I lived in a predominately LDS town for nearly 20 years. It was total hell in many ways, since they controlled most of the social and political elements of the town.
If you weren't LDS, you weren't shit, plain and simple. You didn't count, and you were locked out of a lot of things going on in your own town.
It's quite similar in some ways to being a Witness, except that they can use politics and other things that Witnesses don't use to twist your arm.
I can't tell you how many times I was told by people in that community to just give up and become LDS so that my life would be easier.
There was pretty much constant forms of coercement to join up.
A lot of the main LDS church doctrine was written by Brigham Young, not so much Smith, who died too young to write much. Young was a self appointed lord over the whole of Utah at one point, combining religious and political power over his followers to the point where it wasn't against the law to murder non Mormons who came through Utah and gave them the least excuse to do so.
A really frightening guy they follow and his tenets are the worst sort of 19th century nonsense and bigotry against people of color and women.
If the Mormons were really still following this guy and Smith, they really would all be living in compounds holed up against the US government and practicing polygamy like the offshoot groups still do.
They've prettied it up over the years to conform to more currently socially acceptable ideas, but at the heart of Mormonism is a whole lot of weird mixed up with a whole lot of ugly.
I think it's a cult...living in Mormon land and observing them, it was pretty much Children of the Corn. Nice people individually, of course, but that religion is pure crack.
It has nothing much to do with the Bible...it doesn't really need to and if pressed, they will admit that, usually. A lot of them are actually kind of proud of that, that they have their own "Bible".
