As an Arizona Latter-day Saint and a Mesa City Council member, Julie Spilsbury did not expect her vote for a 2021 nondiscrimination ordinance to be particularly controversial.
Little did she know then how that vote would cost her that council seat now.
After all, a council majority passed the measure, and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints later joined a wide coalition of faith, business, LGBTQ+ and community groups in supporting a similar statewide bill.
Years earlier, the global faith had endorsed successful legislation in Salt Lake City and Utah that bars discrimination in housing and employment based on, among other factors, sexual orientation and gender identity. It also gave its blessing to the federal Fairness for All Act.
On top of that, apostle Neil L. Andersen praised the Arizona effort in a General Conference talk about peacemakers, saying, “We genuinely love and care for all our neighbors, whether or not they believe as we do,” and pointing out a headline in The Arizona Republic that read: “Bipartisan bill supported by Latter-day Saints would protect gay and transgender Arizonans.”
Spilsbury felt she was in good company when she celebrated these statements, especially since new church President Dallin H. Oaks, leader of the 17.5 million-member faith, has echoed the call of his predecessor to be bridge builders and peacemakers.
Besides, her focus as a nonpartisan council member was on zoning, development, public safety, keeping the lights on, access to services and other nitty-gritty city issues.
(Delia Johnson | City of Mesa) Julie Spilsbury helps at a city event.
What the Arizona mother of six failed to anticipate, however, was how national politics had come to dominate and divide her state. Nor could she foresee how the battle between traditional Republicans and their Donald Trump-supporting opponents would overshadow even small municipal races.
Further, she did not fully grasp how the move of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA to Arizona in 2018 would create an army of foot soldiers — including fellow Latter-day Saints — to oppose her.
“Julie Spilsbury is wrong, wrong, wrong…about everything,” says Tyler Bowyer, executive director of Turning Point’s political action committee and the late Kirk’s right-hand man. “Julie is the enemy of every conservative that has their eyes open, ears open and a brain.”
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Tyler Bowyer on the stage at the Turning Point event in Logan in late September. He campaigned against Julie Spilsbury.
Bowyer, a Latter-day Saint and returned missionary, decries the church’s support for nondiscrimination measures as just “trying to make people feel more included,” but it had “caused more harm and conflict.”
[Read more about how Latter-day Saints and evangelicals, divided over doctrine, unite politically at Turning Point.]
Some of the faith’s moves, he says, “are antithetical to conservative voters” and have “unintended consequences” — like members who never came back after it shut down worship services during COVID-19.
By pushing these positions, Bowyer says, the church is not focused “on what should really be its priorities — bringing people to Christ.”
Member versus member
(Cassidy Araiza | The New York Times) Political signs for the special election for Mesa City Council between Julie Spilsbury and Doreen Taylor in Mesa.
Some Arizonans — including Bowyer and Turning Point troops — were so incensed by Spilsbury’s support of the nondiscrimination ordinance that they launched a recall petition to remove her from the City Council in Mesa, a city founded by Mormon pioneers that boasts a landmark temple and a sizable Latter-day Saint populace.
Her opponents focused almost exclusively on transgender issues, alleging the ordinance allowed high school boys in girls’ restrooms — despite the fact that the nondiscrimination measure excluded high schools.
Turning Point’s get-out-the vote brigades prayed that God would help them “unseat a deceiver” and replace her with “a good person.” They produced a video of high school girls saying they were frightened by the prospect of men invading their private spaces.
Spilsbury says the most hurtful attacks, though, came from members of her own Latter-day Saint congregation, where she had raised her family and her husband had served as bishop.
She says such personal messages included these: “God is displeased with you.” “You need to read the family proclamation.” “You’ve broken the hearts of your pioneer ancestors.” “You should never be allowed to work with the youth ever again.” “How can you even claim to be LDS?” “You’re going to hell.”
For her part, Spilsbury believes she was “following the prophet,” as members are taught to do, noting the faith’s backing of nondiscrimination laws.
“I don’t do anything in spite of my church,” she says. “I do it because of my church.”
(Delia Johnson | City of Mesa) Julie Spilsbury speaks at a city event.
When Spilsbury heard former Republican gubernatorial and Senate candidate Kari Lake say the choice between her and her Democratic opponent was “between good and evil,” she recoiled. Then she heard Ruben Gallego, who, she says, eschewed such simplistic characterizations, and decided to support the Democrat in his successful U.S. Senate run in Arizona.
Though a Republican, Spilsbury also backed Democrat Kamala Harris for president, based on her assessment of the candidate’s character.
“We cannot look at people as enemies,” Spilsbury says, pointing to the church’s 2023 neutrality statement that reiterates that “some principles compatible with the gospel may be found in various political parties.”
Spilsbury sees through “a peacemaking lens,” she says, which is “what the prophet has asked us to do.”
The Nov. 4 recall vote, though, went against her. She was replaced by Dorean Taylor, who is not a Latter-day Saint but was supported by Turning Point.
“One of the biggest wins in America tonight, RECALLING the leader of ‘Republicans for Harris’ Julie Spilsbury,” Bowyer crowed on social media.
Spilsbury now joins a mushrooming list of Republicans displaced by MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) politicos.
A call to politics
It was the church’s position on immigration that prompted Jerry Lewis, a former Latter-day Saint stake president (overseeing a group of congregations) to get into Arizona politics.
A June 10, 2011, church statement reads in part: “The church supports an approach where undocumented immigrants are allowed to square themselves with the law and continue to work without this necessarily leading to citizenship. … [The church] supports a balanced and civil approach to a challenging problem, fully consistent with its tradition of compassion, its reverence for family, and its commitment to law.”
That was exactly how Lewis felt about the complex immigration question, he recalls. “Clearly we need to have the rule of law and enforce them, but we can’t be tearing families apart. We need to [elect] good people who will correct the laws that are creating the problem.”
(Rick Egan|The Salt Lake Tribune) Then-Arizona Sen. Russell Pearce talks about immigration at the state Capitol in Phoenix in 2010.
In a recall election, Lewis defeated fellow Republican Russell Pearce, a firebrand Latter-day Saint politician and president of the Arizona Senate known for his anti-immigration efforts.
Pearce, who died in 2023, was the lead sponsor of a bill, dubbed the “show me your papers law,” which required law enforcement officers to ask about immigration status of any they “suspected” of being in the U.S. illegally.
“Of all people, we should be the most compassionate to immigrants,” Lewis says, “and work to solve the problem.”
Clint Smith — a co-chair of Lewis’ campaign, along with John Giles, Mesa’s mayor at the time, both of whom are Latter-day Saints — says he was appalled by the legislation targeting not just undocumented immigrants but also those who helped them.
“If you took an undocumented kid to church,” Smith says, “you could be cited for that.”
Smith, who served as a mission president in Florida during the pandemic, supports what he sees as his church’s “balanced” approach to LGBTQ+ and transgender issues.
The church has made clear that it stands by its belief that marriage should be between one man and one woman, he notes, but that it cannot impose that standard on the whole country.
“Nothing that gets said in General Conference requires us to do anything other than love God and love your neighbor,” Smith says. “If you support the church’s nondiscrimination position, you shouldn’t be bad-mouthed by opponents. If you have neighbors who belong to a different party, you should act civilly towards them.”
‘I do not want to be a winner by cheating’
(Jacquelyn Martin | AP) Rusty Bowers testifies before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2022.
Then there’s the case of Rusty Bowers, a longtime Arizona legislator who became House speaker in 2019 and whose Mormonism was central to his politics.
Bowers was a faithful Republican who voted for Trump but balked in November 2020, when Rudy Giuliani asked him to hold hearings about alleged election fraud.
Without credible evidence, Bowers wouldn’t do it, and many of his Latter-day Saint friends and neighbors turned on him.
On Dec. 4, Bowers wrote in his diary, “It is painful to have friends who have been such a help to me turn on me with such rancor. I may, in the eyes of men, not hold correct opinions or act according to their vision or convictions, but I do not take this current situation in a light manner, a fearful manner, or a vengeful manner,” according to an article in The Atlantic. “I do not want to be a winner by cheating. … How else will I ever approach [God] in the wilderness of life, knowing that I ask this guidance only to show myself a coward in defending the course he led me to take?"
Bowers, who was term-limited in the House, ran for Senate and lost to David Farnsworth, another church member but who had Trump’s backing.
There were “two types of Mormons,” Farnsworth told a Business Insider reporter. “There are those who look at their leaders as being infallible, almost,” he said in 2022. “And then, you’ve got the mindset of those that are a little more realistic about it.”
Farnsworth’s father “warned me not to trust the brethren,” he said, referring to church authorities. “I believe it was really good for me, because it caused me, at a young age, to question and decide what the proper course is.”
Like Turning Point’s Tyler Bowyer — who was pardoned by Trump this month for being one of Arizona’s “so-called fake electors” — Farnsworth said he believed that the church was wrong to endorse the LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination bill.
“It is contrary to our church doctrine,” the Arizona senator said in the article, pointing to the church’s 1995 family proclamation.
Weeks later, Spilsbury remains surprised by how much the recall campaign hurt her. She worries about the voices that will no longer be heard by the Mesa City Council.
(Delia Johnson | City of Mesa) Julie Spilsbury helps at a city event.
And she plans to continue showing up every Sunday for church services, she says, sitting by fellow believers, some of whom came to believe she had lost her way.
“I was never interested in politics,” she says, “but God was putting it in my heart.”
The former council member is confident she will find “another way” to serve the community that she loves. Who knows? Maybe even politics.
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