The Church is NOT the Same Everywhere
A necessary part of deconstructing and healing from my negative experiences at Church has included a lot of reflection on regionalism, rejecting the idea that "the Church is the same everywhere." I want to rifle through some of the ways this isn't true.
To say the Church is the same everywhere assumes that the doctrines, policies, messaging, and practices have been universally spread, understood, and applied in every place the Church exists. It denies the very real influence different regions have on the church experience.
I joined the Church on the East Coast of the United States. I attended church meetings all over the mid-Atlantic, from D.C. to upstate New York, for many years. I have also spent many years of my life in Utah and Idaho, attending church in both places. I served my mission in Brazil in non-English speaking units. I served in rural and urban regions of São Paulo state, supporting leadership of districts and stakes of almost every size and configuration.
What I've learned from those experiences is that the Church is not the same everywhere. It can't be. It never will be. And that's not something we should even be trying to force upon people because that's the worst version of what the Church can be.
As an East coast native and a convert, I learned a deep and abiding mistrust of people from Utah and the Mormon Corridor. It was something I absorbed from the people around me from my earliest days in the Church. To describe the attitudes I witnessed, "Utah Mormons" are pedantic, straight-laced weirdos with no mental flexibility, no "real life" experience, who care more about orthodoxy and keeping up appearances than being a real person. I was taught not to take any of that too seriously because those folks grew up in "a bubble," had no idea what it was like to be me, and their insistence on being the default for the entire church was based on nothing but their own high opinion of themselves. Nothing else.
I've had the experience many times of being an East Coast Mormon and participating in a collective eye roll at some general authority visiting from Utah who was up at a pulpit, giving us a public spanking over something completely irrelevant to our lives.
I describe this to you to illustrate a reality. We were East Coast first. Mormons, second. We experienced them both simultaneously in such a way that they couldn't ever truly be separated. But in a choice between the two, East Coast wins out. The mistrust of outsiders. The refusal to be corrected by someone who doesn't know us. The cardinal rule of "minding your own business." The prioritization of being authentic over keeping up appearances. That's the culture of where I'm from. It profoundly shaped my Mormonism.
That same process takes place wherever the Church has a presence. There is a local culture that molds what the Church looks like wherever it has been planted that Salt Lake will never control. No matter what they do, they can't erase or overpower it. I know this because I've seen them try.
I watched them try to go to bat against the matcha drinkers in Brazil and lose. I've watched them try to inculcate Utah Mormonism through EFY and have the session director in Virginia go up and reject everything that was taught by CES teachers from Utah afterwards. I've watched members of the Church read the riot act to missionaries from the Intermountain West for being judgmental, disrespectful brats for trying to present themselves as the perfect rule for what the entire church should look like. That refusal to submit to one way of thinking is real. I've witnessed it happen all over the planet, in congregations large and small.
In deconstructing the ways I've been hurt at Church, I've realized I'm looking at it in an incomplete way. I wasn't hurt by a structural institution. I was hurt by people, whose vision and version of the Church they have experienced is completely different from mine.
Those conflicts aren't going to go away. And I'm realizing now that I don't want them to. Those conversations can become more healthy and constructive, but they should never disappear entirely.
They're how we build the house we all can live in together.
