Between being out of town and the Fourth, it’s been a slow couple of weeks here. Let’s get July started with an Orson Scott Card column at the Mormon Times, “Mormon ‘Tribe’ Feels Like Home.” OSC reflects on the fact that Utah seems like home to some Mormons who weren’t born there and don’t live there.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from the column.

These days it isn’t politically correct to talk about “tribes” — we’re supposed to say “ethnic groups.” But those are not exact synonyms. A tribe is considerably more than a mere shared ethnicity.

A tribe commands your loyalty — often more than any other community you belong to. When you’re in a place where your tribe is in a minority, you feel like a sojourner; you look to the tribal homeland as the center.

I imagine that for Catholics Rome is the “tribal homeland” and for Jews it is Jerusalem. Do Evangelicals and Protestants have a tribal homeland? Or is Protestantism so decentralized (which is a nice way of saying almost incapable of maintaining institutional unity and integrity) that it does not have a central place?