I agree.
I guess the difference is that we have less free time than the average American...
Yes, that's part of what I was getting at.
But I would not call us “insular,” unless by “insular” you mean that you won’t find us in the local pubs after work, looking for company. We are counseled to be “in the world, but not of it.” We tend to be highly educated, and well involved in the business of the world.
Emphasis on education, oh yes. But the context of what we were talking about was voter mobilization. Your under-18 kids in public schools couldn't mobilize many...
...and your BYU kids, your Ricks' College kids, your BYU-campus offshoot in Hawaii kids will mostly run in Mormon circles...and even at secular colleges, if there's an LDS Institute there, that's where you'll find these same circles...
...And even certain geographic areas are very highly LDS...your Utah/southern Idaho, southwest Wyoming, Northern AZ, Eastern NV, for example...
We all are called upon to do volunteer work in our churches, too...Because most of our young people serve distant missions, Mormons tend to have greater experience in the broader world than the average American.
I guess by "insular" I didn't mean to imply LDS eschew all or most outside contact. Of course there are always "business" contacts. But even your own examples here doesn't counter my point -- things such as volunteering in church -- where you're not likely to find very non-Mormons...or, I could mention countless hrs spent in genealogical research -- where a lot of work is quite impersonal...or, even LDS mission work tends to be more "hit & run" style where certainly it is de-emphasized in spending significant time toward relationship-building.
The Mormons in California I know, including college kids, spent hours canvassing neighborhoods and manning phone banks. They weren’t just running in “Mormon circles.”
But I will give you your point about lack of time. I have lived outside of Utah most of my life. When I was a young housewife, I moved a couple of times into apartment buildings filled with young families. I was invited to joint the daily coffee klatsch, but I just plain didn’t have time.
I didn’t work then, but I had tiny kids. I used to sew and cook and lot from scratch to save money. My volunteer church responsibilities were pretty heavy. There weren’t enough hours in the day to complete everything I thought I should be doing.
Not to mention the fact that, most of the conversation at the coffee klatsches was just women running down their husbands and generally bitching about life, which seemed worse than a waste of time to me, it seemed destructive, although I never said so to them. They were perfectly nice women, otherwise.
Maybe to the women at the coffee klatsch, though, I was insular. It’s always seemed to me, though, that we have a finite number of hours, and we have to choose the most productive ways to spend them.