https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/01/the-most-american-religion/617263/
There is something classically Mormon about this aversion to wallowing.
In the past few years, Mormons have become a subject of fascination for their surprising resistance to Trumpism. Unlike most of the religious right, they were decidedly unenthusiastic about Donald Trump. From 2008 to 2016, the Republican vote share declined among Latter-day Saints more than any other religious group in the country. And though Trump won back some of those defectors in 2020, he continued to underperform. Joe Biden did better in Utah than any Democrat since 1964, and Mormon women likely played a role in turning Arizona blue.
When Donald Trump called for a ban on Muslim immigration, the Church, hearing an eerie historical echo, issued a blistering condemnation. Later, when Trump signed an executive order allowing cities and states to veto refugee resettlement, Utah was the first red state in the country to request more refugees.
I quickly realized that my knack for playing the likable Mormon would come in handy in the Bible Belt. Likability, it turned out, was a big part of the job. With our black name tags and IBM-salesman uniforms, missionaries were walking billboards for the Church. We were trained to take rejection in stride, to cling to our good-natured wholesomeness no matter what. When a Baptist minister condemned you to hell, you smiled politely and complimented his landscaping. When somebody hurled a Big Gulp at you from a passing car, you calmly collected the cup and looked for the nearest trash can. Once, in the seedy apartment complex where I lived with another missionary, we made the mistake of leaving our laundry unattended, and returned to find it drenched in urine. Not wanting to make a scene, we shrugged and pumped more quarters into the washing machine.We spent most of our time teaching prospective converts about the faith or offering English classes for local Spanish speakers. On slow days, we’d go door-to-door passing out pamphlets and copies of the Book of Mormon. This was not a particularly efficient method for finding future Mormons, but we looked for small victories. I skimmed an old copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People, and practiced jokes that I could deploy on strangers’ doorsteps. We took consolation in these pleasant, fruitless interactions, telling ourselves that we’d improved the Mormon brand, however slightly. “Planting seeds,” we called it.
reassure his shaken congregation. “You are children of God,” he thundered. “Never, never let them make you feel like less.”
Unlike most American Christians, Latter-day Saints don’t get to choose whom they go to church with. They’re assigned to congregations based on geographic boundaries that are often gerrymandered to promote socioeconomic diversity. And because the Church is run almost entirely by volunteers, and every member is given a job, they have to work together closely. Patrick Mason, a historian of religion, calls this “the sociological genius of Mormonism”—in a society of echo chambers and bowling alone, he says, the Church has doubled down on an old-fashioned communitarianism.
Though Utah is very conservative, its residents generally don’t romanticize rugged individualism or Darwinian hyper-capitalism. It has the lowest income inequality in the country, and ranks near the top for upward mobility.