As someone who lived in Utah, you will get this.
Last year, we were driving through Utah and like I always do when I’m in Utah, I was wearing a big cross and a Christian T-shirt (I tend to scream I’m not LDS with my clothing). Hubby is dressed more ‘normal’ for there. White western shirt, undershirt and jeans (which happened to be torn at and right above the knee).
We are at a Flying J truck stop south of Provo, I go in and go to the bathroom while he is getting gasoline. As I am coming out, a woman is walking in and sees my cross and shirt and turned as I walked past giving me a dirty look. It happens so I didn’t think much about it. I go to find hubby and as he is walking up to the front the clerk looks at him, looks at me then leans over the counter to look at hubby’s jeans. She was doing a ‘garment check’!
My poor husband (never Mormon btw and a wonderful Christian man), that was the first time he had ever noticed someone doing a garment check on him. We head back to the car and he is just aghast at what happened. The clerk saw his undershirt, saw my cross and shirt and was trying to figure out if he was LDS.
And you are right, apostates can have a rough time in Utah. I use our trips through there (about 2 a year) as an opportunity to witness and I love the looks on their faces when I tell them I used to live in Provo and go to BYU.
What’s a garment check?
We visited good friends (mormons) in Rexburg, Idaho a few years ago. (Their brand new temple was just about to open up.)
The local Protestant church was small but nice. As visitors and on the young side with kids I felt like a rock star. It was sad - no doubt the population was shrinking. There were perhaps 20 folks there, all over 60. The preacher even asked of it would be okay for our kids to come up so he could do a “children’s sermon”. Even though our kids were borderline age-wise they went up. And the whole congregation loved the “children’s sermon” which I suppose they haven’t heard in a long time.
I commented on the beautiful front doors the church had. The preacher said “Yes - it was worth the trouble to finally get them in.” I asked him what the trouble was and he said “It’s a long story”.
I asked another gentleman and he said they ordered the doors from some door place in Utah that also supplied a list of installers throughout the areas. When the doors arrived to the church, they called the local installer and he said he would be out on Monday. Well, Monday afternoon came and he never showed up so they called him. He just got a big job and wouldn’t be able to install them.
They called all of the other places and no one would come install them. I’m not sure why they needed a special installer, but they finally found some guy from far away to come out to install them. That guy was not a mormon. Seems the mormon door company had mormon employees in most of their service areas, and they would not intall the doors on a Christian church.
The guy said it was pretty much impossible to get a job at any decent local company in town if you weren’t a mormon. He said it was good that a Walmart opened in town as they weren’t as bad on the discrimination.
It was weird spending so much time in a town where you were an “outsider”.