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So, you're telling us that Utah is the closest thing to a theocracy in America

© Arthur C. Ruger

I've created this article at the request of a fellow feature writer, someone I respect who wanted to know. I've inserted my own perspective between excerpts from from an article published in Washington Monthly in June 2001 entitled

Theocracy in America: What Gentile life in Mormon Utah can teach us about church and state

by Stephanie Mencimer, at that time (and perhaps still) an editor of The Washington Monthly.

The entire article is much longer and more detailed than the few excerpts I've used.

"If you have lived, as I have, as a non-Mormon in a place whose population is 70 percent LDS, you would understand the real dangers in mixing too much church with state. I was born and raised in Utah, and my entire family still lives there. Every time I go back, from the minute I wade past the missionaries in the Salt Lake City airport to my first watered-down beer, I am struck by the fact that, while inmates may be able to duck Chuck Colson, the average Utah citizen has no hope of escaping the Mormons. - Stephanie Mencimer"

I was born and raised in the SouthEast corner of the state of Idaho; 40 miles east of the Wyoming state line and 40 miles North of the Utah state line (and 160 miles north of Salt Lake City). My home town was probably 99% Mormon including my family. Mormonism is - as I heard many times in my childhood - "not just a religion but a way of life."

"The LDS church proselytizes relentlessly. If it fails to convert you in this life, it will try to get you in the next one by baptizing the dead. (Even Holocaust victims have not been spared this posthumous rite.) A financial and political powerhouse, the LDS church not only dominates most of Utah's social service agencies, but also the government, the public schools, and the media. It even runs the shopping malls. As a result, the church shapes the life of everyone who lives in Utah, Mormon or not."

When I was in elementary school, every Wednesday school let out at 3:00 p.m. instead of the usual 4:00 p.m. and all the children were expected to go across the street to the church for "Primary", at that time an LDS training program for children.

In high school, I spent an hour each school day taking religion classes entitled "Seminary." Each year the class studied one of the 4 scriptural writings considered "canons" by the LDS Church: The Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon and The Book of Doctrine and Covenants (which was the framework for studying LDS Church History.)

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