Mormons. Mormons made Utah weird—that’s the answer. In a few more words: a century and a half
of Mormon voting majority in an isolated, insular state made Utah anomalous compared
to the country of which it’s a part. And in a few more words than that, well: on
first glance, Utah appears the intuitive average of its neighbors—it’s a melange of the
red-rock deserts of Nevada and Arizona; the deep-red politics of Idaho and Wyoming; the
glitzy ski towns of Colorado and Wyoming; and the ruggedly indep
endent, outdoors-loving
culture of the entire mountain west region. But it’s also got some things its neighbors
do not. It’s got… drive-thru soda shops. Utah pioneered this style of shop where instead
of getting coffee or tea one gets so-called, “dirty-soda”—carbonated drinks mixed
with assortments of syrups, creams, or juices to make a cocktail-like concoction. In Salt Lake City, Swig, a leading dirty-soda
chain, has nearly as many locations as sector-dominating Starbucks. The reason for this i
s that most of the half
of the state that are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the
Mormons—follow the Word of Wisdom: purported revelations from God delivered to the church’s
founder, Joseph Smith. Along with alcohol and tobacco, the text prohibits
so-called “hot drinks” which is interpreted by the church to mean coffee and tea, regardless
of whether they’re actually hot. Therefore, to fill the role that coffee shops
do elsewhere, Utah entrepreneurs started selling dirt
y soda instead and it’s become such
a hit that Swig has now spread to Idaho, Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas as well. Other anomalies stem from the same text. For example, up until the 2002 Salt Lake City
Olympics, public bars were technically not allowed—at all. Anything that functioned like a bar had to
run as a private members club and sell $5 “temporary memberships” to allow entry. Restaurants, meanwhile, could have physical
structures that looked and operated like bars, but only if t
hey had so-called “Zion curtains.” State alcohol laws prohibited establishments
operating with restaurant alcohol licenses from allowing alcoholic drinks to be prepared
in view of customers, under the logic that this would help prevent excessive drinking
and the normalization of alcohol for those under 21. Similarly, waiters were prohibited from proactively
offering diners a wine list, and could only furnish it when asked. While these laws were eventually eased, Utah
still has some of the strict
est alcohol laws in America: it’s the only state with a 0.05%
drunk-driving blood-alcohol content limit, rather than the standard, looser 0.08%; and
all but low-alcohol beers and beverages are sold exclusively through state-run stores
with limited opening hours. In fact, all of these stores are closed each
July 24th. While a perfectly normal-day for the rest
of the United States, each July 24th in Utah is what’s called Pioneer Day—it celebrates
the arrival of the first group of Mormon settlers t
o the Salt Lake valley. Across the state, this is celebrated almost
as a second Independence Day, with main-street parades, backyard parties, and evening fireworks. Fittingly, and perhaps pointedly, to accommodate
this extra holiday Utah does not typically celebrate Columbus Day each October—the
holiday to commemorate the arrival of the Italian explorer to the Americas. Rather than celebrate European arrival to
the Americas, they celebrate Mormon arrival to Utah. The wall between church and stat
e in Utah
can be, at times, blurry. For example, each of Utah’s public high
schools are allowed to permit, upon parent’s request, up to an hour of so-called “released
time,” when students can learn off-campus. In practice, this means time for religious
education. Utah law includes a litany of rules to make
it clear that these off-campus religious classes are not technically part of the public education
system, since that would likely violate the first amendment. But day-to-day, Latter Day Saints
seminary
classes slide into the Utah high school experience almost seamlessly. At Bonneville High School near Ogden, for
example, the seminary is right across the street and it schedules its classes to correspond
with the high school schedule—so for fourth period, for example, one just walks across
the street and learns about Joseph Smith. In fact, it’s almost impossible to find
a Utah high school without an adjacent seminary. At Dixie High School in St George, in fact,
the seminary sits in the
exact center of the campus—while technically on its own property
and fenced off, its main entrance faces the high school’s parking lot, rather than its
own, and it sits on the direct path between the high school and its baseball fields. It is quite literally unavoidable. Considered an inevitability, many new high
schools in the state draw a location for the seminary into their original architectural
plans and count on selling the land to the church without a second thought. After all, a strong
majority of the Utah voting
public does not consider this coziness between church and state controversial—it’s just
simply convenient. Among the US’ two major political parties,
the Republican side consistently supports a softer interpretation of the first amendment
as it relates to the separation of religion and government—for example, the majority
of Republicans polled believe city governments should be allowed to put religious symbols
on public property, while 27% believe the Federal Governme
nt should flat-out stop enforcing
the separation of church and state entirely. So with a strong, deeply-religious voting
majority, it’s perhaps no surprise that Utah is an incredible Republican-party stronghold. Now, Utah is certainly known as a red-state. It feels right at home with its conservative
neighbors in Idaho, Montana, and the Dakotas, but perhaps the part that would surprise is
how they compare. Based on self-reported party affiliation,
Utah is the most Republican of these states. In
fact, among all states, Utah has the second
highest portion of its population identifying as Republican, and the second-lowest portion
identifying as Democrats. Now, this statistic almost certainly surprises,
and with good reason: Utah does not look, feel, or even act like the second-most conservative
state in the nation. Across the US, there is a consistent correlation
between urbanization rate and party affiliation: the urban areas are Democrat strongholds,
with about 62% of voters going for t
he party, while rural areas lean Republican, gaining
54% of voters. Therefore, on a state by state level, the
states with low urbanization rates tend to have high portions of their electorate voting
for the Republican party, and vice-versa. Yet Utah is the seventh most urbanized state
in the country—more than 4/5ths of the state lives in the Salt Lake City metro area, meaning
it completely bucks this trend. Another broken correlation in Utah relates
to LGBTQ rights. The Public Religion Research
Institute conducts
a large, annual survey that includes a question about support for nondiscrimination protection
for LGBTQ people—as in, whether there should be legal protections preventing landlords,
for example, from denying a lease to an individual based on their sexual orientation or gender
identity. Fascinatingly, 86% of those surveyed in Utah
were in support of such laws. The only state to boast higher support was
Hawaii, meaning Utah—the second most Republican state in the nation—was mor
e in support
of making discrimination against queer people illegal than the people of California, New
York, Massachusetts, or any other liberal stronghold. And this does not appear a statistical anomaly. After all, in 2015, the Utah legislature did
something no-other Republican-controlled legislature had ever done: they passed a bill expanding
nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people. From then on, sexual orientation and gender
identity became protected classes for matters of employment an
d housing. The bill in question, SB296, was dubbed “the
Utah Compromise” since it had simultaneous support by the Republican party and the Church
of Ladder Day Saints and organizations like the ACLU and the Human Rights Campaign. Of course, it was a true compromise—notably,
the bill excludes religious organizations and their affiliates like schools and hospitals
from the same nondiscrimination regulations, meaning a religious school could theoretically
fire a teacher, for example, based solely o
n their gender identity. And in practice, this means that Brigham Young
University, run by the LDS church, can continue its codified prohibition of “same-sex romantic
behavior” by students. But simultaneously, the bill isn’t an isolated
case of support for certain LGBTQ rights in Utah—in 2020, it once again became the first
state with a Republican-controlled legislature to ban conversion therapy in minors, and this
bill was once again passed with the support of both the LDS church and LGBTQ advo
cacy
organizations. And Utah’s anomalous support for policies
that might elsewhere be perceived as liberal is not restricted to the matter of LGBTQ rights. Utah has also long been softly in support
of expanded rights for undocumented immigrants. In 2002, it started to allow undocumented
immigrants who graduated from high school in the state to pay in-state college tuition
rates at Utah public universities. In 2005, it passed a law that allowed for
the issuance of driver’s licenses to the group.
Still today, it’s one of only twenty with
such a law, and is the only one of these that went red in the last Presidential election. In 2019, Utah then tweaked the maximum penalty
for misdemeanor crimes to make it easier for undocumented immigrants to avoid deportation
by Federal authorities, in 2022 they made it so fewer employers were required to check
a new hire’s immigration status, and in 2023 they expanded eligibility for taxpayer-funded
health insurance to certain children of undocumented
immigrants. This culminated in this brief memo by the
director of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Salt Lake City Field Office
complaining that Utah’s jails were not holding those arrested by the Federal immigration
authorities, and therefore that they were officially designating Utah a “sanctuary
state.” Utah’s leaders quickly shot back in sharp
rebuke, but this memo was saying the quiet part out loud: for all its statistical conservatism,
Utah’s actual policies are far more nuanced
. Now, Utah is far from a liberal bastion—the
legislature overrode a veto by the governor to pass a ban on transgender girls in women’s
sports; it passed a near-total abortion ban, even if it was later blocked by the state
Supreme Court; and like many red states it passed a series of laws allowing for the banning
of individual books deemed objectionable from school libraries. But at the same time, polls conducted in Utah
indicate broad support for gun-law reform, for expanded sex-ed beyond absti
nence, and
even for free bus service in Salt Lake City. Utah politics break norms. Most policies in America sit on a spectrum
where the strength of a given party’s hold on a state’s legislature correlates cleanly
with the likelihood of passing traditionally left or right-leaning laws, yet Utah just
does not sit on these spectrums. It’s like an alternate reality, it exists
outside the United States’ norms. It’s like they built a completely different
society. But that means they’ve succeeded, beca
use
that’s exactly why Brigham Young and his first group of pioneers came to the Salt Lake
valley. You can learn a lot about a place by its names. If one starts here, at Last Camp Site Monument,
then follows Emigration Road west, passing Donner Hill—where the ill-fated party spent
weeks working around rugged terrain long ago on the right, then passing the Hogle Zoo—the
region’s largest, and very much a piece of the present—on the left, there’s a
small outcropping where a 60-foot tall monument ri
ses from the foothills. By its grandeur, its granite and bronze composition,
and its sheer size, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine this standing some 1,800 miles
or 2,900 kilometers away on the National Mall. But look closer at the characters enshrined
and it becomes clear that this celebrates less the westward expansion of a nation, and
more the birth of a new one. It was here, or somewhere very near here,
that a sick, wagon-bound, travel-weary Brigham Young, the second president of the Church
of
Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, looked over the Salt Lake Valley and proclaimed that
this was the place. The place for what exactly, becomes clearer
after considering what the region lacked in July of 1847. Before the shores of the Great Salt Lake served
as the Saints’ shining city, the lake was a myth. Fur trappers said they had seen it, but told
stories that were hard to believe. It was massive, it was salty, it didn’t
seem to have an outflow, and perhaps it instead drained through some sor
t of whirlpool feeding
a subterranean river. Like the towering heights of the Rockies and
the absurd depths of the Grand Canyon, it was properly a figment of a frightening American
frontier. Following the fur-trading storytellers who
bounced from fort to fort, though, was the pathfinding, mythbusting, military man John
C. Fremont. Tracing the lake’s banks, rafting its waters,
and touching foot on its islands, Fremont found the Great Salt Lake large in size, but
less remarkable than lore had led
on. It had fairly reasonable agricultural potential,
and thus fairly reasonable settlement potential. His following report and published maps of
his journey south of the Oregon trail began to fill in a map that to Anglo-American eyes
had long been blank. These journeys, sponsored by a westward bound
United States, were understandably of interest in the halls of Washington DC. Curiously, they were also of interest to an
increasingly nervous religious minority stationed in western Illinois. Now, S
alt Lake City was not preordained in Mormon theology as any sort of holy land in
the religion’s founding. The Great Salt Lake, after all, had yet to
even appear on a map when Joseph Smith discovered the golden plates—the foundational moment
of the religion. But something odd began to happen in the wake
of Fremont’s trips into the Salt Lake region—with increasing regularity, accounts and excerpts
began to appear in the small town newspaper of Nauvoo, where the Mormons had escaped to
from Missouri
, and increasingly believed they now needed to escape from. What made the flat lands along the Wasatch
range so alluring was the fact that through the 1840s it hardly existed on maps or in
American minds. Unlike Illinois, Texas, California, or Oregon,
it was devoid of Anglo American settlements, overland trails, booming trade, or the rules,
laws, regulations, federal administrators, and agents that oversaw such budding developments. On the fringes of two young countries, each
seemingly uninteres
ted in the territory, a religion on the run from persecution and one
bent on building a civilization in the image of their beliefs found opportunity. Looking out over the valley beyond the Rockies,
south of the Oregon Trail and north of the Spanish Trail, hemmed in by mountains, and
only within reach of a few indigenous tribes, Brigham Young declared this was the place
for a fledgling religion to take root, for a civilization to bloom the desert, for a
city to rise not in the image of the Americ
an ideal, but the Mormon ideal. And for the perfect Mormon city, well fortunately
there was a blueprint, as Joseph Smith had drawn up a plat map for the city of Zion in
1833—the outlines of a pure city for the pure of heart to await the second coming. The new Salt Lake City residents did their
best to stick to it. Emanating from the temple’s location, they
laid out massive 660 x 660 foot blocks to accommodate church and municipal functions. Splitting these blocks were 132 foot-wide
streets orien
ted by cardinal directions. Farther from the core was housing, separated
from the street by twenty-foot sidewalks, then 25-foot offsets for yards and gardens. Beyond the housing was room for agriculture
along the city’s south. With such land pushed to the southern edge
of town, this city was intentionally dense for the time, ensuring that all saints were
connected pieces of a shared city. And as part of the shared city, the standard
for cleanliness and order was set high. The emphasis on well ma
intained gardens and
orchards, for instance, caught the eyes of travelers as early as 1850 and those of the
famed naturalist John Muir who visited the valley in 1877. While the buildings may be long gone, the
footprint remains. And if it were difficult from above to pin
down the city’s spiritual center, well there’s the street names, be it 100 South or 300 East,
each informing every visitor just how far they are from the temple. Salt Lake City, while the shining example,
is not the only city tha
t adopted such a layout. In Provo, follow the descending street numbers
and you’ll find the temple. The same goes in Logan. The same also goes in St. George. Cities more or less in the image of the religion’s
center that communicates the religion’s values through design, does after all, make
intuitive sense. But ultimately cities whose existence in the
first place can’t be explained solely through theology. The settlers weren’t just city builders,
they were state builders. The dream didn’t end w
ith a Mormon city,
but a Mormon state, the state of Deseret. With the US wrestling control of the southwest
from Mexico in 1848, Mormons were again within the confines of the US—a country whose laws
seemed to come down hard on Mormon practices like polygamy but didn’t seem to protect
them from mobs and militias who threatened and attacked the saints in the past. The best recourse, they figured, was statehood—something
not necessarily sovereign, but certainly not reliant on the rest of the nation
, either. And as they fought for the expansive Great
Basin state they called Deseret with politicians in Washington, they furthered their own self-sufficiency
with colony building of their own. Until 2022, St. George’s Utah Tech University
was called Dixie State. Its nickname, until recently, was the Rebels. Located in Washington county in southwestern
Utah, and very far from the American South, this region is called Utah’s Dixie. And while stances over names, mascots, and
statues have spurred e
ndless debate in the region, the moniker of Dixie dates back to
the founding of St. George as part of the church’s southern mission to grow warm weather
crops such as grapes, figs, and especially cotton. At the same time that church officials were
fighting for statehood on their terms, Brigham Young was pushing for self-sufficiency across
Mormon society that, in 1861, would only have tenuous connections to the American South
with the onset of the Civil War. Colonization as a strategy to self-suf
ficiency
wasn’t just a one-off, either. Mantua was founded to source flax, Minersville
was for various minerals, while Coalville was founded for what its name would suggest. Of course, there is no state of Deseret, and
the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 bringing goods and gentiles downplayed
the need for Mormon resource colonies and diversified the population. The arrival of troops, an army base, and a
generally increasing federal presence in the territory also ensured it’d sta
y tethered
to the nation going forward. But the towns founded and families relocated
in this state-building era still persist in such places. And so too does a social memory informed by
distrust fueled by federal incursion, skepticism informed by prior persecution, an understanding
to outsiders who have experienced similar persecution, and continued sense of pride
and purpose in their self-sufficiency. In its embrace of tourism, its ski industry
boom, then its brilliant marketing of its natural
parks, in its embrace of the Olympics,
and more recently the tech center and the hordes of Westerners relocating within the
state’s bounds, Utah’s fundamental singularity in its founding has been paved over bit by
bit. This makes aspects of the state’s differences,
its dearth of Dunkin Donuts or its watered down beers, seem quaint, trivial, and randomly
dispersed. But here opinion on LGBTQ or immigrant rights
are informed by the same worldview that opens the doors for a burgeoning dirty soda mar
ket,
one informed both by theology and a shared set of experiences now long mythologized that
no state neighboring it, nor really any state in the union can mirror. So ultimately, the seemingly anomalous actions
by the LDS church can be explained—it supports certain, limited LGBTQ rights, but typically
only when it will not directly affect its own discrimination towards the group. The church came out in vocal support for nondiscrimination
protections that directly excluded itself, yet is still l
argely opposed to same-sex marriage
and certainly does not facilitate them itself. And through the years, the church has barely
changed how it itself treats LGBTQ people, all it’s changed is its view on how others
should treat the group. This is pragmatic for LDS leadership’s mission
of preserving and expanding the strength of the church—public sentiment has changed
tremendously and the youngest cohorts of LDS members express majority support for marriage
equality. So the more it can be perceive
d as changing,
even without actually changing, the stronger the church. Similar logic underpins its support for expanded
rights for undocumented immigrants. Most Mormon men go on a two-year mission somewhere
around the world to spread the religion and convert individuals to the faith. A disproportionate number of the 400 or so
LDS missions are in South or Central America, given that this is the area of the world in
which the church has seen the most success. This is also the area of the world th
at is
the source of much of the undocumented immigration to the US, so, according to a study done on
the matter, missionaries actually gain a more pro-immigrant political view after a post
in the area, where they might see and experience the forces that drive undocumented immigration. And then in addition, the church seemingly
recognizes that it can’t be anti-immigrant and simultaneously find success in converting
new arrivals to the religion, so it has prioritized the strength of the church. In
a society built by the church, it's no
wonder that the church has strong, centralized control. That control appears focused first and foremost
on the church itself, so that creates these scenarios where Utah deviates from national
norms in nuanced ways that are convenient to the Mormon mission. The LDS church seemingly understands that
to be globally relevant, they have to be viewed as somewhat tolerant globally—not just by
the people of Utah. So Utah is a state that has all the legislative
abi
lity to pass some of the most conservative laws in the country, but its most powerful
institution understands that doing so would be against its own interests. The LDS church is small, so a certain degree
of inclusivity is a pragmatic necessity that often trumps any instinct to engage in exclusionary
tenets of the culture war. Weirdly, at times, this pulls Utah towards
the left, in the more progressive direction. So put simply: Utah’s differences stem from
the LDS church’s differences. It’s a re
latively tiny, relatively new religion
whose persistence is far less guaranteed than equivalents centered in the Vatican or Mecca. Therefore, their political influence is more
rooted in pragmatism. Other churches that influence politics in
other states operate at such scale that their political influence appears more firmly rooted
in historical inertia. LDS is a different church, and so Utah, itself,
is different. This topic was, at times, difficult to write
about since it relates to so many top
ics that are highly politicized in American media. With news outlets relying so heavily on advertising,
and therefore clicks for their revenue these days, they’re incentivized to write highly
partisan stories that create the kind of outrage that leads to readers spreading stories further
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te
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