Sometimes, Neighborliness Works

So what is Utah to do about its Great Divide?

Perhaps the first step is to recognize there are places where the religious and cultural rift takes a rest, where antagonism takes a back seat to neighborliness.

Many of those places are in rural Utah, where "gentiles" and backsliders keep their irritations to themselves. They may be mum because in their scarcity they know their place.

More likely, though, it is because country people cross paths morning and night, week after week. It's not us vs. them when everyone knows one another. "As long as you don't steal their water, you're fine," says Mary Elliott, who moved with her husband, Dudley, from Texas to heavily LDS southern Utah in 1985. "I see them accepting people left and right. If you're a good person, they just open their arms to you."

When the Elliotts and other Catholics were building St. Anthony of the Desert church in Torrey in the early 1990s, locals of all stripes lent a hand, says Dudley Elliott. "I could just go to town and grab people off the street and they didn't care."

The day the small mission church was consecrated, the mostly LDS crowd overflowed into the courtyard.

These days, a quilting group made up mostly of LDS women, the High Country Quilters, meets monthly at the Catholic church. "It's just a nice little place," says Phyllis Coombs of Teasdale, one of the Mormon quilters.

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