The Myth of Monolithic Mormons
The Church is the same everywhere you go.
This mantra represents an idea that I once took great pride in. After all, Mormon scriptural canon is bursting at its seams with clear-cut commandments for sameness. Moses 7:18, a Mormon favorite, insists that the communal concept of Zion exists on the prerequisite of “one heart and one mind.” Doctrine & Covenants 38:27, another favorite, teaches, “Be one; and if ye are not one ye are not mine.”
There’s a cultural, theological unity that this idea affords The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mormons believe in a Jesus who died for everyone. And for the sake of establishing and upholding an identity of covenant-keeping, Jesus-following, peculiar people, we often feel a need to live a certain way and be a certain person in order to express a certain sense of Mormon-ness. Scriptures invite members of the Church to abandon their personal prejudices, political ideologies, and “alternative identities” to be united as one body: children of God. These ideas always seemed beneficial to me. Accomplishing this unity, especially for the sake of peacemaking, seemed a valuable venture for Latter-day Saints to pursue.
My thinking shifted a bit when I became a missionary. In several of my areas, I began to notice the difference between non-Utah Mormonism versus the brand of religiosity I grew up on in my arid pocket of red-rock southern Utah. In one congregation I served in, I felt jolted the first time I heard a member exclaim, “Good God!” and “Lord help us!” But her devotion to material discipleship was as strong, if not stronger, than my own. Most members view the sin of taking the Lord’s name in vain as a verbal transgression, but for her and other like-minded members, it is an action; the sin is insincere charity and apathy to the poor.
I remember my surprise seeing members who were lifelong smokers and borderline alcoholics serving in involved and engaged callings within their congregation, or the new convert in one branch who blessed the sacrament every Sunday and indulged in an occasional joint to ease chronic back pain. I’ll never forget the cigarette-smelling compassion of a primary teacher in one area who was a masterclass teacher of grace. She made sure the primary kids knew Jesus loved them, all while smoking half a pack a day. I began to ask myself if a Mormon could be faithful, “worthy” to serve in a calling, and be that publicly disobedient to the Word of Wisdom, one of our most visibly practiced and engrained commandments. According to the people in these congregations, the answer was an unequivocal, unapologetic yes.
Coming to BYU wasn’t my first time in a predominantly Mormon environment, but it was my first time in one that was so unexpectedly varied in the way people practiced and believed in Church norms. There’s a prevailing attitude that all BYU students are the same, but my experiences steadily continued to prove the opposite. I found that the more I collected stories and the more other people bore their souls to me, sharing their innermost beliefs and opinions, the more they all differed from one another in both negligible and significant ways.
This variety within the Church became more apparent to me when I formed a friendship with someone at BYU teetering on agnosticism. He was genuinely one of the kindest people I had ever met: sincere, involved in his ward, passionate about the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and simultaneously a theological outlier. Unsure of his future in the Church. Uncertain of the existence of a God who cared about him. But he was committed to charity with rare and precious authenticity. As I continued making connections with people like him––and people not like him––at BYU, I found that the paradigm of sameness that I once believed in was a mere house of cards, and I watched it tumble asunder with every friend I made.
Some felt a meaningful cultural tie to Mormonism while suffering under the crushing weight of an institution that demanded a testimony of a church they no longer believed in. Others loved going to church every week but felt frustrated by the conflation of political conservatism and religious sincerity. Some found profound value in certain doctrines and passionately rejected others. I found real disciples across the entire spectrum of Mormon belief at BYU, from the rigidly orthodox to the eager-to-leave and everything in between. But they all had something in common, and it wasn’t sameness. It was a character built on Christlike charity.
So, if this sameness wasn’t true, why did it seem true? Why did I believe in it for so long? I think there are two extremes insisting on this claim, holding up this fragmented concept with desperately blind fixation. Many people on the outside, looking in on our weird little Mormon paradigm, express this concept of sameness in their own way. You don’t have to scroll very far under Mormon-adjacent hashtags on any platform to find videos of interviewers asking BYU students if they would rather kill a puppy or take a shot of alcohol. Some students hesitate too long, and choke out taking the dog’s life over breaking their commitment to religious sobriety. Others quickly answer the latter over the former, either because they actually would or because they’re scared of humiliating themselves on social media. The other day, I found myself fishing through the top comments on one of these BYU student interview videos.
“I refuse to believe BYU is a real place.”
“I’m exmo, and I can confirm Mormons are insanely culty, especially at BYU.”
“Do any of these people even think for themselves?”
After a while, I stopped watching these videos every time they popped up on my phone. Not only was I frustrated by some of the students’ responses but I felt that even the questions––hollow hypotheticals asking students to either break deeply held religious convictions or commit a morally repugnant act––proliferated only because they produced an image of Mormons that some want to believe, one that depicts our small sect of restorationist Christianity as radically sheltered and humiliatingly, willfully ignorant to the world’s ills.
It appalled me to watch the growing rift between the Church’s image on social media platforms––one of dead-eyed, uneducated, simple-minded naivete, carefully curated in these BYU interviews––and the Mormons I knew and loved in my own life. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t my friends and family. It wasn’t the BYU I knew. It wasn’t the Church I belonged to. But it’s easier to believe that the Church is full of bigoted, brazen ineffectuals than a collection of diverse thinkers with their own unique relationships to Mormon beliefs.
Along with this unflattering social media spotlight is a growing call from many Church leaders for sameness. In a 2022 BYU devotional, President Dallin H. Oaks called for Latter-day Saints to be different from “the world,” and then clarified, “Being different does not suggest being different from your brothers and sisters who follow the Lord and His servants.” I remember leaving that devotional feeling confused by its tension with other messages about diversity inherent in the messages and doctrines of the Church. The Church’s website released “We Don’t Need to Be the Same to Be One” in 2021, a video highlighting all of the ways Mormons and other disciples of Christ could be different from each other and still united in their commitment to being like Jesus.
In the New Testament, none of Jesus’s disciples came from the same background. Matthew was a tax collector; Simon was likely an anti-imperialist activist; Peter was a fisherman by trade. Although all of these men were Jews, their individual conversions to Jesus’s teachings were not instantaneous; their religious journeys did not all look the same, and that’s what makes their stories so inspiring and personal. This diversity continued on through hundreds of years of Christian tradition, even manifesting in the Joseph Smith era of early Mormonism. To insist that it is not acceptable to be different from others who “follow the Lord and His servants” is to reject hundreds of years of Christian diversity.
On the outside of the Church, thousands of faceless strangers on social media are establishing an idea that Mormons are all the same. But they don’t know the cigarette-smoking primary teacher from my mission, or my friends at BYU who walk a tightrope of disbelief and faithful devotion to God. On the inside of the Church, I’m constantly told by bishops and general authorities and prophets of God that the Church is the same everywhere. But they don’t seem to acknowledge that it differs in regional and individual ways––that one person’s Mormon heresy is another person’s Mormon core value. There is a suffocating relentlessness inherent in both of these views, and they both fail to acknowledge the validity and value of Mormon diversity.
It’s clearer to me every day that the most staunch insisters of institutional uniformity exist both in and outside the Church, creating a hollow, harmful, false abstraction. It’s an inaccurate image of Mormons that intentionally erases the beautiful complexity of my faith and the faith of other Mormons I know. Do they know that some of us are queer? Do they know that some of us are emphatically progressive? Do they know that we study feminism, secularism, and race in our humanities courses and evolution in our biology classes at BYU?
I worry that I will forever be stuck in the cognitive dissonance of recognizing the religious, cultural, and personal pluralism within the Church while continuing to hear from both polarities that “Mormon” only looks one way. Maybe it’s that very lie that keeps us glued together. Maybe we insist on sameness because we feel that it’s the only thing that defines our religious identity. Certainly, a defined sense of identity is important to any culture––religious or otherwise. But a ward in rural Tennessee will look, feel, and act vastly different than a branch in Ghana––and it should, because adaptation and cultural fusion is not just normal but exquisite.
Theological and interpretive diversity seems to always come dead last in acceptable forms of variation. Some think it is blasphemous to find power––rather than performance––in a father giving his newborn a baby blessing even though he and his family never attend church. Too many queer Mormons who have been shunned and shamed by friends and family for finding their footing in their Mormon identity while also pursuing connective and meaningful relationships with those they are attracted to. Many would cry heresy at someone rejecting the historical veracity of the Book of Mormon while simultaneously enjoying its thematic, literary, and theological depth. Students at BYU who don’t believe in God or a church but still attend have to constantly face the tired question: “Why do you even go there?” There’s a sense of threat seeing others engage with the institutional, cultural, and ritual aspects of your belief system in their own way––especially if they don’t believe in them the same way you do. But Jesus invites all to come unto Him. Can the Church really be His if it doesn’t operate under the same embrace?
The Church isn’t the same everywhere you go, and I’m grateful for that. When we stifle our religious community in blanket statements of asphyxiating insistence, we neglect the raging romantic roots of its tradition––roots that insist upon an individual’s ability to receive personal revelation and act with free agency. It’s these roots that have produced a Mormon paradigm full of differences, and if we can’t reckon with those differences and cherish them wholeheartedly, then we will suffocate under the weight of a misrepresentation that will eventually supplant our religious identity, leaving behind a cold and colorless monolith that was never meant to be there in the first place.
I hope Mormons can have the bravery and compassion to insist on differences within, however threatening or scary they may seem. I hope we can do better at creating spaces in our hearts to love all who fall along the entirety of the Mormon belief––and disbelief––spectrum. I hope that those who insist on Mormon singularity can take a step back, consider the picture in its wholeness, and critically examine whether it’s truly a canvas of black-and-white thinking painted by black-and-white people.
Our sameness doesn’t need to manifest in our orthodoxy; our sameness can be radical charity in the face of hate. I feel more and more every day that the sustainability of the future of this religion depends on a shift in the way we allow or prevent people to be fellow Saints among us. It would be a vain mistake to worship the idol of uniformity over the Jesus that lived and died for us all.