Why do anti-LDS chants keep popping up at BYU road games?

A young girl peppered her father with a question during their car ride home after a Brigham Young University basketball game against Providence College.

From the stands at the private Catholic school, she had heard a chant that’s become all too familiar for Cougar fans: “F- - - the Mormons.”

“Why were they so mean?” 10-year-old Katie asked during the December drive from Providence, Rhode Island, to the family’s home in New York. “Why? I don’t understand why.”

“Sometimes people are just mean,” Mark Buchanan, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, remembers telling his daughter, “and you try to get by, not engage.”

It was the mindset he was taught growing up. But now that he was a father, that didn’t feel satisfactory anymore.

The most recent chant at Amica Mutual Pavilion on Dec. 3 reopened a familiar discussion for Latter-day Saints. Why do the taunts occur with such frequency at sporting events? And should the church respond more forcefully when it happens?

“Maybe we should put a little bit more force into it, like, ‘Look, we are not going to put up with this. This isn’t right,’” said Buchanan, a BYU alum originally from Utah. “Instead of being reactive all the time, be proactive with this.”

The chant from Providence Friars fans happened once in the first half and again in the second. Providence’s athletic director quickly apologized.

This was hardly the first time an anti-Latter-day Saint chant broke out at a BYU event. When the faith’s flagship school went on the road to USC in 2021, it happened. When the Cougars played at Oregon in 2022, there it was again.

Each time, BYU leadership largely ignored it, accepting a simple apology and moving on.

“We can all agree that there is certain fan behavior at athletic events that crosses a line. We would hope that more people could see that disparaging someone’s religion crosses that line,” the BYU Athletics Department said in a statement to The Salt Lake Tribune this week.

“... We’re not going to make a statement after every incident. We understand that us having to hear some bad words is a small consideration when viewed in the wide landscape of issues in our country or even in college athletics right now. However, we also believe that words really do matter, and we believe that we as a society should examine anywhere we can eliminate prejudice and hate.”

Prodded by his daughter’s question, Buchanan had dug around for context to help him understand the persistent chant until a quote in a story by The Atlantic stopped him. It was published at the height of Latter-day Saint politician Mitt Romney’s presidential bid and the introduction of “The Book of Mormon” musical on Broadway. A theater critic was asked why a show that openly mocked the Utah-based faith could face almost no backlash.

“It’s because,” the critic responded, “your people have absolutely no cultural cachet.”

A ‘perfect storm’

Anti-religious chants aren’t a new phenomenon.

As far back as the ancient Romans, faith has been weaponized at sporting events. Famously at Roman chariot races, fans would carry tablets with curses on them aimed at their rivals and champions.

“Sports allegiance has always been sort of the vessel, or the standard carrier, for … identity conflicts,” said Eliza Rosenberg, a lecturer who teaches biblical studies at Utah State University.

In a more modern sense, anti-religious choruses have broken out across Europe.

In Glasgow, Scotland, fans of the traditionally Catholic soccer club Celtic F.C. were subjected to refrains of “everybody hates Roman Catholics” in 2019. When the team played Rangers F.C., a Protestant club, fans were known to chant they were “up to their knees in Fenian blood.” By Fenian, they meant Irish Catholics who supported Irish independence.

In Amsterdam last year, several fights erupted when the Israeli soccer team, Maccabi Tel Aviv, played the Dutch side, Ajax. Maccabi fans chanted “F – – – the Arabs” and several Israeli fans were beaten in what was deemed an anti-Semitic attack, according to police.

Even given those examples, four religious scholars who spoke to The Tribune agree that, at least in America, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and BYU have become more frequent targets of these chants. They believe it’s because there is a “perfect storm” of elements.

For one, scholars say the global faith gets a disproportionate amount of attention, considering it has only about 7 million members in the United States. In the past three years, there have been several major television shows about the church, such as “Under the Banner of Heaven” and “American Primeval.” The church’s history, scholars said, makes for dramatic television and an easy target.

“It has a very rich history that’s easy to make fun of, especially around polygamy and things like that,” said Patrick Mason, head of Mormon history and culture at Utah State. “If you’re a filmmaker and you want to say something about religion these days, you’re probably not going to make fun of Jews, for obvious reasons. Catholics, it’s a little tricky, because there’s so many of them. So then it becomes a market consideration with the [LDS] Church.”

Because of the type of media exposure and political strength, many Americans are at least familiar with Latter-day Saint faith, at least on the surface. At the same time, Mason said, they may not know a member who could educate them on the teachings — or make them think twice before shouting an anti-Latter-day Saint rant at a sporting event.

“Most people in the United States do not personally know a Latter-day Saint,” he said. “And we know one of the best measurements for tolerance and acceptance of minority groups is whether you personally have” a connection.

He continued, “You compound that with, most of the time when the LDS Church appears on people’s radars, it’s for a big media event that usually revolves around some negative aspect of the faith — whether it be polygamy or violence. The fact is that many, if not most, Americans still carry negative perceptions about the LDS Church.”

BYU is an anomaly when it comes to athletics, too.

Whereas other religions, such as Catholicism, have multiple affiliated universities competing at a high level, the LDS Church only has its flagship school Provo.

Scholars noted that at Catholic universities — like Georgetown, Notre Dame and some Big East schools — the religious barbs are often directed within the faith. A Jesuit school may take jabs, for example, at a Catholic school of an Augustinian order.

“But you’re all Catholic,” said Mason, who earned his doctorate from Notre Dame.

BYU, meanwhile, is the lone representative of its church in mainstream athletics, and any anti-Latter-day Saint sentiment comes from the outside.

Plus, BYU is distinctive in how it operates. It is one of the few major college athletic programs where religion is a significant part of students’ lives. There is a strict Honor Code based on the faith’s teachings. More than 80% of the students served religious missions.

That doesn’t happen at Boston College, for example. Even Providence, another Catholic school, isn’t equivalent. BYU is more strongly associated with religion, in fans’ minds, than most other religious schools.

“The average Providence College student is probably not necessarily as serious about his or her Catholicism as the average student at BYU is about being a Latter-day Saint,” said John Turner, the chair of religious studies at George Mason.

Rosenberg, the Utah State biblical scholar, suspected that if there was another major Division I program that took its faith as seriously as BYU, it too would be the subject of chants. But Yeshiva, a Jewish university, plays at the Division III level. And there is no major Islamic university in the U.S.

“BYU is a special magnet for anti-LDS sentiment,” Rosenberg said. “BYU is alone.”

Combine this with the current era of social media, and scholars said it’s almost inevitable that anti-Latter-day Saint chants would pop up at BYU games.

“We live in a culture where, unfortunately, I think people have been freer to say rude and hostile things in public, on social media,” Mason said. “I think it has unleashed some of the broader tendencies in our culture.”

A slow-moving response

While anti-Latter-day sentiments — chants and protests alike — aren’t new at BYU, neither is the school’s response, or lack thereof, to criticism.

“It’s a religion that doesn’t push back,” said Matthew Harris, a history scholar at the University of Colorado-Pueblo.

Harris, who has written about Latter-day Saint racial policies and politics, pointed to the church’s responses to protests in the 1960s and 1970s as examples.

During the Civil Rights Movement, several schools refused to play BYU over their racial policies. Black men and women weren’t allowed to enter Latter-day Saint temples, and Black men were barred from holding the priesthood until the church lifted the ban in 1978.

In response, eight track and field athletes at the University of Texas at El Paso famously boycotted their trip to Provo in 1968. That included the world record holder for long jump, Bob Beamon.

The following year, 14 members of Wyoming’s football team planned to wear a black armband during their game against BYU as a protest. They were kicked off the team before kickoff.

By year’s end, there were dozens of schools protesting BYU games. But the church was slow to respond. It wasn’t until then-BYU President Ernest Wilkinson lobbied the faith’s general authorities that the school spoke up.

“He said, ‘Look, we can’t ignore this. We’ve got to be able to produce a response to our critics. They’re dominating the airwaves,’” said Harris, who wrote a book on the topic called “Second-Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality.”

Eventually, BYU took out a two-page spread in several newspapers in cities where the criticism was the loudest, including Salt Lake City, Seattle and Portland, Oregon.

“They only did this reluctantly,” Harris said, “because they felt they had to.”

Whether in response to valid criticism or anti-Latter-day Saint chants at sporting events, Harris said there is a pattern in how the church responds to controversy.

Pushing positivity

BYU athletics director Tom Holmoe has heard the chants at Cougar road games. And not just at Providence, Oregon and USC.

“There have been a few highly publicized chants at our road games over the past few years, but really, we hear these types of things often, with a variety of our teams, in a variety of venues,” BYU Athletics told The Tribune.

“After these kinds of chants happen, we’re always thankful for an apology from a university leader or an athletic director, and we hope that productive conversations can happen on those campuses,” according to the school’s statement. “We hope that opposing fan bases can understand that when they are disparaging The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and/or its members, they aren’t just disparaging BYU. There are members of their community, fans of their school and even coaches and student-athletes on their teams who are members of the very faith they are chanting about.”

Jake Retzlaff, BYU’s first Jewish quarterback, was stunned when he first heard about the chants.

“Faith is way more similar between religions,” he told The Tribune when discussing the chants. “And yet, we only focus on the differences for some reason.”

There are those who think that BYU should speak up more often and more forcibly.

Harris suggested that BYU could write a letter to other athletic institutions spelling out how it felt about anti-Latter-day Saint chants and suggest policies to stop them.

“The security ought to forcibly remove people ASAP if they hear them using vulgarity like that,” Harris said. “And so I think if BYU were to be proactive within the conference, that could help prevent it.”

Then, again, that could draw attention to the church and some of its policies and teachings.

“They’re just afraid of people scrutinizing their teachings and particularly the Honor Code,” Harris said. “And the biggest hot button issue is LGBTQ and how the gay population of BYU is being treated, and that is the last thing that BYU administrators want to be published in newspapers.”

Others offered a different opinion.

“I wouldn’t really think of a chant like that as some major expression of anti-Mormonism,” Turner said. “I tend not to think it’s something BYU needs to make more of an issue. I definitely think schools should take action. It’s a little harder if you have 1,000 people shouting. At the moment, it’s not like they’re going to suspend all those people.”

BYU said it hopes that positive changes eventually come from the negative chants and that the Cougars’ athletics program can be a “vehicle for showcasing that goodness.”

“Ultimately, it’s our hope that in times of increasing cultural division, athletics can be a mechanism to bring people together in positive ways,” the athletics department said in a statement. “Religious bigotry is counterproductive to that, and while it can be disappointing and frustrating for BYU student-athletes, coaches, staff and fans to experience that on the road, we also recognize all of the incredible goodness that we find in various fan bases across the country. …

“While we’ll never be able to control the amount of negativity we experience at a road game, we can always control the amount of positivity that we strive to share.”

Until then, that night in Providence will stick with Buchanan and 10-year-old Katie.

“My daughter doesn’t want to go back to that type of environment,” Buchanan said, “which sucks.”

He used to believe that BYU should lay low, just like he first suggested to his daughter that night. But now, his perspective has changed. He wonders if BYU’s will, too.

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