In February 2017, weeks after the inauguration of Donald Trump, a conservative political operative named Don Peay trudged up a steep, sagebrush-covered hillside outside Salt Lake City. Peay served as Trump’s campaign manager in Utah and is a hunting advocate who has gone out shooting with prominent rightwingers such as Dick Cheney, Ted Nugent and Donald Trump Jr.
Peay wanted to point out a particular parcel of public land that used to be overrun by highly invasive cheat grass. Several years ago, he worked with local land managers to revegetate it with native plants favored by deer and elk.
“We’re proud of what we’ve done here,” Peay said. “It shows that local people know the land better than bureaucrats from Washington or tourists from California.”
“Doesn’t it belong to all of us?” I asked, noting that the land we stood upon was managed by the federal government, in trust for the American people.
His answer was unexpected.
“Yeah,” he replied. “But it belongs more to me than it does to you.”
Peay is Mormon and his striking claims regarding public land have a long history in Utah. Under Trump, these claims are being taken seriously. Peay believes this helps explain high Mormon approval levels for the president despite the Stormy Daniels affair and other scandals that might be thought shocking to a conservative religious conscience.
A January Gallup poll found that Trump’s approval among Mormons had risen to 61%, higher than any other religious group surveyed, and 13 points higher than among the next group, comprising Protestants and others.
Utah has become the epicenter of Trump’s public lands policies, culminating, to resounding acclaim from local politicians, in the president’s executive order to significantly reduce the size of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments. The areas now outside the monuments can be opened up to mining and drilling.
Rob Bishop, the Republican Utah congressman and chairman of the House natural resources committee, has led the charge against public lands preservation, introducing sweeping legislation to reform the Antiquities Act of 1906. Among its many changes, Bishop’s bill would require state and county approval for the creation of any monument larger than 10,000 acres.
Few issues divide the western US, and its tribes, ranchers, hunters, hikers, climbers and naturalists, as much as access to the publicly owned land that is the ancient home of Native Americans and now constitutes more than half of states such as Utah, Nevada and Idaho. It includes such treasures as the Grand Canyon and Zion national parks.
For decades, some westerners have decried what they see as oppressive environmental laws and disproportionate control of these public lands by a remote and villainous federal government, hindering access for grazing or resource extraction. This loose movement – dubbed the Sagebrush rebellion in the 1970s – is often regarded as secular in nature. But the cause is deeply entangled with reactionary strands of Mormonism whose adherents look back to the pioneer days when Mormon settlers staked their claim in Utah.
The figurehead of the latter-day rebels is Cliven Bundy, the Mormon rancher who refused to pay more than a million dollars in back fees to the federal government on public lands his cattle had grazed for more than 20 years. He and his followers, several of whom said they had been influenced by their Mormon faith, participated in armed standoffs at his ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada, in 2014, and at the Malheur national wildlife refuge in central Oregon in 2016.
Cliven Bundy’s son, Ammon, whose name is taken from the Book of Mormon, said he was personally instructed by God to join the occupation. Another Malheur participant referred to himself as “Captain Moroni”, a freedom fighter from the Book of Mormon.
During the occupation, Mormon church leadership distanced itself from the Malheur occupiers: “This armed occupation can in no way be justified on a scriptural basis,” read an official church release. Others in the church have dismissed the group’s views as outdated, the leavings of a “frontier” or “fundamentalist” Mormonism, the sect of the religion commonly associated with polygamy.
Some members of the Mormon mainstream, however, share views in line with those of the Bundys. In 2012, Bishop, the congressman, authored the Transfer of Public Lands Act, which sought the handover of more than 30m acres of federal land, including the Arches and Canyonlands national parks, to the state of Utah. He has continued to agitate along these lines.
“It’s very deep in our roots and our ancestry and our families,” Peay, a large man with a tousled mop of gray hair, said during an interview last month on the same Utah mountain.
Like many Utahns, he traces his ancestry to the “handcart pioneer” exodus from the Midwest in the mid-1800s. “My great-great-grandfather came here from England and crossed the plains when he was fourteen years old,” he said, gesturing to the snowcapped Wasatch Mountains, running to the north. His mother and sister died of exposure.
“We love this land,” Peay said, “and it’s very offensive for people who’ve never been here to come in and tell us, ‘We love it more than you and we’re going to tell you how to manage it.’”
These perspectives are no longer limited to the Beehive state. Under the Trump administration, trends in Utah are energizing a host of rightwing causes, such as the rise of anti-governmental militia groups and the constitutional sheriff movement, which asserts that the county sheriff, rather than federal officials, should be the highest government authority on local matters.
“It feels almost hardwired into people here, the mistrust of the federal government,” said Steve Bloch, legal director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.
Today, Peay is devoted to hunting advocacy. Over the years, his not-for-profit groups have been instrumental in pushing policies to eliminate coyotes and prevent the recolonization of wolves on public lands across Utah in an effort to increase the size of deer and elk herds. (He says that he was the one who convinced Trump to wear a camouflage-patterned “Make America Great Again” hat during the campaign.)
Some Mormons undoubtedly appreciate Trump for his choice of the conservative supreme court justice Neil Gorsuch, even if they find other aspects of his presidency distasteful. “None of the Mormons that I know who voted for or support Trump are unambivalent about him,” said George Handley, a professor of humanities at Brigham Young University who describes himself as a “progressive and practicing” Mormon.
But Peay thinks that support for the president is on the rise among Utah’s Mormon Republicans, despite the administration’s growing list of scandals, because of Trump’s policies on public lands and monuments, too.
As for Stormy Daniels, Peay said that Mormons were not puritans.
“I think we also try to be good Christians and forgive and forget. That’s what we’re taught on Sunday.”