A girl who moved into my ward from Alaska repeatedly talked about how great the Stake Dances up north were, and that everyone went. I, on the other hand, wouldn’t have been caught dead stepping foot into a stake dance. I went to a private school, so I didn’t know anyone in the stake outside the ward, and rich, preppy, motivated guys were a lot more to my liking than the unmotivated mediocrities of my neighborhood. (No, I don’t think you have to be privately educated to be motivated/attractive/worthwhile, or that public school atendees are losers. My point is I had no interest in the guys from my stake, and you generally go to a dance to mingle with the opposite gender.)

I noticed a similar insularity in the Institute attendees in Paris, France. They weren’t just Church friends: they were each others’ principal friends and did everything together.

My school was about 50/50 Mormon and not, and about 20% of my grade was the Seminary-going type. I had two groups of friends at school: the smart kids in all the AP classes (mix of both), and the Seminary Council (Mormon, obviously). It was nice to have the groups to support me in different contexts: if you want to study for an exam, it helps to have smart friends, and if you want to go do baptisms, well, you kind of have to be Mormon.

As far as sharing similar values, one of my closest friends was Persian and Baha’i. We had interesting discussions about our respective religions, and she had very good morals as far as modesty, drinking/drugs, sex, etc., and she wasn’t Chrsitian, let alone Mormon. I’m not sure if being a member in the minority generates any xenophobia of the “dangerous” influence of non-members.

My church friends are girls who range from a year to four older than me, and all went to college. I have stayed friends with a few of them longer than the majority of my high school friends, simply because of the fact that many of them go to BYU (as do I), and I can see them when I go home (remember, my school friends came from all over the valley and went to colleges all over the nation).

At BYU, nearly everyone is Mormon. Many cite the potentially stifling nature of that fact, but in a way, it is nice, because that can’t be a factor in whether you are friends with someone or not. On the one hand, your opportunities for friendships with non-Mormons is limited, but on the other, you can’t just assume you will get along with someone because he or she shares your religion. Instead, the groups here fall along lines of interest, or geographic location. I feel that I have made longer-lasting and more authentic friendships here, but I would attribute that to increased maturity and not to any issue of religion. Nearly all my current friends happen to be LDS, but it is not because of that fact that we are close.

In summary, all members won’t share your values, but I think that at least some feeling of a connection with members of your faith (whatever it may be) will help to strengthen your own personal faith. It is important to be able to realte to and befriend members not of your faith, so you can function in the real world. There has to be a balance between upholding your own convictions and refusing to be a part of anything not LDS. (I think we often ignore the first part of “Be in the world” . . .) And I think that we always talk about “values” as if they can only be religious: it is important to me that my friends share, to at least some extent, my educational, intellectual, musical, and social values, in addition to similar senses of humor and enjoying each others’ company.

As far as the two LDS guys in my graduating class were concerned, I would have been perfectly happy to be friends with them. But as the girl on the math team and working for the school A-V department, I wasn’t precisely in their social circle, to put it mildly (one was wealthy and the other on the football team).

Running in the nerdmeister circles, it turned out that many of my friends (including all of the guys who were interested in me) were atheists, and that probably did affect my later choices, as I explained in my post “He has his faults, such as being a perverted-democrat-atheist, but…..

I noticed, in following generations in the same ward, the parents have adopted this idea that the kids should only be friends with mormons and they have become increasingly insular. Instead of the focus being on core values, it seems to be on superficial values like movie ratings, word of wisdom, shorts and sleeves length etc. This weekend at a family reunion at the beach, my SIL (a junior in HS) asked if our cousins wife, who had a tattoo and was wearing a bikini, was a member and if they had married in the temple. (She is, and they were. Not that it should matter…) Shes obviously getting these ideas from somewhere.

But, even when I went to that ward, it was expected that we would all be friends now with the ‘others’ but when graduation came around, good kids went off to BYU (no really, a YW leader told me it was Wrong to go anywhere else) and missions, got married, and then the ward was your life. This has been the bigger problem I have run into. In adulthood, it seems to be widely regarded that your social life should revolve around the ward. This is the pressure I have felt anyways.

b) My freshman year at college (this past year) there were 3 LDS students in my grade. This upcoming school year I think it’s safe to say that I’m the only member. One of the other members from last year moved and transferred to a school closer to home, and another is now inactive and “not practicing”. I count myself fortunate that I grew up outside the geographical Mormon bubble, because it taught me how to follow the guidance of being in the world but not of it. I’m not saying that I could not have reached the same end in an area more populated by other Mormons, but I think that it was much less of a shift from high school to college than it may have otherwise been (and with all the other changes going on between the two, I am grateful that I had one less thing to worry about). As bbell said, having only LDS friends in these circumstances is impossible.

I’ll also take a moment to brag on my parents, because they helped a great deal by making it easy to have friends. What I mean is that, on top of that whole parenting thing they did from time to time, they always made our home available and welcoming. Friends have come over to talk to my mom about arguments with their parents, asking my dad for advice on just about anything, and one came to live with us after he turned 18 and his own father threw him out. They have always made it known that the word “impose” is all but nonexistent once someone enters the door, and I hope that that practice will not end with them.

/end thank-imony

My favorite comment from her is: “Make your standards known, but don’t be a Nazi about it.”

That really sums it up: be willing to know what your personal values are and to stand up for them; allow others their own attitudes and beliefs without condemning them; be friendly and respectful and you will receive the same.

It struck me that my son had picked his friends exactly the way he should: finding people who indeed had similar values, coming from families seeking to follow Christ. And indeed, there are many non-LDS people out there who share our values, at least the ones that count. I’m glad my son has come to know some of them.

I mean, how much trouble can you get into when you’re hanging out with other members of the cello section?

I don’t know man.

I don’t doubt for a second that there is such a strain of Mormon thought; I just don’t (also anecdotally speaking, of course) see it as being a large one

Sam, it’s alive and well and living here in Zion. We had a lesson in EQ a while ago where the opinion was expressed (and seconded) that allowing your kids to play with non-member kids is akin to paving their way to hell. The discussion was about grade school age kids, not high school, but I think it’s wrongheaded at any age.