Utah’s LDS vs. non-LDS divide: Kids might not understand why, but they feel the pressure

Editor’s note • This story is part of a six-part series on the impact of Utah’s religious divide on neighborhoods.

A Latter-day Saint wants to invite her daughter’s friend to join them for their congregation’s annual Halloween trunk-or-treat. But it’s being held in the parking lot of the church, and she worries the parents will think the invitation carries ulterior motives.

Across the street, a couple plan a neighborhood dinner party. They want to throw the invite open to everyone, but there will be alcohol and they fear offending their teetotaling Latter-day Saint neighbors. In the end, they opt to play it safe and invite only a few (non-Latter-day Saint) couples.

The Salt Lake Tribune heard stories like this and more when, nearly a quarter century ago, it undertook no small task: an in-depth exploration of Utah’s religious divide.

The 2002 Winter Olympics were just around the corner and leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had made it a point to encourage the state’s faithful to forgo any “clannish” tendencies.

“Get to know your neighbors. Learn about their families, their work, their views. Get together with them, if they are willing, and do so without being pushy and without any ulterior motives,” former apostle M. Russell Ballard instructed church members in an October 2001 sermon. “Friendship should never be offered as a means to an end; it can and should be an end unto itself.”

Billionaire industrialist-philanthropist Jon Huntsman Sr., an active Latter-day Saint who rose to a high leadership position in the faith, had taken this call to heart, co-founding an organization — called the Alliance for Unity — with the aim of smoothing over religious differences among Utahns.

The Tribune’s own research suggested there was good reason for the attention.

In a poll the newspaper commissioned at the time, 68% of all respondents — including 86% of non-Latter-day Saints and nearly 60% of Latter-day Saints — said that they perceived a religious divide, be it socially, culturally and/or politically, between the dominant faith and the rest of the state.

The Tribune published a special section in which this “Unspoken Divide” was, at long last, spoken.

Two decades later, much has changed about Utah, beginning with Utah’s population, which has ballooned by nearly a third. Paired with that growth has been the steady decline in the percentage of residents who self-identify as Latter-day Saints, dropping from just over half in 2001 to a little more than 40% today. (The church’s stats put nearly two-thirds of Utahns on its membership rolls.)

The time, it seemed, was ripe for a second look at the impact of the state’s religious makeup on residents’ daily lives.

Tribune readers apparently agreed.

A callout to readers to share how the divide impacts their neighborhoods (future installments will focus on other areas such as, say, schools and politics) resulted in hundreds of responses from all corners of the state, plus more than a few former residents. Their experiences, in addition to interviews with Utahns whose work includes efforts to bridge the Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint worlds, suggest the divide remains stubbornly intact.

“There is truthfully quite a bit of othering that still occurs,” Kimberly Applewhite Teitter, a Latter-day Saint psychologist observed — a conclusion she has reached based on her own experiences and her clinical work.

Some of these barriers are blatant. Children bullied or ignored by their Latter-day Saint peers. Friendships that dissolve after a person leaves the fold. Neighbors who lose interest in newcomers after attempts at proselytizing fail to convert. On the flip side, mistrust of Latter-day Saints as a group and belittling comments of their beliefs and practices.

But, perhaps more often, the divide is a byproduct of the simple fact that people gravitate to the familiar. For Latter-day Saints, who constitute the majority in many Utah neighborhoods, that often means defaulting to the ready-made community that church involvement offers.

The result, Latter-day Saint scholar of Mormonism Patrick Mason observed, is that the state’s religious divide remains, all these years later, “the defining feature of Utah cultural life.”

Just ask the kids.

‘Why can’t I go?’ — The divide’s impact on children

Sometimes, when the weather is nice and school is out, Chloe Quinn catches her 10-year-old daughter standing by a window or on the porch of their Millcreek house, watching other kids play together without her.

“It tears at my heart,” the mother said. “I can tell she’s looking over there like, ‘Why can’t I go?’”

Her daughter, an only child, didn’t start out on the sidelines. She was about to start kindergarten when the family moved into the neighborhood in pursuit of a quiet street with other kids the girl’s age. They were still unpacking when children swarmed their front door asking if she could play with them.

“I was so happy when these kids came over,” Quinn, who grew up Catholic in New Jersey, recalled. “I literally felt like I was in a TV show, and my husband and I were standing on the porch, waving her off.”

Her daughter came back later that day — red-faced, spent and happy. Almost as quickly as the invitations materialized, however, they evaporated.

“One day,” Quinn said, “they just stopped talking to her.”

In the beginning, the girl tried to reengage her peers but eventually gave up when her efforts went ignored.

“I have a video from my doorbell camera of her standing on the front porch, waving enthusiastically at a bunch of kids that were walking by,” she said. “And they all looked at her and then just kept going.”

Quinn said she has racked her brain for a reason. Her child, she said, doesn’t swear, is polite and a “good kid.” She asked her daughter: Was there something, anything, she could think of that might have created a barrier?

The little girl just shrugged.

So the puzzled mother approached one of the parents about the shunning and received, Quinn said, a nonanswer about how overscheduled their kids are.

Quinn acknowledged she can’t prove that her daughter’s isolation is the result of her being a religious minority in a neighborhood of largely Latter-day Saint families. But she sees indications that suggest as much. The biggest, to her mind, is the timing of it all. The requests to play dried up when Quinn and her husband started receiving, and declining, invitations to Latter-day Saint services and activities.

Her suspicion is held by many Utah parents who do not belong to the state’s predominant faith.

To get around the issue, some Utah parents — Quinn included — end up sending their children to charter schools and pricey private schools with greater religious diversity. Others decamp, either for another town where they hope things will be better or another state entirely.

Those options aren’t open to everyone, however, in which case the question — particularly in communities with little religious diversity — becomes how far one is willing to go to try to put Latter-day Saint neighbors at ease.

‘So many pearls’

Alicia Tullis is a former Latter-day Saint and mother of three living in Tooele’s Stansbury Park. She stepped away from the church during the pandemic (her husband shortly before then) but said for a long time she kept her religious art up in her home.

“I wanted to signal to Latter-day Saint parents dropping off or picking up their kids,” Tullis explained, “that we were part of their group.”

The social worker encourages her daughters to keep their religious and political views (her family is more liberal than many of her Latter-day Saint neighbors) to themselves out of fear of their being labeled “other” but worries that she is teaching her children “to hide who they are.”

She wondered: “What kind of mother am I?”

Tullis, meanwhile, constantly strives to control the messages she sends to other parents.

“I very carefully choose my clothes before playdates and birthday parties,” she explained, hoping to signal that even though she no longer wears the sacred temple undergarments worn by many of her Latter-day Saint neighbors, she is still “safe.”

“I wear,” she said, “so many pearls.”

Playdates and birthday parties can be especially fraught events for many Utah parents, with invitations often falling along religious lines.

A 15-year-old Millcreek resident, who asked not to be identified, given the sensitive nature of the topic, recalled an instance when, in second grade, she invited a Latter-day Saint classmate to come over and play.

She said the girl and her mother ventured all the way to the door before the would-be playmate announced, “‘We are going home. Jesus is not welcome in this house.’”

The teenager, who now attends a private school, said the comment was hurtful but not totally surprising. In the neighborhood and at school, she said, her Latter-day Saint peers ignored and excluded her, at times specifically citing her lack of membership in their faith as the reason.

The teen knew part of it was just because, between Sunday services and youth activities, the other kids and their parents spent all kinds of time together outside of school (and what parent doesn’t feel more comfortable sending their kid to the home of another child whose parents they know?). Had her classmates been more keen on including her, she would always have been one step — and inside joke — behind.

Still, the emphasis on religion baffled her, explaining that she never remembered being aware of a divide when she was little and living with her parents in east Salt Lake City’s Sugar House neighborhood.

‘No one … made friends with her’

Rhonda Uber, an Episcopal mother of three, has also had a front-row seat to geography’s impact on the divide, having witnessed it in her own children’s lives. In Provo, she said, her teenage son let his peers assume he was a member of their faith to feel included.

This was around 2014, and Uber’s daughter was in elementary school at the time.

“She had a terrible experience,” Uber said. “No one in her class made friends with her. She was never invited to any parties or to join others at lunch. “

After they moved to Cottonwood Heights in 2015, that pressure melted away, and both kids thrived.

Salt Lake City Council member Victoria Petro said Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint kids — including her own — play together “all the time” in her west-side district, an area that includes Fairpark, Jordan Meadows, Rose Park and Westpointe.

The former evangelical attributed this to the area’s great diversity, including religious diversity.

“We can’t,” Petro said, “form echo chambers over here.”

Latter-day Saint Lisia Satini stressed this point as well, explaining that her five kids — ages 15 to 23 — have had friends of all religious backgrounds growing up in Fairpark. And while the California native sometimes invites neighbors to church activities, it’s not a deal-breaker if they decline.

That’s not, she quickly added, to say there’s no room for improvement in the relationships between the Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint communities where she lives. Satini said a “bubble of self-righteousness” exists among some church members that alienates people who smoke, may not own a white shirt or otherwise don’t fit the Latter-day Saint model.

Nonetheless, the executive director of Jayhawks House, a nonprofit designed to support local youths, described her community as one where residents constantly interact with people of other faiths.

Likewise, Pastor Jeff McCullough said his four kids — ages 7 to 15 — have had no problem making friends in South Jordan, in southwestern Salt Lake County, since arriving in August 2023 but noted that his fellow evangelicals living in Utah and Davis counties “feel more isolated.”

On the whole, McCullough said he believes evangelical children in Utah have a head start over their “unchurched” peers when it comes to making friends with Latter-day Saints. The creator of “Hello Saints,” a YouTube channel explaining Latter-day Saint beliefs and practices to fellow evangelicals, attributed this to a shared sense of values among families of the two faiths.

“There are significant doctrinal differences between Latter-day Saints and evangelicals,” he said, “but when it comes to Christian values and standards, there’s a significant amount of overlap.”

“Almost daily,” McCullough added, he hears Latter-day Saints bemoan the direction of the world and the need for “those who claim to be Christian…to stick together.”

When Latter-day Saints are stereotyped

Non-Latter-day Saints aren’t the only ones who feel they are at times the target of suspicion and mistrust.

Mary Brough, a Latter-day Saint mother of five living in Layton, emphasized that her children play with kids of all faith backgrounds and that, on more than one occasion, she has encountered parents who aren’t members of her faith who are “surprised that I’m actually authentic and nice.”

Esther Jackson-Stowell, a Black Latter-day Saint convert originally from Pittsburgh, is also accustomed to people making assumptions about her.

Those she encounters, Jackson-Stowell said, are “shocked” when they learn she’s a member of the church (she attributes this to her “appearance” not fitting the traditional mold).

“Then they start adjusting to the stereotype that they know about Latter-day Saints, for instance not wanting to swear around me or invite me to go drink,” she explained, calling the sudden switch an unnecessary one.

“I’m an adult,” Jackson-Stowell, who moved to Utah 10 years ago, said matter-of-factly. “I can make my own decisions, and I’m not offended by yours.’”

The entrepreneur lived with her husband, Richard, and their three kids — ages 7 to 15 — in Poplar Grove before moving to Sandy. The difference, she said, is stark but not entirely driven by faith.

“What I see is [more of] an economic divide,” she said, “than a religious one.”

On the west side, there was just “more togetherness” between neighbors old and young when compared to the “don’t walk on my grass” mindset she said she’s encountered on the valley’s more affluent east side.

Petro echoed that point, explaining that west-siders generally can’t “afford to isolate” for religious — or any other — purposes.

“We’re sharing resources and child care with one another,” she said, “and helping each other get through the day.”

Coming next • How Utah’s religious divide can affect neighborhood get-togethers.

The Salt Lake Tribune wants to hear from you: How can we overcome Utah’s religious divide, which often separates Latter-day Saints from their neighbors and vice versa? Share your stories and ideas.

Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.