Six years ago, the hashtag #DezNat appeared on X, then known as Twitter, and a movement was born.
The largely anonymous accounts that have since embraced the term (short for Deseret Nation or Deseret Nationalism, depending on whom you ask) are united in the belief that allegiance to leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints past and present ought to be total.
But, as a recent study of the movement found, it’s not quite as simple as that.
According to its authors — Spencer Greenhalgh, an associate professor of communication at the University of Kentucky, and Amy Chapman, operations director at the New Jersey Psychological Association — DezNat “provide[s] an opportunity to consider overlaps between Mormonism, the far right and aggressive anti-feminism.”
(Courtesy photo by Pete Comparoni | University of Kentucky Photo) Spencer Greenhalgh is an associate professor of communication at the University of Kentucky. He and Amy Chapman, operations director at the New Jersey Psychological Association, are the authors of a study on DezNat, a movement they say is shaped by far-right political influences.
The Utah-based church has emphasized that these self-anointed defenders of the faith are not affiliated with or endorsed by the global religion.
The Salt Lake Tribune spoke with Greenhalgh about the duo’s research and why Latter-day Saints — many of whom have never used X and probably never will — should care.
The following has been edited for length and clarity:
What is DezNat?
DezNat is an online movement that’s particularly prominent on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, but has been active in other online spaces as well.
While prominent accounts and those who are kind of loosely the leaders of the movement have claimed that it’s about supporting the leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, critics have pointed out that there are a number of right-wing references that get brought up over again.
Critics have sometimes described the movement as alt-right. Personally, I think it’s a little bit more ambiguous than that, but there’s no doubt that there are far-right influences.
When did DezNat form and how representative is it of U.S. Mormonism more broadly?
August 2018 is when the hashtag was first used on Twitter. They are arguably more conservative than even your average Latter-day Saint.
What are you basing that on?
(The New York Times) Former President Donald Trump, left, and U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney. DezNat, the researchers found, tends to align more closely with the MAGA movement than the conservative brand of Latter-day Saint Sen. Mitt Romney.
Honestly, that’s a gut feeling. I don’t have hard numbers on that. But there are influences of white nationalist ideas in DezNat and as conservative as U.S. Mormons can be, they famously had trouble with Donald Trump in 2016, and in DezNat we can see influences that are pro-Trump and even to the right of Trump. These are not Mitt Romney Mormons. We’re seeing influences from the ugly corners of American conservatism today.
What issues are DezNat most concerned about?
There’s a strong insistence on the traditional hierarchy and the traditional ecclesiastical structure of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the need for everyday members of the church to fall in line rather than question, discuss or even criticize the pronouncements that come from higher-ups.
(Greenhalgh & Chapman, via X) A woman wearing a sweater emblazoned with the words "proud feminist" holds aloft the scissors she used to cut the hair of a man representing BYU. The cartoon, a reference to the story of Samson and Delilah from the Bible, is one example of the kind of imagery shared by members of the DezNat movement.
Our data primarily comes from prior to 2020, before church leadership started talking about things like vaccines and — more so than in the past — the need to take a stand against racism. Had we looked at 2020 or 2021, would there be that same emphasis? I’m not sure.
But, in 2019, at least, the emphasis was on getting in line behind church leaders. Often in practice, what that ended up meaning was taking traditional conservative approaches on things like gender and sexuality and making sure that Brigham Young University students were falling in line with the Honor Code.
So there are some legitimate questions about whether DezNat cares about traditional authority structures or whether those structures happen to line up behind issues that they care about.
Why should the average church member care about DezNat?
DezNat raises questions about what appropriate boundaries within Mormonism are.
Anti-feminist discourses that are present in DezNat have some overlap with church teachings. Where is the line between what is preached at General Conference and aggressive behavior towards women online? Can you form a boundary between those? Can you form a boundary between sustaining Ezra Taft Benson as a former president of the church and accepting that earlier in his life he wanted him to run for president with famous segregationist George Wallace?
I don’t know where those lines are. That’s largely an exercise for Latter-day Saint leadership and membership. But it does blur some of those boundaries in ways that I think are challenging and maybe even disturbing.
Do you have a sense of the movement’s gender breakdown?
It’s hard to tell because many of these accounts are anonymous. My gut reaction is that it’s a predominantly male space, and you can see that in some of the data.
For example, early in Russell M. Nelson’s tenure as president of the church, he challenged the youth and women of the church to engage in a social media fast. So everyone was wondering: Is this going to be applied to men? It wasn’t. And there was a very interesting DezNat discourse at the time in which some were saying that President Nelson did not issue a social media challenge to the men because he wanted DezNat to keep doing what it’s doing. Implicit in that is an understanding that DezNat is mostly masculine.
(Greenhalgh & Chapman via X) An example of a post using the hashtag #DezNat to criticize women who speak out against leaders of the church, in this case President Russell M. Nelson's 2018 call for a social media fast.
Who are their influences?
Historical Latter-day Saint figures who show up over and over are former President Ezra Taft Benson, former apostle Boyd K. Packer and [former President] Spencer Kimball and his book “The Miracle of Forgiveness.” On a number of occasions Brigham Young is held up as a kind of a hero of this movement.
One of the phrases that you will sometimes find in a DezNat tweet is “Brigham Young did nothing wrong.” Implicit in that is his authoritarianism, his racist views and views on gender.
And then there are references to Ben Shapiro and that sort of firebrand right-wing figure. It’s hard to say the extent to which any of these groups has had an explicit influence on the movement. But DezNat does reference these folks a fair amount.
Do they ever advocate for violence?
There’s no denying that there is violent language. I think DezNat accounts would describe it as over-the-top humor. But this sort of strategic ambiguity is the hallmark of the far right, especially since 2015 and 2016.
Do you have a sense for how big the movement is?
Between Feb. 1, 2019, and Dec. 12, 2022, we collected 114,573 original posts containing #DezNat and 144,970 retweets of those posts, for a total of 259,543 posts. Those came from 5,158 different accounts, some of which only used the hashtag once and some of which used it a lot more frequently. There are 14 accounts that tweeted more than 1,000 times and about 10 accounts that retweeted #DezNat posts more than 1,000 times (those two lists are overlapping).
The founder of DezNat tweeted or was retweeted over 20,000 times over this time frame. He left after his real identity was exposed, but another influential user has 6,000 followers — not huge, but not insignificant either.
Do Latter-day Saint leaders know about DezNat, and do they care?
I would expect that church leaders know about DezNat. Official church spokespeople have on at least two instances provided a statement to the media making it clear that the DezNat movement is not affiliated with or endorsed by the church.
I would guess that they care some. Some of the things that DezNat does, when it flirts with racist ideas, undercut the work the church is doing in that area.
And yet — I mentioned boundaries earlier — I don’t think the church has set as many of those boundaries as it could and for understandable reasons. To call into question, for example, Ezra Benson’s legacy is to call into question the prophetic mantle that is at the head of Latter-day Saint leadership.
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