Maybe the mormons aren't peculiar? Sometimes I wonder whether the appeal of the Mormons isn’t their theology at all. Maybe they just remind us of what America used to be. It stood out to me watching the BYU Notre Dame game in Provo, the civility and the decorum in the stands, the clean cut look of the fans. By and large, what Provo is today is what the majority of America used to be. Mormons in the United States look a lot like what America probably looked like in the 1980s. Even the modesty standard LDS women hold to now is just what American women wore in the 1980s. Nobody called it modesty back then. It was how people dressed, and you can still see it in how the Saints dress today. And that culture of wanting to help people, of giving, of showing up, used to be the American culture, not a Mormon one. I know because I lived in it. I spent years in a small mountain town in the Rockies. There were no Mormons there to speak of, but people had each other’s back. My wife got caught in a snowstorm once and couldn’t drive home, and a stranger drove her home and asked for nothing in return. The town had complete cohesion. None of the social stratification we take for granted now. When I went for coffee, the judge was in line at the same counter, and so was the rich man. There was one grocery store, and the rich didn’t shop somewhere else, because there was nowhere else. People were welcoming and friendly, and they meant it. I made more friends and real connections there than I have anywhere else in my adult life since college. In a sense the whole town was a priesthood quorum. People just helped each other. It was our little Zion. You still find that in Iowa, across much of the Midwest, in parts of the South. But it used to be the whole of much of the country. So what I’m getting at is this. The Mormons, as a community, have encapsulated and preserved the American culture that was once simply predominant. Which makes me wonder. If this were the 1950s, or even the 1970s, would the Mormons seem peculiar at all? Set a Mormon kid next to a nice kid from Iowa and tell me which one is strange. I don’t know. I really don’t know. I think it’s an open question. Maybe the Mormons never were a peculiar people. Maybe the country just moved.