Last night, we arrived to Korol Seniors' household in Las Vegas after simul-roadtrips -- Korol Seniors drove for three weeks from Maine to Vegas; and we, Korol Juniors, up to Canada and back, most recently through my home state: Utah. Both sets of Korols have seen a lot of beauty along the way but Korol Seniors told us that they believe that Utah is still the most beautiful state. And I might have to agree. I love many other states -- obviously California -- but Utah's diversity and vistas make it a top contender.
Our last few days in Utah didn't really include the dramatic landscapes of Southern Utah. Instead, the trip was concentrated along thirty or forty miles of the Wasatch Front mountains and I was reminded of (or perhaps noticed for the first time) the concentrated geologic diversity in those canyons. Before this past trip, the canyons of the Wasatch Front somewhat blurred together in my mind but this week, but over the last week or so we saw the huge range that the Wasatch Front have to offer.
We climbed the grey pocketed limestone of American Fork Canyon, hiked through the granite-like quartz monzite of Little Cottonwood Canyon to White Pine Lake, hiked on sparkly quartzite to the top of Mount Olympus near the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon, and I climbed with my brother Paul and his daughter on the rounded and steep cream walls of Ferguson Canyon while Wilson mountain biked the layered conglomerate rock of City Creek Canyon and Ensign mountain with my brother Dave. I was surprised by how different the rock was or looked across such a small area. All this diveristy found in less than forty miles, as the crow flies.
The geologic variance in such a small geogragraphic area made me think about Utah's religious variance and my own family's variance. In Utah, thinking about religious variance is often a binary exercise: Mormon or not Mormon. In my family, it is binary: four of us, including me, are no longer Mormon, and four of us are Mormon. All of my Dad's eight children grew up Mormon but at different stages of our adolescence and adulthood, each of us decided whether we would believe in and adhere to the Mormon faith.
Counterintuitively, this decision doesn't explain who lives in Utah -- currently four of us live outside of Utah (two Mormons and two non-Mormons) and four of us live inside Utah (two Mormons and two non-Mormons). Our percentages are not that far off of the Utah percentage as a whole -- according to a 2012 Salt Lake Tribune article, 62.2% of Utah's population is Mormon. The fact that Mormons compose the majority of the population isn't surprising. But it may be surprising that being Mormon in my family is not indicative of whether you will or will not live in Utah. I am hopeful the my family's lack of correlation between being Mormon and living in or out of Utah is a trend in Utah, as well as a larger trend in the USA: that other people's religions (or lack therof), don't have to dominate a community and correspondingly how members of the community perceive each other. It's about time, as the current 113th US Congress was the first to include a Buddhist in the Senate, a Hindu in either chamber, and to have the first member of Congress to describe her religion as "none".
Viva diversity and feeling comfortable to be any or none religion!
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