MAGA Mormonism

Latter-day Saints have a right-wing extremism problem. Who's to blame?

illustration courtesy of Beck Seamons

Late last year, the Heritage Foundation, the influential conservative think tank behind Project 2025, came under fire for refusing to repudiate antisemitism. After the conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson conducted a softball interview with avowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes, Heritage president Kevin Roberts released a video mocking the notion that the think tank he led should exclude anyone from the conservative coalition. “The Heritage Foundation didn’t become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians,” Roberts said, “and we won’t start doing that now.”

When Roberts’s comments didn’t land well with other conservatives, he decided to deflect responsibility for the video to his chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus. Neuhaus, who had angered some of his Heritage colleagues by suggesting that those who were angered by Roberts’s statement were engaged in pious “virtue signaling,” was first given a new assignment within Heritage and ultimately pushed to resign. Asked a few weeks later whether, given the intracoalitional tensions that had gotten him booted from Heritage, the MAGA movement was sustainable, Neuhaus responded that “it has to be, [because] I think if not, then you lose 2028 and you go to the gulags.”

Neuhaus left Heritage in November 2025. The following month, the twenty-three-year-old conservative influencer Nick Shirley posted a video on YouTube that claimed to uncover rampant fraud at Somali-run daycare centers in Minnesota. Shirley’s incendiary video, intended as corroboration of Donald Trump’s racist rants about the crimes of Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, was only the latest in a long line of man-on-the-street style video propaganda that Shirley pushed out on his YouTube channel. Previously, Shirley’s content had echoed the right-wing conspiracy theories that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating their neighbors’ pets and undocumented immigrants were planning on voting for Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential election.

In spite of Shirley’s obvious lack of credibility, his video on Somalis in Minnesota garnered hundreds of millions of views. As of February 2026, his video had been viewed more than 141 million times on X alone. Even more significantly, the White House took notice. Vice President JD Vance hailed Shirley’s journalism, and a few weeks after Shirley posted his video, the Trump administration sent thousands of federal immigration agents to Minnesota to terrorize Minneapolis. The New York Times called Shirley “the influencer who spurred the federal crackdown in Minneapolis.”

The New York Times published a profile of Nick Shirley in February 2026. The following month, the Guardian reported that the new political director for College Republicans of America, Kai Schwemmer, had a history of airing racist, homophobic, and sexist opinions in livestream videos. In one video reviewed by the Guardian, Schwemmer called himself “very much an anti-universal suffrage guy,” indicating that he preferred “family voting” to female suffrage. In a video from 2023, Schwemmer accused gay men of “subverting the gym” to give people AIDS. “They’ve been weaponizing it,” he told his viewers, “they’ve been weaponizing it to give you AIDS.”

More recently, Schwemmer accused Indian immigrants of disloyalty to the United States, suggesting that “whether you’re an H-1B visa worker in the United States who’s from India or whether you’re living in India . . . your views and the way you do your job will not be American.” Schwemmer’s views should not have come as a surprise, as he had long been allied with Nick Fuentes, the pro-Nazi streamer whose interview with Tucker Carlson triggered the blowup at the Heritage Foundation.

Ryan Neuhaus, Nick Shirley, and Kai Schwemmer are all mouthpieces of the contemporary American right, giving voice to the extremism, bigotry, and white supremacy that have devoured the Republican Party of George Bush and Mitt Romney. They are also all Latter-day Saints. Neuhaus served a mission in Bolivia and graduated from BYU in 2019. Shirley grew up in Farmington, Utah and served a mission in Santiago, Chile from 2021 to 2023. And Kai Schwemmer is currently a student at BYU and also served a mission, returning from Argentina in 2025. One of Schwemmer’s supporters has dubbed him “our Mormon Nick Fuentes.”

It is tempting to categorize Neuhaus, Shirley, and Schwemmer as anomalous, but they are not. Utahns, many of whom identify as Latter-day Saint, supported Donald Trump in large numbers in the 2016, 2020, and 2024 presidential elections. Trump’s share of the vote increased each cycle: 45.5% in 2016, 58.1% in 2020, 59.4% in 2024. Utah’s senior senator, Mike Lee, a practicing Latter-day Saint, is one of the president’s most obsequious allies on Capitol Hill. Last October, BYU’s student newspaper reported that the campus chapter of Turning Point USA, a far-right conservative youth organization founded by Charlie Kirk, had seen an influx of 1,500 new members in the wake of Kirk’s murder in September 2025.

Kirk was an inspirational figure to many young conservatives, but his views were those of someone seeking to protect white, Christian, male Americans from those unlike themselves. He claimed that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to target white people,” called Islam “the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America,” and warned that presidential candidate Kamala Harris wanted to “kidnap your children via the trans agenda.”

These quotations do not misconstrue Kirk; they are representative of his entire project. Nonetheless, Brigham Tomco—a graduate of BYU, a staff writer at Deseret News, and one of the last people to interview Kirk before his assassination—insists that the true Charlie Kirk was less divisive and confrontational than most people realized. “Most people will come in contact with [Kirk] via a clip where he says something that seems edgy or offensive to some, you know, at first glance,” Tomco told the Columbia Journalism Review, “But if you were to have a more in-depth conversation with him or, say, read his book or listen to his podcast or attend one of his events that he hosts for young people, his emphasis is always on Take faith seriously, get married, have children, contribute to your community.” In Tomco’s gloss, the prejudiced and reactionary advocacy of Charlie Kirk becomes a series of quaint bromides one might hear in a Sunday School lesson. The upshot is that a reporter at a church-owned newspaper is repackaging right-wing extremism and distributing it to his largely Latter-day Saint audience.

On one hand, the popularity of right-wing extremism among Latter-day Saints is surprising, as it runs counter to the recent rhetoric of senior church leaders. The current prophet, Dallin H. Oaks, has developed an approach to political engagement predicated on “civic charity and mutual accommodation,” and the immediate past prophet Russell M. Nelson spent the final years of his ministry elaborating a theology of “peacemaking.” In an April 2023 general conference address, Nelson exhorted Latter-day Saints to “show that there is a peaceful, respectful way to resolve complex issues and an enlightened way to work out disagreements,” teaching that Latter-day Saints could change the world via “mutual respect and dignified dialogue.”

Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, has applied the teachings of Nelson and Oaks in the political arena, taking his “Disagree Better” campaign around the United States. More significantly, the emergence of “peacemaking” as a core virtue of contemporary Mormonism has coincided with the growth of Mormon Women for Ethical Government (MWEG), a bipartisan, faith-based advocacy group that, most recently, participated in the successful effort to preserve a non-gerrymandered Utah congressional map for use in this November’s election. In short, there are signs that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is resisting the hard-right turn taken by other members of the conservative coalition, and that those Latter-day Saints who identify closely with the MAGA movement do so in spite of their faith.

On the other, the church’s efforts to beat back rabid Republicanism are at times halting and can be unconvincing. The church has received much positive publicity for its role in the 2015 “Utah compromise,” when the Utah legislature extended anti-discrimination protections to LGBTQ people in housing and employment, but in other instances it has proven less accommodating of queer rights. In October 2025, the church co-filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court arguing that transgender people should not be afforded class status because doing so would “chill religious freedom by unsettling federal rights” and risk “making people outcasts for their religion.” In the suspect reasoning of the brief, protecting transgender Americans from discrimination would violate Latter-day Saints’ freedom of religion.

The 2025 amicus brief followed on the heels of a 2024 policy change that made it nearly impossible for transgender Latter-day Saints to worship in accordance with their identity. Scholar Taylor Petrey told the Salt Lake Tribune that the policy change “contributes to fears that [transgender saints] are a danger to others,” adding that the policies legitimate “right-wing fearmongering.” In the wake of the policy change, Emily Redzich, a transgender Latter-day Saint wrote in this publication that “I did not want to leave the faith of my fathers,” but “the church did not want me to stay.” The church did not endorse Donald Trump in 2024, but months before his election, it rolled out an anti-trans policy that was in keeping with one of the vicious themes of his presidential campaign.

The church’s animus towards its transgender members is not its only overlap with the MAGA movement. The second Trump administration partakes of an excessive, violent, and deeply misogynistic hypermasculinity—see, for instance, Kai Schwemmer’s skepticism of female suffrage or Pete Hegseth’s ever-clenched jaw—that represents an extreme caricature of the church’s strict patriarchy. Female Latter-day Saints are excluded from almost all significant leadership positions in the church, and the podium at the faith’s biannual general conferences only rarely hosts female speakers.

Casual misogyny at BYU is so common that some syllabi include the reminder that female professors are entitled to the same honorifics as their male colleagues. In the 1970s, the church played a key role in defeating the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have outlawed all sex-based discrimination. In 2019, amid efforts to rekindle support for the ERA, the church reiterated its opposition to the amendment. In Furious Minds, her 2025 book on the “ideological radicalization” of conservatism during the Trump era, political theorist Laura Field writes that the MAGA New Right “is misogynist and obsessed with masculinity.”

That feature of MAGA finds a corollary in the church’s approach to female power. Certainly, the benevolent sexism of a general authority is far less toxic than the outright misogyny of a JD Vance, but the effort to withhold ecclesiastical power from women rhymes with the effort to strip them of political freedom. At the very least, Latter-day Saints should recognize that Kai Schwemmer’s interest in “family voting” is not wholly at odds with the religious power structure he was raised in.

My point is not that Mormonism is MAGA in a suit and tie, nor that there is an inevitable affinity between the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Trump-led Republican Party. Far from it. I myself am a practicing Latter-day Saint. I wouldn’t be an active member of the church if I thought that it was irredeemably racist, transphobic, misogynistic, or generally hostile to human difference. Mormonism is a rich tradition, and it contains resources and teachings that members can and do draw on to defend liberal democracy from the depredations of far-right authoritarianism. Latter-day Saints such as Jeff Flake, Mitt Romney, Rusty Bowers, Julie Spilsbury, and the thousands of members of MWEG have drawn on their faith to stand up to the lawlessness and criminality of Donald Trump and his followers.

However, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints also contains elements that fit with contemporary right-wing extremism, specifically a thinly-veiled hostility toward queer children of God and an overwhelmingly male leadership hierarchy. Neither one of those features is exclusively or especially responsible for Latter-day Saints who have joined Donald Trump’s political movement, but they do provide justification for those members who want to argue that MAGA and Mormonism are compatible phenomena.

There is, I think, an eagerness among moderate Latter-day Saints to downplay the church’s culpability in the rise of right-wing extremism. That is an understandable instinct, but it is also risky and dishonest. Ryan Neuhaus, Nick Shirley, and Kai Schwemmer are products of many things, and their right-wing extremism is not reducible to their Mormonism, but it would be wrong to conclude that their Mormonism had nothing to do with how they formed their political views. The views of these three young men were formed in concert with, rather than in opposition to, some of the principles they learned at church.

It is probably unrealistic to expect the church to authorize queer identities and relationships and to begin calling women as bishops, stake presidents, patriarchs, and general authorities. Given everything we know about Dallin H. Oaks, those sorts of changes seem far off. Nevertheless, as long as the church teaches gentler forms of misogyny and anti-queerness, it will keep the door open to right-wing extremists. Even if the church’s public-facing identity is that of a socially conservative institution that is committed to pluralism—and the journalist Jonathan Rauch has praised it for that very stance—its continued commitment to heteronormative patriarchy will give fodder to the reactionaries within its ranks.