“We are not so much concerned with whether your thoughts are orthodox or heterodox as we are that you shall have thoughts.” — Apostle Hugh B. Brown
In their rush to defend Brigham Young University in the wake of Peggy Fletcher Stack’s recent article, “Dark Days: New Rules Have BYU Professors Running Scared,” some commentators have mistakenly implied that professors who take issue with Clark Gilbert’s heavy-handedness and dogmatism are, by extension, also opposed to BYU’s religious mission. This is false: These professors are just as committed to the school’s unique position as a religious university as are Gilbert and his allies.
By drawing an imagined distinction between themselves and their foes — by conflating faithful disagreement with spiritual subversion — Gilbert and his allies ultimately do a disservice to the students whose education they oversee.
In a recent essay in the Deseret News, BYU law professor Shima Baughman defended Gilbert’s actions on the grounds that “when there isn’t alignment with the mission or values, that naturally matters.” In other words, Baughman frames the concerns of BYU professors as the protests of scholars at odds with the university’s religious mission. However, the problem is not a lack of alignment with mission or values per se, but rather a disagreement with Gilbert concerning the specific manner in which a religious university ought to operate.
Should such a university’s focus be on inculcating devotion to the specific doctrines, policies, and aims — some of them historically contingent — that are of special concern to the current commissioner of education? Or should the focus instead be on the formation of engaged and thoughtful Christian disciples who, though active church members, may not agree with church leaders on every particular? That, a disagreement over the best way to live out a shared mission, is the real source of division. To suggest, as Baughman does, that this is some sort of battle between, on the one hand, faithful faculty members, and on the other, “professors who . . . openly challenge [the church’s] teachings in classes or even behind closed doors,” is spurious.
Hal Boyd, chief of staff for BYU President Shane Reese, makes an error similar to Baughman’s. In an op-ed, Boyd writes of BYU’s “commitment to transform[ing] students into disciple-scholars, lifelong followers of Jesus Christ,” as though that were at the heart of the dispute. In actuality, virtually all BYU faculty share that commitment; if they didn’t, they likely would never have applied to work at BYU. What is at dispute is whether this commitment to disciple-scholarship necessarily requires that all faculty members be in lockstep agreement with all official positions of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Beyond being inaccurate, the framing from Baughman and Boyd of internal dissent as disloyalty to BYU’s religious mission is also harmful, because it allows them, as well as the administrators they defend, to sidestep important questions about the variety of paths a religious university might take.
As blogger Sam Brunson recently argued, one of the dangers of imposing a false dichotomy between loyalists and non-loyalists is that you risk alienating the very people who can instill faith in wavering students, people who can show students the plethora of forms that engaged discipleship can take. Imagine, for example, students who disagree with the church’s recent decision to prevent transgender members from holding callings that would have them interact with children or youth. Those students would be better served by a like-minded faculty member who still actively attends church than they would by a faculty member who tells the students that the brethren have spoken so they must get on board — yet only the former faculty member would pass muster with Gilbert.
BYU needs scholars who can demonstrate fidelity to both their personal conscience and to their faith, yet Clark Gilbert’s purity campaign seems designed to rid the school of precisely those sorts of people.
This is personal for me. I graduated from BYU last April, and the most meaningful class I took while a student there is likely not one that Gilbert would have embraced. Once a week during the semester, I’d gather with my classmates to discuss contemporary Latter-day Saint discipleship. Together we gave voice to our gratitude and our frustration, to our profound appreciation for the people we were because of our Mormonism as well as our impatience with an institution that was patriarchal, hidebound and too assured of its own chosenness. Our gratitude and love for the restored gospel and the institutional church were inseparable from our frustrations and impatience with both.
And what of the professor who presided over it all? Was this person faithless, openly hostile, irresponsible? Of course not. The faculty member was, on the contrary, an invaluable example of integrity, compassion and, yes, faith.
(Zach Stevenson) Zach Stevenson graduated from Brigham Young University in 2024. His work has been published in Wayfare, BYU Studies Quarterly and Criterion.
Zach Stevenson graduated from Brigham Young University in 2024. His work has been published in Wayfare, BYU Studies Quarterly and Criterion.
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