Editor’s note • This story is part of a six-part series on the impact of Utah’s religious divide on neighborhoods. Read previous installments on the divide’s effect on kids, block parties and, yes, snow shoveling.
As a devout Presbyterian, Joseph Good has held “just about every possible position” in his congregation. To which, he said, more than one neighbor has told him: “‘It’s too bad you’re not LDS.’”
Good, who has lived in Bountiful, Magna and now Sandy, said he doesn’t get angry over these comments, adding that he does set boundaries — avoiding theological debates not only with neighbors but also family (his wife is a Latter-day Saint) and co-workers.
“I’m not going to lose a friend over” religion, he said. “And I’m not going to cause my wife to lose a friend over it.”
As it happens, one of his best friends is a neighbor who used to be a Latter-day Saint bishop.
“I wouldn’t,” he said, “trade my relationship with him for anything.”
Not all Utahns are as lucky.
All too often, warm welcomes from Latter-day Saint neighbors thaw into cold shoulders when those moving from out of state or between towns rebuff attempts at proselytizing.
Case in point: Michelle Thompson said she and her family enjoyed a “deluge” of baked goods from neighbors introducing themselves when they moved into Millcreek in 2016. Paired with these greetings were frequent invitations to attend church with their new Latter-day Saint neighbors — invitations they politely and persistently declined.
“We had one neighbor quite aggressively say, ‘And we’re happy to take your children to church with us,’” Thompson said. “My husband and I were gobsmacked.”
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Two Latter-day Saint chapels sit next to each in Kaysville in 2014. Such meetinghouses are common in Utah neighborhoods — as are invitations from Latter-day Saints to their friends and neighbors to attend services.
Eight years later, she said, her neighbors barely acknowledge her family’s existence.
“I feel like we have cooties,” Thompson said. “Our poor children.”
Before joining The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Kaysville’s Ron Hendricks said he would often tell his wife, “‘If our house burned down, I have no doubt the neighborhood Mormons would do everything they could to help us. It would just take our house burning down for them to get to know us.’”
His conversion has done little to change his thinking on the subject.
“We members sometimes see nonmembers and nonactive, nontraditional members as a statistical conversion opportunity,” lamented Hendricks, who still maintains his Jewish identity, “rather than the makeup of the diverse community we live in.”
As a result, sincere efforts by Latter-day Saints to get to know their neighbors are often viewed with suspicion.
Layton’s Mary Brough, a Latter-day Saint, said she sometimes feels as though “my efforts in trying to genuinely just know people outside my religious circle are interpreted as insincere or [having] an agenda.”
“So much,” she said, “is assumed about me.”
She is hardly alone.
“People immediately assume that Mormons just always want to convert them and that if they’re being nice, there’s an ulterior motive,” scholar of Mormonism and Latter-day Saint Patrick Mason said. “I hear that all the time.”
(Utah State University) The LDS Church calls on all its members to proselytize, said Latter-day Saint Patrick Mason, a professor of religion at Utah State University — and not just the ones with nametags. One outcome of this emphasis is the need for members to be sensitive to their motivations, he said, when reaching out to neighbors not of their faith.
The view isn’t totally unfounded, the Utah State University professor continued. Proselytizing is baked into the faith’s DNA. “Every member a missionary,” a phrase coined by former church President David O. McKay, is something of a motto for Latter-day Saints, who are taught that all share in the responsibility of inviting others to hear their faith’s message — with or without a plastic nametag.
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) President David O. McKay, with U.S. President John F. Kennedy in the Tabernacle in September 1963, made "every member a missionary" a famous phrase in Latter-day Saint circles.
Given this, Mason said, his fellow Latter-day Saints “have to think hard” about “their motivations. Are they really serious and sincere about friendship with no strings attached? Or, in the back of their minds, is what they really want is for those people to get baptized?”
Coming next • Why the state’s religious divide chases away some Utahns.
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.
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