Utah Mormon stereotypes examined: #2 Release time seminary
When fellow BYU students found out I was from Utah, some of them would start in with the snarky comments about release time seminary.
As luck would have it, I did attend early morning seminary, even though I grew up in Provo. Attending a small private school in the middle of Happy Valley meant that I had the unlikely combination of early morning seminary and a CES instructor. I would correct the comments of the snarky students, but then they'd usually follow up with "How early?"
I don't remember the exact time it started, but I don't think it was terribly early. (The private school paradox again intervened, meaning that we could hold seminary classes in our regular classrooms, since we didn't have to worry about church / state separation issues.)
For what it's worth, I don't happen to believe that righteousness is correlated with the start time of early morning seminary, and I'm not terribly impressed with anyone who tries to make a self-righteous contest out of it. (Also, with the amount of extra sleep that teenagers need, I'm not convinced that I support the idea of early morning seminary, at all, to be honest.) However, if you non-Utahns are still smarting from the injustice of your adolescent matutinal sacrifice, you may be comforted to know that an informal survey suggests that most early-morning attenders had a better experience, overall, than their snooze-button-hitting CES peers.
