Today’s letter is from Kris:
Do you have any advice or comments on a Catholic 12 yr old girl growing up in a small Utah community surrounded by 90 % Mormons ?
My daughter is struggling with all the girls turning 12 and going into the beehives ( 12 & 13 yr old girl ) young woman’s, and to summer camp. She was asked to go however, she is not feeling comfortable talking and doing plays about the Mormon religion since she is not a Mormon. She is having a hard time since the girls do not want anything to do with her.
thoughts, suggestions, any insights ?
thank you
I’m sorry that your daughter is struggling. Mormon children in predominatly Mormon areas such as Utah (and even sometimes in big cities) are warned not to spend time with non-Mormons. I’m sure she could get all the attention in the world from the girls if she would just look like she was interested in the church. But I wouldn’t recommend that at all.
While she might find Mormon friends, more often than not she will either be drenched with attention as a potential member, or shunned as a Non-Mormon “Gentile”. I went to a few different wards as a youth – some I was accepted, others the “clique” mentality was rampant, and since I wasn’t part of that clique, I had no friends. Typical teenage type behavior, really.
Personally, I *hated* MIA camp and thank Goodness I was only subjected to two years of it.
I imagine you don’t have a huge parish in that part of the world, but I would recommend looking into maybe sending your daughter to a reputable Catholic camp for an overnight weekend trip, or even taking a Mother-Daughter journey weekend, possibly staying at a convent or a retreat center. I don’t know much about camp programs for children or for Catholics, unfortunately.
I hope this helps.
April 24, 2007 at 10:46 pm
Hey Kris,
I’m a Mormon, here in Utah. I’m from a small town that is about 80-85% LDS. Because of the nature of our church, we don’t want to shun anyone or make anybody feel unwanted an alienated and so yes your daughter will be invited. There are about 3-4 girls in our town not LDS. Even though they come from different religions, still they go to activities with their friends and have just have fun. It’s understandable your daughter having reservations about going. We do believe diferently. And that does cause a problem. Hopefully, both sides can focus on our similarities rahter than on differences. Maybe what you could do is to inform your daughter your core beliefs in Christ. (She probably already is). Explain to her that she can be who she is and hold to what she believes versity of religion. Her friends will understand. I’ve enjoyed meetings at Baptist, Pentecostal, Catholic, and non-denominational churches. Listened, to what they said, recognized our differences but still received something good. It is a tough situation in your case. I gotta tell ya that I’ve tried to friends with people not LDS and most put up walls because “I am a Mormon.” Too bad, I feel like I could have had friends in them.
If your daughters friends have invited her, you don’t have to worry about cliques. She’ll have friends.
Good luck, Kris
April 24, 2007 at 11:42 pm
@Peach:
No, she won’t be accepted. If she doesn’t accept the Mormon church, she’ll be shunned. End of story. I’ve seen it done more times than I can count. Heck, as a youth, and a Young Adult, I did it.
Don’t try to paint a rosy picture on something that has so much potential to be rife with challenges and unhappiness for this Catholic child.
I’d no more expect her to allow her child to go to this church camp than I would expect a Mormon family to allow their child to go to Baptist Bible Camp or to a Catholic Spiritual Retreat.
April 25, 2007 at 1:47 pm
Kris,
I can’t explain M2C’s behavior. Visitor’s are always welcome to our church. They won’t be shunned if she doesn’t accept the church. I am not trying to paint a rosy picture. The situation would be different and hard but I am giving you the truth. M2C’s gotta vendetta against the church for some reason.
April 25, 2007 at 1:50 pm
Vendetta? That’s a bit of a strong word, don’t you think? I call them as I see them, nothing more.
Again, if the situation were turned around, if you were in a predominantly Baptist neighborhood, and your child was invited to a Baptist Vacation Bible School, would you let your child go?
Actually, I have a story about that. Maybe I’ll blog it.
April 25, 2007 at 9:32 pm
All but two of my Mormon friends from childhood left me when I converted.
April 26, 2007 at 1:58 pm
Mormon children in predominatly Mormon areas such as Utah (and even sometimes in big cities) are warned not to spend time with non-Mormons.
Kris what M2C said in the quote above is simply not true as a general matter. I do not know whether she has lived in Utah or not. It is possible that some individual Latter-day Saint would periodically teach his or her children that but it is certainly not standard. As a Latter-day Saint who has lived in both Utah and Texas, I can assure you that Latter-day Saints by and large do not teach their children not to spend time with non-LDS children. To the contrary, it is more common to find Latter-day Saints teaching their children to treat people of other faiths with love and kindness and to be friendly to them. I am guessing that if girls in the town where you live are treating your daughter poorly because she is not a Latter-day Saint, then the parents of those girls would be absolutely horrified to learn of it.
Please do not believe the cartoon caricature of Latter-day Saints that M2C is trying to create for you.
This should be reinforced for you, Kris, by reading M2C’s comment #2 above. From that comment you can see that she is unfairly reductivist in her assessment and treatment of Latter-day Saints. Also, she displays a perplexing inconsistency with her own experience when she states in comment # 2 that
And yet we read on her own blog in a post written on April 25, 2007 that “When I was a child, my mother enrolled me in two Vacation Bible Schools.”
Kris, ask yourself how this can be: M2C claims to you that a Mormon family won’t let their child go to a Baptist Bible Camp or a Catholic Spiritual Retreat when her own mother sent her to two of them.
Suffice it to say, Kris, that if M2C is telling you something that is demonstrably false when she says that Latter-day Saints in Utah warn their children “not to spend time with non-Mormons”, then the rest of her words should also not be accepted uncritically.
As you likely already know, however, from living in a predominantly LDS town, Latter-day Saints who are active are very involved in their Church. This is because the responsibility falls to them to actually run the local churches. I am aware that an unfortunate side-effect of this for people who are not LDS living in an area with a high concentration of Latter-day Saints is a potential appearance of clannishness. That is, the LDS neighbors are always at the Church for whatever reason and sometimes have little time to socialize with neighbors who are not in the Church simply because of the heavy responsibility of managing the Church and its activities at a local level. The result might seem in some cases like Latter-day Saints aren’t paying very much attention to their non-LDS neighbors, and this is regrettable. I assure you that your LDS neighbors would be absolutely delighted to see you attending their social activities at the Church but, having been a Latter-day Saint in Utah before, I am pretty sure that most of them think that you do not want them to invite you. They do not want to offend you by inviting you to their Church acitivities, but the reality is that most of the limited free time that they have is spent either attending or organizing such activities.
Some of your LDS neighbors might have invited you to some of these Church activities. Because religion is involved by virtue of the summer party or whatever being held on the Church premises, there is a high potential for misunderstandings that can lead to hurt feelings. It is possible that when your LDS neighbors invited you to a ward activity because they wanted to include you in the social life of the neighborhood, you turned them down because you did not want to be proselytized. This is entirely understandable — few people want to be proselytized by another religion. In the spirit of understanding, you should be aware that many or most of your LDS neighbors will probably not invite you again to a social function in the ward because they will be afraid of offending you or causing you to have a negative view of the Church. This has an ironic and unintended outcome because you will feel left out of the neighborhood life. This is because in small predominantly LDS communities ward parties can look more like neighborhood parties than like an LDS ward function. In fact, LDS wards in predominantly LDS communities often announce their socials as “neighborhood parties” in a directed effort to make non-LDS neigbors feel welcome at such ward parties. The irony is that because it is called a neighborhood party and usually the non-LDS neighbors do not go to them, then it seems like the neighborhood is living on without the non-LDS neighbors. I sense that to some this could seem like shunning although nothing is further from the truth. Ironically, in an effort to not offend their non-LDS neighbors, some Latter-day Saints simply won’t invite them to social functions once they have been turned down once. It backfires and this silence is interpreted sometimes, including purposefully by non-charitable critics, as clannishness. This places you in the unenviable position of having to accept invitations to ward social functions if you want to be fully integrated into the social life of your neighborhood, but I assure you that it is not malicious or anything of the sort.
April 26, 2007 at 3:07 pm
@John F:
You again?
Ok, so my mother sent me to Baptist camp and Lutheran camp. At the Lutheran camp, my religions beliefs were mocked for a week. At the Baptist camp, they tried to baptize me Baptist. And I doubt there would be this ecumenical love for a Catholic at a Mormon camp. Just a hunch.
My parents are extremely “liberal” Mormons. Both of them smoke and drank coffee (My mother, who is still living, still does), and we had periods of inactivity in my youth. My parents were converts, introduced to the church by my uncle when I was a small child. My mother was raised Baptist and saw no harm sending her child to a Baptist Vacation Bible School. Until they tried to baptize me.
I grew up in the “mission field” in Texas, and was not taught not to socialize with non-Mormons because if I did that I would have no friends to socialize with. However, I’ve met MANY Utah Mormons who were told as children not to socialize with non-Mormons. I’ve had multiple e-mails come to me with people saying, “My children has Mormon friends, but while they invite him over all the time, they are not allowed to spend time at my house. Why is that?”
Do your daughter’s Mormon friends come over to your house, or is your daughter always invited to come to theirs?
April 26, 2007 at 3:57 pm
My daughters don’t have any LDS friends. I live in England. I didn’t have any LDS friends growing up either. I grew up in Dallas.
When I lived in Salt Lake City, I would have never dreamed of restricting which of my daughter’s friends could come to our house and whose houses she could go to based on the friends’ religion. On the other hand, I am not at all confident that non-LDS people in my neighborhood would have tolerated my daughter’s presence as an LDS child. (You may or may not be aware that Latter-day Saints are treated extremely poorly in Salt Lake City proper.) Still, we had numerous of my daughters’ friends over to play while living in SLC — many or most of her friends from school were not LDS. I don’t fault your for not knowing of the open hostility that people have for Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City given that most Latter-day Saints who do not live in Salt Lake City have no idea about this either and simply assume that Salt Lake City is an LDS city. Although Latter-day Saints are the largest among religious minorities, they are not a majority in Salt Lake City.
As for areas outside of Salt Lake City within Utah, I can confidently say that if Latter-day Saint parents are warning their children not to spend time with non-LDS children, then such parents are in the fringe minority of all Latter-day Saints, whether active or inactive. In addition to living in SLC, I have lived in Provo. From my time in Provo I have made the observations that I passed on to Kris regarding being non-LDS in a predominantly LDS neighborhood. In the neighborhood where I lived, there were approximately five non-LDS families. Everyone else in the neighborhood was LDS and most of them were active. That means that a ward BBQ brought the entire neighborhood up to the church building for a social evening — except those non-LDS families. The ward started calling the parties neighborhood parties to emphasize that everyone was invited. I know for a fact that some of the neighbors invited some of the non-LDS neighbors specifically to the parties at first. When the non-LDS neighbors turned down the invitations, no more invitations were forthcoming. I suppose the reason for this is simply that the LDS neighbors were trying to avoid living up to the pushy stereotype that has been made of LDS people in Utah. So they simply don’t invite the non-LDS people in the neighborhood to anything at the Church anymore. The problem is that all of their free time is spent organizing and attending such activities, so there aren’t many private backyard BBQs that the non-LDS neighbors are being invited to. It is an interesting dynamic, moreso because the non-LDS neighbors invariably develop a sense that their LDS neighbors are leaving them out of the social life of the neighborhood. One solution is for the Church to have fewer social activities, but then one wonders if that is really an appropriate solution to a situation like this.
April 26, 2007 at 10:48 pm
I didn’t know this would strike a cord in so many people. My daughter does go over to other homes that are all Mormon. She even spends the night. There children also come over to my house and have spent the night. She socializes at b-day parties and other events. That is not the issue. My question was her feeling. She could be put into a situation that she would not want to be in. At that point who would stick up for her ? It is not in the interest of the people of the camp to be on my dauthers side. She is still young enough that she would not know how to hold her own in that type of enviroment. She would feel like she is being “picked” on.
April 27, 2007 at 10:01 am
Kris, then you have your answer. A Beehive camp might not be the best place for your daughter to spend her week. I do not think that not attending would weaken her friendships with the LDS girls — after all, they know she’s not LDS and I would guess they aren’t expecting her to come.
April 27, 2007 at 2:15 pm
It is still up to her if she would like to go. We have not said no yet. She will be the one to make up her mind if she would still like to go. I told her to take a week or so and think about it. The Moms and her friends would like to see her there. That is not the issue. It comes down to her feelings and understanding that there is a differance between the two religons.
May 1, 2007 at 4:02 pm
Kris,
Why not get her involved in the Diocese Youth Group? She can maintain her neighborhood friendships while making new ones and growing deeper in her faith.
http://www.dioslc.org/departments/detail.php?idx=49#Youth
May 2, 2007 at 11:04 pm
Thank you Steve for the information !
June 23, 2007 at 3:50 am
I’m an LDS girls camp leader and can say from experience that you really should have nothing to worry about. In our ward we’ve had nonmembers, inactives and staunchly religious girls all in the same cabin for a whole week and it has been wonderful. I only hope the girls in you ward are as loving and caring as ours have been to their friends who aren’t LDS. Last year we had two girls who were not members and they had just as much if not more fun than any of the other girls. It’s not like the LDS girls are out to convert anyone who enters the tent or cabin, they’re just there to have fun and not have to worry about the pressures of school and their peers. I suggest you let her go. Talk to one of her leaders and make arrangements for her to call you if she wants to come home. If they can’t work with you that way and let her have the freedom to leave if she’s uncomfortable, then perhaps you should keep her home.