Faith, culture, the arts, and community life

A healthy society is not held together by economics and law alone. It is held together by meaning, shared stories, creativity, and the ability of people to see themselves— and one another— as fully human.

That is where faith, culture, and the arts live. They are not side projects. They are civic infrastructure.

I strongly support religious freedom alongside a firm separation of church and state. Faith can be a source of meaning, moral grounding, service, community care, and belonging. Government, however, must remain neutral and inclusive. Public policy should serve everyone, regardless of belief, and no single religious or philosophical worldview should be imposed through law.

That neutrality is not hostile to faith. It is what protects faith. It is what allows people of different religions, people who are spiritual but not religious, and people who hold no religious belief at all to live together without fear that the government will privilege one conscience over another. Freedom of religion cannot exist without freedom from religious coercion. Both principles rise or fall together.

I am honored to have earned the endorsement of the Center for Freethought Equality PAC. I see that support as an affirmation of a simple governing principle: the state must protect freedom of belief and freedom from imposed belief at the same time.

That same principle applies to culture and the arts. Art is one of the primary ways human beings process reality, challenge assumptions, transmit values, and imagine futures that do not yet exist. Long before societies change their laws, they change their stories. Long before people can name what feels wrong, artists help them feel it. Long before a new possibility becomes policy, it appears in music, literature, theater, film, dance, visual art, and design.

I know this personally. Music has been one of the central languages of my life. I have spent years as a musician, producer, songwriter, and worship pastor. I have seen music create community among people who entered a room as strangers. I have seen it give language to grief, hope, faith, anger, and experiences people could not otherwise express.

The arts do more than entertain us. They help us understand ourselves.

A society that neglects the arts does not become more practical. It becomes more brittle. When imagination atrophies, fear fills the vacuum. When cultural expression is narrowed, conformity hardens. When art is treated as decoration instead of infrastructure, civic life thins out and polarization deepens.

Culture is a cornerstone of a healthy democracy. The arts belong in schools— not as enrichment reserved for students whose families can afford private lessons, but as foundational education available to everyone.

As a legislator, I will work to strengthen the Utah Division of Arts & Museums, expand public grants for artists and community organizations, increase arts education funding from kindergarten through higher education, and begin building a permanent Utah arts endowment capable of supporting creative life across generations.

That includes music education. Music is not fluff. It supports language, attention, memory, collaboration, discipline, emotional processing, and the ability to listen— not only to sound, but to one another. The arts matter in their own right, but it is also true that cutting them has not produced some golden age of academic achievement. It has produced a thinner educational experience at precisely the moment students need more creativity, connection, expression, and meaningful ways to engage with the world around them.

Schools should not be forced to choose between literacy and music, mathematics and theater, science and visual art. A complete education gives students all of them. It teaches people not only how to calculate and analyze, but how to communicate, interpret, create, collaborate, and imagine.

In our communities, the arts are social glue. A concert, a local theater production, a mural, a poetry reading, a dance performance, or a film screening is not merely an event. It is a place where belonging is practiced.

These experiences bring people together across age, income, belief, identity, and background. They give communities ways to encounter one another outside of conflict, commerce, or crisis. In a political culture increasingly organized around outrage and suspicion, creating places where people can share something beautiful is not trivial. It is part of how we remember that we are neighbors.

The arts also matter economically. Utah’s creative economy generates jobs, attracts tourism, supports small businesses, strengthens downtowns, and helps communities keep talented people rooted locally. Artists hire technicians, designers, musicians, builders, printers, photographers, caterers, venues, and other working professionals. Cultural investment moves through an entire local economy.

Communities with strong creative ecosystems are more resilient, more attractive, and more capable of adapting to change.

That is why Utah should invest seriously and consistently in the arts. Instead, culture is too often treated as the thing government funds last and cuts first.

The Legislature directed public agencies and education leaders to identify potential 5% reductions, placing arts programs and other student supports at risk while districts were already stretched thin. In higher education, HB265 required Utah’s public colleges and universities to redirect tens of millions of dollars from programs lawmakers classified as inefficient toward areas they considered to have greater workforce value. Arts, theater, dance, language, and humanities programs were among those eliminated, consolidated, or placed on the chopping block.

Workforce preparation matters. But a university is not merely a job-training center, and human value cannot be reduced to the starting salary attached to a degree. A state that trains people only for the economy that exists today will be poorly prepared for the economy, culture, and civic challenges that come next.

At the same time, Representative John Arthur introduced legislation to provide Utah school districts with certified teacher-librarians— trained professionals capable of supporting literacy, research, media literacy, and responsible library administration. The bill was held in committee and ultimately failed.

We keep handing schools more mandates, more review requirements, and more political scrutiny without giving them the trained people needed to do the work. That is not accountability. It is an unstaffed mandate followed by blame when the system cannot carry the load.

I support stronger public investment in arts education, school libraries, local arts organizations, music programs, museums, cultural institutions, and creative opportunities in communities that are too often overlooked. Access to the arts should not be determined by ZIP code, family income, or political favor. Rural communities, working-class communities, marginalized communities, and emerging artists deserve investment too.

I also support transparent and independent structures that grow arts funding through public investment, philanthropy, partnerships, and long-term stewardship— not political gatekeeping. The purpose of arts funding should be to expand creative possibility, not control it.

Just as important as funding is freedom. I am firmly opposed to political gatekeeping over what kinds of art may exist, receive support, or be taught. Artistic freedom is not a side principle. It is the point. Art that challenges power, makes people uncomfortable, questions assumptions, or provokes disagreement is often the art that matters most.

A society confident in itself does not fear art it disagrees with. It engages it. It debates it. It learns from it or rejects it on its own terms. It does not suppress it through state power.

Utah has already crossed that line. The state now maintains an official list of books that every public school must remove from student access. Under the law, removal decisions made by as few as three school districts— or two districts and five charter schools— can trigger a statewide prohibition, regardless of what other local parents, educators, librarians, or school boards decide is appropriate for their own students.

That mechanism was created through HB29, sponsored by my opponent. The statewide list began with 13 books and has grown to more than two dozen. It includes significant works of American and world literature, and it continues to expand. The structure is now being challenged in federal court through Vonnegut v. Utah, a lawsuit brought by students, authors, and the estates of Kurt Vonnegut and Maya Angelou arguing that the law violates First Amendment protections.

I do not believe the State of Utah should be in the business of maintaining a banned-books list. Parents have every right to guide what their own children read. That authority does not extend to controlling what every other family’s child is allowed to access. A handful of political actors should not be able to game the system and narrow the intellectual world available to students across an entire state.

We do not need government deciding which stories are safe, which ideas are acceptable, or which forms of expression are worthy. That path leads to stagnation, fear, and repression. Artistic freedom is inseparable from free expression, and free expression is inseparable from democracy.

This commitment to culture and artistic freedom is part of how I see the future. A society grounded in infinite diversity in infinite combinations makes room for difference— of belief, identity, experience, expression, and imagination. The arts are among the most important ways that diversity is expressed, explored, challenged, and understood.

Utah has extraordinary creative talent. We have artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers, dancers, designers, performers, librarians, educators, technicians, and craftspeople whose work enriches this state every day, and offers alot to our economy and state GDP, unfortunaly its often met with too little support and too much personal sacrifice.

My goal is not to dictate their vision. It is to make sure they have room to create, resources to survive, places to gather, and the freedom to speak.

When we protect freedom of belief, invest in the arts, support our libraries, and refuse to let the state decide which stories are allowed, we are not indulging ourselves. We are doing the essential work of keeping a free society free.

Culture is how a society remembers who it is. Art is how it imagines who it could become.

As a legislator, I intend to treat both as essential.