timdiggerm said:
CP3S said:
I grew up in city that had a large enough Mormon population that we had a massive temple in the middle of it. If you were white and middle-class in that town, there was a very high chance you were Mormon. I once had an elderly woman approach me in the toy section at some department store when I was six or seven and tell me what an adorable young man I was, then asked if I was LDS. When I told her "no" her response was to look away, say "That's ashame." and not say another word to me. Creepy to start with, that just made it creepier.
My guess? She has a granddaughter and was looking for a nice, young, handsome LDS guy for her. Mormons can't marry non-Mormons, so she wasn't interested in your meeting her granddaughter anymore.
I'd be interested in hearing thoughts about the "white and middle-class" bit, though.
You did catch the part where I mentioned I was six or seven years old at the time, right?
As for the white and middle-class bit, I am from a white middle-class family and grew up in white middle-class neighborhoods, there were actually Mormon church buildings scattered every so many miles throughout the neighborhoods. In fact, there was this really cool wooded area with a creek a short bike ride from the house I lived in while in elementary school. Several years ago I went back to where I grew up to visit family and decided to give the old creek a visit. I was kind of surprised to find the trees had been torn down, the creek and canals filled in, and a Mormon church building occupying the spot.
I never saw Mormon churches scattered in the poorer lower class neighborhoods of my home town; and when I was a bit older I got my first job working on construction sites in some of the more ritzy parts of town, and noticed the lack of Mormon churches in those neighborhoods as well. That probably doesn't mean much and isn't much to go by, it just seemed like it was kind of a white middle-class thing (but maybe that is just organized religion in general). The Hispanics I worked with in construction were never Mormons, and I don't recall any of the upper-class white contractors I worked for being LDS either. But usually in school I seemed to be one of only three or four kids in my class who were not Mormon.