Is it time for us to become a Mormon country?

I went to school and taught for a while in Utah.  As a non-Mormon, I was always chaffing under the peculiarities and control of Utah by the Church.  Generally, any business with Zion or Deseret in its name was owned by the Church.  Weird strictures, beliefs and customs (temple garments, no coffee, state-owned liquor stores, white salamanders, golden plates, seer-stones, polygamy by splinter sects, Jesus in America, etc.).  It was like living in a different country.

In retrospect, however, the worst places in Utah were far safer than life in DC (where I was panhandled every day only a couple blocks from the White House), St Louis, Kansas City, Denver, Dallas, NY, Sacramento, San Francisco, Las Vegas or any other major city I lived or worked in.  And I lived in a lot of places.

Moving back to Colorado I witnessed the meltdown of Ted Haggard, but never saw such things among the practicing Mormans I knew in Utah.  I have to say that the Mormans I knew largely “walked their talk” more so than the fundamentalists I’ve known in my life.

I’ve also been involved in community volunteer projects here in Colorado and find that the local LDS Church regularly gives back to the community in the form of an army of volunteers who regularly participate.  By comparison and in my experience, other major churchs in the area are absent and much less community oriented.