this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2026
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I'm from Texas. From my experience, it could apply to anyone over here or east straight on to Florida. Nevermind the nightmare politics of the upper midwest or the fascist fuckwit colony of Idaho.
Oh yeah, I mean, religion is everywhere, including in those governments. But the Mormon church quite literally is the government in Utah. The vast majority of the state government are temple-recommend card carrying members of the church, and also went on missions. These aren't just practicing christians, most of them are bishops or high ranking members of the church.
I think that it's a difficult thing to understand from the outside, but if you lived there for more than a year, you'd definitely understand what I mean. Utah is a huge bubble. They turn their noses up at anyone perceived as an outsider (in practice, this meant "not Mormon"), including Atheists, people who were agnostic, Christians, Catholics, and people practicing Judaism. The way this was done was very insidious as well, because to your face, they'd be all nice, but then you'd hear their disapproval and judgement through the grapevine.
Anyway, I'm rambling/venting now, but my point is that Utah is about as close as you can get to a fully theocratic state in the US, it's much closer to something like the Vatican than anywhere else that I've lived or visited. Idaho is the way it is because of Utah - it has an extremely high Mormon population as well.
And the Southern Baptist Convention run Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi. Meanwhile, Opus Dei Catholics have their hooks deep into Missouri and Louisiana. Churches are a common way to organize a political vanguard in order to manage an ostensibly democratic institution. The Mormons have a ton of influence in neighboring Arizona, Nevada, California, and across the border in Sonora, Mexico.
I grew up in a town outside of Houston, Texas called Sugar Land. We also used to jokingly refer to it as "The Bubble", as it was a Planned Community that resulted from a collaboration of the O&G industry, the D.R. Horton Home Builders, and the Sugar Creek Baptist Church under Tom DeLay. Then the Catholic Church moved in and blew the whole thing up by flooding the district with the perfidious Irish and the nefarious Taiwanese.
But yes, being one of half a dozen Jewish kids in a sea of Southerners was certainly an experience.
US Theocracies are more common than you'd first guess. Louisiana is fully co-opted by southern Catholics. Check out the Veiled Prophet Society in St. Louis (half a zillion podcasts on the subject). Texas has its share of outright cult towns, the Branch Davidians being an iconic but hardly idiosyncratic example. And then you've got the various Black Baptist church tentpole institutions from Harlem to Oakland (marginally less toxic than the whites, but no less influential nor dogmatic).
The fastest way to get a large number of people to vote for you is to appeal to a member of the clergy. So quite a bit of US democratic power springs from a comparatively small but vocal set of religious hubs.
I am in no way denying that other states do similar things. I am saying that Utah is a completely different animal than those states. It was founded, incorporated, built, and run by Mormons the entire time (there used to even be a Mormon army), with a super majority of residents themselves being Mormon, all while the Mormon church is one of the richest religious organizations in the county. They're literally one of the biggest private land owners in the country as well. They are rich and by far the most powerful organization in Utah and Idaho.
Again, I do genuinely believe that you'd have to live there (and thus deal with the Utah government) to understand what I mean. It is not the same as the south. There aren't just cult towns like you describe, that is literally the whole state. Even relatively blue areas such as SLC suffer from the control and oversight of the church.
It's insular because it's Mormons giving the reach around to other Mormons. But you see the same social dynamic replicated in other religious groups in other states. You just don't see the bright dividing lines, because the religious organizations transcend state boundaries in other areas of the country. There's not some hard stop between the Kansas and Missouri state lines, where being a Southern Baptist begins and ends.
I've lived a number of places, some of them very deeply religious and others much more plural. I can't speak to Utah specifically, but I can speak to a few places that were functionally operating as Jonestown minus the kool-aid. If you give the history of these states a hard look, you can see the same patterns and the same social structures. "First Colony" got its name for a reason, and it echoes through the community in a way you wouldn't understand unless you lived there.