We refer to it in our family as “the clown episode.” Over a dozen years ago our family visited a collection of rare Bibles open to the public as part of a Sunday service sponsored by Salt Lake City’s Evangelical churches, and my kids quit complaining when they saw balloons in the children’s class. Unfortunately, things went south when the hired clown berated my little boy for mentioning the Book of Mormon in a scripture discussion.
I’ll never know definitively what happened because I was with the adults listening to an excellent lecture on biblical translation. However, to my children’s chagrin, I sympathized with the clown’s dilemma: People of other faiths in Utah have long felt dominated by the LDS majority, and here we were bringing our threatening book of scripture into their territory. Still, the event was open to the public. Couldn’t the clown have been sensitive to various faith traditions that had wandered in, including ours?
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