Depending on who you ask, we're either fire-breathing zealots out to run whatever ward we move into or religious slackers only going to church because everyone else in the neighborhood does. The butt of jokes in Mormondom throughout the world, we of the Utah variety grow used to answering "Where are you from?" with a sense of chagrin, knowing the various incarnations of naiveté, insularity, or hokeyness that being a Utah Mormon evokes.
I'm as qualified as any to address what it means to come from a religious enclave, having grown up in Salt Lake City during the 60s and 70s, and having once asked a childhood friend of another faith, in complete sincerity, "Do Catholics drink milk?" Aside from a few families in the neighborhood, everyone we knew was a Latter-day Saint, and in the houses I walked past on the way home from school lived my Sunday School teachers, Primary classmates, past and current bishops, and other familiar figures from the ward. My ancestors crossed the plains with Brigham Young, settling in various parts of the state -- but up in Salt Lake, where my family lived, it was the Utah County Mormons, down in Provo and at BYU, who were the parochial ones. Even in Utah, we needed other Utah Mormons to make us feel more sophisticated.
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