New rules have BYU professors running scared

Clark Gilbert, the church’s education commissioner, is determined to have faculty members who support the faith’s teachings — or at least how his office interprets those teachings.

By Peggy Fletcher Stack
Jan. 6, 2025
The Salt Lake Tribune

Midway through Jeffrey R. Holland’s hotly disputed “musket” speech — in which he admonished Brigham Young University’s faculty to take up metaphorical arms in defense of the faith’s opposition to same-sex marriage — the Latter-day Saint apostle pointed to a less familiar face: Clark Gilbert, the church’s “budding new commissioner of education” and his “traveling companion for the day.”

Music professor Jason Bergman was sitting 10 feet away in the Marriott Center that August day in 2021. He could not have predicted then that the popular apostle’s uncharacteristically harsh rhetoric was an omen of the next three years under Gilbert’s leadership, yet Bergman felt a growing unease.

Bergman, who had been teaching trumpet at a prestigious Texas university in 2018 when BYU recruited him, bristled at the increasing clampdown on LGBTQ+ activism he saw on the Provo campus (which eventually would include shutting down Y Mountain to rainbow colors) and at the denial of racism and misogyny that still existed.

“I had LGBTQ students and saw how they suffered,” Bergman said. “I started to pay attention to how people of color and women were treated. It was and continues to be hard for them.”

Then, in 2022, came a new employment contract, a sort of “loyalty oath,” in which faculty members (incoming and current) were expected to attest to their support of the church’s position on marriage, family and gender. To many, like Bergman, who felt pressured to agree, it went beyond the church’s own stance and seemed to carry an implicit threat: You can’t advance if you don’t sign off.

A convert and former bishop in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Bergman began to wrestle with his faith but feared discussing it with his local ecclesiastical leaders or fellow congregants. What if he said something in a Sunday school class that was seen as challenging on, say, polygamy, and it got back to his BYU superiors? He decided, “I can never speak up at church again.”

The whole point of the gospel “is to bring people to Christ through repentance and pastoral care,” Bergman said. “But when you make those people who can offer that care also control your job, you shut down the ability to be honest about concerns or problematic issues in virtually all settings.”

In the end, it seemed to him that faculty members were being asked to be “un-Christlike at a Christlike institution to keep our jobs.”

So, like many others, Bergman remained silent. He later found a position at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music.
BYU is “not safe,” Bergman said, “for anyone who doesn’t fit the orthodox mold.”

That seems to be a sentiment shared by a sizable number of faculty members who feel demeaned, disrespected, powerless — and afraid.

To many of them, the environment represents a throwback to the era of Ernest Wilkinson, BYU president from 1951 to 1970, who worked with conservative apostles and future church Presidents Joseph Fielding Smith and Harold B. Lee to remold church education.

“They targeted instructors they believed unorthodox, tightened the curriculum, and transformed the processes of hiring to favor teachers who shared their own ideas about orthodoxy,” Latter-day Saint historian Matthew Bowman writes in his latest book, “Joseph Fielding Smith: A Mormon Theologian.”

A pre-meme quip from the time mocked Wilkinson’s approach with the jab: “Free agency — and how to enforce it.”

Today, the threat of retribution apparently is so real that after dozens of interviews with present and former BYU faculty and administrators across many disciplines, not one current professor (including those with tenure, known as “continuing status”) would go on the record for this story.

“Low morale is pretty universal,” said a veteran teacher. “The default position is not to trust anybody.”

For their part, Latter-day Saint leaders in the global faith of 17.2 million members are ditching checklists in favor of choice and personal accountability on how to be a righteous member.

Church founder Joseph Smith famously taught that the best way to manage people was to teach members “correct principles” and they then “govern themselves” — an approach the faith’s latest “For the Strength of Youth” booklet follows along with its new design-it-yourself “ministering” program.

Even Clark Gilbert, who declined to be interviewed or comment for this story, espoused the freedom to choose and encouraged what he called in a recent speech at BYU-Idaho “moral agency.” But under his leadership, interviewees say, the Church Educational System seems to favor obedience to rigid doctrinal interpretations over personal choice.

If the school continues on this path, some academics warn, BYU may look less like a Latter-day Saint Notre Dame and more like Liberty University, an evangelical school founded by Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg, Virginia, which requires faculty members to agree to a lengthy list of Christian doctrines and policies, including opposition to same-sex marriage and transgender rights.

Spokesperson Carri Jenkins defends BYU’s policies.

The school has a “unique and compelling faith-based mission to develop disciples of Jesus Christ. Our employees and students come to BYU because they want to contribute to the university’s spiritual mission,” Jenkins wrote in an email. “We are grateful to have employees who are deeply committed to the values and aims of a BYU education.”

To that end, Gilbert, who previously laid off 43% of the staff at the church-owned Deseret News, has worked to “disrupt” faculty systems long in place at BYU and to make it more overtly orthodox.

Secular pressures “threaten to limit the valuable contribution of religious universities,” Gilbert, who supervises BYU campuses in Utah, Idaho and Hawaii as well as Salt Lake City’s Ensign College and a global online offering called BYU-Pathway Worldwide, argued in a 2022 essay for Deseret Magazine.

Another danger, he wrote, is “decoupling of faculty hiring from religious mission.”

In his first year as CES commissioner, Gilbert undertook an informal study of BYU faculty members and grouped them into four categories:

• The Faithful Core: They teach with the Holy Spirit and weave in church tenets as they understand them.

• The Supportive Center: They support the church but are not as enthusiastic as church leaders think they ought to be.

• The Secular First: They put “truth” from any source on an equal footing with the Latter-day Saint gospel.

• Open Foes: They write an article or take a public position contrary to that of the church.

When presenting this to a Salt Lake City dinner group of prominent Latter-day Saints, Gilbert said that the faith’s governing First Presidency “will not stand for a contrary opinion by professors at BYU,” according to several attendees, and that he would find a way to “get them out.”

Gilbert did not respond to a specific Salt Lake Tribune question about how he would remove them.

“I honestly don’t know any ‘open foes’ among the faculty,” said a senior professor, “or a single ‘bad apple.’”

Gilbert’s groupings “fail to recognize a variety of spiritual strengths that professors bring,” a female instructor wrote in an email. “They just don’t capture the thoughtful, heartfelt and spirit-filled ways that faculty approach their faith, their academic disciplines, the church and its leaders, or their stewardships at BYU.”

It’s “pretty hurtful to think that faculty might be being lumped into some of these categories,” she said. “So, it’s probably not surprising there are tensions and distrust on all sides.”

The Ecclesiastical Clearance Office, which Gilbert leads as a general authority Seventy and as CES head, has say over hiring and firing. It is intended to “assist in the process,” said Jenkins, the BYU spokesperson, of ensuring that “employees in the Church Educational System commit to maintain gospel standards as part of their employment, including an annual ecclesiastical endorsement from their local bishop.”

The university “has been clear about its commitment to these expectations, which are consistent across [all church schools],” Jenkins said, and communicated to all prospective BYU employees.

It’s not clear, however, to everyone.

The guidelines about what is — and isn’t — church doctrine can be ambiguous, said Taylor Petrey, a Latter-day Saint religion professor at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. “What Clark Gilbert and some church leaders think is fixed and unquestionable church doctrine is not what others think.”

Take the new contract, which professors say goes beyond established protocols of belief and behavior.

On top of the traditional “recommend” standards, which are required for entrance to any of the faith’s sacred temples, lay leaders must affirm that candidates: have a “testimony” of church doctrine, including its teachings on marriage, family and gender; support current church policies and practices; have “demonstrated an exemplary and extended pattern (at least one year) of avoiding pornography.”

The Utah-based faith opposes same-sex marriage, for example, but does not necessarily penalize members who support it. Could a BYU professor who writes in support of LGBTQ+ rights or wears a rainbow pin be seen as bucking the church and in danger of workplace discipline, even dismissal? Could attending a same-sex wedding be seen as rebellion? Is saying that you are a feminist taking a stand against church leaders? Is discussing Heavenly Mother tacit disobedience? Will studying Brigham Young and slavery put you in jeopardy? Is criticizing Donald Trump against the church’s policy of political neutrality?

The administration recently appointed three BYU-Idaho teachers to the religious education department in Provo, including Ross Baron, co-author of an anti-evolution book. But the church has not taken a position on evolution and the flagship school has been teaching it for more than 50 years.

Other professors wonder why Baron’s position on evolution is not seen as disqualifying, while those who explore feminist ideas about priesthood, for example, are considered suspect.

Like at most universities, BYU’s hiring begins in academic departments, where candidates are vetted, interviewed and then recommended up the ladder to deans.

Potential faculty members must already have an “ecclesiastical endorsement” from their local lay leader. After they are approved by the dean, they must meet with a Latter-day Saint general authority and, finally, be approved by the Ecclesiastical Clearance Office.

In the past, most candidates put forward by a department sailed through the other levels. During Gilbert’s administration, however, the ecclesiastical office has overruled those decisions, professors say, leaving many wondering whether it was vetoing general authority sign-offs.

Jenkins, BYU’s spokesperson, insists that is not happening.

“Neither the [CES] commissioner nor the Ecclesiastical Clearance Office can override a general authority interview,” she said. “The final arbiter of all hires is the church Board of Education [made up of the First Presidency and other top church leaders] and not the commissioner nor the Ecclesiastical Clearance Office.”

She added that the most recent statistics on ecclesiastical clearances “indicate that the overwhelming majority of employees (greater than 95%) are cleared for employment.”

Even so, these unspecified rejections can breed speculation and paranoia. And, because a few female candidates were rejected after all other interviews appeared to go well, faculty members said, some have asked if women were being singled out.

Before Gilbert came along, the history department “had been able to cobble together women faculty at a higher percentage than most,” said Ed Stratford, who recently left the university, where he had taught ancient Near East studies for 15 years.

The history department had recommended several female candidates who were “canceled without explanation or deemed ineligible,” Stratford said. “Women were more exposed than men.”

The reason given — “not a mission fit” — for rejecting prospective hires or denying advancements felt like an “umbrella euphemism,” the former history professor said. It’s a “cloak under which a number of measures that could not be explained out loud can be hidden.”

It is unclear who exactly made all these decisions and why, Stratford said. “It is a black box that doesn’t seem open to anyone but Clark Gilbert.”

He said BYU’s atmosphere under the CES boss was “a contributing factor” in his decision to change careers.

These days faculty members are also noting another worry.

Previously, spouses were “invited” to accompany a prospective hire to the general authority interview. In some cases, according to several candidates and faculty members, that now has become required.

It is “absolutely unprecedented” at other schools, said Petrey, the Kalamazoo College professor. “I have never heard of that.”

On top of that, some lay leaders have threatened to withhold candidate or continuing faculty members’ ecclesiastical endorsement if their spouses stop attending church.

A number of faculty members pin this on Gilbert.

Indeed, a longtime professor said he is “the most proactive and interventionist commissioner we have ever had. We’ve never seen anyone this aggressive.”

Frederick Gedicks was a professor of constitutional law and legal theory at BYU’s J. Reuben Clark Law School for 34 years, enjoying a successful career before retiring in the spring.

During the summer, though, one of his junior colleagues asked Gedicks to return as a part-time adjunct to team-teach a seminar on natural law and natural rights. Gedicks agreed and thought all it would entail would be a call to his bishop for “clearance.”

To his dismay, Gedicks discovered he was required to open an account with a “background investigating firm,” which advertised its expertise as “scraping” off the internet every bit of information about a person.

He asked a senior administrator about it and was told the company was checking only for criminal convictions in the past seven years and whether he had earned the degrees he claimed. The official denied any knowledge of what the Ecclesiastical Clearance Office might be looking for, Gedicks said, and closed by saying, more or less, “that if I didn’t like the process, I shouldn’t apply.”

Without specific details, Gedicks assumed the firm would prepare an in-depth report on him and his life’s work. “There is actually no disclosure of what the ECO is interested in,” he said, “so I can’t say, for sure, what it’s looking for.”

The legal expert began to wonder if there were items on his curriculum vitae that “could be seen as liabilities, my work with the ACLU and Obergefell [the landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage],” he said. “I have gay relatives so we have hung a pride flag.”

These were aspects of his career that he is proud of, Gedicks said. “It just irritated me that the process was making me worry about them.” It also bothered him that “strangers were going to look at a report and make a decision about my spirituality without having met me.”

The process is “creepy and Orwellian,” Gedicks said. “They are operating on standards of spirituality that are not disclosed.”

Gedicks believed he would have been cleared but didn’t want to be part of the process so he called his colleague to say he would pass on teaching that summer.

“It betrays a deep lack of trust in the faculty who are already there, in people who apply,” he said, “and in bishops and [regional] stake presidents.”

Of all the issues that seem to raise the most red flags for faculty, any support of LGBTQ+ rights seems to be the most common.

After the new contract required employees to support the church’s stance on marriage, family and gender, a number of adjunct professors — including some with decades at BYU campuses — were dropped without explanation.

Like all universities, BYU does not have to cite why adjunct contracts went unrenewed, but many, including Sue Bergin, assume it was for their LGBTQ+ advocacy.

Because Bergin had worked for BYU’s public communications office when now-apostle Jeffrey Holland was the university president, she contacted him after she was let go to ask if someone at church headquarters “had a problem with me” since she didn’t know anyone at BYU who did.

She said the apostle wrote back to say, “it was not a board of trustees matter per se,” so he was going to “step out of this circle,” and urged her to contact Gilbert. She said he passed her along to another administrator, who offered no explanation.

Brock Kirwan, who taught neuropsychology at BYU for 15 years, was turned down to direct a study abroad program in Budapest, Hungary, as he had done in 2022.

Having a temple recommend, having “opted in” to the new contract, and having a temple-worthy wife were apparently not enough. Senior administrators gave him no idea what the problem was.

“Maybe I posted a few rainbows on social media,” quipped Kirwan, who took a job in May at the University of Pennsylvania as executive director of the Ivy League school’s MindCORE neuroimaging facility, “on behalf of my two queer kids.”

Jeff Dotson, who had taught in BYU’s Marriott School of Business since 2013, faced a conflict. Because of close family friends and relatives, he wondered how he could endorse the church’s position on same-sex marriage, while supporting his LGBTQ+ loved ones? He said he felt he would have to lie about his beliefs to keep his job.

Dotson began to suffer panic attacks, especially since his wife had recently stepped away from the faith over the issues, and turned to his bishop for counsel.

“I was forthright about my personal struggles, my family’s challenges, and my feelings about recent policy changes at the university,” he explained. “Despite what I believed to be a productive discussion, the bishop elected to revoke my endorsement a couple of days later. This decision initiated a chain of events where I was placed on probation and told I would be terminated in 90 days unless I resolved the issues with the bishop.”

He ultimately resigned at BYU, effective at the end of the 2023–24 academic year. Later, after a second interview, the bishop reinstated his endorsement, allowing him to finish out his employment.

Dotson ended up securing a tenured faculty position at Ohio State University.

“The shift from behavior-based to belief-based standards raises theological and practical concerns,” Dotson said. “I personally struggled with the idea of being required to have a testimony of policies, which are subject to change, as opposed to doctrines.”

In his 2022 essay, “Dare to Be Different,” Gilbert outlined the ways universities that started as religious institutions lost their way. That, he vowed, would not happen at BYU on his watch.

“While religious identity requires courageous leadership, it also calls for deep structural alignment,” Gilbert wrote, taking “steps to ensure that religious governance remains strong… beginning with the selection of university leadership.”

All these changes, observers say, may have contributed to BYU’s decline in rankings by U.S. News & World Report from 61 in 2017 to 109 today. They are “already affecting BYU’s reputation,” Petrey said, “in the broader academic world.”

The new strategy “is a classic purity campaign to root out undesirable people and ideas and to create homogeneity,” he said. “But purity campaigns are always dangerous. They create division, stifle thought, and prioritize fear over faith.”

Some say they also undermine the worldwide church’s shift toward principle-based living and personal responsibility.

Jesus did not list “a dozen administrative steps they had to take…,” Holland said in a 2018 General Conference sermon. “No, he summarized their task in one fundamental commandment: ‘Love one another; as I have loved you. … By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.’”

The problem BYU faculty members are confronting is: What makes someone a true disciple — and who gets to decide?


Can a ‘unique’ BYU really be true to its two missions: faith and scholarship?

The tensions between two are — and always have been — present. But in the wake of apostle Jeffrey Holland’s talk, some say it’s possible.

Salt Lake Tribune
By Peggy Fletcher Stack
Sep. 7, 2021

It is possible, some say, to balance faith in divine Truth (with a capital T) and faith in the truths of earthly scholarship.
And that is exactly how Brigham Young University sees its “unique” mission.

All seem to agree that the school owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is — and should be — different from other universities.

The truth-seeking tensions, however, can be difficult to navigate. Trying to maintain professional standards and religious orthodoxy can be challenging. Is it even attainable or could the school lose its footing?

What it takes are teachers who are “bilingual,” former church President Spencer W. Kimball, told BYU faculty in 1975. “You must speak with authority and excellence to your professional colleagues in the language of scholarship, and you must also be literate in the language of spiritual things.”

Mormonism’s flagship university “will not and cannot divorce itself from the big questions of human experience,” religious history professor Spencer Fluhman said in a 2019 address. “Unlike other institutions, there is no secularizing retreat here that permits any discipline or field to imagine itself apart from questions of human flourishing or morality or even holiness.”

That charge was reiterated last week by apostle Jeffrey R. Holland, who reminded teachers that the school “stands unquestionably committed to its unique academic mission and to the church that sponsors it.”

Yet top church authorities have complained at times that the scales were tipping too far toward secularism — on questions about evolution, race, women and, more recently, LGBTQ individuals.

Earlier this year, BYU students lit up the Y on the mountain in rainbow colors and a high percentage of Mormon millennials support same-sex marriage, which the church opposes.

And now Holland, like some of his predecessors, has called for a retrenchment.

Quoting from a recent letter he received, Holland said that “some faculty are not supportive of the church’s doctrines and policies and choose to criticize them publicly.”

They should take up their intellectual “muskets” to defend the church, especially “the doctrine of the family and...marriage as the union of a man and a woman,” the popular apostle said, but some choose to aim “‘friendly fire’ — and from time to time the church, its leaders and some of our colleagues within the university community have taken such fire on this campus. And sometimes it isn’t friendly — wounding students and the parents of students who are confused about what so much recent flag-waving and parade-holding on this issue means.”

If maintaining the faith’s policy on LGBTQ members — that it’s no sin to have same-sex attraction but acting on it is — costs the school some “professional associations and certifications,” Holland said, “then so be it.”

The Provo school “must have the will to stand alone, if necessary,” said Holland, BYU’s president from 1980 to 1989, “being a university second to none in its role primarily as an undergraduate teaching institution that is unequivocally true to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ in the process.”

Some report the speech already has had a chilling effect on campus, with some professors worrying about what they might teach, write or research.

It might not be an idle threat.

In recent days, BYU’s Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship quietly scrubbed from its website any mention of the work by historian Benjamin Park, a BYU graduate, history professor at Sam Houston State University in Texas, and faithful Latter-day Saint whose work is sold at church-owned Deseret Book. Gone are Park’s podcast interview for the institute, the announcement of his short-term fellowship, even his profile page.

“I was surprised and disappointed to see my content was removed,” says Park, author of the acclaimed “Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier.” “Given BYU and the Maxwell Institute had played a significant role in my own development in general, and this book in particular, their hosting my scholarship was a high point for my career.”

Now, Park says, “I worry I don’t have a place there.”

Questions have swirled through other corners of the school about how much support for their LGBTQ students is OK, what is included in doctrine versus policy, how best to defend the faith without diminishing their academic standards, what would happen if the school loses accreditation — and how best to chart a middle course between the prestigious but religiously free-floating Notre Dame and the lower-ranked but more religiously controlled schools like Oral Roberts University.

“BYU occupies a really important place as a part of a little solar system of faith-based colleges dedicated to excellence in research and teaching,” says Patrick Mason, chair of Mormon history and culture at Utah State University, “while also being serious about its religious identity.”

There is an “inherent tension between secular scholarship and religious faith, but BYU tries to bring the two into conversation with each other,” Mason says. For students and faculty, “it is all part of who you are, part of the bigger, integrated world of knowledge.”

By what authority?

A singular aspect of Mormonism is the belief that a divinely appointed prophet ultimately pronounces truth — and members trust him to speak for God.

Beyond that, Latter-day Saints agree to “sustain” all their top leaders known as “general authorities.”

But university professors typically defer to consensus in the field, not to a single individual, which sets up competing authorities. And they feel free to critique their school’s president.

In recent years, two BYU presidents — Merrill Bateman and Cecil Samuelson — were simultaneously serving as general authorities, which gave them extra ecclesiastical protection from criticism.

The current president, Kevin Worthen, has no such shield.

The issue of religious authority came into play in 1981, with a strong exchange over the nature of God between English professor Eugene England and outspoken apostle Bruce R. McConkie.

McConkie vehemently opposed England’s speculation that God might be progressing, saying that the Almighty’s perfection is absolute, and in a letter wrote: “It is my province to teach to the church what the doctrine is. It is your province to echo what I say or to remain silent.”

For believing scholars working at BYU, says Janan Graham-Russell, a graduate research fellow in Mormon studies at the University of Utah, the question becomes: Where does one’s adherence to doctrines end and secularism begin?

Pursuing questions about faith in any field, she says, “can be a spiritual practice in itself.” After all, the church was built on Mormon founder Joseph Smith asking a question about which church is right.

At BYU, Graham-Russell says, the expectations concerning asking questions “is beginning to position the practice as less of an academic exercise and more of a test of one’s faithfulness to the church.”

Parallels from the past

The England-McConkie exchange was not the first time Latter-day Saint leaders came down on BYU faculty for what the former viewed as opposition to church teachings.

In 1910, Horace Cummings, superintendent of church schools, reported to his higher-ups that several BYU professors were teaching evolutionary theory and Darwinism, which was disturbing students’ faith.

Within a year, four professors were fired or pressured to resign over teaching evolution or a more nuanced look at scriptures and, by 1921, up to 30% of the faculty had left, according to researcher Gary Bergera’s history of the school. At issue “was not only the question of a literalistic approach to religion, but the role of a church and its administrators to intervene in the daily curricula of an institution of higher secular learning. If science lost and religion won in 1911, defeat and victory would prove short-lived, even illusory.”

In fact, evolution has been taught at the church-owned school for decades.

Another issue brought BYU into conflict with the federal government and accrediting organizations due to the absence of Blacks on campus.

That was clearly a result of the church’s then-ban on Black members holding the priesthood or entering temples.

In the 1960s, Latter-day Saint leaders declared that the long-standing prohibition, which ended in 1978, was a fundamental doctrine.

“The church has no intention of changing its doctrine on the Negro,” said N. Eldon Tanner of the governing First Presidency in 1967. “...Throughout the history of the original Christian church, the Negro never held the priesthood. There’s really nothing we can do to change this. It’s a law of God.”

That stance got the attention of the U.S. government, which investigated the church school for alleged violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Rather than giving into the government’s threat to deny all federal funds to the university unless it recruited Black students and faculty, says Matthew Harris, who is writing a book on the church and race after World War II, then apostle and future church President Harold B. Lee “vowed to shut the school down before allowing Blacks on campus.”

During the tumultuous spring and summer of 1969, several things happened that changed Lee’s mind: Western Athletic Conference officials threatened to kick BYU out of the league; athletic protests continued garnering increased national media coverage; and federal investigators planned another site visit to determine if BYU had, in fact, boosted its “Negro enrollment.”

Still, the school’s board of trustees “dug in its heels,” says Harris, a history professor at Colorado State University in Pueblo. By that fall, however, the trustees — predominantly apostles — changed their minds, allowing coaches to begin recruiting Black student-athletes.

And the next year, he says, federal investigators “backed off BYU when the school hired its first Black faculty member.”

Promoting faith

Another issue that makes BYU stand out, says Laurie Maffly-Kipp, professor of religion and politics and Washington University in St. Louis, is the nature of its global faith.

BYU emerged from a church “in the midst of intense external persecution and saw itself in part as a haven from larger cultural-social issues in U.S. society,” says Maffly-Kipp, author of the forthcoming volume “Making Zion: A Global History of Mormonism.” “The school has since seen different eras of academic assimilation and retrenchment, depending on the stance of church leaders vis-a-vis wider social currents.”

The church is “very mission-oriented, more so even than some evangelical churches,” she says. “When a faith community declares every member a missionary, it becomes difficult to separate out the promotion of faith from other kinds of speech and education.”

Given that “centrality of evangelization” is a key purpose of “what it means to be a member,” Maffly-Kipp wonders, “what role does education play? Must it always be about promoting faith? And is agreement with church leadership the only way to promote faith?”

Completely free inquiry “means that you have the latitude to consider all sorts of options,” she says, “to take facts and other data as they come and reinvent the world of understanding.”

This doesn’t mean that the scholarship that comes out of BYU “isn’t outstanding,” Maffly-Kipp says. “But it may, if constrained by limits on speech or inquiry, have to be contained within certain bounds that are previously established.”

The scholar adds that such tensions over a university’s mission are hardly unique to religiously related schools.

“There are plenty of state schools that are facing threats from political factions in their states that want to steer the ways that faculty are teaching (e.g., forbidding the teaching of critical race theory),” Maffly-Kipp says. “The compulsion there might be facing dismissal or not being promoted.”

At BYU, however, the problem “is complicated by the fact that faculty are simultaneously risking job status,” she says, “and ecclesiastical consequences if they do not abide by the guidance of church leadership.”

Creating community

To Mason, who graduated from BYU and taught at Notre Dame, the Provo school provides a great setting for a community of like-minded but diverse members.

Students agree upon a certain set of shared, behavioral norms — no to smoking, drinking, premarital sex and rooming with the opposite sex, yes to attending church and supporting ecclesiastical leaders — which, he says, can help educate the whole person.

Even so, the school could do a better job of explaining the why of these rules (like no beards for men), he says. “The voice of authority often seems arbitrary and is not as compelling or persuasive, especially to younger church members, as thoughtful explanations. Why can’t BYU students drink coffee, for example, and what does that have to do with getting a degree in engineering?”

Overall, though, Mason hopes the school doesn’t “jettison its core identity.”

The historian appreciates that every student has to take a certain number of religion classes but wishes they would engage contemporary issues more robustly.

Or as Fluhman, executive director of BYU’s Maxwell Institute, said, “A steady diet of religious or intellectual Twinkies — sugary sweet but without real nourishment — as one of my colleagues describes them, has no place in God’s kingdom. The intersection of academic disciplines and [church history’s] grand facts should be electric and, in every sense, rigorous.”

Your religion “can’t be the least sophisticated part of your life,” Mason privately tells his USU students, who are trying to balance their secular learning with faith. “You are developing a more complex view of the world and should bring the same kind of rigor you see in all these other fields to your religious life.”

As to the church school’s unique mission, he says, he wants students to “lean into the tension.”

The church’s prophets and apostles “declare doctrine for the church,” he says, and the university “is a good place to explore what that means in light of all the other ways we gain knowledge about the world.”

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