A few scattered thoughts on both anti-“Utah Mormon” and anti-Latter-day Saint bias in general. (Sorry to mix the two but they are often synonymous and I don’t want to write two posts.)
- I still remember the first time I met a socially awkward non-Utahn, and my surprise at my surprise. I realized that I had been conditioned to see Utah Mormons as weirdos, and non-Utah Mormons as living some Seinfeld-esque, fun life filled with attractive, erudite, and witty friends and coworkers. Of course, I’m hard pressed to think of a time when that was said explicitly, but growing up in Utah I had realized that the thousands of little slights about Utah had built up.
- There is a double standard on the part of some people who would never be caught dead critiquing, say, New York Jews, but feel absolutely no compunction about saying rather cutting things about Utah Mormons.
- I occasionally see a hesitancy by some inside the Church to push back against anti-Latter-day Saint sentiment in cases where they feel the antipathy comes from our purportedly backwards social history. If you believe that you need to be consistent and grant a pass to antipathy towards other religious minority groups that don’t exactly score high on social justice issues such as religious LGBT acceptance (e.g. Muslim immigrants). Of course I don’t think one should dismiss anti-Muslim sentiment because of their beliefs on hot button social issues, but I believe the same about antipathy towards Latter-day Saints.
- Being against this or that Utah characteristic is often just a lazy way to juxtapose how enlightened and cosmopolitan the interlocutor is by comparison.
- In my admittedly limited, anecdotal personal experience, some of the most vociferous anti-Utah Mormons are in fact, Utah Mormons. Of course you’ll never get them to admit that. On their Facebook profiles they’ll claim that they are “from” the state they lived in for a few years as a child when their parents were going to graduate school, but if you count up the years spent outside of Utah and the years inside of Utah, they’re clearly Utah Mormons. With so many Utah Mormons griping about Utah Mormons, growing up I became a little fuzzy on who these authentic Utah Mormons were supposed to be that everybody was complaining about.
- On that note, for all the people who claim to hate Utah there sure are a lot of people eager to move there and drive up the housing prices.
- I feel like a lot of the characteristics people tend to associate with Utah-ness have significantly changed with the Internet. Congratulations, you have popped our sacred canopy.
- According to one perspective, you can punch “up,” but not “down.” Of course, this begs the question of whether Latter-day Saints are “up” or “down,” and I’ve heard arguments both ways. I suspect that we actually do score relatively high in terms of educational attainment and income. Also, US Latter-day Saints tend to be non-Hispanic white (although that might change), so in terms of ethnicity we’re in a privileged category. On the other hand, the fact remains that by many measures, for example, willingness to vote for an otherwise qualified candidate for president, we are objectively in one of the most reviled demographic categories. Like a lot else it’s complicated; sometimes we’re seen as sort of nice but weird. My vote is that we’re a “down” group; it doesn’t take a lot of courage to crack a Mormon joke or to criticize Mormon/Utah Mormon culture, which is the very reason why people should think harder about doing so.
- Maybe it was because I grew up in the South Park era, but for me this distinction mattered: are they mocking my sacred cows because that’s what they do to everyone and are having a bit of fun? Or are they looking me straight in the eye and saying “go to hell”? There is clearly a difference between, say, the South Park guys, whom a Mormon could non-awkwardly go out for a rootbeer with, and, say, a Lawrence O’Donnell or Christopher Hitchens with their unapologetic sharp antipathy. (Although not so much Hitchens’ friend Stephen Fry, as you see when he recounts getting kicked out of his Temple Square Tour).
- If generalizations are made they should be rooted in something other than stereotype or lazy statistics, or stringing together lazy statistics into some kind of uber-narrative of Utah’s dysfunctions (e.g. because of our sexual hangups the men watch a lot of porn and the women get a lot of plastic surgery). That’s not to say that every characteristic about a culture or community is good or neutral, or that every insight needs to be established in peer-reviewed literature, but they should be made in the spirit of generosity, based actual current internal, and not just adjacent, experience and not compared to some halcyon ideal that doesn’t really exist anywhere.
- I have no idea where the “bad Utah drivers” gripe comes from. Whenever I visit Utah I have to re-learn how to use my blinker, since in the Beltway region where I live a blinker is a challenge to somebody’s manhood/womanhood and they inevitably speed up to cut off your lane change. Admittedly, my sample (Philadelphia, Texas, DC) probably isn’t the best, but I’ll take polite Utah indecision to monster trucks running you off the road (Texas), or a game of chicken at every four way stop (Philadelphia).