“So You Wanna Go Back to Egypt” – title and lyrics from Keith Green’s album, circ. 1980
Author’s Note: This series is autobiographical to provide background for the books and articles you will find on this website. When the series is finished, I will provide a summation in a bio-page. Links to previous installments are found at the bottom of the article. – JWS, website creator.
He who would be my disciple, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. – Jesus
My descent into the Hades of Politics to “preach unto the spirits” in bondage there, I knew it would be a crucible. I concluded that there was scarcely a remote chance of winning an election. They are rigged. Only now is that reality encroaching into civic consciousness.
In 2008, I encountered an accountant and software engineer who had fled the State of Arizona upon discovering that Republicans there were not interested in election reform. He explained to me how it was done. Incumbent Republicans benefited from the scheme. Only now, after a decade in which the Democrats do the rigging in their favor, do Arizona Republicans howl. I did not expect to prevail against such institutional corruption in Idaho.
Nevertheless, elections provide a bully pulpit for candidates. So, I made the best of it.
If there is anything unseemly about oneself, it is magnified an hundred fold from the scrutiny of “adversarial research” in a political campaign.
While I thought it might have happened in 2008, it did not occur until the 2010 Election. It was then, because of my book on biblical polygamy from over 20 years before, it resurfaced from the simmering church controversy as explained in a previous chapter.
Vindictive board members, moved by envy and hatred, used the cloak of the campaign to denounce me and my son. County GOP chairman, Phil Sergent, was pressured to run me out of the Party. He had no legal standing to do it, but did have the power – in a secret meeting – to disavow me. He promised to keep the controversy internal and confidential if I volunteered to resign my positions and drop out of the race. But I already knew that he had told everything to the local newspaper editor. He was lying through his teeth.
My book represented an exercise in academic freedom; I was not going to repudiate my research to comply with what amounted to a “religious test” forbidden by the Constitution.
Even though the book began with a disclaimer, it mattered not because neither he nor anyone else had read the book.
These detractors claimed that an appendix entitled “Polygamy and the Survival of the White Race” somehow represented a plea for white supremacy, which any reader of the offending essay, would discover that it is clearly not. “Survival” is not the same as “supremacy.”
[As of this writing in 2026, with Europe and America being overrun by unchecked immigration, both “White Survival” and polygamy are accepted topics of civic discourse. And as for the GOP, it has devolved into a party led by a serial polygamist in the person of Donald Trump and a billionaire class which does as it pleases, e.g. Elon Musk who has four wives and fourteen children.]
But in 2010, the perfect storm of personal animas knew no bounds. The various newspapers which picked up the story failed to provide satisfactory condemnation. Polls showed I was still solidly in the race. GOP hacks feared that in spite of all their efforts, I might yet win. They passed resolutions un-endorsing me, and then made the gossip circuits in area churches.
Kootenai County operative, Mike Oliver, promised to destroy me for not siding with Bill Denman’s “gold bug” ideology and took great pleasure in denouncing me before a rally for home schoolers in Potlatch, Idaho, never mind that he had a shady past as a bouncer in a strip club.
Then Ron Paul delegate and legislator but now State Senator, Phil Hart, confidently declared me “not a Christian,” even though, soon thereafter, he was forced to resign in disgrace for having pilfered trees from public lands to build a new home. He experienced a political resurrection when, years later, he successfully clung to the coattails of Donald Trump.
Idaho has a unique clause in its State Constitution which prohibits not only polygamy outright but also prohibits its advocacy (Art. I, Sec. 4). Unmindful that such a provision restricts free speech, local church people would use that provision upon legal counsel from my nemesis and local attorney, Mark Moorer, to attempt a legal entrapment for criminal charges. They wanted me arrested for advocating polygamy to cause me further embarrassment. This was an accusation which they could not prove, since years before, I had pulled copyright for the book and released it into the public domain.
Moorer was soon dead from complications arising from a routine surgery.
Of course, Rev. Douglas Wilson had already labeled me “the biggest flake in North Idaho,” all the while pimping his role as the godfather of Idaho’s Christian Right. I, on the other hand, still got up every morning and worked by the sweat of my brow.
Various attempts were made to ruin my business. I had to commute to a nearby city for work until local people either forgot or forgave whatever wrong it was that I allegedly had done.
Hopes for my children finding spouses from within any local body of believers were smashed to pieces. My daughters had to go afar to find husbands and for two of my sons, they found their brides outside of the churches.
My son, Jeremy, tried valiantly for ten years of service in the Potlatch community church of home schoolers to make himself a worthy witness, only to give up and move to Florida. One of the leaders of that church, Wayne G_______n, was the man who had run against my son Josiah for the local precinct committeeman position. He participated in the smear campaign and proved himself a typical GOP operative: smiling to your face while stabbing you in the back.
But ultimately, I lost the election because at the time Democrats could still vote in the Republican primary and I was running in a three-way race against an incumbent.
By 2012, concluding there wasn’t a “dime’s worth of difference” between the two parties, I ran for state office as a Democrat because of redistricting. In my mind, the GOP had become King Saul’s army and like David, I was driven out to live with the Philistines. How I handled the transition can be found here. I ran as a “Ralph Nader” Democrat. But like the Philistines to the young David, Democratic Party leadership did not trust me, either.
The move was good for business, however, which now flourished because of my increased profile in a community dominated by Democrats. After losing the election, I still continued my community service as a board member for a local credit union and other civic organizations.
After a decade of silence, my friend, Dennis Zwonitzer, suddenly appeared one day in 2016 seeking work and asylum. He would live on the property – off and on – for the next decade. At first working in my business but then later as a builder and grounds keeper for our various garden ventures and outbuilding construction projects, he was a recovering divorcee. While still a productive Christian, he was forlorn and hollowed out. I like to think that his experience here has been edifying. But it has to be hard on a man who has invested so much into his family to have it taken away from him as if he does not matter anymore. . .
to be continued . . .
Part 14 – “Well it’s true that God works lots of miracles, But Moses thinks they’re all his . . .”
