Editor’s note • This story is part of a six-part series on the impact of Utah’s religious divide on neighborhoods. Read the previous installments on the divide’s effect on children, block parties, even snow shoveling, and how the pressure to proselytize can impact relationships.
For some Utahns, the religious divide becomes too much. Tired of feeling as though every interaction — from conversations with co-workers to parent-teacher conferences — is somehow refracted through the prism of Latter-day Saint membership, they pack their bags, load up the U-Haul and kiss the Beehive State goodbye.
Among those to make a clean break are Lauren and Ethan Ryan.
Before moving to Logan in 2020 from Missoula, Montana, the couple were warned repeatedly about the culture shock they were in for upon their arrival.
They were undeterred. They bought a place and sought out jobs and friends, determined to make their choice work.
They lasted three years before returning to Missoula.
“It is odd to say, since I am a straight, white, female, I can fit in almost anywhere,” Lauren said, “but Logan was the first place that I truly felt I didn’t fit in or belong.”
Neighbors, she recalled, were “outwardly friendly and welcoming,” but she always sensed an undercurrent of “judgment” when people found out the couple were not part of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
For Paul Murphy, on the other hand, it wasn’t so much a sense that his Latter-day Saint associates were judging him that drove him away. Rather, it was the awareness that, surrounded by a robust faith community, they simply weren’t looking for deep new friendships with outsiders like him.
“I’m not angry about it, and I don’t blame them,” the former elementary school teacher and administrator said. “But there was a ceiling, for lack of a better term, that meant you couldn’t make that last step into really getting to know them because they didn’t need you. They had their world.”
A New Jersey native, Murphy spent nearly 20 years living in Salt Lake City’s Westmoreland Place neighborhood and working in Davis County before he headed back East for Virginia.
The decision has paid off.
“I’m more connected with some people I met two years ago,” he said, “than I was with people I knew for a decade or longer in Utah.”
Jana Spangler, a faith transition coach based in Holladay, said Murphy had good reason to feel ancillary, even if that wasn’t the intent of the Latter-day Saints around him.
“In Utah, everyone spends so much time with their families,” Spangler, a Latter-day Saint who is currently “taking a break from the church,” said. “And then you put work and church responsibilities on top of that” and a “natural divide” occurs — less because people only want to associate with neighbors who share their faith and more because that’s simply whom they happen to see on Sundays.
Move-ins aren’t the only ones to struggle. Murphy Lisch grew up in West Jordan and was living in Eagle Mountain when her then-husband left the church. She soon followed.
“We felt such alienation and tiptoeing around us by neighbors,” she said, “that we moved.”
In 2020, the couple packed up for Saratoga Springs, where they hoped things would be better. They weren’t. And so, in 2022, they cut ties with Utah and headed with their three kids to Missouri, where they could manage a bigger place and a chance to be themselves.
“I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life defined by my relationship to Mormonism,” she said. “I didn’t want to be known as the angry ex-Mormon neighbor. When I moved out of state, I finally got to be me, a unique person with her own interests, hobbies and thoughts.”
Seeing Utahns flee that state due to the religious divide is, of course, not a desire of Latter-day Saint leaders.
Apostle M. Russell Ballard, who died in 2023, said as much in his 2001 General Conference address.
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) Apostle M. Russell Ballard speaks at General Conference in 2021. He spoke forcefully two decades prior regarding the need of Latter-day Saints to build meaningful bonds with their neighbors and discouraged listeners from ever suggesting, even as a joke, that others leave Utah.
“If neighbors become testy or frustrated because of some disagreement with the [church] or with some law we support for moral reasons,” he said, “please don’t suggest to them — even in a humorous way — that they consider moving someplace else. I cannot comprehend how any member of our church can even think such a thing.”
Ballard then noted how early Latter-day Saints were driven from their homes by intolerant neighbors.
“If our history teaches us nothing else,” he said, “it should teach us to respect the rights of all people to peacefully coexist with one another.”
Coming next • What you can do to erase — or at least narrow — Utah’s religious divide.
The Salt Lake Tribune wants to hear from you: How can we overcome Utah’s religious divide, which often separates Latter-day Saints from their neighbors and vice versa? Share your stories and ideas.
Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.
