What I learned at a Utah festival of Scottish culture

As locals laughed about “scotched eggs” while munching honey corndogs, I looked around for anything to be proud of at this festival of arid nationhood. The park was a desert of clans and kitsch. Cardboard Stormtroopers in kilts were propped against the toilet block, next to a truck-sized Nessie with no hoops but a large belly, presumably swollen with broiled burger.

The sign at the welcome tent read “Make Scotland Great Again”. Old men with Trump caps and Defund Congress t-shirts browsed “find your clan” stalls and bought cotton candy for sun-glazed grandkids.

The town of St George, an ironically named place to hold a Scottish festival, is a grid of wide streets and stucco houses where Mormons go to die. Its finest buildings are the temple and the mortuary. From Tinder I learned that more than half of under-35s are members of the Church of the Latter Day Saints (LDS), mostly working in the health industry or training to do so. There is plenty of Scottish heritage here. Many punters I asked proclaimed their clan, and then the date of their family’s LDS conversion.

Kilts were not the only costumes. Among the crowd wandered families that looked like they were from a different era. The women wore neat ankle-length dresses of homespun prairie style, hair swept stiff above their brows. When I asked one pair of young women about their Scottish heritage, they told me meekly that I had best ask their brother.

A puck-faced teen with a strong southwest twang said they were MacDonalds, and that he played the pipes. (When I asked the sisters how they liked his practising, they just smiled.) After I had spoken to this earnest family, Kathy Rawlings, the games’ organiser, told me these were fundamentalist Mormons, a splinter sect who still practice polygamy.

Utah is of course the promised land of Mormons. In Salt Lake City I had come across the Utah Lighthouse Ministry which invited me to come in and learn the truth about Mormonism. In a room lined with religious books, a sour-sounding older woman explained that she and her husband had once been LDS, till they started to look into it.

One of their issues was the principle, so fundamental to Mormon life and worship, that people only reached the upper echelons of heaven in family units. This meant that New World converts could rest assured that their grandfathers and ancestors in the Old World would get to paradise. It also meant polygamous men could bring multiple women and their children through the pearly gates.

When the official church formally gave up polygamy at the end of the nineteenth century, some held fast to the principle. But it was a problem either way, my jaded authority explained. On the old system, if you were a second wife, would you have to spend eternity with the first wife whether you liked her or not? And after the reforms, when divorce and remarriage were allowed, what was the celestial fate of the first wife? Their practices, she said, were nonsense.

At the games, Kathy did not go into such detail. She only explained that these highly patriarchal polygamous communities were shunned by society for years, often enduring dire poverty, but now they were more able to integrate into the life of society.

Kathy struck me as tolerant, even liberal, until she gave her own remarks to close the Games, citing the slogans of her two clans: the Macfarlanes – to defend – and the Erskines – to think. “Scottishness means clanship. You don’t need to be Scottish to have a clan: above all it is just about family. We all think about family more than anything else. It’s what we know. So, WILL YOU DEFEND WHAT YOU KNOW?” The crowd cheered.

Most of the Mormons I met at the games were generous and gentle, but there were also rougher redneck types for whom Scotland stood for freedom of the American kind. A Vietnam veteran with a zimmer frame laden with plastic bags said that he was a Wallace, and that Utah was the freest state in the country. Free like Wallace meant, he said. Free because you could get away without paying taxes, and you could take your gun wherever you went.

In the Campbell tent, a man boasted that the Campbells had claimed the land they owned by being most Scottish of all, fierce and looking out for themselves. He joked about the Glencoe massacre. I found no MacDonald stall to tell their story. Indeed, there was no patriotic tradition here of which to be the least bit proud.

The main events comprised caber tossing, a clan procession and a beard competition presided over by an actor playing Mary Queen of Scots, who endured her period dress and red wig in the heat and showed an impressive grip of the details of Mary’s life, down to the details about her dastardly uncle the Duke of Guise.

The most authentic Celtic connection was in the music. Traditional band The Fire played a fine set including lesser-heard Burns numbers. They expressed no awareness, however, of any radical folk tradition. The one and only reference to popular hardship was expressed by a local family band who sang Christy Moore’s Chicago and The Fields of Athenry.

What exists of a radical Celtic tradition in the US is Irish, not Scottish. Historians will debate the role and experience of Scots in shaping the New World, but the folk of Utah regard Scots as a nation of freedom, capitalism and romance. If a more impressive spirit of Scotland is to ever reach St George, it must be exported entirely anew.