Religious Divide Implicates All

[The promotions committee, of which I am co-chair, is attempting to get D4U members to write letters and op-ed pieces about our issues. This is a draft of mine. –David]

My attendance at Mayor Rocky Anderson's Bridging the Religious Divide meetings over the summer and fall made it clear to me that there is a Mormon/other religious divide here in Utah. But more important than the divide between Mormons and non-Mormons, I learned that the divide within myself is the one I should be most concerned about.

When I first signed up for these meetings I listed myself as a former Latter-day Saint who was now Episcopalian. But after the first meeting with my group I realized I was identifying more with my Mormon heritage and identity than with any other faith or non-faith. This was odd, but it should not have surprised me. After all, Mormonism is a totalizing faith, meaning that it is as much — I would argue more — about the culture than it is about any religion. I'm not the only one who has explored the notion of Mormon identity. Historian Jan Shipps has discussed in some detail the ethnic component in Mormonism, and literary scholar Harold Bloom has even argued that Mormons function as a race of people not unlike the Jews.

What became clear in these meetings very soon, however, was that whoever the "typical Mormon" is in this fair city and state of ours, he or she isn't okay. Since then I have discovered that if you want to know just how unacceptable Mormons are, ask a Mormon. He or she will mention any number of unattractive attributes — the close-mindedness, the self-righteousness, the tendency to have too many children — but then follow it up with, "But I'm not a typical Mormon."

Make no mistake about it, Utahns exhibit the standard prejudicial nature of all people who find themselves faced with difference of any kind. Prejudice is real in our state. The first thing everyone seems to need to know about you is "Are you LDS?" Once that is established, then the social codes can kick in, many of them hurtful and divisive: the jokes that get told, the rolling eyes, the constant rejoinder when introducing someone who is LDS, "Don't worry, he's not a typical Mormon."

On the Mormon side it's just as bad — the persecution complex, the fear of outsiders and, worst of all, the condescending attitude that, for many Latter-day Saints, comes with being the dominant group which dominates everything from education to business and most worrisome, politics. "If others don't like it, they can always just leave." (I heard that once.) "Non-members of the church, though they may mean well, are trying to destroy our lifestyle." (I've heard that one more than once.) "They don't understand." (I hear that all the time.) The operative word, of course, is not "understand"; it's "they." Them vs. Us.

Tragically, Utahns lack real leaders who can perceive what needs to happen. The LDS hierarchy seems to know that its selective silence will both inure them from "meddling" with a people who to our glory and to our shame almost always seem to act collectively but still mobilize the bloc vote through ad hoc moralists like the Eagle Forum's Gail Ruzicka and others. Aside from the occasional prescriptive language in general conference to be inclusive of neighbors, a culture of suspicion, moralization and passive-aggressive minority marginalization persists in the Mormon ward house. Our state legislature is just as moor-less, being incapable of distinguishing between the dangerous political fundamentalism of state senators such as LaVar Christensen and Chris Buttars and the legitimate discourse of real and time-honored conservatives.

On the other side we have Rocky Anderson, the mayor of Salt Lake City who despite what I think is often good governance, can't resist referring to "them" as the Taliban and whose staff can't even retain the leaders in the very program designed to address the divide. Then there is "Saturday's Voyeur." What was once a good-natured theatrical ribbing of Utah culture turned into a screed last year — and not a very entertaining one at that — against anyone who thinks differently than the show’s creators. Funny how the directors of the Salt Lake Acting Company acknowledged in song those Mormons who have come around to a more progressive view of things but are somehow still powerless. You know the ones, the ones that aren't "typical Mormons."

No wonder a college professor, a social worker and even a participant of the "Bridging the Religious Divide" meetings have privately referred to Mormons as "neo-Nazis." No wonder there is a prevailing sense among non-Mormons that in Utah the LDS Church hierarchy will always act in corporate self-interest even at the expense of the larger community which they sanctimoniously claim to support. No wonder we've seen the rise of angry ex-Mormons still posing as "insiders" and who spend most of their time figuratively burning crosses on people lawns by recruiting other Utahns, primed with garden-variety prejudice, to discriminate against all things Mormon.

Like the strife of other, higher-profile communities across the globe, the religious divide in Utah is an indictment of us all. It indicts LDS leaders from the bottom right to the top who don’t have the religious imagination to see that in just a few years the defensive, often punitive stance toward a pluralistic community engenders a kind of prejudice that will devastate their own people in just a few years' time when changing demographics are likely to move active Latter-day Saints into Utah's minority. The levels of non-Mormon hatred against my forty-some-odd Mormon nieces and nephews will, in my view, vault to planet Kolob when Mormons and their church suddenly find themselves stripped of state power in the voting booth and the legislature.

The divide also indicts those non-Mormons who, powerless though they be politically, have allowed their hatred to objectify their Mormon neighbors and everything related to them to the point of lunacy. You want to wear a halter top Sunday morning in your Sandy neighborhood? Go ahead. But don't come crying because the majority of your neighbors avoid you just as you likely avoid your own version of "offensive" people. You mean to tell me that Mormons are the only ones that don't carefully regulate who their children play with, date and marry? We need to include yourselves in the human family, all of whom prefer to congregate with like-minded people and to evaluate their world based on background and beliefs.

Finally, the divide indicts someone like me, the Episco-Mormon who can fly into a rage at anyone who criticizes the people of his origin — but is shocked when someone calls me on my own need to vilify the thing which has injured me and from which I somehow have to distinguish myself. Like other self-appointed Mormon "insiders" who are now outside, I have done my fair share of Ku Klux Klanning.

Whatever external power discrepancies there are in Utah — and they are real — the crucible in which any "bridging" will take place is mostly internal. A start might be if we all started saying "Us" rather than "Them." Perhaps then we might begin to see the pattern of our self- and other hatred, to identify our leaders and to begin to address the imbalances of power that, in the end, threaten all Utahns.