The Books of My Life: Brigham Young University

When I transferred from Ball State University to Indiana University in Bloomington in the late 1970s, I decided to change my major from Classical Civilisations to Religious Studies with a specialisation in Biblical Studies. By 1980, however, I began to develop an interest in the history of American Christianity and particularly the history of Protestantism along with an interest in social theory and particularly semiology and hermeneutics, theoretical interests themselves stimulated by my studies in Biblical Studies. 

At some point in the 1980s, I don't remember precisely when, I also developed an interest in Mormonism. By the early 1990s my interest in Mormonism was such that I decided that I wanted to learn more about Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I thus decided to apply to the doctoral programme in sociology at Brigham Young University, the university run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons, in Provo, Utah. Where better, I thought, to study and research Mormonism than in a Mormon run research university in the heart of the Mormon culture region? So in the early 1990s I matriculated into the doctoral programme in sociology with an emphasis in the sociology of Mormonism at BYU.

One of the things that surprised me when I applied to BYU was that I had to meet with a Mormon Bishop (roughly equivalent to a vicar in the Anglican Church) and covenant to follow the BYU honour code with its mandated grooming, clothing, and behavioural standards for all Y students, undergraduate or graduate, faculty, and administrators. At the time, I simply couldn't imagine that a large research university with doctoral programmes could or would take such standards seriously. I, a Gentile in Zion, certainly didn't take parts of the honour code seriously, an honour code I thought a throwback to the nineteenth to mid-twentieth century paternalistic college and university. Instead I assumed that in practise BYU would be much like the University of Notre Dame, a place where I briefly undertook graduate work in American Studies and did research on the history of American conservative Protestantism, and which had no grooming and dress standards for its students, faculty, and staff. 

In retrospect, I wish I had read Gary Bergera's and Ronald Priddis's well documented Brigham Young University: A House of Faith (Salt Lake: Signature, 1985) before I thought about going to school at BYU and before I matriculated at the Y. For if I had read the Bergera and Priddis book I would have known that  BYU did take its honour code seriously, all of it, that BYU culture like Mormon culture was authoritarian and paternalistic, that the Y and Mormon culture had a significant right wing our way or the highway moral theocratic culture that included, at one time, an inquisitorial spy ring established by the president of BYU to, using students, ferret out and monitor "liberal" and "left wing" faculty (that good old time right wing political and ideological correctness), that films were routinely censored at the Y (that good old time right wing cancel culture), and that things that are now accepted as long standing BYU distinctives or exceptions, such as the dress and grooming components of the BYU honour code, were actually reactions to the post-WWII fashion industry, the 1950s youth culture, and the counterculture of the 1960s.

Bergera and Priddis argue that BYU and its mostly secondary school predecessor, the Brigham Young Academy have, since its founding, been strongly impacted by tensions between Mormon distinctives or what Mormon sociologist Armand Mauss calls the angel, and the beehive, Mormon assimilation to dominant Victorian American society and culture. Bergera and Priddis explore in detail tensions between the angel and the beehive at BYU and between what Mormon historian Richard Poll called Iron Rod or fundamentalist and literalist Mormons and Liahona Mormons, Mormons that are roughly akin to more moderate and liberal Roman Catholics and Protestants. In nine well documented chapters Bergera and Priddis explore in historical and thematic terms tensions, religious versus secular tensions, surrounding the relationships between faculty and bureaucrats at BYU and the general authorities of the Church, who claim at least some degree of prophetic authority, the honour code, evolution and higher Biblical criticism, politics, student government and student clubs, athletics, the humanities, the social sciences, paintings and sculptures, and films.

The BYU I matriculated at, took classes at, did research at, and taught at in the 1990s, was like the BYU Bergera and Priddis describe. It was rent through with tensions between the "secular" academic life and a revelation grounded Mormon religious culture. After I entered BYU I found a university that was, as was Mormon culture, deeply authoritarian and paternalistic. I found a campus and a community that was characterised by strong right wing elements, something that in retrospect foreshadows the mainstreaming of Bircherism and Dixieism in the Republican Party of the early twenty-first century. I found a university that would not let those who violated honour code grooming and dress standards take tests or check out books from the library. I found a university that fired faculty for their explorations into some aspects of Mormon history and culture and their feminism. I found a university where I could be turned in to the chair of the Sociology Department for bringing a copy of the Tanner's book on the changes in the Mormon temple rituals over time (the Tanner's are well-known and notorious ex-Mormon turned evangelicals who polemicise against the Church). I found a university that couldn't decide whether it wanted to be Bob Jones University, a university where an authoritarian faith trumps (pun intended) all, or the University of Notre Dame, a university that had come to grips with modern and postmodern scholarship in the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts though Notre Dame too had its own right wing intellectual culture, in Notre Dame's case a law school that ferreted out "homosexuals" in the Theology Faculty. I ultimately found a university that, like Notre Dame, which seemed to me an isolated secular monastic community with football and a limited and much more parochial intellectual culture compared to Indiana University, simply wasn't for me.

At the same time that I found an authoritarian, puritanical, paternalistic, and petty Y, I also found a Y with quality faculty in several academic departments, a Y with a vibrant intellectual culture, particularly when it came to the history of Christianity and Mormonism, a Y with several ethically and morally heroic students (e.g. the amazing Cari Petersen), and a Y with some of the best students I ever taught Social Stratification to, students who, in some cases, had the ability to do research in non-English archives because of the fact that they had been on missions overseas. Several of the students in my class would end up in top graduate programmes at Yale, the University of Texas, Indiana University, and the University of Washington. I found, in other words, a Y that was, as Bergera and Priddis described it, schizophrenic.

I found Brigham Young University: A House of Faith an excellent history of Brigham Young University and the tensions that have been at its heart since it was founded. Bergera's and Priddis's book should be on reading list of anyone interested in higher education in the United States, anyone interested in tensions between religion and "secularism" in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, anyone interested in the tensions between religion and education in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, anyone interested in the tensions between religious authority and "secular" authority, and anyone interested in Mormonism. I must, however, note a few unfortunate mistakes I found in the text. On page 199 Bergera and Priddis have Robert Francis Kennedy representing Massachusetts rather than New York in the US senate. On page 287 Bergera and Priddis refer to the University of Indiana rather than Indiana University. On page 343 and 344 Bergera and Priddis place the University of Oxford in Cambridge rather than in Oxford. On page 358 Bergera and Priddis claim that the Graduate Theological Union is part of the University of California Berkeley; it isn't though the students at the eight schools that now constitute the Union can take classes at UC Berkeley.