Theocracy U.S.A.
by Robert Griffin - May 20, 2010
Reprinted with permission.
"So how do you like it here?" a coworker of my wife, Myra, asked her anxiously. Before Myra could respond, the woman leaned in and in a low voice said, "We know we're a little off."
Most Mormons in Salt Lake City could count on one hand the number of times they've been more than an hour outside of the city. They're justifiably proud of Utah's six national parks and their proximity to some of the world's most beautiful and varied terrain. But if you make the short drive from Salt Lake to their most breathtaking park, Bryce Canyon, you'd find almost everyone there speaking German or Japanese.
For many Mormons, their two-year mission stands as their only taste of the "outside" world, and even that is spent in the 24-hour company of other believers. This explains why they have an almost insatiable need to hear what Myra and I think of Salt Lake. The underlying question is really not how we like the city but how it compares with the outside world. That's what we came here to find out.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) had used the 2002 winter Olympics to showcase the world's most secretive – yet fastest-growing – major religion. Although it didn't throw open the doors of its temples, it did rather proudly pull back the curtain on its family-first society. Exercising an astounding amount of control over how it was portrayed by the normally inquisitive world media, the LDS had for the first time put on a public face. And it was a smirk.
Few principles in modern democracy are as ingrained as the separation of church and state. With the bright lights of the Olympic cameras turned on them, the LDS made their case that a theocracy can not only work in America and the world but, thank you very much, already does so in Salt Lake City. Myra and I were intrigued.
Mormonism is perhaps the most American of all religions, claiming that Jesus appeared to tribes in North America after he rose in Israel. Yet in many ways LDS culture is more foreign to American sensibilities than anything found overseas. So why did media normally hostile to conservative religious groups use kid gloves with the Mormons? Because to a short-term visitor, life in Salt Lake appears idyllic. In fact, I lived there for more than six months before I could begin to sketch a more detailed picture for myself.
In the Shadows of the Wasatch
The memories of a triumphant Olympic games have faded like the sun over the spectacular Wasatch mountains. For those left in the Salt Lake Valley – between the towering mountain ranges – life is sheltered. And while there's relative peace and safety in the valley, there are also some very long shadows.
Joseph Smith – the founder of the LDS – famously predicted that the Mormons would build a utopia. Since then, their civilization has thrived. There's little untouched land along the hour drive south from Salt Lake to Provo, the headquarters of Brigham Young University. And much to their credit, the Mormon spirit spread with the development of the land.
Mormons don't just talk about putting families first. Fathers take an active part in raising their children, rushing to get home instead of hitting the bars after work. Their large but extremely tight-knit families challenge the current American belief that having more than two children somehow cheats their upbringing.
Salt Lake society is geared toward the family. Every corner has a strip mall with two grocery stores, a Babies 'R Us, and an ice cream parlor. Parks and playgrounds are filled with the happy squeals of children.
Pornography is so rare and out of favor in Salt Lake that many stores and gas stations slip Maxim behind the same black covers normally reserved for Penthouse. Cosmopolitan carries a sign advising readers that the magazine contains "objectionable material." It's no coincidence that Clean Flicks, a chain that has drawn the wrath of Hollywood for editing profanity and sex out of popular movie videos, was born here.
There's a palpable spirit of optimism in Salt Lake that supersedes daily life. Political correctness is out, replaced with a refreshing naïveté. For example, the owner of a car dealership in north Salt Lake that sells big American trucks and SUVs used his last name to title his business. Unfortunately, that last name is "Menlove." It doesn't take a marketing genius to see the problem in attracting a masculine, testosterone-fueled clientele to "Menlove Automotive."
Honesty is such a hallmark of Salt Lake City that even used car salesmen and mechanics toe the line. I once found my lost wallet – flush with a recent ATM withdrawal – in exactly the spot where it fell from my pocket. Two days later.
But the truth of life here is also far from the spotless image painted during the Olympics. Mormon society is no less confusing and contradictory than other modern democratic societies – perhaps even more so, since civil law also carries the weight of religion.
Unlike other churches that preach that God's law is higher than man's, Mormons are religiously obliged to adhere strictly to both. But tying the two together is confusing when they seem to clash.
For example, if you drive near Salt Lake, you may notice traffic cameras mounted on the stoplights. Salt Lake is one of the most residential cities on earth with an endless string of suburbs surrounding a paltry downtown. Cameras that were installed to protect children from spilling into the streets have been turned off for two years. Why?
One fateful day a high-ranking city official ran a red light and was caught on camera. A picture of the violation was automatically mailed with a citation to his house. His wife opened the envelope to find a photo of her husband cozying up to a young, attractive woman in the passenger seat. Legislation was quickly passed to end the traffic camera program.
Sometimes the laws of God and man seem to run counter to one another. Salt Lake uses a hopelessly confusing but theologically correct pattern for its roads. They name and number them not for the direction of the road but by its relation to the downtown temple. It's not uncommon to be headed northwest on a street named Southeast. The interstates elevated over these roads were so poorly conceived that traffic reporters who patrol the sky in helicopters mockingly refer to the twisting Interstate 15 and Interstate 80 interchange as the spaghetti bowl.
A Very Different World
A hundred fifty years have passed since persecution drove Mormons to the Salt Lake Valley. The wounds may have healed, but they certainly left scars. Mormons are initially some of the most friendly and welcoming people you could meet. And yet the LDS church is habitually wary of people outside the religion and discourages its members from fraternizing with nonbelievers. Some Gentiles – the LDS term for nonmembers – have lived and worked in Salt Lake for decades and still feel like outsiders.
But Gentiles certainly don't remain so through a lack of Mormon effort. If Myra and I had accepted all the free copies of the Book of Mormon we'd been offered in conversion attempts, we'd have a dead tree lying in our apartment. The LDS door-to-door-salesman style of evangelism is so renown that several telemarketing firms set up shop in Salt Lake to take advantage of a workforce unashamed to pursue clients at their homes.
(But Mormons are just as famously closed off from listening to the people on the other side of the doorway. A few years ago, the LDS felt the wrath of the U.S. legal system and the ACLU for forcibly removing a man distributing Christian literature in downtown Salt Lake.)
Whenever conversion attempts stretch beyond polite conversation, Myra and I have learned to use our ace in the hole. "Explain this whole polygamy thing," we say. The answer is usually a series of stutters, but I've heard at least ten murky justifications. From the same person.
A female coworker of Myra's used this argument to explain the marital behavior of Salt Lake City's founder: "Well, Brigham Young only had relations with about half his wives." When my wife observed that Young had 30 wives, she said, "Yeah, so he only had sex with about 15 wives." After a pause, she added, "He was a good husband."
Parental and spousal responsibilities are hallmarks of the Mormon faith, as is strict adherence to chastity. Yet some still share the view of an interstate billboard that reads "Polygamy: a cherished part of our heritage."
It is true that most religions have some dicey stains on their history; Catholicism is no different. But few religious idiosyncrasies color an entire society as much as polygamy shapes the world's perception of Mormons. The modern LDS has officially distanced itself from the practice its founders embraced – Utah itself was forced to abandon polygamy to achieve statehood in 1896. Embarrassing as it is to most Mormons, polygamy is particularly stupefying for LDS women, and most dismiss it as a relic of the past.
Only it isn't. With the unpleasant details that emerged from Elizabeth Smart's 2002 abduction – that she was taken as one of seven wives to a radical (and excommunicated) Mormon – national attention focused on Utah's underground polygamy community. In fact, Utah has so many pending cases scattered across its deserts and mountains, that support groups like Tapestry Against Polygamy (run by women who have fled plural marriages) have formed to force the state to take its laws against the practice seriously.
It's not very difficult to find polygamist communities in Utah. One afternoon, Myra and I explored some desert back roads for a lava cave popular with the locals. On the way, we stumbled across a small trailer park. There was one man among many women and children. Each woman had a separate trailer she retreated to as we approached.
With some estimates of polygamists numbering around 50,000, Utah prosecutors have in the past treaded very lightly. When they do prosecute, it's only those who make their crime impossible to ignore by publicly flaunting or promoting it. And prosecutors almost never pursue a polygamy conviction, just the other offenses that usually go with it, like sex with a minor (some fundamentalist groups consider girls who have had their first menstruation – which can occur as early as eleven years old – to be at an adequate age for marriage).
The Other Side of the Rainbow
For a religiously conservative society, there's a surprising number of divorces in Utah. This can be explained in part by the age at which many Mormons get married. Forget college – in Utah most marital connections happen in high school. This is not only encouraged by the church, but by the larger society itself. In fact, there's such a saturation of bridal stores here that even WalMart offers wedding services. Unmarried women commonly feel unwanted or even like "old maids"… by their early 20s.
But perhaps the darkest shadow that falls over the valley is one that strikes at the heart of the Mormon utopia: the family. Utah has one of the highest rates of suicide and depression in America, particularly among the young. Emergency response personnel have labeled the problem "epidemic" and are weary of going on calls for ten-year-olds who have hanged themselves.
Although the reasons behind this are many and complex, one teenager I met at a Barnes and Noble bookstore offered me his simple perspective. "It's impossible to have fun here," he said. "We always feel like someone is looking over our shoulders." His eyes darted around the store throughout our conversation.
The LDS encourages reporting one another's failings under the auspice of returning the sinner to the fold. The symbol of Utah – a beehive – was selected because it represents the communal attributes of bees…and because it looks like a single, staring eyeball (and was described by early church leaders as "the all-seeing eye").
This oversight – the feeling of being constantly watched and controlled – is especially hard on the young. There's only one dance club in Provo, a college town. The owner feels that Mormon city officials have passed a series of creative requirements – including a high-tech X-ray machine that almost bankrupted him – to force his establishment to close. The LDS church discourages dancing and tries to replace it with tightly monitored church socials. It's hardly a coincidence that the popular 1980s movie Footloose, about small-town teenagers forbidden to listen or dance to rock music, was filmed here.
Club and bar activity is discouraged by long-standing Mormon laws that make any establishment serving alcohol require the membership of every patron. With that comes additional expense to the customer and effectively kills any chance of going to more than one establishment in a night.
And the restaurants don't pick up any of the nightlife slack. They're so uniformly mediocre that when Salt Lake magazine named the 100 best gourmet restaurants, the Costco café made the list for serving reheated slices of pizza. You can find the few notable exceptions by driving downtown and looking for lines stretching around the block.
The disenchanted youth of Salt Lake find small ways to stand up to the overwhelming pressure to conform. The store All in White does good business in the mall selling traditional clothing and temple undergarments (special clothing Mormons wear during their temple ceremonies). The lone employee on a Friday afternoon is a shapely young woman wearing a skintight, black miniskirt and a low-cut, red blouse.
But perhaps the most public rebellion against Mormon morality can be found in local product advertisements. Brighton Ski Resort is popular with locals for being just 15 minutes from downtown and having a very good beginner's slope. A popular promotion offering a reduced children's fare uses the tagline "Bring 'Em Young." A Salt Lake Japanese restaurant, Ichiban Sushi, promotes its sushi selection with the slogan "There's one raw pleasure you don't have to repent for."
While Mormon laws may force local breweries to water down their beer, the brewers are fighting back with full-bodied ads. The Wasatch Brewing Company achieved wink-wink notoriety during the Olympics for promoting their Polygamy Porter beer with interstate billboards encouraging drivers to "Bring some home to the wives." Polygamy Porter T-shirts and hats with the tagline "Why have just one?" have quickly become Salt Lake souvenirs.
The media themselves are also divided between strict Mormon adherence and free-thinking reportage. The Deseret News was started in 1850 as an organ of the official religion. Twenty years later, the Salt Lake Tribune was founded to provide an independent voice. The two newspapers were at odds from the beginning. In 1880, city officials and police officers conducted a bordello sting to catch non-Mormon, territorial officials engaging in prostitution as a payback for earlier federal prosecution of Mormon polygamy. They bought houses in the red-light district and paid prostitutes a then-kingly sum of $300 for every official they could lure into the house for diversions. A series of peepholes were installed in the homes to provide a view to police who would then act as witnesses when the officials were brought up on charges. As would be expected, the papers were divided. The Deseret News called the action "an appropriate way to clean up the area." But the Salt Lake Tribune had a different perspective: "Salt Lake now enjoys the distinction of being the only city in the world in which houses of prostitution were established by the city authorities. The only city that ever hired official prostitutes and paid them a premium for every person ensnared."
As the papers demonstrate, Salt Lake has two sides to every story. It's no surprise that painter Thomas Kinkade is immensely popular here. Labeled the "painter of light," his prints sell out as soon as they arrive at local outlets. Kinkade has achieved fame for his escapist depictions of American landscapes. Every hedge is trimmed, every dusk a magnificent sunset. To achieve this he uses unnatural hues of bright, fluorescent colors to create an inviting but hopelessly idealized portrait of life. It's as if he omits the shadows that frame the reality.
And so it is with Salt Lake City.
