Church statement, misconduct allegations throw Tim Ballard’s LDS backers for a loop

The YouTube video opens on a smiling mother-daughter duo, a cozy faux farmhouse kitchen serving as the backdrop. The two look as though they’re about to launch into a discussion of how to foster healthy relationships between parents and children, or maybe a walk-through on mastering the art of Texas sheet cake.

But the parenting advice and baking tips will have to wait. The mother, who introduces herself as Kathleen, and her daughter, called Jane, are on a mission of no less importance than “cleansing” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints of leadership they accuse of being “not just corrupt but evil — and we mean evil.”

Kathleen and Jane, who do not share their last names and did not respond to a request for comment, explain they have suspected for some time that there was rot in Salt Lake City. But it wasn’t until a senior apostle publicly disavowed Tim Ballard, founder of the anti-trafficking organization Operation Underground Railroad, that they decided it was time to act. In two videos that together have grossed almost 20,000 views, the women surmise that because the church has not been vocal about sex trafficking, they must be guilty of it.

These women are among many Latter-day Saint supporters of Ballard who have found their loyalties in conflict in the aftermath of the faith’s rare and pointed rebuke. This wrestle, playing across social media, reveals a community grappling with a crisis of faith, some in Ballard and some in church leaders.

‘Tim is not the church’

Conservative Latter-day Saint podcaster and YouTube personality Greg Matsen, the founder of Cwic Media, addresses this tension head-on in a sober video that racked up nearly 43,000 views in 12 days.

“Tim,” Matsen tells viewers emphatically, “is not the church. I get so many comments from people, where it’s very obvious that almost to some degree their testimonies are tied to the church’s statement and how things are going with Tim.”

He instead tells listeners that “there is a corporate side to the church, so to speak, that should be standing outside of your testimony, whether it’s getting vaxes or it’s the border, or it’s how things are dealt with with the LGBT community.” Such matters, he says, “have to be handled with a corporate side, a policy side, and Tim’s story is one of the examples of this.”

When the devil strikes

Amy Stratton, a Salt Lake City-based event planner and active Latter-day Saint, says she never considered Ballard a hero, though she knows plenty of people did and, in many cases, still do. For her, the focus was always the cause, that of fighting sex trafficking and “the consumption of pornography and the consumption of children as slaves” more broadly, that she cared — and continues to care — most about.

Still, the church’s statement worries her, as do the allegations that have since surfaced accusing Ballard of sexual misconduct. He has denied those allegations.

“I feel in my heart that…this is a similar situation to what happened to Joseph Smith,” she explains, clarifying that while she doesn’t consider Ballard a prophet like her faith’s founder, she nevertheless sees a parallel in their stories: Both took a stance against evil and, in doing so, provoked the devil.

“Whether it’s [Ballard’s] own character and Satan working on him,” she says, alluding to the possibility that the allegations of sexual misconduct are true, “or whether it’s external forces and defamation, it doesn’t matter.”

Either way, she believes Lucifer is working overtime to prevent people from learning about and doing anything about “the damage of pornography and trafficking.”

She remains steadfast in her faith but acknowledges there have been times she has disagreed with church leaders, in particular when President Russell Nelson encouraged members to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

“I put it on a shelf,” she says of her struggle with that announcement. “That’s kind of what I’ve done with this situation. I’m just putting it on a shelf because my testimony is in Jesus Christ and the church of Jesus Christ.”

One heavy item she’s recently been able to take off that shelf has to do with the wild allegation that top Latter-day Saint leaders are involved in Satanic ritual abuse, an unsupported rumor that she says had been going around her circles. The idea had been gnawing at Stratton for some time when she found herself at a social event with the faith’s Young Men general president, Steven Lund.

“I had the opportunity to ask Elder Lund,” she says, “and he just bore his testimony to me and confirmed to me that there’s nothing of the sort happening. I felt the spirit witness to me he was telling the truth, and that put it to rest for me.”

A small minority

Political scientists David Campbell and Quin Monson have been studying Latter-day Saints’ views on current events for years. What their studies have shown is that for most members, their religious identity far outweighs their political identity. Whether that is starting to change, only time will tell, but both caution that any individual who opts for the side of Tim Ballard over the church is almost certainly in the minority.

However, Campbell notes, the impact of social media and its ability to lure people to ideas by creating a sense of community around them make it a “very powerful and frankly an alternative source of information and truth compared to the church.”

As for Matsen’s theory regarding the corporate versus the spiritual side of the church, Campbell, a professor at the University of Notre Dame, points out that is not a form of division that the church itself teaches.

Instead, it represents, as Monson puts it, “a perfect example of somebody compartmentalizing things in a way to square the circle and rationalize their way out of the very clear conflict that they’re faced with.”

Both agree that Stratton’s fear of Satanic ritual abuse represents the influence of QAnon conspiracy theories on church members, though Monson stresses the fact that she held space for its possibility even for a short time means she likely belongs to a “very small group” when it comes to Latter-day Saints generally.

For his part, Monson, a professor at church-owned Brigham Young University, says he was “kind of astonished” by videos like that of Kathleen and Jane.

“They’re not talking about church leadership in ways that I would expect, given the way they dress and behave otherwise,” he says. “So it was surprising in that context.”

As time has gone by, however, his thinking has shifted.

“I don’t think I should have been as surprised as I was because the same kind of conflict has been present on the political left for much longer,” Monson says. “The thing that astonished me was that I was not used to seeing it on the right. It’s there. It has been there. I should have seen it more in the past.”

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