Eli McCann: If variety is the spice of life, then LDS families are well seasoned

There’s a common misconception outside of the Jello Belt that all Latter-day Saints are roughly the same. That, as a whole, the religion is packed with a mass of homogenous doe-eyed Osmonds who have never tasted anything spicier than a banana.

It may be true that if you put a thousand members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in a room together, you’d see some patterns (and a lot of filler and Botox), but the levels and ways in which one’s devoutness manifests can vary pretty drastically.

These variations in gospel commitment probably don’t seem like much to those on the outside, but for anyone who has ever spent any significant amount of time as a citizen of Zion, the differences are stark.

As a child, if I ever found out a friend of mine was permitted to do something that was forbidden in my home, like play sports on Sundays or listen to explicit music, I would complain to my parents about this. They’d usually respond by saying something like, “Well, that’s how they do things at their house, and this is how we do things at ours.” There was no judgment in it. Just a simple acknowledgment that every family is different and sometimes ours was just more lame than someone else’s.

I like to describe my own Latter-day Saint upbringing and family as the kind that almost never actually did Family Home Evening, but we also were the kind that felt supremely guilty about that. We were the type who drank caffeinated sodas but never turned down a church calling. We didn’t go shopping on Sundays, but we also didn’t attend church while on vacation. We weren’t like the family down the street who got dressed up to watch General Conference from the living room and went to Nauvoo and Kirtland for every family trip. But we also weren’t like that other (wicked) family who sometimes went boating on Sundays and let the kids watch “The Simpsons.”

Quick note: The inconsistency in my parents’ rules around which television programs were prohibited during my childhood should honestly be studied. If a character of an animated TV show said “damn” one time, it was forever banned in our home. But we also regularly watched gritty prime-time procedurals as a family without batting an eye. When I was 7, my mother announced one day we were no longer allowed to watch “Care Bears,” an animated television program for toddlers, citing some vague content-based reason. A few years ago, I asked her if she remembered what she found so morally objectionable about “Care Bears,” and she responded in a tone like she was finally ready to let me in on a family secret. “Oh, honey, I just couldn’t handle one more second of that obnoxious theme song.”

Ward talent shows? Nah.

Mine is a full-tithe paying sort of family. Well, excluding me. When The Salt Lake Tribune showers me with the outrageous sums of money I get for writing these columns, I immediately spend it all on babes and booze without even considering setting aside 10% for the Lord.

Mine is a family that goes to ward activities and stays after to help clean up, but not the type to volunteer for the choir or perform in the ward talent show. When I stopped going to church a decade ago, my membership records somehow got transferred to my childhood ward, so I started getting a lot of ward emails asking me to come in for tithing settlement or some other thing. I was finally dropped from the email distribution list when the ward activities committee sent around a Google document asking people to sign up for the talent show and I booked my 70-year-old parents to do comedy magic in drag. (My parents and I have never once discussed this incident, but these people raised me to be this way so I can only assume they thought it was funny.)

Even in my extended family, there were substantial variations in how we practiced the religion.

I experienced my own personal hell when I was 10 and was sent off to spend the weekend with my cousins who were the 6 a.m. daily-scripture-study type of family. After sitting through three hours of church that Sunday, I was informed that part of keeping the Sabbath holy in their house included wearing our ties for the rest of the day. We also weren’t allowed to watch TV, besides “Saturday’s Warrior” and old VHS tapes of past General Conferences. I hugged my parents extra hard when I next saw them. This was around the time someone at church told my dad if he didn’t shave his beard, he would never be called as bishop. My dad responded “promise?” (He still has never been a bishop.)

Looking back, I’m not sure as a child I really knew what to make of the fact that a shared religion could produce such different rules for different people. Was my family made up of godless heathens or were we too buttoned-up or were we, perhaps, the perfect Goldilocks “just right” kind of Latter-day Saints? That’s not a question anyone can really answer, even though there are certainly people reading this who already have.

Easter tradition

Last Easter, my in-laws flew in from Portland, Oregon, for a weekend visit. My husband and I took them to my parents’ house for a large family dinner with all my siblings and their children. After dinner, my dad read several New Testament passages and then led the group in a religious discussion about the meaning of the holiday.

When we returned to my house after the dinner, we opened a bottle of wine and sat in my living room, where my husband’s nonreligious parents commented that they had never really participated in a religious Easter celebration like that, asking me if that was a common occurrence with my family.

Warm memories from my childhood of singing carols at Christmas and attending ward activities flashed through my mind. Family prayers where my dad would take the opportunity to reference each of his children individually and tell God the specific reasons my parents were so proud of us. Quiet Sundays my family would spend together, playing card games after church and declining invitations from friends to go out and play. There was the boring stuff, too, and the aspects of the faith that are the reason it’s no longer mine. But when it comes to my kind of Latter-day Saint family, it’s the happy stuff I most remember.

I must acknowledge, even though I no longer practice the faith, I have a lot of nostalgia for some of those times. Certainly not enough nostalgia to introduce these traditions in my home, but nostalgia even still.

I sipped my wine, thinking of my parents, and told my in-laws, “Well, that’s how they do things at their house, and this is how we do things at ours.”

Eli McCann is an attorney, writer and podcaster in Salt Lake City, where he lives with his husband, new child and their two naughty (yet worshipped) dogs. You can find Eli on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @EliMcCann or at his personal website, www.itjustgetsstranger.com, where he tries to keep the swearing to a minimum so as not to upset his mother.

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