Why Utah is So Weird

Mormons.

Mormons made Utah weird—that’s the answer. 

In a few more words: a century and a half of Mormon voting majority in an isolated,

insular state made Utah anomalous compared to the country of which it’s a part.

And in a few more words than that, well: on first glance, Utah appears the intuitive average

of its neighbors—it’s a melange of the red-rock deserts of Nevada and Arizona; the

deep-red politics of Idaho and Wyoming; the glitzy ski towns of Colorado and Wyoming;

and the ruggedly independent, outdoors-loving culture of the entire mountain west region. 

But it’s also got some things its neighbors do not.

It’s got… drive-thru soda shops.

Utah pioneered this style of shop where instead of getting coffee or tea one gets so-called,

“dirty-soda”—carbonated drinks mixed with assortments of syrups, creams, or juices

to make a cocktail-like concoction.

In Salt Lake City, Swig, a leading dirty-soda chain, has nearly as many locations as sector-dominating

Starbucks.

The reason for this is that most of the half of the state that are members of the Church

of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Mormons—follow the Word of Wisdom: purported

revelations from God delivered to the church’s founder, Joseph Smith.

Along with alcohol and tobacco, the text prohibits so-called “hot drinks” which is interpreted

by the church to mean coffee and tea, regardless of whether they’re actually hot.

Therefore, to fill the role that coffee shops do elsewhere, Utah entrepreneurs started selling

dirty soda instead and it’s become such a hit that Swig has now spread to Idaho, Arizona,

Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas as well. 

Other anomalies stem from the same text.

For example, up until the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, public bars were technically not

allowed—at all.

Anything that functioned like a bar had to run as a private members club and sell $5

“temporary memberships” to allow entry.

Restaurants, meanwhile, could have physical structures that looked and operated like bars,

but only if they had so-called “Zion curtains.”

State alcohol laws prohibited establishments operating with restaurant alcohol licenses

from allowing alcoholic drinks to be prepared in view of customers, under the logic that

this would help prevent excessive drinking and the normalization of alcohol for those

under 21.

Similarly, waiters were prohibited from proactively offering diners a wine list, and could only

furnish it when asked.

While these laws were eventually eased, Utah still has some of the strictest alcohol laws

in America: it’s the only state with a 0.05% drunk-driving blood-alcohol content limit,

rather than the standard, looser 0.08%; and all but low-alcohol beers and beverages are

sold exclusively through state-run stores with limited opening hours. 

In fact, all of these stores are closed each July 24th.

While a perfectly normal-day for the rest of the United States, each July 24th in Utah

is what’s called Pioneer Day—it celebrates the arrival of the first group of Mormon settlers

to the Salt Lake valley.

Across the state, this is celebrated almost as a second Independence Day, with main-street

parades, backyard parties, and evening fireworks.

Fittingly, and perhaps pointedly, to accommodate this extra holiday Utah does not typically

celebrate Columbus Day each October—the holiday to commemorate the arrival of the

Italian explorer to the Americas.

Rather than celebrate European arrival to the Americas, they celebrate Mormon arrival

to Utah. 

The wall between church and state in Utah can be, at times, blurry.

For example, each of Utah’s public high schools are allowed to permit, upon parent’s

request, up to an hour of so-called “released time,” when students can learn off-campus.

In practice, this means time for religious education.

Utah law includes a litany of rules to make it clear that these off-campus religious classes

are not technically part of the public education system, since that would likely violate the

first amendment.

But day-to-day, Latter Day Saints seminary classes slide into the Utah high school experience

almost seamlessly.

At Bonneville High School near Ogden, for example, the seminary is right across the

street and it schedules its classes to correspond with the high school schedule—so for fourth

period, for example, one just walks across the street and learns about Joseph Smith.

In fact, it’s almost impossible to find a Utah high school without an adjacent seminary.

At Dixie High School in St George, in fact, the seminary sits in the exact center of the

campus—while technically on its own property and fenced off, its main entrance faces the

high school’s parking lot, rather than its own, and it sits on the direct path between

the high school and its baseball fields.

It is quite literally unavoidable.

Considered an inevitability, many new high schools in the state draw a location for the

seminary into their original architectural plans and count on selling the land to the

church without a second thought.

After all, a strong majority of the Utah voting public does not consider this coziness between

church and state controversial—it’s just simply convenient.

Among the US’ two major political parties, the Republican side consistently supports

a softer interpretation of the first amendment as it relates to the separation of religion

and government—for example, the majority of Republicans polled believe city governments

should be allowed to put religious symbols on public property, while 27% believe the

Federal Government should flat-out stop enforcing the separation of church and state entirely.

So with a strong, deeply-religious voting majority, it’s perhaps no surprise that

Utah is an incredible Republican-party stronghold. 

Now, Utah is certainly known as a red-state.

It feels right at home with its conservative neighbors in Idaho, Montana, and the Dakotas,

but perhaps the part that would surprise is how they compare.

Based on self-reported party affiliation, Utah is the most Republican of these states.

In fact, among all states, Utah has the second highest portion of its population identifying

as Republican, and the second-lowest portion identifying as Democrats.

Now, this statistic almost certainly surprises, and with good reason: Utah does not look,

feel, or even act like the second-most conservative state in the nation. 

Across the US, there is a consistent correlation between urbanization rate and party affiliation:

the urban areas are Democrat strongholds, with about 62% of voters going for the party,

while rural areas lean Republican, gaining 54% of voters.

Therefore, on a state by state level, the states with low urbanization rates tend to

have high portions of their electorate voting for the Republican party, and vice-versa.

Yet Utah is the seventh most urbanized state in the country—more than 4/5ths of the state

lives in the Salt Lake City metro area, meaning it completely bucks this trend. 

Another broken correlation in Utah relates to LGBTQ rights.

The Public Religion Research Institute conducts a large, annual survey that includes a question

about support for nondiscrimination protection for LGBTQ people—as in, whether there should

be legal protections preventing landlords, for example, from denying a lease to an individual

based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Fascinatingly, 86% of those surveyed in Utah were in support of such laws.

The only state to boast higher support was Hawaii, meaning Utah—the second most Republican

state in the nation—was more in support of making discrimination against queer people

illegal than the people of California, New York, Massachusetts, or any other liberal

stronghold.

And this does not appear a statistical anomaly.

After all, in 2015, the Utah legislature did something no-other Republican-controlled legislature

had ever done: they passed a bill expanding nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people.

From then on, sexual orientation and gender identity became protected classes for matters

of employment and housing.

The bill in question, SB296, was dubbed “the Utah Compromise” since it had simultaneous

support by the Republican party and the Church of Ladder Day Saints and organizations like

the ACLU and the Human Rights Campaign.

Of course, it was a true compromise—notably, the bill excludes religious organizations

and their affiliates like schools and hospitals from the same nondiscrimination regulations,

meaning a religious school could theoretically fire a teacher, for example, based solely

on their gender identity.

And in practice, this means that Brigham Young University, run by the LDS church, can continue

its codified prohibition of “same-sex romantic behavior” by students.

But simultaneously, the bill isn’t an isolated case of support for certain LGBTQ rights in

Utah—in 2020, it once again became the first state with a Republican-controlled legislature

to ban conversion therapy in minors, and this bill was once again passed with the support

of both the LDS church and LGBTQ advocacy organizations. 

And Utah’s anomalous support for policies that might elsewhere be perceived as liberal

is not restricted to the matter of LGBTQ rights.

Utah has also long been softly in support of expanded rights for undocumented immigrants.

In 2002, it started to allow undocumented immigrants who graduated from high school

in the state to pay in-state college tuition rates at Utah public universities.

In 2005, it passed a law that allowed for the issuance of driver’s licenses to the

group.

Still today, it’s one of only twenty with such a law, and is the only one of these that

went red in the last Presidential election.

In 2019, Utah then tweaked the maximum penalty for misdemeanor crimes to make it easier for

undocumented immigrants to avoid deportation by Federal authorities, in 2022 they made

it so fewer employers were required to check a new hire’s immigration status, and in

2023 they expanded eligibility for taxpayer-funded health insurance to certain children of undocumented

immigrants.

This culminated in this brief memo by the director of the US Immigration and Customs

Enforcement’s Salt Lake City Field Office complaining that Utah’s jails were not holding

those arrested by the Federal immigration authorities, and therefore that they were

officially designating Utah a “sanctuary state.”

Utah’s leaders quickly shot back in sharp rebuke, but this memo was saying the quiet

part out loud: for all its statistical conservatism, Utah’s actual policies are far more nuanced. 

Now, Utah is far from a liberal bastion—the legislature overrode a veto by the governor

to pass a ban on transgender girls in women’s sports; it passed a near-total abortion ban,

even if it was later blocked by the state Supreme Court; and like many red states it

passed a series of laws allowing for the banning of individual books deemed objectionable from

school libraries.

But at the same time, polls conducted in Utah indicate broad support for gun-law reform,

for expanded sex-ed beyond abstinence, and even for free bus service in Salt Lake City.

Utah politics break norms.

Most policies in America sit on a spectrum where the strength of a given party’s hold

on a state’s legislature correlates cleanly with the likelihood of passing traditionally

left or right-leaning laws, yet Utah just does not sit on these spectrums.

It’s like an alternate reality, it exists outside the United States’ norms.

It’s like they built a completely different society.

But that means they’ve succeeded, because that’s exactly why Brigham Young and his

first group of pioneers came to the Salt Lake valley. 

You can learn a lot about a place by its names.

If one starts here, at Last Camp Site Monument, then follows Emigration Road west, passing

Donner Hill—where the ill-fated party spent weeks working around rugged terrain long ago

on the right, then passing the Hogle Zoo—the region’s largest, and very much a piece

of the present—on the left, there’s a small outcropping where a 60-foot tall monument

rises from the foothills.

By its grandeur, its granite and bronze composition, and its sheer size, it wouldn’t be hard

to imagine this standing some 1,800 miles or 2,900 kilometers away on the National Mall.

But look closer at the characters enshrined and it becomes clear that this celebrates

less the westward expansion of a nation, and more the birth of a new one.     

It was here, or somewhere very near here, that a sick, wagon-bound, travel-weary Brigham

Young, the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, looked

over the Salt Lake Valley and proclaimed that this was the place. 

The place for what exactly, becomes clearer after considering what the region lacked in

July of 1847.  

Before the shores of the Great Salt Lake served as the Saints’ shining city, the lake was

a myth.

Fur trappers said they had seen it, but told stories that were hard to believe.

It was massive, it was salty, it didn’t seem to have an outflow, and perhaps it instead

drained through some sort of whirlpool feeding a subterranean river.

Like the towering heights of the Rockies and the absurd depths of the Grand Canyon, it

was properly a figment of a frightening American frontier.

Following the fur-trading storytellers who bounced from fort to fort, though, was the

pathfinding, mythbusting, military man John C. Fremont.

Tracing the lake’s banks, rafting its waters, and touching foot on its islands, Fremont

found the Great Salt Lake large in size, but less remarkable than lore had led on.

It had fairly reasonable agricultural potential, and thus fairly reasonable settlement potential.  

His following report and published maps of his journey south of the Oregon trail began

to fill in a map that to Anglo-American eyes had long been blank.

These journeys, sponsored by a westward bound United States, were understandably of interest

in the halls of Washington DC.

Curiously, they were also of interest to an increasingly nervous religious minority stationed

in western Illinois.

  Now, Salt Lake City was not preordained in

Mormon theology as any sort of holy land in the religion’s founding.

The Great Salt Lake, after all, had yet to even appear on a map when Joseph Smith discovered

the golden plates—the foundational moment of the religion.

But something odd began to happen in the wake of Fremont’s trips into the Salt Lake region—with

increasing regularity, accounts and excerpts began to appear in the small town newspaper

of Nauvoo, where the Mormons had escaped to from Missouri, and increasingly believed they

now needed to escape from. 

What made the flat lands along the Wasatch range so alluring was the fact that through

the 1840s it hardly existed on maps or in American minds.

Unlike Illinois, Texas, California, or Oregon, it was devoid of Anglo American settlements,

overland trails, booming trade, or the rules, laws, regulations, federal administrators,

and agents that oversaw such budding developments.

On the fringes of two young countries, each seemingly uninterested in the territory, a

religion on the run from persecution and one bent on building a civilization in the image

of their beliefs found opportunity.

Looking out over the valley beyond the Rockies, south of the Oregon Trail and north of the

Spanish Trail, hemmed in by mountains, and only within reach of a few indigenous tribes,

  Brigham Young declared this was the place for a fledgling religion to take root, for

a civilization to bloom the desert, for a city to rise not in the image of the American

ideal, but the Mormon ideal.  

And for the perfect Mormon city, well fortunately there was a blueprint, as Joseph Smith had

drawn up a plat map for the city of Zion in 1833—the outlines of a pure city for the

pure of heart to await the second coming.

The new Salt Lake City residents did their best to stick to it.

Emanating from the temple’s location, they laid out massive 660 x 660 foot blocks to

accommodate church and municipal functions.

Splitting these blocks were 132 foot-wide streets oriented by cardinal directions.

Farther from the core was housing, separated from the street by twenty-foot sidewalks,

then 25-foot offsets for yards and gardens.

Beyond the housing was room for agriculture along the city’s south.

With such land pushed to the southern edge of town, this city was intentionally dense

for the time, ensuring that all saints were connected pieces of a shared city.

And as part of the shared city, the standard for cleanliness and order was set high.

The emphasis on well maintained gardens and orchards, for instance, caught the eyes of

travelers as early as 1850 and those of the famed naturalist John Muir who visited the

valley in 1877. 

 While the buildings may be long gone, the footprint remains.

And if it were difficult from above to pin down the city’s spiritual center, well there’s

the street names, be it 100 South or 300 East, each informing every visitor just how far

they are from the temple.    

Salt Lake City, while the shining example, is not the only city that adopted such a layout.

In Provo, follow the descending street numbers and you’ll find the temple.

The same goes in Logan.

The same also goes in St. George.

Cities more or less in the image of the religion’s center that communicates the religion’s

values through design, does after all, make intuitive sense.

But ultimately cities whose existence in the first place can’t be explained solely through

theology. 

The settlers weren’t just city builders, they were state builders.

The dream didn’t end with a Mormon city, but a Mormon state, the state of Deseret.

With the US wrestling control of the southwest from Mexico in 1848, Mormons were again within

the confines of the US—a country whose laws seemed to come down hard on Mormon practices

like polygamy but didn’t seem to protect them from mobs and militias who threatened

and attacked the saints in the past.

The best recourse, they figured, was statehood—something not necessarily sovereign, but certainly not

reliant on the rest of the nation, either.

And as they fought for the expansive Great Basin state they called Deseret with politicians

in Washington, they furthered their own self-sufficiency with colony building of their own. 

Until 2022, St. George’s Utah Tech University was called Dixie State.

Its nickname, until recently, was the Rebels.

Located in Washington county in southwestern Utah, and very far from the American South,

this region is called Utah’s Dixie.

And while stances over names, mascots, and statues have spurred endless debate in the

region, the moniker of Dixie dates back to the founding of St. George as part of the

church’s southern mission to grow warm weather crops such as grapes, figs, and especially

cotton.

At the same time that church officials were fighting for statehood on their terms, Brigham

Young was pushing for self-sufficiency across Mormon society that, in 1861, would only have

tenuous connections to the American South with the onset of the Civil War.

Colonization as a strategy to self-sufficiency wasn’t just a one-off, either.

Mantua was founded to source flax, Minersville was for various minerals, while Coalville

was founded for what its name would suggest. 

Of course, there is no state of Deseret, and the arrival of the transcontinental railroad

in 1869 bringing goods and gentiles downplayed the need for Mormon resource colonies and

diversified the population.

The arrival of troops, an army base, and a generally increasing federal presence in the

territory also ensured it’d stay tethered to the nation going forward.

But the towns founded and families relocated in this state-building era still persist in

such places.

And so too does a social memory informed by distrust fueled by federal incursion, skepticism

informed by prior persecution, an understanding to outsiders who have experienced similar

persecution, and continued sense of pride and purpose in their self-sufficiency.  

In its embrace of tourism, its ski industry boom, then its brilliant marketing of its

natural parks, in its embrace of the Olympics, and more recently the tech center and the

hordes of Westerners relocating within the state’s bounds, Utah’s fundamental singularity

in its founding has been paved over bit by bit.

This makes aspects of the state’s differences, its dearth of Dunkin Donuts or its watered

down beers, seem quaint, trivial, and randomly dispersed.

But here opinion on LGBTQ or immigrant rights are informed by the same worldview that opens

the doors for a burgeoning dirty soda market, one informed both by theology and a shared

set of experiences now long mythologized that no state neighboring it, nor really any state

in the union can mirror.

So ultimately, the seemingly anomalous actions by the LDS church can be explained—it supports

certain, limited LGBTQ rights, but typically only when it will not directly affect its

own discrimination towards the group.

The church came out in vocal support for nondiscrimination protections that directly excluded itself,

yet is still largely opposed to same-sex marriage and certainly does not facilitate them itself.

And through the years, the church has barely changed how it itself treats LGBTQ people,

all it’s changed is its view on how others should treat the group.

This is pragmatic for LDS leadership’s mission of preserving and expanding the strength of

the church—public sentiment has changed tremendously and the youngest cohorts of LDS

members express majority support for marriage equality.

So the more it can be perceived as changing, even without actually changing, the stronger

the church.

Similar logic underpins its support for expanded rights for undocumented immigrants.

Most Mormon men go on a two-year mission somewhere around the world to spread the religion and

convert individuals to the faith.

A disproportionate number of the 400 or so LDS missions are in South or Central America,

given that this is the area of the world in which the church has seen the most success.

This is also the area of the world that is the source of much of the undocumented immigration

to the US, so, according to a study done on the matter, missionaries actually gain a more

pro-immigrant political view after a post in the area, where they might see and experience

the forces that drive undocumented immigration.

And then in addition, the church seemingly recognizes that it can’t be anti-immigrant

and simultaneously find success in converting new arrivals to the religion, so it has prioritized

the strength of the church. 

In a society built by the church, it's no wonder that the church has strong, centralized

control.

That control appears focused first and foremost on the church itself, so that creates these

scenarios where Utah deviates from national norms in nuanced ways that are convenient

to the Mormon mission.

The LDS church seemingly understands that to be globally relevant, they have to be viewed

as somewhat tolerant globally—not just by the people of Utah.

So Utah is a state that has all the legislative ability to pass some of the most conservative

laws in the country, but its most powerful institution understands that doing so would

be against its own interests.

The LDS church is small, so a certain degree of inclusivity is a pragmatic necessity that

often trumps any instinct to engage in exclusionary tenets of the culture war.

Weirdly, at times, this pulls Utah towards the left, in the more progressive direction. 

So put simply: Utah’s differences stem from the LDS church’s differences.

It’s a relatively tiny, relatively new religion whose persistence is far less guaranteed than

equivalents centered in the Vatican or Mecca.

Therefore, their political influence is more rooted in pragmatism.

Other churches that influence politics in other states operate at such scale that their

political influence appears more firmly rooted in historical inertia.

LDS is a different church, and so Utah, itself, is different. 

This topic was, at times, difficult to write about since it relates to so many topics that

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