A cult within a cult: Operation Underground Railroad, the Mormon church, and me

Two weeks ago, Slate published an essay from a woman I know about a paramilitary raid she went on with Operation Underground Railroad.

OUR is an organization of self-proclaimed abolitionists fighting to save children from sex slavery. It was founded by Tim Ballard, an ex-DHS agent who’s been capitalizing on QAnon. It seems Mormon millionaire mediamongers stick together: Tim pitched OUR as a reality TV series to Glenn Beck. Tim’s upcoming biopic, an action movie called Sound of Freedom, stars Jim Caviezel. Ballard is chummy with Trump, and told him that a border wall would “save the children.”

In the article, Meg Conley described how Tim invited her, the writer of a mommy blog, to bust sex traffickers in the Dominican Republic. Her piece was part mea culpa, part takedown of OUR. I can imagine how difficult it was for Meg to write this. Despite experts who decry Tim’s methods as “arrogant, unethical, and illegal,” Mormons are a large swath of Tim’s supporters—and Meg’s.

Half of her essay centered on the raid itself. Early on, in the fourth paragraph, she established a bit of self-awareness:

I was a 28-year-old stay-at-home mother in Utah. I was lonely and grieving: My dad, my best friend, had died not long before. As I changed diapers, managed tantrums, and sat in the playground, I felt unmoored from my past and unsure about my future. I suppose, in my grief and my search for meaning, I wanted [Tim] to be called by God, because maybe that meant finally, I was too.

I was hoping she’d return to these sentiments later on. How did her search for meaning leave her vulnerable to a man who offered her power? I was excited by the buildup in the narrative. She described her gradual disillusionment with Tim, and the climax of the piece kicked off with a dramatic hook: “I began to face the truth.”

But from there, Meg disappeared in the story. With a snap, what I thought was a personal essay became an explainer on human trafficking. The narrative arc was “I didn’t know X about Y, but now I do.” But to me, the most vulnerable words in the essay were lonely, diapers, tantrums, playgrounds, grief, search, God. The path to human truth is always “I didn’t know X about me, but now I do.”

Tim offered Meg what the Church denied. He noticed her, recognized her as a writer, saw that she had a voice, valued it. He called her to something beyond motherhood.

But this is my own insight, not Meg’s.

Instead of grounding this essay in her own vulnerability, it feels like Meg swerved. While half of the essay centered on her personal experiences, just about any reporter could have arrived at her sterile conclusions. In the context of OUR, Meg is not just any writer. She understands Tim intimately through first-hand experience, yes, but also as a direct product of Mormon cosmology. This, I think, is the analysis she was uniquely positioned to offer the story, and I was disappointed not to see it.

I have a story about human trafficking on the spiritual plane. It’s about cults—who builds them, lures us in, and how we stay unfree.

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Documentaries like Abducted in Plain Sight and Murder Among the Mormons often showcase “normal” Mormon men who abuse and manipulate others. But filmmakers rarely dig into the deeper psychology behind their behavior. If they did, they might discover that a religion founded by narcissistic megalomaniacs has a funny habit of breeding narcissistic megalomaniacs.

If you didn’t grow up Mormon, it would be easy to miss this. But Meg did—and time and time again she’s proven her capacity to see it. In March, she published a Medium essay about Murder Among the Mormons, telling her followers: “I realized Mark Hofmann’s story is not about a Mormon man, it’s about Mormon men. His forgeries and murders happened in a male-dominated culture.” I wish she’d given Tim Ballard this treatment.

Ballard acts like Rambo Jesus. His jump teams plan raids throughout the Global South, busting down doors with badges and guns. He works with local law enforcement and extols the virtue of “public-private partnerships," but hell, the CIA’s Dark Alliance was a public-private partnership.

Mormon men are brought up in a culture that revolves around their priesthood, revelatory power, and leadership. When you tell a 30-something Mormon male he’s Harriet Tubman, he’s inclined to believe you. And as the type of wealthy, obedient guy who climbs the LDS ladder, Tim believes he’s doing right by God.

If you do not contextualize Tim within the very thing that gives him power, you miss what the story is about. On top of all this: OUR’s leaders are Mormon. Its donor base is Mormon. Tim was on the cover of LDS Living magazine. He owns a CrossFit gym in Draper, for fuck’s sake. How is Mormon culture not implicated in this story?

Some might say that Tim is simply an imperfect man who does not represent the faith. First: “imperfect” is far too generous a descriptor. Second, this is dismissive, deflective, and flat-out wrong. Yet this is the loop that runs when Mormons want to avoid the shadow side of the Church.

“It’s not a Mormon problem, it’s a people problem.” Whether it’s Tim Ballard or Bruce R. McConkie, the most terrible authority figures in the Church do, actually, represent it. These men do not become who they are without Mormon cosmology. It is intellectually untenable—gaslighting—to insist that men who are the most influential products of Mormon culture do not represent its people.

Tim has a savior complex and an ethnocentric view of America. C’mon, now. You don’t gotta be Freud to get this one.

He’s an embodied Book of Mormon.

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Tim Ballard, Mark Hofmann, Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Donald Trump: Mormons like men with trisyllabic names who claim to know something special. We like big talkers, strongmen, mythic figures. We build systems to protect the reality on which they claim authority.

This is what happens in a cult.

Cults are high-demands groups that work by convincing people they’re in on a secret—be that the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, a higher purpose, a better body, or how to make a million dollar selling polyester leggings. A charismatic, beautiful leader makes you feel so good that it hardly seems like coercion.

A tribute painting by a Mormon artist that has NO cult vibes whatsoever. Harriet Tubman kneeling before Tim. This is fine.

Cults control behavior, information, thoughts, and emotions. This is the BITE model, which you can read more about here. Quickly:

• Cults require members to internalize the group’s doctrine as truth; instill black and white thinking, deciding between good vs. evil.

• Cults use loaded language and clichés which constrict knowledge, stop critical thoughts, and reduce complexities into platitudes and buzzwords.

• Cults discourage critical questions about leaders, doctrine, or policy.

Both OUR and the Church control members and donors with the BITE model. General Authorities say confusing and batshitfuckingawful things without fear of blowback from anyone, even their own peers. To refute each other publicly would implicate not just their own authority, but the infallibility of prophetic counsel.

This is why it’s hard to get a firm answer on what, exactly, constitutes “doctrine” or “culture.” Prophets, apostles, BYU, Church historians, PR teams, Church-sponsored media, and lawyers at Kirton McConkie are paid to make this confusion look benign.

You’re supposed to feel dumb in a cult. This doesn’t detract from its influence—it adds to it. If you are confused, frustrated, and victimized, you need someone to lead you. Someone called of God. If people will follow a prophet, you can get them to follow you—as long as you sell something different. Fish don’t know they’re in water. If hero worship and hypermasculinity is all you’ve ever known, Donald Trump won’t fail your sniff test. Or Tim.

OUR isn’t the first micro-cult within the Church and it won’t be the last. Look around. Any Mormon who’s endured an MLM pitch knows what a cult sounds like. Read the billboards along I-15, where tech companies advertise their jobs (“People. Not Employees.”) Think about BYU students getting signing bonuses and a free meal at Tucanos to sell pest control. Or how OUR has partnerships with Tony Robbins and Capitalism.com (I swear I am not making this up).

In this photo, Tim’s stance evokes the Christus statue on Temple Square, but what really caught my eye was a comment I saw about the photo:

A real life Superman in plain clothing! I also hope you’re on the guest list for the dōTERRA convention in September too—would love to breathe the same air as you and show my respect for all that you do for our sons and daughters of the world!

I wish I could say I was never this kind of sycophant, but I was. Discipleship was at the core of my identity—the blood in my veins. The last 200 years of my family history involved ancestors leaving Sweden, Wales, Scotland, Denmark, Switzerland, crossing the plains on foot, and making a promise to avenge the blood of Joseph Smith.

For Meg, it meant booking a flight.

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Meg may have left OUR, but to my knowledge, she has not left Mormonism.

I’ve seen Meg call out hypocrisy in Mormonism. She’s not afraid to do that, but only to a point. In her writing, I’ve noticed the buck often stops at a poetic metaphor yearning for change.

If I’m being honest: I think she panders to Mormon progressives. She makes them feel a little too comfortable. This type of writing can be useful to some extent. But I rarely think it’s brave.

As her essay concludes, Meg writes:

Anti-trafficking work is not a punch-pow battle between good and evil . . . [it’s] providing support for gay and trans kids kicked out of their homes and therefore exposed to heightened risk of being trafficked. It’s pushing for racial justice. It’s writing and voting for policies that provide a safety net and economic certainty. Anti-trafficking work, the kind that really works, doesn’t have an immediate satisfaction. It’s slow and steady. There are no starring turns.

Here she becomes an unreliable narrator. If this is what you believe: why stay in a church that hates trans people? Why make apologies for a prophet who says gay people can’t go to heaven? Why put your shoulder to the wheel for a faith built on white supremacy? “Safety nets and economic security”—is this not the religion with a $100 billion investment fund that claims tax-exempt status?

You cannot go hard on Operation Underground Railroad while going soft on what lay the tracks. These systems of power are enmeshed.

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“In 2014, I went on a vigilante raid to “save” kids sold for sex. What we did haunts me now.”

I want to talk about Mormon women and how the Church controls them.What would I have done if Tim Ballard had invited me to bust a sex ring in 2014?

Driven to the airport, duh.

I would have been flattered. I would have foamed at the mouth for prestige and even physical proximity to Tim—sitting in a room with him, making decisions, having a voice. I know I would have done this because in 2014, I was doing it in my own way.

I was a 26-year-old with a faith crisis and a job offer from the CIA. Makes sense when you think about it: a controlling religion denied me autonomy, so I turned to the most controlling employer imaginable. Tim was connected to all kinds of ex-CIA, ex-blah-blah-blah dudes with security clearances. I would have wanted to leverage this social capital. I would have chummed around, been the cool girl, joined the CrossFit gym, whatever it took.

Meg thought OUR would help her save kids; I thought the CIA would help me save America. It’s scary to realize how easily we make bad choices, how susceptible we are to authoritarianism. I sought salvation through men because that’s all I knew.

Ever since Emma Smith, Mormon women have been props for men who fancy themselves demigods. This demigod doctrine has been preached for generations, by multiple prophets: “As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be.”

Through this theology (or rather: pathology) Mormon women are starved for any meaningful control over their lives. Their “divine” gender role is to be a helpmeet. They do not have the priesthood; they are along for the ride. If the idea of a demigoddess (Heavenly Mother) is any alternative hope for their fate, this consolation appears to be an eternal life in the shadows, muted and unknown by her children.

Church leaders double down on this misogyny by excommunicating women who challenge them, and, more obliquely, by refusing to acknowledge how women’s voices foment even the smallest changes. Proximity to power is not just alluring; it’s the best they can get.

Testimonies at church became my own Greek myths. “I’m so grateful to be married to a worthy priesthood holder.” “We didn’t have a priesthood holder at home, so we had to call the bishop.” Week after week, I was conditioned to not only defer to male authority, but to need it. This became a personal cosmology—how I saw myself in the universe as it was shown to me.

In 2014, Deseret News named Tim a local hero. In the article—after the journalist makes googly-eyed comments about his thick blond hair, blue eyes, and manner of speech (“sprinkled with surfer slang”)—there are some telling reflections from his mother:

Even as a child, he was obsessed with the idea of right and wrong: “He was the conscience of the family, he sees right and wrong as very black and white,” she said.

Looking back, his mother sees a few clues to what would become his crime-fighting career: When he was in preschool, he insisted on wearing a Superman cape on all occasions—even to bed. “He had that vision of himself as being somebody who would go in and save people.”

And of course, there is his wife:

While in college, he met his wife Katherine, who he courted and married within a span of four months. Today they have six children. 

Mormon women are victims of visions of grandeur. If Tim had called me up in 2014, I would have enabled this. There is no doubt in my mind. That type of power was not just magnetic, but my magnetic north.

For many years, I thought that if I rose above my own disempowerment with wisdom and grace, maybe I didn’t need the priesthood after all (just like they told me). I held my tongue in Sunday School and put a rainbow on my Facebook profile. I wrote Sacrament talks about Heavenly Mother. I twisted everything about my abuse into a lesson about something else.

Instead of interrogating my pain, I put it on a doily. I conjured faith-promoting fables for testimony meeting, desperately trying to intellectualize my way out of what my spirit knew: I was being abused. It was emotional and spiritual abuse. Tying yourself to the Church is predicated on pressure and the inability to truly consent to covenants. Child baptism, endowment, marriage.

I was never mine. I was manipulated, dispossessed of myself. Growing up Mormon, I felt possessed by others. Men determined my choices, identity, sexuality, ambitions, values. Even imaginary men had control over me, like my future husband who wanted an eight-cow wife.

I also felt psychologically possessed, haunted by demons that made it hard to trust my own feelings. I would think things like “Am I being too sensitive, or is it fucked up that men can be sealed to more than one wife?” “Isn’t it wrong that nobody told me what the temple covenants were before I went in there? I felt like I couldn’t say no, or even stop to think. Is that bad?”

As I struggled with these demons, people who stayed in the Church gave them power. In what amounted to tacit indifference to how I was being harmed, I read their behavior as: “None of this is so offensive as to make me wanna walk outta here.”

Some say staying is a path of spiritual integrity. I’ve heard progressive Mormons say things like “Change happens from the inside.” “I’m an advocate, I’m an ally.” “I can hold the tension.” “You can be all things.” “I contain multitudes.”

Spare me these treacly petitions. There is no nuance in abuse.

I waited for answers and hoped for change. Pleaded, prayed. I came to see the absurdity of begging for empowerment in pews that denied it. I was sacrificing myself on a wicked altar, waiting for a ram in the thicket. Slowly, I understood that my own dignity was reason enough to leave. I lifted up my staff and stretched my hand across the sea, rejecting the terms of my disempowerment.

We are all haunted, in our own dark rooms, with our own creaky floors. There are cobwebs on the chandeliers, plastic on the furniture. Pull back the drapes. I want a canyon of sunlight on the floor, bright and sharp, with flecks of wild dust floating in its rays. The demons will scurry about, screeching. But let me tell you, nothing’s better than an exorcism.