should we expect anything different? You might say, oh, but he’s, he’s the president of the church. He’s the prophet. He could be. But we’re only inspired to the extent that we’re curious and ask questions with very rare exception when God is like, hey, I gotta beat you over the head with this. Everything else requires us to initiate and wonder and ask and seek and uh and if someone has had these blinders on that, this is what medicine is like. This is what is appropriate. This is what should be legal. Why would they ever kind of be curious enough to entertain alternative perspectives? So, I think that’s more what it is. It’s just a cultural upbringing of the big Pharma, whatever. And you get these doctors and these lawyers and everybody else who just are products of the system that they’ve been raised in and therefore they govern and communicate and teach, uh, from what they know and that worldview that they’ve developed,
[1:03:40] Michelle: that makes so much sense to me. I really agree with that. It’s more about the relationships and the mindset that it is the balance sheet of the investments. So, yeah. OK. Thank you for answering that. So do you want to go ahead with your, with your narrative? And I’m sure you’re going to get back to telling us what this did with your relationship with the church every step along the way because that’s
[1:04:02] Connor Boyack: Yeah. OK. Yeah, I’ll weave that in. So, you know, going back to 2015 anti discs. Uh that was the first time as I said. And I, I re it brought to memory two years prior 2013, I just started Liberts and someone on my board asked me, what will you do when Liberts takes a, an opposing position from the church, the most politically powerful institution in the state, your own church that you’re a faithful and believing member of. And I kind of brushed it off at the time. I’m like, yeah, you probably won’t. Like, I, I had no like imagination for what we’d be stepping into in future years. So in 2015, when it first happened, I was like, oh, yeah, here’s an example where we’re, you know, but again, like we were nobodies. I, it was just me and I think maybe one or two other people so sure we issued a press statement and we did a blog post and we did a social media but like, we didn’t make enough, enough of a ripple to, for it to really matter. So I didn’t really get a spotlight on me. I didn’t get haters. I didn’t, you know, it was, it was minor when 2016 came around. Uh You know, here we are like my face is all over the news. I’m doing all these interviews. Oh my gosh, they’re pushing medical cannabis in Utah. It was just this crazy thing at the time. Uh And uh and so we’re developing a lot of political influence. We’re passing other bills and so forth. And, and so now when that happened, things were, were a little bit bigger. And so when I publicly, I, I wrote, in fact, I think it’s the lack last blog post I ever wrote on Connor’s conundrums. Uh was why is my church opposing medical cannabis? And I shared some details of that meeting publicly. And uh and so, you know, I, I got some, a little bit of flack from people but nothing compared to what happened in 2018. Uh, this was when, you know, 2016 we failed and, and the bill wasn’t advancing. So we did a ballot initiative going back to our discussion about alcohol or whatever. Like we, we just figured we can’t go through the legislature to do this. We got to take this to the people. We raised like a million and a half dollars. We gathered all the signatures and we got it on the ballot. Now, the legislature couldn’t do anything about it. Now, the church had to play on our turf rather than us kiss the ring of the church. So uh the church uh quietly starts kind of going behind the scenes to try and like peel off some, some Mormon patients from our group. So now there was a split in the patients community we had. So because all the patients were with us.
[1:06:30] Michelle: Wait, what do you mean? So the church had people reach out to patients that, that were supporting you saying you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing like that. Let me, let
[1:06:38] Connor Boyack: me be more, let me be more specific because I, I don’t want to make any kind of allegations that uh that aren’t accurate specifically. What happened was the church’s Government Affairs Public Affairs Department had individuals reaching out to some of these patients, offering them a meeting with some of the kind of public affairs staff uh to discuss the issue and to hear them, the very type of meeting that we had asked for two years prior and been denied. And so they offer some of these patients this meeting. Um and you know, you get these believing faithful members of the church, like, like who, who gets a meeting like that, like you never get a meeting at the church headquarters, right? So of course, I’m gonna go. And so now they, uh, they were told by the church public affairs, hey, we think that prop two proposition two, which was our ballot initiative. We think that’s not the way to go. It’s too recreational, it’s too loose and it’s protections. Uh, we wanna do something more conservative through the legislature and we want your help. So they’re basically like, divide and conquer, right? So now we had a fissure,
[1:07:39] Michelle: we hear you and we’ll take care of you and we’re the church. So you don’t need to be with them because we’ll do it better. So that’s, yeah.
[1:07:45] Connor Boyack: Yeah. So, so there was a fissure, there was a fissure in the patient community and things really came to a head because again, it’s on the ballot, there’s no way to pull it off the ballot. And so now the church is in the, the position of like, ok, they’ve already kind of quietly made statements in 2016 and, uh, they hadn’t yet really come out on, on this issue in 2018. But the Utah Medical Association sent a letter to President Nelson. Hey, will you, uh will you oppose this church? Public affairs? Writes a draft statement uh opposing prop two. They take it to President Nelson. He takes a sharpie, he crosses out a few things. Adds a few things. Strengthening the opposition against prop two with his edits, gives it back to public affairs. And then that becomes the official statement of the church. Uh uh not just opposing the bill. This was the first time that they emailed all members of the church in Utah saying this is a bad thing. Don’t vote for this. Uh You know, we think there’s a better way signed Elder Christiansen, the president of the Utah area, whatever 70. And uh it’s, it’s the first time they’ve ever done that every member gets an email. You know, I, I, I’m, I’m jumbling this a bit because prior to uh a little bit prior to that, they didn’t go, they weren’t so public yet. They had curtain mcconkie, which is just, I mean, it’s their law firm. Uh It’s independent, but it’s like, you know, the Venn diagram is very overlapped of Curtin mcconkie in the church. So the church instead punts over to, they, they throw a lateral over to Curtin mcconkie and they have them write a legal memo attacking prop two. And uh and, and so they published this legal memo that purports to point out all the problems with our ballot initiative. Now, mind you, I’m not a lawyer. I just play one on TV. Like most people think that I’m an attorney based on what I do. I have no formal training or experience. So here I am just a former web developer who’s learned a few things along the way. I’m reading this legal memo and laughing out loud at how ridiculously it is written, how, how poor it’s legal arguments are. And I’m just like shaking my head like that. They’re putting their name to this like the it, I, I had a whole bunch of attorney friends reach out to me and the cons census among all of them was that this was like a law school intern that, that wrote this, that no one and Curt mcconkie probably wanted their name associated with this thing. So they probably had some kid in the basement write it. So I write this rebuttal, you know, on Libert letterhead and everything I write rebuttal to the Curt mcconkie memo and I just tore every line of their thing to pieces. And, uh and so, you know, we got a lot of press, as you can imagine, the press is just eating this up, all the, the back and forth and the uh you know, the conflict. And uh so then, then Kurt mcconkie issues a rebuttal to the rebuttal, oh my God. And they, they address my, again, poor arguments and I’m just like, you know what I’m gonna take the higher road. I’m not gonna engage anymore in the back and forth. I, I’ve spoken my piece and I think it’s readily apparent to anyone with impartial eyes that, you know, we’re in the right and they’re way off, you know, in, in yonder. Uh Anyways, so we do this battle with curtain mconie. The media is lapping it up and there’s all this conflict. Then the church organizes the church public affairs, the same people that were going out to our patients and trying to peel them off. They organized this, this press conference with the, who’s who of Utah royalty and political power? They’ve got law enforcement, they’ve got chamber of commerce, they’ve got PT A, they’ve got, you know, university, they’ve got uh Utah Medical Association, they’ve got some legislators, they’ve got the uh the lady from the primary president. Oh I, I wrote it down right here. Sister Harkness, Lisa Harkness of the primary general presidency. Uh and then General authority seventies elder Jack Gerard and elder Craig Christensen, who’s the one that put his name to the uh the email that got sent out. So you got these three church leaders sitting there at the, standing at the podium announcing the church’s opposition. They are are the backdrop is like 30 or 40 of these other, I mean, there’s like, you know, big wealthy people and, and uh just these community, you know, like stakeholder in influential people in the community and they’ve got them all back on the stage just because the church approached them and said, hey, will you, uh will you come stand with us? This is because again, for image, the church didn’t wanna just be the one driving this and be the one, you know, sticking themselves out. They wanted this to be a consensus community thing. Look at all these people who agree, but the church was spearheading the entire thing, uh prodded on by the medical association as I said, uh but it was really the these three people and I’m sitting there, I, I was in the room because it’s a, it was at the uh it was at the, the Capitol. So it’s the public, you know, uh place. So I’m like, I’m going to this thing. We brought our, our team, we all went out, we’re standing there in the crowd with all the media and I was just shaking my head the whole time. Here’s I, I think she was a counselor. I don’t know that she was the maybe she was the president. I don’t remember, but here’s sister Harkness from the primary presidency standing up to say prop two is bad and, and it was because of image they wanted to position prop two as being harmful to kids. It doesn’t have enough regulations. So we’re gonna,
[1:13:06] Michelle: why the primary president, why not the young men and young women’s president? I mean, that’s so weird. Ok.
[1:13:12] Connor Boyack: Uh It was weird and, and I don’t even know that it was as overt as I just described. That’s just my interpretation of why they had her there, there was never anything said or, or explain as to why they were there. Um, and so this was, uh, this was September of 2018. So then of course, the media is all there. They turned the cameras to us. What’s your response? You know, so again, conflict, conflict, conflict and uh all year long, you know, the email gets sent the Curt mcconkie memos are out there. Things are heating up and I’m just getting all these emails and all these D MS from members of the church who I never would have imagined struggling with their faith struggling with. Why is my church opposing something that helps me? Why is my church trying to keep my grandma’s arthritic cannabis cream a felony, you know, illegal and uh and all these people like how and so the question to me for nearly all of them was like, how do you do this? You’re like in the middle of all this, you’re fighting like and from what I can tell you’re a believing, faithful member of the church. Uh So, so really, it was two questions that I got a lot. It was how are you navigating all this and what can you share with me because I’m struggling and then it was also what is your bishop saying? Are you getting into trouble over and over. I kept getting asked, right? Like, are you getting any discipline or are you getting any two of my
[1:14:34] Michelle: questions? I just wrote down to remember to ask.
[1:14:37] Connor Boyack: Ok. All right. So never at any point. Did I get any church discipline uh for publicly opposing the church? In fact, uh And, and this is one thing I struggle with, with the church, in fact, in my musing, uh very recently at the time, we’re recording this, I was talking a lot about Bishop Roulette in the context for that podcast of like LGBT policy. Can a trans person get baptized? Can gay couples be on the records of the church? Take the sacrament? Well, so many of these, these prickly issues that we deal with. It’s Bishop Roulette, it’s, it’s, if you have a bishop who’s a hardliner versus a bishop who’s, you know, a more chill dude or whatever. And so it’s very difficult uh to have disparately enforced policies like this. Well, fortunately, the, the roll of the dice with the bishop Roulette was in my favor. I had a very uh chill bishop who now is our state president lives literally, you know, 20 ft that way from me and, and my current bishop lives 20 ft in the other direction. So it’s kind of fun. But at the time, our state president now he was the bishop and uh and I didn’t know this at the time. In fact, it was tiding settlement two years later when he’s like, hey Connor, I never told you what happened during PROP two. Did I, I was like, what are you talking about? He said, oh, I, I was getting all these emails from random people who found my email somehow and, and were reporting you and saying that, you know, I should, uh, discipline you and take you to state president. I was like, really like he never mentioned it or whatever. I was like, uh you know, what, what did you do? He’s like, well, I was kind of a Newish bishop. I didn’t know what to do. So I contacted the state president. Uh I was like, what should I do with this? And the steak president was like, do nothing. And so the bishop did nothing. My state president, you know, the previous one was a pretty chill guy. He’s actually a principal of a, of a high school. And um and so both of them were just like, no, this is we’re not, you know, doing anything. And, you know, I tried my best in everything publicly to be like, look, this is a, a disagreement with the, the institutional arm of the church as an organization when its administrative capacity to engage in a political issue. This is not doctrinal, this is not spiritual, you know, I know we as a culture like to, you know, handed glove, combine the two, but that’s not how I think reality is, and that’s not how I perceive all of this. Um And so I, I was very comfortably able to publicly say I am a faithful believing member of the church. And I think they are totally wrong doing what they’re doing right now. More to the point. I think that, and I, I know this, that there were leaders in the church who disagreed with what the church like high up uh leaders of the church. I’m not gonna give names, but there was disagreement amongst the brethren about all this because they stepped on a land mine because we, we had been working for years to shift the sentiment in Utah in favor of medical cannabis. When we started the percentage of Utah’s who supported it was like 30 something percent and this was like 2014 or something like that, maybe 2013. Uh but it was very low. And so we were doing a lot of education, we were doing events and videos and all, you know, sharing patient stories. And by the time prop two heats up, it was 82% support. So we had swung it with all this education and the church when I say they stepped in it, it’s because they took an adversarial po political position on an issue that tons of tos supported, including conservative uh faithful members of the church. And so, uh I, I think there were many in the church who were very eager to have a speedy resolution to the church’s opposition to save face. So ultimately, what ended up happening was the church was very successful. They were able to provide a public narrative that said you can be for medical cannabis. In other words, you can be part of that 82% you can be pro medical cannabis but still oppose prop two. They were positioning themselves as saying, oh, we have no problems with medical cannabis. It just needs to be done the right way. You know, we, we we’ll tell you later what that means. But but it’s just, it’s just not this, it’s not prop two. And that talking point spread like wildfire. So many members of the church online were, were pivoting slightly because now their church and therefore God has come out to decree, you know, prop two is of the devil and yet they were still supportive of medical cannabis. So they found a way to reconcile the two with the church’s talking point. Oh OK, good. I can, I can still the church isn’t saying that medical cannabis is bad or that I’m wrong for supporting it. I just can’t support prop two. And so same thing
[1:19:13] Michelle: with your, with the patient. That was, it was the same
[1:19:16] Connor Boyack: and we’re
[1:19:17] Michelle: for you, we’re for you. We just need to do it differently and we will take it and we will do it, trust us to do it better than how they’re doing it.
[1:19:25] Connor Boyack: That’s right. And uh and so we saw we had internal polling numbers that we didn’t publicly reveal that showed that support for prop two. Like we were asking both questions. Do you support medical cannabis? And it was still in the eighties? But then we would say, do you will you vote for PROP two? And that number started taking a nosedive man. And so here we are two years of work, million and a half dollars, blood sweat and tears and everything else. And I’m freaking out like, oh my gosh, my church is about to kill this for the second time. You know, what do we do? And so uh we decided to negotiate and be because it wasn’t a for sure thing that it would fail. It was just gonna be super close and we didn’t want to roll the dice and gamble. So we said, all right, look, the church wants to save face. They stepped in it and uh and they probably want a golden bridge to walk across to not look, you know, like they did this horrible thing and screwed all these patients over. So there’s a win win here where we can give, we can make the church look better by compromising and we can protect the vast majority of what we’re going for by compromising. So we end up in the uh the at the Capitol. Oh, this was a prickly meeting. It was um it was the speaker of the house it was myself and my vice president who was overseeing the whole campaign DJ. So it was the two of us, uh the speaker of the house and then the church’s chief lobbyist who used to be the speaker of the house and he used to be the speaker of the house when the current Speaker of the House or the, the speaker of the house at the time was a freshman. So they had this bond in this relationship and now this guy is overseeing all the churches, you know, political affairs. The four of us sitting in a room, we’ve been butting heads publicly for a long time, you know, very tense meeting. And the whole point of the meeting was just to see if it, if there was reason to have a second meeting, right? Like it does it make sense that we even continue talking? Is there any, you know, middle ground? And so it was, there was some very kind of, you know, polite jabbing and, and there were hurt feelings. There was a lot of tender emotions, uh because just like when the home teachers sat in the room and told me, you know, effectively we’re killing your bill here. Now, I’m, I’m finally meeting, you know, the, the church’s chief lobbyist after being denied a meeting previously. Um and, and, you know, there’s a lot on the line. So anyways, the, the short version is we, uh we, we met gosh, uh over 100 and 50 hours of meetings over the course of like three weeks, just intense negotiations and drafting. Uh my chief role was kind of the the negotiator, wheeling and dealing and then coming up with ways to accomplish what the church wanted, but protect what we wanted. And so my, my kind of role was being in the middle of all this and trying to come up with creative political solutions that would satisfy both sides. And uh you know, the church’s chief uh arguments were we want more restrictions against youth, you to make sure that youth aren’t going to get it. And we want this to be medical. So they didn’t, you know, like that, they didn’t like various provisions of the bill. So we just had to kind of tighten some of the regulations, but we protected 85 to 90% of what we were after and which was a huge win. And then all of a sudden now the church is on our side because they realized what, what was very interesting here, Michelle is that the church more readily agreed than the Medical association. The Medical Association was like a hard no, like we hate all of this. None of its FDA approved, blah, blah, blah and, and yet the the church, the church was very eager to negotiate and find that Golden Bridge. So they’re like, ok, yeah, we’ll go for that. Ok. Yeah, we’ll do that. And the church ended up pushing the Medical Association into supporting the bill that they otherwise hated. They, they swallowed just such a bitter pill because they wanted to be in the good graces of the church. They were the ones that were buddy buddy with President Nelson. So, so just like at that press conference, I mentioned where the church lined up all these other people so that they weren’t alone. Now comes the time for the grand reveal. Uh You know, the the the the the media is catching wind of these private negotiations, things are starting to leak because by now, we had broadened it to about a dozen people to make sure we were including all the relevant perspectives. Things are starting to leak. The media is just frothing at the mouth as you might imagine because the, the LDS church sent this email and did this press conference. This is a big deal right in Utah. And so the media is going wild and, and social media is ablaze. So we have a press conference, it’s time to now announce the grand compromise. This is like a month or two before the vote. So the vote was in like November. This was sometime I think in October, I’m I’m fuzzy but it was, it was uh I think it was October and we announced this press conference and we say, look, we can’t pull the ballot initiative off the ballot. There’s just no legal mechanism to do so. So the public is still going to vote for PROP two. But we have all agreed and, and we’ve gotten the Senate and the President leadership, uh, the Senate and the house leadership and the governor’s office. Everybody’s on board that no matter whether prop two passes or fails, we will call a special session of the legislature in December and we will pass this new compromise bill, win or lose PROP two. We’ve all blessed this thing. Well, it was hilarious. I’m sitting in the, the gold room at the Capitol, this ornate room. The governor is there the Senate president, the speaker of the house myself DJ. And then I’m sitting next to this like, I think he’s like a like episcopalian bishop or something like that. And, uh, and he spoke like for 20 seconds or something. And I, I sit there the whole time like this guy, I’ve never even heard of him before. He hasn’t been involved in anything. Why is he sitting up here with all these other people who have some deep relevance to this issue? And I realized after it’s like the press conference, the church invited him there to help show that this wasn’t just the church. They wanted, spread things out right to other people and have it not just be the, even though it was them, they were the ringleaders of the whole thing and he was window dressing for, for the church. So, um, ok, let me, let me wrap up here and then uh throw it back to you. So back to your question. How did I navigate the faith issue? How was I helping other people? Uh This was a very difficult time for me. Um I was being attacked publicly. We had to call the cops at one point because, you know, crazy people online were talking about my kids and trying to figure out where they went to school and all this stuff. Um and you know, my wife, as you can imagine is really not loving all the hostility that is being, you know, thrown our way. Now I’m being accused. Ok, what happened was uh if you recall the fissure with that patients group, there was like the pro church patients and then there were kind of the the anti church patients, I’ll call them, it’s a poor term. But a lot of these people were former Mormons, they left the church, you know, they, they, they hated, hated the fact that we negotiated with the church because they view the church as this like unworthy entity and how dare you be involved and why are you? And, and, and we’ve worked so hard for this initiative and now the church that I’m no longer a part of and hate is now trying to, right? You can imagine all of that. So here I am as kind of a ringleader in all this going to negotiate with the church and from their vantage point. I’m uh I’m, I’m negotiating with the enemy. I, their, their, yeah, their, their mantra was that I was throwing patients under the bus. Uh One of their, their leader who was a former dear friend of mine and, and coconspirator in this whole effort. She was part of this crowd. She turned against me claimed at one point that I had been bribed $300,000 by the church to, to negotiate with the church. So I’m just getting it from all sides. I’m getting it from the, you know, the, the, the act of Mormons saying that I, I’m apostate for fighting the church. I’m getting it from the former Mormon saying that I’m a lackey for the church and all these things. And, um, and I just, I just
[1:27:41] Michelle: have, I just have to say I relate to this so much like everything you’re saying and I’m sure mine is on a small scale. But yes, it’s like, like, oh, it’s so hard because you get it from every single side in these bizarre positions. We find ourselves that it’s, it’s, it’s crazy making. So OK, continue, I just like, let
[1:28:02] Connor Boyack: me, let me Riff on that Michelle. We, we talked a little bit about, you know, being a little libertarian as a libertarian. I find that conservatives think I’m a liberal and liberals think I’m a conservative, right? And so I’m, I’m kind of caught in between these opposing camps. So I, I see it kind of similar in a religious context where I’m like, no, I, I don’t think it is like the TB M, you know, traditional cultural narrative that you like the propaganda that you’ve been growing up with. And that is just cultural baggage. Like, no, I’m not over there, but I’m also not with the, you know, the Dalys and the whoever and like all the people on the other side. Um And, and yet both sides accuse me and you, you know, of like being in the other. I’m like, no, I’m just here doing my thing trying to like, find the truth and share it and right,
[1:28:50] Michelle: I get called coal whore by like family and friends that are, you know, very traditionally in the church. And then on the other side, I get called a shill or a Yeah, I mean, like, like, yeah, exactly. It’s like they, you can’t see the nuance the middle ground, the, yeah, it’s crazy. Everyone wants to just be put you in a camp, right? You have to be in one camp or the other and if you’re not in our camp, you’re in their camp. So, anyway,
[1:29:16] Connor Boyack: well, for me it was just so tragic. The church never needed to do this. Uh That’s what I wanted
[1:29:22] Michelle: to ask. Like, why did they care so much? What, what was the reason to send an email? And they have that, that, um, bizarre press conference? Like, why?
[1:29:33] Connor Boyack: Well, the church historically has always opposed, uh, not always, I should say, has often opposed various efforts to legalize, you know, marijuana even recreationally, especially. Um, and, and their ultimate conclusion. In fact, if you remember Mormon leaks from like years ago for a little while, there was like a Mormon leaks website. And, uh, I don’t know when this was, this was probably seven or eight years ago now, but one of the leaks that they obtained was footage of, I believe it was now Elder Gong. But at the time he was like a area 70 or something giving a presentation to multiple apostles about, I think it was California legalizing marijuana. Uh, but anyways, he was giving a report on this thing and, and the response, I don’t even remember it was like Boyd Packer and some of these other guys and, and they’re like, well, we’ve, we’ve always fought against, you know, cigarettes. Why aren’t we fighting against this and just this again, this like grandpa and I, and I mean, this in a loving way, but it’s just again, the old people with, yeah, certain culture that they’ve grown up with. And so I, I think it’s just a lot of that. It’s like, well, what’s happening to this world now, you know, cats and dogs and, and all this stuff. And so I, I think the church based on precedent and past behavior, es especially now that it was in their home state. Like, look, if Rhode Island is working on a medical marijuana law. The church ain’t gonna get involved in Rhode Island. They just don’t have the, the population density to, uh, you know, church members to support it, but this was in their backyard and, and uh, oh, gosh, what’s the other issue that’s coming to mind? Oh, another one was, uh, this is 20 gosh, 1314, something like that. We were working on a, a gun bill with a legislator and it was kind of a second amendment bill pushing against Congress for its uh you know, regulations on guns, basically saying that we were gonna nullify them. And uh uh this must have been, this must, gosh, I’m, I’m bad on my timing. Uh I think it was 2012. Anyways, Mitt Romney was running uh for president at the time and the church’s lobbyists showed up to our sponsor of the bill, the lawmaker, um, a member of the church and said, hey, we don’t want you to run this bill. And, uh and he’s like, well, why I said, well, you know, I mean, Mitt’s running for president, there’s a lot of spotlight on Mormons and politics and there’s this perception that the church controls politics. And so if this bill continues and gets passed, a lot of people are gonna think that the church wants a bill like this and, and we don’t really like that to his credit. This lawmaker immediately threw it back in, in this lobbyists face and said, so let me get this straight out of a concern for the perception that the church influences politics. You are here in my office to influence politics. Exactly.
[1:32:20] Michelle: Exactly. The irony is
[1:32:21] Connor Boyack: rich. Oh, yeah. And, and he further challenged him, like, you know, what do you know about the bill? Turns out he knew nothing other than what he read in the Salt Lake Tribune article, which as you might imagine on a gun issue was less than flattering and accurate. And so again, these legislators get these little instances, these interactions where they’re like, what is going on with my church? Why are they, you know, taking this position? Why are they doing this? Um I don’t remember how we got off track, but that was just another little anecdote popped in my head.
[1:32:48] Michelle: Yeah, they know. It’s, it’s fascinating and I don’t know exactly where we were going, but you were talking if we want to go back like, well, you had started to say they didn’t need to do this and I asked you why they did. So you can go back to that and then we can go back to kind of your faith journey. But so,
[1:33:02] Connor Boyack: yeah. Yeah. Yeah. OK. Thank, thank you for the reminder. Yeah, I was saying that they have precedent. They have uh past examples where they’ve done it and now this is their church backyard. That’s where I got off off track. That uh that what happens in Utah is a reflection of the church publicly, at least in the church’s mind. Therefore, we need to get involved in political issues. So I think that’s why it happened. Uh And, and clearly they have the population density, the, the demographics uh that, that it’s worth, the juice is worth the squeeze, right? In Rhode Island, it’s not, but in Utah it is because if we squeeze a lot, it’s gonna come out. So I think that’s why uh why it happened, but it was totally unnecessary. We had requested a meeting with the church. We would have been willing to all of the amendments that we made in the compromise we would have been elated to do beforehand. Save two years of time, save a million and a half dollars, save the public battle, save the faith crises that all these members are now having and all the carnage in the wake of the church’s activities. We would have been tickled pink to have had a discussion with the church and, and them to say, hey, like we’ll be neutral on this. We’ll stay out of as long as you guys can, you know, fix these things, hey, more than happy to do it, but they had their chance. They preferred to kill the bill rather than negotiate. And it’s only when we secured the political leverage that forced them to the table that they were willing to talk. So, um so as I said, you know, I’m getting all these D MS, all these emails and I don’t know what it is about me. I have very thick skin. Uh I, I don’t even when these people are coming after me calling me names, saying I’m being bribed by the church or throwing patients under the bus or whatever, it didn’t really like affect me. Uh What did affect me was people’s testimonies being, you know, weakened or, or destroyed. Uh Because again, a lot of these people come from a church culture where president of the church equals profit equals God. Therefore, everything the corporate church does under the auspices of the president is from God. And these people were now having to be confronted with. Well, wait a minute. I, I think that cannabis was created by God and it helps my uncle with his cancer so that he can actually hold down a meal and it’s saved his life. And now my church is saying that he shouldn’t be able to have it. So a lot of people were just struggling to, to reconcile these things, whereas I had reconciled them. I, I think just fine. I’m like, these are the follies of men. These are well meaning sincere at times inspired individuals, but they’re not always inspired uh much like myself as a father entitled to inspiration for my family. There are plenty of times when I am not inspired and I’m not gonna cite God on my side for, for what I’m doing. So I, I don’t think that, that having keys or having an office or, or being sustained a certain way is a, a predicate for, for thinking that everything that’s done is somehow, you know, sanctioned by God and decreed from on high. So I long ago had come to this viewpoint a decade or, I don’t know when, uh, and I think it was slow at times because I had to kind of, you know, uh pull the scales off my eyes to fully understand these things. I, I too grew up in kind of this uh church culture. I remember my mom after I wrote Latter Day Liberty, that first book, she called me crazy. Uh She, she’s like, whoa, you know, you’re, you’re, you know, saying all these things and then it was like five years later, uh she had read the book, I think for a second time, she had kind of gone through her own little journey and she came back. She was like, I now totally agree with you on everything. So, yeah, you know, some people they’re on, they’re on their journeys. I uh I’ve just come to this under like it’s a, it’s a position of grace, I guess where if people are criticizing me or if they’re, you know, oh, you’re fighting the church. Therefore, I’m like, look, I get it. I used to think that way too. I’m gonna give you some grace and recognize that you haven’t really had to grapple with this yet when you’re ready to talk, I’m more than happy to uh in the meantime, I wish you nothing but the best. See you later. Right. So, um I just have a thick skin. I’ve, I’ve had this kind of grace for these people because I get it and I’ve been there. Um But I, I found myself as kind of like a, I don’t know, like a spiritual first aid person, like going in trying to help these people have all these conversations. Like I lost track of how many conversations I was having with people. Just sharing my own perspective of how I’m navigating things and, and people were like, oh my gosh, I’ve never understood that I can be a faithful believing member of the church and think that the leaders of the church get it wrong sometimes. And, and then, then that led to a further question like, well, how do I know when it’s from God? And when it’s not, I’m like, welcome to spirit of discernment. Like I know we love to be just, you know, avoid all that mental and spiritual work and just be told, you know, what to think and what to do and move on with our day. But that’s not how it’s supposed to work. So welcome to the
[1:38:07] Michelle: purpose of this life, right? That’s what I think it’s like you’re not supposed to just sit, sit in the boat and let someone else do the rowing. You’ve got to be individually progressing toward God,
[1:38:18] Connor Boyack: period. That’s right. Well, and I think of it like, uh, you know, in the scriptures that talks about milk versus meat. And so here’s all these people who’ve just been like sipping on milk, like a little cat, you know, and they get some meat shoved down their throat. It’s like, oh, what do I do with this? So again, just having a little compassion to realize, oh wow. People, you know, haven’t really had to grapple with this before. So, um so, you know, it was, it was certainly, you know, during prop two, it was later during the, the flu that shall not be named uh where we had the, the same issue pop up again. And um it, it’s just been a very heartening opportunity for me to help people because I think now, I mean, like you, right, like you get a few of these people out in the community who people are like, well, wait a minute, you don’t compute like you’re a faithful believing church attending temple worthy person who’s saying things that I thought you weren’t allowed to say and asking questions. I thought we weren’t allowed to ask, but you haven’t been kicked out of the church and you want people to stay in the church and have more testimony, you know, have more faith uh and sustain our leaders. And but then you say, our leaders sometimes get it wrong like, you know, and, and so we get a few of these people popping up and it breaks the traditional conventions of how people think that one ought to act. And therefore, I think over time these platforms and these people grow and influence because they, they attract to them, people who are silently struggling but unable to find their answers anywhere. They’re not really finding it in the scriptures. They’re not finding it from kind of the milk that they get at church and the church manuals and their church leaders. Um And that’s not to say that these people should be set up as their own little, you know, like I know you’re not trying to build a following. I’m not trying to, it’s all about like
[1:40:02] Michelle: just being schismatic and yeah, it’s not exactly the church of Latter Day Saints of Connor Boyack, the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saint. Like, like, no, it’s, it’s just voices. We all are allowed to speak
[1:40:13] Connor Boyack: and, and you’re right and it’s just my own personal journey to the extent that could be helpful to others. Here’s how I think about it, here’s how I frame it. Um And, you know, much like being an author, I write a book and that attracts a lot of people who want to learn, you know, those ideas and they’re not really finding it elsewhere, these podcasts and, and other opportunities to share these messages I think provide a similar opportunity for people. You know, I’m sure you get the same messages with my Sunday Musings podcast all the time. I’m getting messages from people like, oh my gosh, like no one in my ward thinks this way I’m being, you know, cast out as just this rabble rouser or this, you know, whatever term. And I’m, I’m so glad to find someone who thinks like me because, you know, I’ve, I’ve been wondering, am I, you know, wrong to think this way? You know? And, uh, and that’s sad that in our church community, people who have kind of a, more, I don’t know, thinking brain, uh, I’ll call it, uh, struggle to find other people. But I think it’s because our church culture has been conditioned on milk for decades where our gospel doctrines and things have been dumbed down to the milkiest level possible.
[1:41:20] Michelle: Oh, yeah. I, I think you’re exactly right. And I want to clarify like it, it can sometimes sound like we are being, um, sort of demeaning of people who have faith crisises crises because they were reliant on milk. But it’s not, it’s what it’s what has been taught. This is what we all have been taught. Like, like how many decades now have our Children grown up singing? Follow the prophet Don’t go astray. Right. And that has been the central theme is you don’t need to listen to anyone else. Just listen to the prophet and it’s really been a disservice to people too. You know. So that’s why I think it’s so critical that there are voices like ours and other peoples who are saying there’s a different way and you don’t have to, it’s not all or nothing. You don’t have to be either in the church or out of the church. Like it’s, it’s been interesting because Brian Hales came on my podcast and I have heard this from many other people as well. Letting me know if you publicly disagree with the church, you are, you have to be excommunicated, period, right? And, and I, and so, so you’ve been some, I like, I guess this is why I’m so thankful. I, I agree with you on the criticism of Bishop Roulette and the inconsistency and the uncertainty is a huge problem. I’m really glad that we have people like you and me who, who have fantastic leaders. So I guess who win at Bishop Roulette, even though I’m so sad that there are so many people who don’t. But it’s really important to let people see that. It’s not like if the, I think the church would be so wise to recognize that they want to keep more members, they have to allow more thought and allow more communication of good, of truth as people see it,
[1:42:58] Connor Boyack: think of it this way when you know, half a century ago, 6070 years ago, you had three TV channels, right? And you had Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man, right? And this is, this is the way the world is, right? And you could take that to the bank and, and information control was centralized. Like if, if you’re the government and you want to shape a narrative, it’s very easy to do so under a centralized system. In fact, fun fact, uh the CIA literally had a program called Operation Mockingbird in which they infiltrated and influenced the media because it was so easy to do so. And they had reporters on their payroll and they were paying off journalists and uh Carl Bernstein later, you know, blew it open in the seventies and the Rolling Stone and um of course, it continues today. But topic for another day, uh The point is that when you have centralized um uh centralized production and dissemination of information, it’s very easy to control the message that is not what we experienced today in any capacity of media, but including uh media, information dealing with the church. So as we all know, the church has had to grapple with the internet and people doing their own research and some of it, you know, making wild crazy claims and others digging into like the Joseph Smith papers and finding completely opposite, you know, messages from what we’ve been taught before. And consequently, I, I think the church has had to figure out how it’s going to deal with uh decentralization of information production. What I mean, by that is your podcast, my podcast, someone’s blog, uh some author of a book and, and we just have this explosion of communication where before the church could say things like Brian Hales and others were telling you, you speak against the church, we’re coming after you. Well, when you know, there were basically just a desert book and maybe one or two other LDS publishers, they could kind of control, uh you know, that pretty well. And when you didn’t have blogs and you didn’t have social media, it was, it was much easier to have, you know, information control. Not that any of this is nefarious, any organization has a vested interest in perpetuating its preferred narrative. The Victor always writes the history in the most flattering of, you know, perspective. It’s just inherent in our bias and how our brains work. Uh But now that there are many other people, what we have is the cultural baggage of, of this mentality where if you speak against the church, you know, you should be excommunicated, which is a legacy I think of back when that could more easily be done and, and controlled versus the landscape today where like, what would that even look like for the church to suddenly just, you know, go guns a blazing after all these youtubers and podcasters and social media. Like if I tweet, like, like if I post a tweet that says that I disagree with the, with the church’s water policy. So like the church is the biggest landowner in Utah, they own all these water rights and the church has positions on water policy. So when we go up to the capitol and say we need more free market and water policy rather than all this central planning. Well, the church as a vested interest in water policy goes to battle and, and you know, wants it in a way that is most favorable to uh to their current rights and their status. So, if I tweet about that and, and criticize the church’s position on water policy in Utah, should I be excommunicated? Like, and, and, and if not, then, ok, well, what about the anti discrimination law or what about the like, where do you kind of draw the line? And I think church leaders have really struggled with that because the pendulum was on one side before and it’s really swung to the other side where you don’t really see excommunications or disciplines that much for uh people who are outspoken unless you’re like really going far a field like a, a John Daly or somebody. Um And so I, I think it’s a lighter touch now because the church realizes that this is whack a mole like for every person they go after for this one podcast. Eight more will sprout up. And so maybe we need to have a different approach as it comes to people sharing their views and, and talking openly about the questions and thoughts that they have.
[1:47:13] Michelle: I hope you’re right. I hope that that’s the direction we’re going because I know that, you know, just like you have people writing to your local leaders telling them to take action against you, that is part of our culture that I just detest. I have no use for that. And it’s so great find to see it not win. Do you know what I mean? Like, I don’t want to, to keeping like this tattle tale culture and get them in trouble because I don’t like what they’re saying. I it’s just heartbreaking to see that ever be effective because
[1:47:44] Connor Boyack: it’s so it’s Mormon cancel culture. Like before cancel culture was a thing, right?
[1:47:49] Michelle: Yeah, it’s terrible. So I hope that that’s the direction that the church is going that would make me inordinately happy because I, I think we need more, you know, we need this is how we come to truth. That is what it’s always been the American idea, the marketplace of ideas, right? The freedom of speech is how we learn truth. It’s how we discover
[1:48:08] Connor Boyack: it. Let me, let me give another example. I often will talk about secret combinations on my podcast and how frustrated I am with churches, literature about this. Uh I was teaching gospel doctrine a few years ago before come, follow me and it was the book of Mormon year. And so I opened up the uh the manual for uh teaching the some of the books in Ether, which included Ether eight. Now, by way of recollection for those who don’t recall off the top of their, their head. Third Nephi 11, right? It’s the pinnacle of the book of Mormon. Jesus is here. Everything’s been kind of pointing to this Chiasmus or however you say that it’s like the pinnacle of the book. Well, I think the set like this, the, the book of Mormon is another Testament of Jesus Christ. Its primary purpose is to testify of Jesus and it does uh amazing job of that. But a massive secondary purpose of the book of Mormon is to serve as a warning manual. President Hinckley talked about how it’s more inspired and inspiring than the morning newspaper, right? In terms of uh how our society is operating today. And you read Ether Eight, which is the pinnacle of the, the second purpose of the book of Mormon, this War manual. And here you have Moon. I, and he’s talking about the, the downfall, both of the nephite and the Jared civilizations and how secret combinations uh infested uh the government uh oppressed the people, the people were seduced by and participated in the secret combinations that uh they imploded from within. It wasn’t external attacks of these civilizations. It was the internal corruption members of the church uh who were uh doing all of this and leaders of the church and Moon, I basically says the Lord commands you to awaken to your awful situation when you see these things come upon you. Not if right. But when and anyways, I could go on the point is that here’s this like massive important purpose of the book of Mormon and so many of our members of the church and the church literature and, and everything completely ignores it. The the manual dealing with those uh chapters did not even mention any of this. It was in a tiny little footnote at the end. In fact, it’s still this way in the come follow me manual. It’s this little footnote at the bottom of oh, hey, you know, maybe you wanna mention that there were these secret combinations. I’m like this, you can hear their
[1:50:33] Michelle: combinations you’re looking for. I’m not just like, don’t pay attention to that. No, not happening. It’s
[1:50:38] Connor Boyack: just like, what are you doing? And so I feel like what we have in the in, in the church today is a lot of terror mixed in with the wheat. A lot of people unable or in, I’ll share it this way. At the time. We’re recording this last Sunday. I was in elders quorum and we were talking about some talk that a church leader gave called like seeking truth and everyone’s talking about, you know, seeking truth and truth is important and you know, we need to embrace truth and truth, truth, truth, truth. And, and finally, the teacher instructor was like, you know, uh, it, it’s important that we understand the truth is under attack and, uh, and we don’t want to dwell on that. But, but it’s important to realize I raised my hands first time I had raised my hand that, uh, in that meeting, we’re about half an hour in. And I said, look, I, I agree with you. We don’t need to dwell on it, but I think it would be helpful to discuss it because everybody in this room has been nodding their head as we talk about the importance of seeking the truth. We get it. Everyone here attending church knows that we should seek the truth, but we do not have alignment and clarity about how truth is under attack. Ask anyone in this room and you’re gonna get different answers. I said, I think it’d be good for us to. And so the instructor is like, oh, yeah, good. Let’s, let’s open it up and I’m sitting here thinking, OK, how’s this gonna go? You know, and, and, and you know, there are some good responses, but a lot of them just came straight back to like, well, that’s why we need the Holy Ghost and that’s, that’s why it’s important to read our scriptures kind of primary answers and they’re not wrong like, yes, that is why we need the Holy Ghost. Yes, we do need to read our scriptures. But still like how is truth being attacked if, if we can’t articulate uh the, the problem, the enemy, uh how the enemy appears in our day, then we’re gonna lose. And III I have this book coming out. In fact, at the time you, you publish this recording, it will already be out called Mind Wars. It’s my latest book. Uh And it’s all about the psychological battlefields that we’re in today and that so many parents don’t even realize that they’re sending their kids out into this psychological battlefield. So they immediately become a casualty. Why? Because they’re not giving their kids armor or weaponry to defend themselves in the mind war. They’re not teaching their kids who the enemy is, how the enemy attacks, how they can defend themselves against the enemy. And I think it’s that way with spiritual warfare and, and how truth is attacked. I was teaching, uh, uh, go, uh, Old Testament just a few years ago. And, uh, and there was this lesson on idolatry and I, I said to the class, I was like, we read these lessons and we talk about the Children of Israel and how stupid they were for worshiping a golden calf. Like, are you serious? What in your, you know, cotton picking mind would lead you to bow down. Well, of course, they, they were coming from Egypt and they were very tainted by their culture and, and so it’s very easy for us to look down on the Israelites, but we do a horrible job at self reflection and thinking through what is our idolatry today? So let’s take a moment as a class and try to have a discussion about what is the idolatry that we struggle with? What, what is our equivalent of the golden calf that saints in the millennium will look back at us and be like, are you kidding me? Right. I opened it up to the class and I mean, one person said celebrities or, or I which OK, I mean, maybe right, Taylor Swift right now and all the craziness. Uh Another person said cell phones, uh social media, money and like, you know, some of these aren’t entirely wrong, but I’m like, oh my gosh, there’s such deeper problems with idolatry in our church. But consider before we talked about the importance of renouncing war and proclaiming peace, President Kimball writing that we worship false gods of stone and steel that when an enemy approaches us instead of becoming pro kingdom of God and lifting a standard of peace, we become anti enemy and train a soldier in the act of war, thus violating God’s commandment to love our enemies. And so here’s the president of the church talking about our modern modern idol. What did we do? We pushed it right down the memory hole because that’s inconvenient to our culture. We too have been tainted by our culture and my biggest motive for speaking out doing interviews like this, doing my Sunday musings podcast is that I look around me and I say the book of Mormon has given us such a great opportunity to rise above, to shake off the dust, to break off the chains, to stop, you know, being idolatrous to learn the mistake, learn from the mistakes of the past. So we don’t repeat them. And we’ve been given this opportunity, this, this abundance of wisdom and knowledge and what have we done? We’ve treated it lightly. Doctrine. Covenant talks about how we’re under condemnation, all of us because we’ve treated lightly the things we’ve received. The new and everlasting covenant, the book of Mormon. And you know, there’s a whole sealed portion and I look around at the church. I’m like, who even talks about the fact that there are more scriptures and more revelation waiting for us, if only we qualify ourselves for, no one even talks about it. So what are we doing on Sunday? We’re just patting ourselves on the back saying, OK, do your ministering and you know, love others and bake casseroles like sure do all those things. But we got to really step up. We need to go after the meat and stop being content with the milk.
[1:56:05] Michelle: OK? I, all of that, I just resonate with so much. We qualify for every condemnation throughout every people of, you know, the Jews, the everyone else who’s like, oh, we’re up on our ROMs. We’re so thankful to be the chosen people of God without recognizing what we are supposed to be doing. Both um Third Nephi 26 tells us that if we take lightly the things we have received, then we won’t receive the rest unto our condemnation. And it’s Doctor M Cona 84 that tells us that we are under condemnation for taking lightly the things we have received. And the example I often go to is like the book of, I mean, on my podcast. The book of Mormon is the strongest document of an Olive scripture against polygamy. And yet we embrace polygamy. How could we get? Yeah, we, we’re fulfilling it. Exactly. And the book of Mormon is also the strongest document about well, freedom, waking up to our awful situation, all of these things and we miss all of it. We like, I would love it if we were in gospel doctrine, having discussions about how do we recognize idols? What would it, what would it look like to worship an idol? It’s what you rely on, what you put your time to what you think about the most, what you serve, what you right like we could come up with list to help us to help us analyze ourselves a little bit more. So we can say things that are more useful and have better insights, right? What would tell tale signs of a secret combination look like? Right? So we can start taking these things seriously. What does it mean to awaken to your awful situation? And you’re right. So often the most important parts of the scriptures are not included in the manuals and all we get are the manuals or seminary lessons. So it’s almost, it’s the worst of both worlds where we think we know everything. We think we’re the, you know, the people of the book and yet we’re completely ignorant
[1:57:50] Connor Boyack: of it. I, I think you’re right that it’s the worst of both worlds. And to me, one of the worst outcomes has been the way our culture has developed around this. We as a people, generally, as a church community are very deferential to the statements and the direction and the teachings of the church leaders. If they’re not saying it, we’re not paying attention to it. Uh Are all of our lessons now are built around reading and sacrament talks are all like let’s regurgitate all these, you know, general conference talks and add your own little twist. Yeah. And so uh we we, we become conditioned to just kind of listen to and regurgitate what the church leaders saying, which isn’t inherently bad, like the whole point of general conference and having church leaders is is to listen to them. But what happens is that if the church leaders aren’t talking about something like secret combinations, then the church membership is not thinking about it at all. Or preparedness. I mentioned that I have a new calling now as the preparedness specialist, it’s like the third or fourth time I’ve had this calling in my life. Um But uh church leaders haven’t really talked much like they did back decades ago about preparedness. So it’s not in members minds. And so getting them to listen to it and pay attention to it is like pulling teeth or freedom type issues. You had Benson and all these guys up there talking about the constitution and agency and freedom. And so more of the church membership was like, yeah, OK. Yeah. Yeah, let’s talk about it. Let’s do. And so then you and I and others come up with podcasts and, and books and materials to say, hey, look, these issues do exist over here. We should talk about them. But then the church membership generally is like, you’re not uh you’re trying to study the ark, you know, we’re, we’re only getting
[1:59:36] Michelle: authorized. You haven’t been,
[1:59:38] Connor Boyack: but then who are the church leaders? I, you look throughout scriptures and the membership of the church gets the leadership that they desire right over and over again. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s all these prophets who are like, I wanna go speak to the people. Oh no, but the Lord has shut up my mouth, right? And, and I, I had to withhold this Joseph Smith saying the saints fly to pieces uh like glass every time he tries to get them to do something that you know, goes again over and over and over again. What we find is that the, the church leadership becomes a reflection of the membership. And, and yet the membership then looks to the leadership and says, oh, we’re taking direction from you and you know, we’ll listen to whatever you tell us. But by and by generation, by generation, we get a church leadership that has been the by product of this milky uh dumbed down, you know, membership where we focus on fewer and fewer core things. We leave the appendages and the the media issues and other things. Plus the international growth of the church, new members, but even like lifelong members, I’ll be in classes and different words over the years. And I’m just like, how is it that people don’t know the answer to this question or don’t know like it’s, it’s a, it’s a sorry state,
[2:00:49] Michelle: what you were talking about with the leaders being of the people, right? And, and we’re all in the same state. I like the blind, leading the blind, right? Blind guys like this. We are warned about this repeatedly. We’re warned Isaiah everything is, is in the scriptures if we will pay attention, like even I think it’s so profound that Isaiah condemns us for, for mingling the wine with water. Jesus comes and turns the water to wine. We come back in our day and we turn the wine back into water, right? It’s I mean, like the the symbolism is pretty profound and rich throughout if, if we will pay attention to our own scriptures. The one commandment Jesus gives us in the book of Mormon or gives to the people of the book of Mormon is to study Isaiah. Right? And there’s so much that, that we could be made aware of if we would be willing to see it. So, so I think it is um important for us to not just be dependent on our leaders because that, that’s, you know, we don’t want to be the blind, leading the blind. We don’t want to be in that and we do have the opportunity to learn more like just we’re not, we don’t have to be limited by what our church is talking about as individuals. And I think that’s a really profound thing. OK, I’m loving this conversation. So thank you for coming and having it. So I do have a couple of more questions for you if um you know, unless you had anything else you wanted to respond to before we go ahead. Ok. So I have, I am wondering about your local church experience. I like I like that you expressed that you have a thick skin, I’ve had to develop a thick skin that definitely did not come naturally to me. But um and I’m glad to know that you were, you know, didn’t have um leadership problems, but the members in your board was that ever an issue? And then also as you would sit in meetings, hearing a lot of times it can be a struggle to hear things said that you just do not resonate with. So, how has your experience been for both you and your wife and teaching your Children things that they’re taught at church that you don’t agree with. You know, these are hard things to navigate.
[2:02:50] Connor Boyack: They’re, they’re very hard. Uh, fortunately we live in a good area where generally speaking, uh, you know, the members of the world, at least the ones who want to say anything privately or, or to me uh have been generally supportive. Uh It’s funny even there was one couple in our ward who were, you know, in the Facebook group during prop two, they were like, oh, but the, the church has said that, you know, this is bad, therefore, whatever and then they had some medical issues, you know, a year or two later where both of them have now strongly benefited from medical care and have come to a completely opposite view that they previously had. So it’s like with my mom reading my book calling me crazy and that, you know, like with people generally or my parents or, or people in my ward, you know, I, I tend to just be like, look, everyone’s a product of their culture and their upbringing. And so I, I know why they’re saying these things I get it. Um But there hasn’t really ever been any kind of animosity or hostility. Uh Our family is generally well liked, we serve others, we bring them food, we, you know, I give them honey from my bees. Like we, we have a pretty, uh, good ward, which is, which has been good. You asked the question about the kit? Well, uh, yes, about my wife too. So, yeah, we’ll sit in classes where like false doctrine is being taught or something that’s like unscripted and, and we just kind of like, you know, we’re always leaning over to one another. Like, should we say something? Should we not? You know, and at least privately, we’ll kind of commiserate uh a little bit, but typically, what we’ll do is we’ll do a detox after church where we’ll be like, ok, what, what did you hear in, you know, relief society or what did you hear? And, and, you know, our kids right now currently are 14 and 13 and, and, uh, and so, and then I would say in the past couple of years, they pick up a bit more on of those conversations. They’re more curious about it where before it would just like, not be on the radar or not care. And so we have amazing discussions with our kids. Now, talking about our perspective, talking about the nuance and the challenge of having a lot of, you know, members of the church or leaders of the church who might be taking positions or, or having perspectives that we disagree with and letting them become comfortable from a young age with uh with the need to navigate truth, not in this binary of the church has the truth and others don’t. So just assume whatever the church gives you is true. But instead this like wide amount of gray where even church leaders who we sustain and, and look to can be wrong in some aspects or be teaching something that has to get corrected by another church leader a few years later. And, uh, what I don’t want for my kids, I, I never want my Children to encounter an, aha from someone claiming, oh, look from this thing from church history or look, look at this thing on the internet or look at this like my goal as a dad is to make sure my kids have heard it all before in a safe environment where I can give my perspective, how I’ve navigated that. Why I think all the, you know, so called anti Mormon claims against the book of Mormon and whatever are rubbish that I’ve looked into them before, uh, that they don’t need to or they can if they want to, but let’s talk about it together just trying to like just be very kind of spoon feed them with some of these things. Uh, whereas a lot of families, I think just the parents keep their head in the sand, they, most parents probably don’t feel that competent or, or confident in their own views about these ideas. Therefore, they can’t really articulate them to their Children. Interestingly, that’s a lot of my political work too with the Tuttle Twins where a lot of parents who believe in freedom don’t really have any depth of understanding of economics or politics or American history. Um And so I help those parents by saying, like, look, you don’t need to be an expert. You can just uh read these books and help your kids. Similarly. I think it’s important for us as adults and parents to engage with our kids in these ideas rather than letting them become a missionary and learn on the mission that Xy and Z happened and then they lose their testimony because they have no idea how to grapple with that claim. Uh I, I wanna help my kids be prepared for all those arguments and all those debates so that nothing will be new to them. And they’ll be like, yeah, I’ve looked into that before and here’s my thoughts and I’m always open to learning more and gaining more truth. But uh that’s not a surprise. Oh, it’s a surprise to you. Where have you been? You know, why haven’t you learned that before? So we have, we have some very frank and open conversations with our kids. And I, I think they like, they like the, I’ll call it a countercultural take on things. They, they know that like mom and I think different on a lot of ways from their teachers and leaders and other kids parents and, uh, and I, I think they can appreciate that. Uh, they’re getting access to a little bit more depth than other people are. And so we, we have some good discussions.
[2:07:50] Michelle: I love that. Ok, that was, that’s been my experience too, is just, it gives you, it brings up issues that you can have fantastic conversations about. And even if, even if there are issues that your kids, um, haven’t yet been exposed to them knowing that you, that they can talk to you about anything and that there are answers and that they don’t need to be afraid of information because I think that’s what happens is parents are afraid of information, don’t want their kids to, you know, and then it is so easy to be black and white and swing. Oh, the church is good. Oh, the church is bad, right? And only see the bad in the church. And I think that the grappling in the nuance is so valuable that the critical thinking. So I could not agree with you more. So, ok, I’m glad to know that you’ve had a good experience with, with your board and your leadership. That’s really encouraging. I know. Same, same, but it is really encouraging to hear. So, hey, I wanna move on. Well, well, first of all, this was a thing I didn’t necessarily plan to ask you about, but since you brought up your mom a couple of times, I’m curious to know with you as a libertarian and your mom is very involved in fighting abortion. Where do you fall on that issue? Um, personally and in your politics.
[2:09:00] Connor Boyack: So, uh, you know, I’ve never been a member of the Libertarian Party. A lot of people when they hear libertarian they think, oh, you’re a capital l like I’ve never, uh, libertarian philosophical people who believe in libertarianism, they’re split right down the middle on this issue because half of them will look at this from a property rights perspective and say it’s the woman’s body, she controls, she should decide. Uh the other half come from a pro life angle and saying because in libertarianism, there’s this concept called the non aggression principle, right? It’s, it’s basically like the golden rule. You should never be an aggressor against anyone else. It’s OK to defend yourself, but you should never be the aggressor. Um And so the other half of the libertarians will say, well, that’s, that’s a human life, that’s a human being. And so if you are going to terminate its life, that’s an act of aggression. And so that’s wrong. The, the tricky part comes from, well, what do you do about it? Do you empower the government to have all these laws? Well, we do have laws against murder and libertarians don’t really complain against that. Um The challenge becomes in compelling a woman to use her own body in ways that she doesn’t want in furtherance of protecting the, the, you know, the baby’s life. So, uh, I personally come down, like, I, I’m very pro life, very anti abortion. I think it’s all, uh, idolatrous, butchery of child sacrifice and, and evil to the core, uh, in, like almost every circumstance imaginable. Um, uh, I, I don’t know that I necessarily think that the government is going to totally solve the problem. I think this is more a cultural thing. It’s like the government and the war on drugs again, like drugs didn’t go away or when you have gun bans, guns don’t disappear. So, uh this is I think a, a cultural issue and I, I did a podcast gosh about a year ago on this issue. Uh My mom ended up sharing it around with some leaders of the church uh and uh in Utah about abortion. And what I did is I went through general conference and I compiled a list of all the references to, you know, abortion or its synonyms in general conference. And what I discovered was that while abortion was talked about, you know, the fifties, the sixties, the seventies, you got Roe V Wade. It’s in the, you know, in the zeitgeist, there’s a lot of discussion about it from church leaders. Then you get into the nineties and it falls off the cliff. Almost no discussion about abortion the past couple decades. Going back to our earlier discussion about how if members aren’t hearing it from current leaders. It’s just not in their mind, what you find is a number of so called pro-choice members of the church today, especially the Gen Z, you know, and some millennial crowd uh because these people have somehow not really reconciled the fact that, you know, uh that the two conflict. So this has been very interesting to me to, to see how I think this is a missed opportunity for the church. You look at the Catholics or like my mom uh with, with her pro-life organization in Utah every year, they do this march for life up at the Capitol and they have some speakers and uh this year for the first time, someone from the church spoke because before then, like the church won’t have anything to do with pro-life. They won’t uh be involved, they won’t donate money. Um And just, they’re barely starting to barely starting to get involved. Now, meanwhile, you have all these Catholic, you know, the Catholics are and the evangelical different churches. Oh, yeah, come speak at our, you know, evening program, Saturday. We’ll get all of our members there. We’ll, you know, and, and uh it’s just awkward to when I feel like my church should be like bold and at the forefront of this issue. If nothing else just to, to be pro life and pro family in a climate right now, that’s anti life and antifa people saying don’t have kids that your attacks on the earth, you’re consuming resources, this, this very antihuman thing. Whereas God has said there is enough and to spare. He’s commanded us to multiply and replenish. If church leaders today, we’re talking about the need to increase the population replacement rate and have more babies and be pro life and have a culture of life. And like you were talking about earlier of the government being involved versus like charitable activities. Well, my mom, her primary role is fundraising for pro-life, Utah and for her, it’s like pulling teeth even from pro-life members of the church. There isn’t a culture of philanthropy around this. Well, what if the church led out by initiative and you know, donated from its foundation or directly from the church? So money to pro-life causes, encouraged other members as they have with other issues before to say, hey, we really need to, to support women who are in difficult economic circumstances, which is a large part of what abortion is about and let’s provide them medical services, let’s provide them childcare diapers, food. Let’s, let’s have a church culture that meets these women in their dire need. And instead of just being like, don’t abort your kid, like you’re saying, right? Instead of talking about the freedom angle, let’s be there charitably and rally around this and say, hey, we want to be there to support you. We’re so pro-life that we’re putting our money where our mouth is. So again, like I I don’t love looking at this from an institutional perspective because I think the institution reflects the membership. And I think it’s a cultural problem that we have in the church where there’s just an apathy and an indifference reflected in the fact that we hear so little of it from today’s church leaders.
[2:14:33] Michelle: Oh OK. I love your answer. II, I actually completely agree. It’s the Alma Principle, isn’t it? Alma? That left the judgment seat to go teach the people because you cannot fix cultural problems through legislation. So now I have a couple more questions for you that are a little bit more current. I really like hearing how you’ve navigated this and how you’ve also watched the fallout. I’ve watched the fallout of people losing testimonies, leaving the church on um different topics. Like I was really involved in the um LGBT community to quite an extent of when the 2015 policy came around. Similar, just devastated people’s connection to the church, you know, so it’s been really hard to watch this happening in so many different areas. So I guess we can move. I, I’m wondering if we should first talk about what started in 2020 that whole nightmare or going to a little bit more modern, maybe work backward to that because you’ve been talking, we, we did talk about the church, how great it is that they’re letting us sort of disagree with them publicly, but maybe things have swung a little too far with our new communications director and some of like, some of the things that have been happening. I mean, what, what do we do with that? What do you do with that? Especially? Well, I guess maybe you can introduce to people who don’t know about shin and some of the issues, maybe. Just,
[2:16:02] Connor Boyack: yeah, so, Aaron Sharin, uh, most recently worked for, um, uh, what’s the cigarette company? I can’t remember which one he worked for, but he, Philip Morris. Uh so he worked for Philip Morris. But before that, he was working for the United Nations Foundation uh for like was it nine years or 11 or something like this? Uh He was their chief communications officer. He was basically the chief cheerleader for the United Nations. He was attending all the World Economic Forums, which if you know anything about that, it’s basically a secret combination uh or perhaps not so secret combination. Um So it’s just he’s part of this globalist community and consequently, his politics are very left. He’s recently been a bishop for every everything you hear from all the people. He’s a great bishop, loving person, you know, good as a bishop as an individual. Uh But his, you know, political views are, are very left, very kind of pro uh you know, climate change, agenda, reproductive rights. Uh uh you know, awkwardly uh when here’s the church that now employs him in this top position, which took a position of opposition the church did to same sex marriage and chins on social media, you know, publicly posting, yay, so glad. And so, I mean, that’s fine. He can have his opinion, but it does conflict with the church. And now he is in this elevated position of influence in the church. So it kind of sending mixed signals to a lot of church members about what the church’s position actually is. Um And so across the board, just every, every leftist uh progressive type of political uh view is one that he has shared publicly in the past. He’s a communications guy through and through. Consequently, he has a treasure trove of social media posts over the years where he shared his views. And so a lot of people, including myself did the research to go uh check out who this guy is. Well, why does this matter? This matters? Because this position oversees the church’s pr department, but also its government affairs and some people have pushed back. I, I did a whole uh Sunday musing about this guy when he, when he came out and I got some pushback from people saying, well, he just does the the bidding of the church leaders. So if the church leaders want to oppose this policy, then, you know, he will uh just carry it out. No, no, no, no, no. Uh Yes. In part, I’ll say that’s only uh so accurate. Uh think of the, the experience that we had with prop two. what happened was the church staff in the Public Affairs Department drafted a statement and President Nelson took at the sharpie and edited the statement and, and yes, the, the Public Affairs Department took what they received from President Nelson obviously and did that. But the initial draft that President Nelson had to work from the positioning, the framing, the, the arguments was all shaped by staff. And so as in any large organization, when you have busy executives at the top, they rely on and delegate power and decision making rights to subordinates. You have to, there’s no way to manage a massive organization like the church without empowering the people below you within reason to take action. And so he will have significant influence or anyone in his position would have significant influence with the leaders of the church in terms of recommending what statements should be made or not made, what organizations the church should collaborate with like the United Nations or whatever, uh which uh which partnerships to develop, which uh current events to engage with, which bills to oppose, which bills to promote. Uh the staff is gonna have a lot of recommending power. And so that’s of a concern, I think to a lot of members of the church to say, well, wait a minute, like this guy seems to be in conflict with a lot of at least historical church positions on things. So is the church now endorsing those things or do we really think that an individual is gonna completely be able to set aside their, their views and not have that at all influence or affect what they’re doing in their job? So, it just raises a lot of question marks for folks, including myself. Um, and so that’s where we’re at today.
[2:20:19] Michelle: Well, so, and I think for me, the issue is even more than, um, the influence he’ll have going forward the church. Like, like we’ve talked about quite a bit, is very aware, very overly concerned with their public. Um You know, how, how they’re viewed their public image. Yes. Like even um Desert book canceled a publishing contract because of a Facebook post or something like that from one of the writers, right? Like, so if someone can get their book canceled by Deseret book because of a Facebook post and yet the church is hiring in this truly most public. I mean, the communications director is the um church position that’s going to get the most attention of any church um employment position, right? And they intentionally chose somebody with this track record of, of, like, not even just, I wouldn’t call myself an activist. I don’t think I’d call you. Well, I mean, you’re a um
[2:21:16] Connor Boyack: yeah, I mean, I
[2:21:17] Michelle: wouldn’t, well, I mean, your political um things but your conor’s conundrums, I wouldn’t call that activism against the church, you know, and I don’t consider myself an activist I would consider Aaron Sinan an activist, right, in, in many ways in positions that so what message is the church sending is the thing that I find fascinating and like crazy making. You know, it’s like so schizophrenic, it’s so schizophrenic, what church is doing
[2:21:46] Connor Boyack: well, and I’ll add this layer on top in an organization this large with a position this influential, there is zero chance that they did not have people on staff go through his social media the way that some of us have, therefore, they were aware of this type of information. Uh and nevertheless chose to hire them, which again, just presents questions of saying, well, you know, what message does that send? What does that mean for us to interpret?
[2:22:14] Michelle: Yes, exactly. I think it’s really interesting. And so, OK, so that’s, that’s an interesting new situation that we’re in. It’s, it’s I have been feeling for the last many years like I’m just on the edge of my seat being like, hey, what’s happening next? What’s happening next because it’s been insane, this whole thing. So now we can go ahead and talk about the church’s response to whatever we want to call it. I don’t know what youtube’s policies are at this point, you know, but that was the, this is, I’m just gonna come out and tell you what I think. I think that we are at war and we’re not aware of it and we are losing badly literal genuine. This is World War Three. This is how warfare is done right now. We are being, we are infiltrated on every level, the border, the government that you like every possible way and we’re just ignorant going along our way, not recognizing what is happening to our sovereignty as a country, to our freedoms as a people who love freedom. That’s my take on it. So during 2020 I was like, what can I do to preserve my country? Right? And I feel like Utah, you know, you that we have good roots, we care about liberty. I at least that’s my perception and maybe I’m wrong. But I think that like I saw at the beginning of this, I think that people would have fought back a little bit more people would have opposed what started happening in 2020 until all of a sudden follow the prophet trumped personal liberty of any kind and all of a sudden it became, we’re following the prophet. So we’re going to stay shut down, we’re going to stop our church meetings, we’re going to wear the face diapers, we’re going to get the death shots, right? Like, right? Like, like it was crazy to see what happened. And then my personal experiences, I, I just like, I’m still trying to grapple with how truly Nazi Germany, our commu our society is like how quickly we went that direction. I, I maybe I’m overstating it but like Nazi Germany didn’t start with death camps, it ended with death camps, right? It started with refusing medical services to certain people with doing all of these inhumane policies and this judgment and separation in society where people could be excluded based on all kinds of things and people, you know, so anyway, I I just probably said way too much. I have strong feelings about this issue and um and and then also the the fallout has been extreme and like, like the most faithful TB M members, their entire families have left because of this. So in some ways it’s been, I guess, maybe useful as a wake up call, but like it’s been appalling to me to be home. So there’s way too much Connor, you take it, fix everything I just said,
[2:25:06] Connor Boyack: oh, no, there’s nothing to fix. I’ll just add on an echo. Uh I’m glad you mentioned the Nazis first. So I’ll, uh I’ll, I’ll go there because I was thinking about sharing this. I highly recommend a book called Maroni and the Swastika. You ever heard of this book? I
[2:25:22] Michelle: have it downstairs. Yeah. Ok.
[2:25:25] Connor Boyack: Uh I think every member should certainly every viewer of your podcast and mine should read this book. It is written by a non LDS historian who cata uh catalogs the manner and methods in which the church handled all of the Nazi stuff going on during world war two. And I, I remember reading this book. Gosh, I don’t know how long it’s been out eight years or more. And I was floored. I, I learned so much that I had never heard before and was just disgusted. I, I had heard of like, certainly Helmut Huber, which if your viewers don’t know who that is, you need to like the youngest person ever be formally executed by the Nazis. He was a Mormon boy who broke the law. Listened to the BBC radio wrote up leaflets, counteracting Nazi propaganda. I was caught with his two buddies, uh beheaded. His two buddies were sentenced to hard labor, came to Utah later after the war, lived to old age. I met one of them uh or, or spoke briefly with him before he died. But um help me Hub has an amazing story which Angel Studios I’ll put in a plug for is uh currently developing a film on that one which I’m super excited for. So I was familiar with all the help
[2:26:38] Michelle: excommunicated, excommunicated for his anti
[2:26:41] Connor Boyack: sort of his, his branch president wrote excommunicated on his membership record, but that’s not how you actually excommunicate people in our church. So it was an effort uh on the branch president’s part, I believe, to try and protect the flock from the gestapo, you know, coming after all of them. So I think it was the
[2:27:00] Michelle: branch president, a pretty flaming
[2:27:01] Connor Boyack: Nazi. He was, he was, he was a supporter of, of what they were doing. Uh at least in part. But uh but so helmut was never actually truly excommunicated. Nevertheless, church headquarters did reverse what the branch president had done after that. So I was familiar with this story. It’s a powerful, powerful story. But so much of this book Muon Versus And The Swastika uh I had never encountered before. And what I was appalled by was the degree to which church leaders bend over backwards, to ingratiate themselves with Nazi leaders. So as to keep the doors to missionary work open. By contrast, what was fascinating to me was to learn in the book. And then I went and did some more research on the contrast between our church and the Jehovah Witnesses. Here’s the Jehovah Witnesses who have their doctrine and they’re not gonna pledge allegiance to flags uh because they’re idols, you know, and they’re not gonna serve in war and they’re, you know, so they had these things that conflicted with the Nazis and they were very bold and, and, and uh forthright in saying we’re, this is our faith, we’re sticking to it. What happened to them? They were decimated, right? Tons of them were killed, sent to camps, all this kind of stuff. Meanwhile, the Mormons are playing nice guy. What did we do? We said, oh, hey, Nazis, you’re focused on racial purity. Well, did you know that we are really into genealogy? So we can help you with genealogical research? There’s something that we have in common and there were all these in. Oh Adolf Hitler doesn’t smoke or drink. Well, we have a word of wisdom, you know, and there were all these efforts to be like, hey, uh you can like us. We can, we can be friends out of a desire to keep the doors open for missionary work. What happened? We weren’t decimated, but we were diluted in the boldness of our doctrine and standing up for what is right? I applaud the Jehovah Witnesses for doing what they did to me that is integrity. It’s like Diedrich Bon Hofer, you get these people who just are living out the expression of their faith doing what is right come. What may you know, let the
[2:29:07] Michelle: Christ, it’s like we have a lot of examples
[2:29:13] Connor Boyack: and, and sadly, in our church, we don’t have a lot of in our mind, modern church, we don’t have a lot of examples because instead what we see in the Nazi era and what we saw during this most recent period that, that we’re talking about was the bending over backwards. It was the deference, it was the doing, whatever the leaders say, it was trying to protect what we could rather than stand boldly and, and have resistance. Uh And so we just have this sheepish culture of, of I don’t wanna say cowardly obedience, but just deferential submission uh to, to what is happening. You did have elder Bednar some months later, speaking to BYU law school saying we should never do that again. The church should have stood up for religious freedom. And I’m like, well, the church should have stood up for freedom, religious freedom is just a subset, you know,
[2:30:02] Michelle: wasn’t he? Just before that? Speaking at the G eight summit, telling, telling the leaders we can be useful to you, we can get our members to do what you want them to do. Was it like, like it was, it was again crazy making it all felt disingenuous.
[2:30:16] Connor Boyack: Well, it, it goes a step further and I’m trying to calculate in my head how much I can share because some of this is in confidence. And II, I spoke about this once in my podcast and then I had all these D MS from people like tell me more, tell me more. And I was like, no, go away. Um But I, I had the opportunity and a few of my associates and friends to go to church headquarters after the first presidency released their statement, urging everyone to do the face diapers and the, you know whats and as you point out and as I myself have witnessed all of this uh spiritual carnage in the wake of such a statement and those of us who didn’t wear a mask to church or were publicly against the thing uh sitting in church in a meeting with everyone else with masks on getting the the laser eyes. How did you? It was a it was a scarlet letter, right? It was the uh a way to kind of show that, oh, we see who the apostate are and just the the contention that that anyway. So we end up in this meeting at church headquarters, not with any uh uh of the upper leadership, but with some of the kind of public affairs type staff. And we had an opportunity to air our grievances. And the basic summary of the meeting was we said, look all of the past statements from church leadership on vaccines. Uh ha has basically always had an out. It’s like, hey, we’re pro vaccine but you know, follow what your doctor says or you know, pray about what’s right for you. And in this particular statement, that exemption was not included, it was we urge everybody, you know, to, to do this stuff and that inflexibility again, in a church culture that takes everything at face value of being from God, created a lot of internal conflict for people who are like, wait a minute. I I think that, you know, some people object to vaccines from a a religious perspective because of the aborted fetal tissue and vaccines or whatever your issue is, people were having this conflict. So we’re in this meeting and we’re basically saying, can we just get another statement like a follow up that says, oh yeah, like uh by the way, you pray about it, talk to your doctor about it, you know and, and whatever. So that was the basic message we were told that it was taken up the chain. Never heard back. Not a surprise, but in that meeting, uh what can I say? OK, I’ll, I’ll uh in that meeting, uh we were informed because keep in mind what was happening at the time, you had all these church leaders taking photos of themselves getting the thing in their arm and, and wearing the mask. And you had renly saying that wearing a mask is a sign of love and all these things, right? And it was just,
[2:33:05] Michelle: it was, it was literal Godsend.
[2:33:09] Connor Boyack: You had, you had just this barrage of like social media from from the church uh pushing on, on members of the church to do this. So in this, yeah. Yeah. The little illustration that’s right. In this meeting, we were informed that I’ll just say a l a substantial percentage of all of those posts from church leaders were at the request and the urging of the Utah government. So the Utah government pushing its public health agenda, Fauci narrative uh including the governor. You know, the governor is very public in saying, oh, we need our, our, our faith community to stand up because they can influence people in ways that we the government can’t. And so behind the scenes, they began pushing and asking, hey, you know, you’re more influential than we are. We can put up a billboard that says hey, get the thing today, right? But people won’t do it as much as if you guys do it. Why again, the the pregnant uh implication that this is what God wants you to do. The church complied. Many of these posts were because they were being prodded into doing it by Caesar. And consequently Utah’s government was the tail that wagged the global church dog. That because the Utah government was pushing this, the church wasn’t just doing this as it pertains to Utah members. It was, oh wow, look, this is, you know, the upper leaders of the church all doing this. Therefore, I ought to as well if I’m gonna be a, you know, righteous latter day saint. So um alarming, disappointing, frustrating all the things. And uh sadly, no follow up statement was ever issued. I mean, you had, you had missionaries being bullied into getting the thing and I hate, I hate how many euphemisms we have to use to talk about this. But like, you know, you had you anyway. It’s just all this conflict and I’m just like, why, why, like, why can’t we just teach people correct principles, doctrinal spiritual principles, let them go themselves on the rest of stuff. But like with cannabis, when they step in it, on this issue, it divides the, the church community, it creates conflict. It, it weaponizes, you know, uh people calling bishops of the other people and reporting them and just, it’s so unnecessary and it’s so sad that it continues to happen. I would like to think that more lessons were learned from the cannabis stuff. Uh 23 years prior to this happening. But uh but again, very similar issues happening, they stepped in it and it caused a lot of conflict. A lot of people lost their, you know, testimonies over it as you pointed out. And it’s just so sad and unnecessary in my mind.
[2:36:03] Michelle: Uh Yes, I agree. I, I felt so strongly if the church would have just taught the message of unity, love, non judgment, accepting people who are different than you, right? So that, that like it was like all of the divisive forces of hell were unleashed during that time and the church continually plays into them instead of helping to counteract them is how it feels to me. And so it sounds to me like you don’t necessarily see um what’s the word I want to use? Well, like you don’t necessarily see secret combination involvement in the church. Like what, for example, I, I put together a post in 2020 because I’ve been watching many of these people for a long time, including Bill Gates. I’ve been had my perspective on vaccines for many years. And um and so I watched Bill Gates with his organization when they were focused more on um women’s health care, you know, abortion and reproductive rights and they would go into the communities and all of the, he, he talked about this himself. They would go to the communities and the women would all go and hide, they’d run away. But they learned that if they would go to the religious leaders of the communities, then the, then the villages would all line up. So, and I, I put together a compilation of quotes of different Bill Gates and different people from the Gates Foundation. Talking about this principle of we get the religious leaders involved and then the then the communities fall right in line. And so when I saw this happening, I could not help but see that. And so when I see the Utah government being influenced and then asking the church leaders and I can’t help but see what feels to me like the conspiring men and the men in the last days. This is what I think it’s about and these secret combinations and these the the worldwide attempt to take over the freedom of all mankind. Like for me, the scriptures are all going through my head and I can’t see it as just stepping in it as just having a medical bias or you know, it feels like there were too many things that happened during that period that were too upsetting. The least, not, I mean, not the least of which like a massive part of it, but one that they treat us the least of which is fetal fetal tissue going into the shots or at least being used in the development of them. It’s like, to me, it feels like the literal wicked witch killing babies or taking the blood of youth to get promise themselves everlasting life. You know, I mean, it was so dark in every possible way and, and I’m sure my circumstance that I’ll share in a different episode made me see it even more in that way. But that’s been a hard thing to navigate is I just like I, I felt even with all of my nuance I’d had with the church and all of my OK, this idea of prophetic infallibility is, is just so flawed and so spiritually dangerous. I’d already viewed it that way, but still, I wasn’t prepared for the church to side with evil in the last days at the attempt to take over of the freedom of mankind. That’s how it felt to me. And so do you see it differently than that? Am I overstating it? How did you?
[2:39:13] Connor Boyack: I, I, no, II, I don’t necessarily think you’re overstating it and I intentionally understate things because I think I in public conversation try to be diplomatic as much as possible and, and charitable in my references. At least I try to be. Uh so when I say that the church stepped in and when I say that, you know, whatever I um uh uh in, in stating those things, I’m not necessarily trying to claim one way or the other, whether they’re being prodded or instigated or whatever by kind of these other forces and, and individuals. Um No, II, I do believe that uh that, that there are, you know, conspiring people uh within the church without the church, just like in the book of Mormon, how the righteous were seduced to partake in the spoils of the secret combinations. I think a lot of unwitting saints are playing that game and supporting secret combinations without even realizing it because they can’t even articulate what a secret combination is. Um And these especially the globalist institutions um that I think are all part and parcel of, of kind of the secret combinations. Um uh And those are just the public ones we know about. Um definitely use the very influence you’re talking about like Bill Gates and, and the Utah government and others do where it’s like, hey, the best form of propaganda is religious propaganda because people don’t think that they’re learning from other people. They think that this is a message from uh from on high. So II, I think the greatest challenge that we face is I I think, I think you’re generally right in the sense that these are dark forces infiltrating all of our social institutions, they’re infiltrating our families, they’re infiltrating uh our, our church as you point out correctly, we are in a spiritual warfare that too few are like you will lose every war you don’t even know is being fought around you, right. And so like, if you just casually wander out in the battlefield without armor and a weapon and knowledge, right? Of course you’re gonna die. And so we, we have these battlefields happening around us. We have all these casualties and, uh, and, and, and yet we convince ourselves it’s like in Utah, it’s like we’re a Republican state. I’m like, you know, like if you really look at what’s going on, it’s, it’s a, it’s a red veneer on top of something that looks a whole lot different. And I think it’s that way with our church, it’s like, oh, we’re righteous and we donate all this tithing and we go to the temple and we uh we, we delude ourselves into thinking that we’re more righteous than we are. Do you really think that the Children of Israel thought that they were idolatrous? Do you think that the, the, the, the Israelites in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus thought that they were all apostate? No, they had, they had imbibed a, a cultural, you know, uh system mixed with their uh the, the term is syncretic religion. You’re, you’re fusing, you know, religion with all these different cultures and they had justified it, they had been raised in it. They had uh told themselves that this was all proper and well and good and, and convinced themselves that they were on the right path. So here we have today, Latter Day saints who by and large think that we’re doing a OK. I could, I could, you know, uh make sure to do my nightly scripture study a little more or I could, I could double my fast offerings or I could, you know, on the margins, there’s areas where I can try a little bit harder to be a latter day saint. But we, we strain it in that and swallow a camel and, and, you know, Jesus would call that being a whited sepulcher. We’re, we’re more concerned with the outward appearance, not realizing that the Lord look at on the heart and uh and yet we look down at the Israelites and we shame all our predecessors who are ignorant rubes when we’re falling for the same thing. I would argue even worse uh than, than the Children of Israel were. So it’s just, it’s so sad, especially when we, we’ve been given. Um like, I know there’s those guys that they have the youtube channel and hemlock knots. Uh I, I didn’t know what that mean until I went and looked up the quote. Uh what Joseph said, like getting the saints to understand things is like trying to basically use the corn bread to split this. Yeah, to split this, this knotted wood that’s super hard. Uh And so even Joseph in his day and the flying to pieces like glass was struggling. Uh and he was this guy with grand visions and, and just revelations every hour of the day and uh And even then the saints could not rise to the occasion. And, and uh so, so what hope is there for us today? Well, I, I think there is hope but sadly, I think we uh we are trying to operate and communicate with other saints in a culture that’s just so degraded, so dumb down, so substandard and mediocre. And uh you know, II I still like to look at silver linings where there’s challenge, there’s opportunity. Um And so I, I think we face an uphill battle in our church and trying to get a lot of saints to wake up. Uh But I, I think the positive is there are a number of people out there who are so called red pill, who, who do, who are awake to the awful situation that we have. And thank God for the internet because in social media, we can connect together, we can, you know, join forces and share uh tips and ideas. We can comfort one another to realize we’re not alone. And uh so, so I, I remain hopeful and optimistic knowing that what does it say in Doctrine, covenants upon my house, shall it begin and from my house? Shall it go forth? Talking about all the calamities of the last days? We, we think that we’re just God’s chosen people and we’ll be detected. And I’m like, no, that’s not at all what the scriptures say. It’s exact opposite of that. And we who have been given so much are going to be punished first for like abandoning, you know, everything God has given us and being content with all this milk superficiality. So it, it, it’s, it’s just sad. It’s just uh and it’s bewildering, you know, it’s periodically I’m like, why don’t we hear more from the leaders of the church? But then I remind myself that again, like think of Benson, like everyone ran Benson out of town, stopped talking all this crazy conspiracy stuff and this constitution stuff and the membership by and large rejected it. And so what happens? We haven’t heard a thing since mostly and uh why? Well, the saints clearly told God just like the Children of Israel. And first Samuel said, we want a king to be like unto all the nations and saying I was like, no, he’s gonna enslave your, you know your kids gonna tax all your grain, gonna do all these horrible things. No, no, no. We, we really want the king. We, we want to be like everybody else. I think it’s the same thing today. The saints have, have repeatedly rejected the light and the greater knowledge. And so it’s being taken more and more and more. Um and uh where we go from here like, I mean, we know where we go from here, from the scriptures, but it’s uh it’s not gonna be pretty.
[2:45:58] Michelle: How do we get that? Yeah. And you know what your pattern of we get what we asked for. I, I think the exact same thing about all of the saints who followed Brigham West. You know, they chose the leadership, they had choices, they had opportunities and they voted with their feet, you know, across the plains. And so we have a long track record of this pattern. So, my last questions, I guess my, like, why do you stay in the church with what you see? Why do you stay?
[2:46:27] Connor Boyack: Ah, ok. Something’s been bugging me lately. There is a quote that I know I have read and I didn’t save it years ago when I found it and I have Googled and Googled and searched general conference talk, everything, trying to find this quote. I know it exists. It’s, it, it’s an instance I believe it was with Brigham Young and, and he’s like, berating some church member in, like a public meeting. Uh, I think it was a public meeting. Um, and he’s just like laying into the guy in, in Brigham style and then at the end he says something like, well, so we’re gonna just pack your bags and leave the church now, you know, and get upset. And the guy’s response was, I wish I could find this. So, maybe one of your viewers will be like, I know who that is. And, and that would be amazing because I’ve struggled to find it. The leaders or the church members response was, you know, this isn’t the church of Brigham. Yes. And uh much like the apostles to Jesus. You know, where will you go and you know, where else are we gonna go? So, um I stay in the church because, you know, I, I firmly believe in uh the restoration of the Gospel Joseph Smith book and all of that. Um I have similar concerns to you with Brigham and some subsequent leaders of the church. But I, so I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me when they hear me talk about that on, on the podcast. Wait a minute. You think that, you know, Brigham did some bad things or that he wasn’t inspired or how do you, if, if he was uh you know, off course, then what does that mean for all the subsequent leaders of the, you know, I’m like, OK, let me give you an example. Let’s say the brother Anderson is in our word and he uh confers the priesthood upon his son as a, as a deacon and that deacon goes out to, you know, bless the Sacrament or later, you know, serve Sacrament, bless Sacrament, go on a mission, get married all these things. Well, then we later find out that at the time of conferring the priesthood upon his son, brother Anderson was uh cheating on his wife. Uh and, and you know, um embezzling money at work or, you know, all these horrible things or had committed a murder the previous evening, pick your, pick your son. Do we really think that the priesthood uh keys and power of the Sun and all the subsequent actions that have happened are invalidated because that individual though having the, the perfunctory kind of authority was not living up to it much like Jesus telling people to go report to the priest who he knew were totally apostate. But the the system was, was there, the kind of authority and technical aspects was there. And so he was telling people like, go through the motions law of Moses, go, you know, kiss the ring. And so, or, or like, you know, you got some priest who was looking at pornography the previous day and then he’s up on the stand blessing the sacrament because he hasn’t really kind of confessed or, or told anybody about it. Do we really think that everyone taking the sacrament is suddenly not having access to the sacrament because that guy made that choice? So to me, that’s how I, I respond to these individuals who struggle with the Brigham and, and subsequent leaders. I’m like, look, we can have leaders of the church who make wrong decisions, including some big ones. Um And, and still be OK, still have the structure still have the priesthood still try and keep things generally on course. Does that mean things are perfect? No. Uh but it doesn’t mean that everything downstream of Brigham is invalidated and, and wrong and, and uh without authority. I don’t, I don’t believe that just like the examples that I shared. So I stay in the church because I think it’s where the priesthood is. It’s, it is God’s church uh albeit administered imperfectly by imperfect people. Um And it’s, uh, you know, it’s where the priesthood is. I, I think it is the vehicle through which subsequent restoration uh will happen and all the events leading up to uh the, the, the uh final days, the apocalyptic uh latter day stuff we’re all gonna go through. So, um I, I think it’s where God wants me. I think it’s, it’s the, the steward of the restoration. Um And uh and I don’t have any reason to leave. Where else would I go? I, I, you get these little like offshoots or people who start up their own thing or little study groups and whatever I’m like. But how do you have claimed the priesthood? How is this any different from what Joseph saw in his day where everyone, I’m a minister, come join my church and come like, no, like I, I don’t think that’s really how it works. So I, I think God uh is a, a God of, of order and process and even though we mess it up along the way as humans, uh this, to me, the church seems like the proper system and vehicle for the restoration to uh continue and I, I only want the best for it. I I am critical openly of things that I see and don’t like. Um but it’s from my perspective, all from a positive faith promoting uh perspective. I, I want, I want the institution to do better. I want the church members to do better. I want us to rise up uh and uh and, and, and shake off the dust and all the things. And so it’s, to me, it’s a rallying cry more to fellow Latter day saints than it is like, hey, you leaders of the church, you’re not, you know, that that’s not really my approach. Uh If we get the leaders that we deserve, then let’s put in the work to, to deserve, you know, more and then God will bestow upon us greater things. So I’m here because it’s, it’s where God wants me. It’s where the gospel uh is found. It’s the vehicle to move the, the latter day restoration forward. And um I’m just, you know, a little voice trying to figure it out on the way and help other people on the path um to do the most good we can in the meantime.
[2:52:25] Michelle: Thank you. Thank you for answering that. I think a lot of people will resonate, at least with parts of your answer, if not with the whole, you know, that’s, it’s good to hear different people’s perspective on it as people are trying to grapple with these difficult things. And so that’s a great place to wrap up but I do want to ask you one more quick question, which is just what do you think? What do you wish? What, what would you counsel other people to do? What do you wish that people would do in this time as you see it? What counsel would you have or advice would you have? How can people help or you, do you know what I’m asking? Like, what counsel do you have for others? If any?
[2:53:00] Connor Boyack: So the scripture that comes to mind for me, oh, there’s two both in the doctrine, confidence. One is uh the importance of being anxiously engaged in a good cause. Uh And secondly, if I talks about acting versus being acted upon, I think we as members of the church have been slothful and lazy and apathetic. Uh We let the government or the church or whatever, you know, do the stuff. So we don’t have to. Uh so I think we need to be anxiously engaged in good causes. We need to be the change we wish to see in the world. We need to speak out about the things that we think should someone else should be speaking out about. So I, I would love to see just uh you know, and all kinds of different issues and ways in which that can manifest for people in their lives. But, but I think we all need to be anxiously engaged in a good cause. That’s a very motivating scripture. For my own life for a lot of what I do. Uh The second scripture that comes to mind is that every man who has been warned has to warn his neighbor. So it’s all well and good for all you viewers out there listening to this stuff or being passive consumers of information. I think what’s more important is what’s done with it. Are you sharing this with a friend? Are you repurposing it into your own thoughts and writing an article or an op ed or a book? Are you starting your own podcast? Are you doing a little book club uh to read gospel oriented books with, you know, people in your ward to have some deeper study, which after they kicked out all the September 6th people, then they were really frowning upon like these little home study groups that were popping up at the time. And I, I think we’re ok to do that now. We haven’t really seen anyone go against that lately. But, but just, you know, we’ve been warned if, if you’ve been warned, if you’ve received uh the light, you know, what does it say in the DNC? There’s, there are many people who haven’t found the truth because they, you know, they know not where to look. And so I think we need to be far more outspoken than we are. We as a culture have been kind of quiet and we just let the official institution do all the talking. Um, I think that misses a lot of opportunity because the church, like, go back to the Nazis. They, they had, they felt that they had to appease and ingratiate themselves with the Nazis. But that doesn’t mean that the helmut Hubers of the world couldn’t still stand up and, and live their faith as they saw it just like the Jehovah Witnesses. The problem was the culture is like, oh, but we’ll just follow the leaders and not do that. No, I think we need to stand up. We as individuals can do things that the institution of the church cannot. And, and we have individual commandments from God that the institutional church does not. And so it’s not that the church needs to warn all our neighbors. It’s that we as individuals, as we’ve been warned about these things, we have the responsibility, the church has not been told to awaken to our awful situation. We as individuals have been taught that. So I think we need to just disconnect ourselves from this cultural deference that we have of follow the, the the church and only do and think and say what they do. We need to recognize that they have their, their incentives and their challenges and their, their political pressures and all these things. And that’s fine. But I have my own autonomy and agency and commandments from God and I have my own charge that I’m supposed to fulfill that might look totally different from what the institutional church uh I I is doing so that that would be, it just uh be anxiously engaged in a good cause and, and warn your neighbor as you’ve been warned so that we can help one another wake more people up. Uh find like minded people join together, support one another, strengthen uh our community so that we can better weather the storms when the terrors start getting ripped out so that we can survive together.
[2:56:27] Michelle: Connor Boyack. This was a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for coming and spending so much time and talking to me. I carry on. Good brother, carry on.
[2:56:41] Connor Boyack: I had a blast. Uh Thank you for having me. It was a great conversation. Hopefully, it’s been helpful to folks uh out there. I’m, I’m very easy to find online if anyone wants to reach me with a question or whatever, but I just appreciate the opportunity to uh share some of what I’m passionate about.
[2:56:58] Michelle: All right. Thank you and thank you all. We will see you next time. That was such a great conversation for me to be able to have. I loved being able to see a different perspective. I always love when my paradigms are challenged. And I’ve kind of been, as I said in the conversation, I’ve been both places on some of these issues of government and, and helping Children and polygamy and how polygamy should be handled on a government level. I think these are really challenging issues. I was glad that Connor was willing to share his, um, his opinions. Let me push back a little bit on them. I think they’re good things for each of us to be thinking through and praying through, to know what God would have us do to help in these situations. I, again, I, I’m always remembering back to my conversation with Tanya too. If you haven’t watched that one, please go back and watch it. Tanya does amazing work in this area and I think that her perspective is an important one to consider as well. So another huge thank you to Connor Boyack for all of the great work that he does and thank you to each of you for joining us. We’ll see you next time.
Erin
Hi Michelle! I listened to this when it was first posted and it was so good! I just sent it to my daughter to listen to only to find out that YouTube has removed it! Is there any other way to access the video??
Adrian Croft
Hi Erin. YouTube blocked the video because of the vaccine talk. We have uploaded an audio version to the top of this page where you can listen to it for now. We will work on getting the video version up in some form. Thanks for commenting and thanks for listening!