It’s the only way I can describe it on Sundays in these Mormon suburbs in my area. The identical houses, the perfect yards. Everyone is dressed in the same style of clothes. The men and women have the same hair cuts. The Churches all look and feel like clones (seriously, I see the same style of building within blocks of eachother!). Everyone is going about their church duties in suits and ties after church. Even the missionaries seem strange to me now. And don’t get me started on the Mormon themed stores and the weird soda shops.

Now that I’m “awake,” I just feel so uncomfortable with the culture I was raised in. It’s so plastic and WAY too uniform. Cultish, if I dare to use that taboo word.

It is a bit weird. It's as if they were Amish, except founded in 1957. I live within walking distance from Temple Square and The Mall, so I see the same uniformity squared, with black name tags to boot.

Even weirder is going to Costco and seeing some guy in cowboy boots with his 3 sister wives with that weird wave in the front of their hair (see Saoirse Ronan in Mary Queen of Scots for a historical antecedent of that hairstyle) and/or tight braids starting at the temples and proceeding down the side of the head to the back.

If red capes and white bonnets start showing up, I'm moving!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/21/2019 12:49PM by Brother Of Jerry.

Brother, you live within walking distance of Temple Square, did that make it even more difficult to leave TSCC?

It was a shorter walk home.

I left while at BYU. Very awkward. Nearly managed to get my butt expelled. I shut up until I graduated, then never set foot in an LDS meetinghouse again except for a few funerals.

I have lived in the Great Plains, suburban SL County and now right downtown. All have their advantages and disadvantages. I'm kind of liking downtown, in spite of a lot of Mormons. Lots of non-Mormons too.

Brother Of Jerry Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I'm kind of liking downtown, in spite of a lot of Mormons. Lots of non-Mormons too. >

That's what I was going to say. I'd be/ am one of those. Beautiful. People. Naturally. Shine. Trip. Bliss. Love-Live. Light. Leap! KRCL

[Who cares about some random obscure, or especially a high hung helpless and insincere "saint" when I am [you are](passing) walking by?] Right?

I acknowledge others, especially when they acknowledge me. It's just as easy, no, easier, to ignore Mormons (or not even see them?) than any other group of people in a society or place. Turn your nose up at them. WAY UP. Or be in your own world!

I go about my business, and/ or pleasure, and am at home wherever I am. It is nice, close-in, up in around downtown Salt (Like) Lake City. Utah. Yee.Haw.

M@t

I felt that way the time I was in St George after visiting the Grand Canyon, the people looked like they were more than just distantly related, and I'm not talking about the FLDS compounds not that far away. I did enjoy having coffee before leaving, as I'm sure I made the locals very uncomfortable, but I didn't care. Now that I think about it, that one hairstyle in Mary Queen of Scots looked familiar, as it was just like the FLDS style.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/21/2019 02:18PM by doyle18.

doyle18 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Now that I think
> about it, that one hairstyle in Mary Queen of
> Scots looked familiar, as it was just like the
> FLDS style.

Thanks, I was wondering where I'd seen that before.

I live in neighborhood that is about 50% Mormon. At 20 minutes before the start of "the block', all the active Mormons garage doors open at the same time & they all back out and head toward the Ward. Eerie how they choreograph that.

Wrinkle in Time, movie and book by Madeleine l'Engle, comes pretty close to describing what you just wrote about.

Only she was writing about a planet in a faraway galaxy that was controlled by a brain that was void of love. It was all pretense made to look ordinary, routine, normal. While people were really living under a microscope. Any variance caught the attention of IT, (l'Engle's version of Orwellian's Big Brother,) who would send in the thought police to arrest the resisters and reschool them until their brains were numbed sufficiently to be returned to society.

I felt like I grew up (Utah County) in a place where Truman Showed, Pleasantville only colors when it bleeds, and an episode of The Religious Twilight Zone.

I was told when I first attended that all the churches were built on the same plan. I'm sure it is true since a corporation that is intent on saving the few hundred dollars it would cost for janitorial service will also want to save money on architects.

That deal when a person realizes that ...... as a MORmON they really were REALLY WEIRD


MORmONS are weird

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xphnhNopWUo

Not to be a wet blanket, but uniform clothing and hair styles are hardly unique to Utah Mormons. Hasidic Jews, many Muslim groups, Amish and others do the same. So do white upper-middle class suburban women carrying their yoga outfits in their NPR totes after stopping by Whole Foods to get some organic quinoa and kale shakes.

is the convention, which many people follow, of getting tattoos and body piercings as a way to demonstrate their resistance against uniformity and conventionalism. In actuality, within the relevant sub-cultures, it has become another variant of virtually obligatory uniformity.

I'm sure there are communities like that. My observation, however, is that in other communities tattoos have become so common that they are useful for neither rebellion nor conformity: they are just fashion choices.

A Pew study, for instance, found that 38% of people 18-29 have at least one tattoo. That is a national average, though, so in some areas the percentage would presumably be north of 50%.

Where I live is largely like that. Older people are "clean," at least as far as one can see during a normal day, but younger people have a lot of ink. Tats are so common that no one pays attention to them or their absence.

There's a metaphor in how many plastic surgery billboards there are in Utah. Everyone must conform to the Utah standards and Utah standards must conform to Mormonism.

They should change Utah's title from "the Beehive State" to "the Stepford State."

I wouldn't mind looking just like those yoga women at Whole Foods!

My children, have always hated to go to Provo. On road trips to Southern Utah, they won't stop there for gas, or for anything. We don't talk about the Mormon cult that much, and all they say is that Provo and BYU are "creepy."

Provo and BYU are creepy, undeniably so.

There are things I don't admire. Our politicians are so bland, so careful, so fake respectful, so deferrent to older men. They speak monotone, never get excited. They blabber on and on about nothing and put themselves on some superior moral spirituality above everyone else. They are very judgmental. Constantly whining (Romney).

The rank and file are just like this too. Mormon culture isn't eerie,...

it's annoying.

Mormon friends and relatives is the automatic respect that they give to certain politicians who dress and speak in the same manner as general authorities. They defer to them as quasi-general authorities based solely on style and presentation, without ever examining what these thoroughly corrupt politicians actually have done.

But, now that I think about it, that's pretty much how the general authorities themselves get away with so much. Brigham Young was a straight-up organized crime boss masquerading as a "prophet of god" and he got a university named after him.

Why do you think I left Utah the day I turned 18? That was 30 some years ago. The whole thing just makes me sick. The drawl, the denim jumpers and the 30 year old samsonite attache case full of scriptures. The women who were cute before marriage let themselves go, and the men have combovers and 25lb casserole belly. Yes I left sorry if I offended anyond

Yes.


DH has always complained of acute Heebie Jeebies just crossing the Nevada/Utah line, and more so around Saint George. This was long prior to his learning about the murderous Brigham Young and the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

For me personally, I see masses of new apartment buildings go up where cornfields used to be. I envision little folks trapped in each mud dauber unit, and see the mormon wasp with a PICC line sucking from each of their wallets and waiting to devour their children.

Seriously.

The big party center revolves around the COB in downtown SLC (and specifically, the "Authorities" and their well-connected friends and family members).

The work and wealth-production is done in the outlying areas and virtually all of it is sent to the center, with a fraction being redistributed back to the outlying areas to provide the bare minimum needed to keep the workers in the outlying districts producing more wealth to send to the center.

That's the working model of the organization. I suspect that if by some weird chain of events the General Authorities were ever to acquire full governing power (including the government's monopoly on coercive violence), it would rapidly turn into a full-fledged Hunger Games situation. The elite would possibly even entertain themselves with survival dramas, but instead of calling them the "Hunger Games," they would call them "Handcart Trekking" or something like that to link it to the falsely glorified disasters of Mormonism's despotic history.

You can't talk about Utah culture without saying "cult".

I remember a cyclist doing a cross-country ride who said in an interview, that when he entered Utah, it was like everything was 3 degrees out of plumb.

That was his shorthand way of saying that while most things looked pretty normal, they never quite fit or worked the way you expected. Everything you dealt with was just a little bit off.

OK, some of it is way out of plumb, but by and large, I think he was right. It's close enough to normal that if you squint just right, and kind of hold your breath, you can ignore the moral stench. :)

I do try to avoid any town south of Lehi and north of Delta. Being a Zoobie ruined Utah County for me.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/22/2019 05:54PM by Brother Of Jerry.

I'm a Utah Native, the product of Jackmormon parents, and seriously, I was the "ward project" when I was a teenager, but I was never baptized.

It is interesting that my sister just younger than I am--who is on church rolls but is an unbeliever--is a lot more sensitive to the "culture" of Planet Utah; she's lived out of state for a long time, however. The politics drive me nuts here, but that's true of a lot of "middle America." I really don't have the energy to waste trying to change something that is such a monolith. I remember the quote Baba Ram Dass né Richard Alpert attributed to the Dali Lama who was asked if he was angry at the Chinese.

His Holiness replied, "That wouldn't be functional, would it?"

Ram Dass noted, "That's pretty conscious."

Uniform.
Outdated.
Irrelevant.