When I was a kid in Southern California, it was obvious to me that there were two kinds of people in the world: Mormons and the rest. As I got older, the rest became more differentiated; there were Catholics and Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Baptists, Syrian Orthodox, Church of Christers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists and even some people who claimed to have no religion at all. I was puzzled at one family’s celebration of Christmas when they apparently didn’t really even belong to any particular religion that I could discern.
As I attended high school and early-morning seminary, I began to notice that there was more than one kind of Mormon in the world as well. Some Mormons had such different attitudes and beliefs from me that I sometimes felt like I had grown up in a different church. Also, some Mormons I knew made strange comments, like whites shouldn’t date those of other races because the prophets have counseled us not to, or Americans shouldn’t pay income taxes because the prophets said not to. To my horror, as one raised by a baby-boomer mom to respect Martin Luther King and John Kennedy, some even used statements of the BRETHREN to condemn the civil rights movement as communist-led and hence Satanic. Continue reading…
