Commentary: BYU can and should promote LDS faith, and there are many ways to do it

I understand what the leaders of education in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are trying to accomplish at Brigham Young University. Over the past few years, they have implemented a number of policy changes. Those that have received the most attention require faculty members to affirm their commitment to a particular set of policy and doctrinal propositions.

The goal is to ensure that BYU’s faculty members hold to a robust sense of religious distinctiveness rather than sinking into a blob of mushy academic consensus.

I share that aim. I was educated and have taught at universities with religious commitments. I know that religious education can offer ways of understanding the nature of humanity, the meaning of human relationships and the purpose of life that can do a lot to heal what ails our society. This stretches far beyond any particular issues in the culture wars.

I want to be careful here. It’s easy to map this conversation as an argument over whether BYU should be a distinctively religious school. That’s a mistaken framing because it assumes there is only one way to preserve BYU’s religious distinctiveness. The question is not whether one supports a religious model of education at BYU. The question is what that model might look like.

There are multiple answers to the question. Here I want to explore a few of them.

Why religious education matters

American higher education — American society, for that matter — faces a lot of struggles. Religion can help us see and gauge the invisible assumptions that guide what we might call secular American life. These assumptions can be worthwhile, but they also can become pathological.

Here is an example: American society is structured around individualism. This has been good, on the whole, for the United States. It has helped us prioritize rights, opportunity and equality. But it can lead to worship — in the attention we give, in the celebrities we support, in the time we spend — of self-expression and success at the expense of community and mutual obligation.

In an individualistic society, it’s easy to reduce religion to ethics. Of course, individual self-discipline and the cultivation of personal belief play major roles in many religious traditions. But overemphasizing these aspects of religion can make us overlook or neglect how religion can help us imagine what community can be.

Clark Gilbert, church commissioner of education, has pointed to some of these possibilities. Studies show, for instance, that strong faith communities on a campus make it statistically more likely that students will graduate.

This is a possible solution for a major problem on U.S. campuses. The Obama administration’s surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, has argued that many problems on college campuses — dropout rates, addiction, depression — can be traced to a plague of loneliness among students born of, among other things, the COVID-19 pandemic. He has urged universities to reinvigorate student social lives.

So far, so good. But this is only the beginning.

What about orthodoxy?

The Church Educational System has instituted a series of specific questions asked of potential hires, has encouraged current faculty to opt into an ecclesiastical recommendation system that subjects them to those queries, and has empowered the Ecclesiastical Clearance Office to scan social media accounts of prospective hires. These requirements go beyond the broad statements of belief in the faith’s temple recommend interviews into what Protestant Christians call “orthodoxy,” a set of detailed and specific propositions about specific church policies.

These moves seem to spring from the conviction that religious education at its core is education delivered by orthodox educators.

Faculty assent to statements of orthodoxy is required at some religious institutions of higher education. Mostly these are conservative Protestant schools like Liberty University or Wheaton College. The Protestant denominations that founded these schools assumed that being religious is about believing the right thing. So statements of orthodoxy at these schools require affirmations of theology more specific than even many members of those denominations might agree with. For instance, Wheaton faculty members affirm their belief that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ will not only happen but also will occur “personally, visibly and unexpectedly.”

Statements of orthodoxy are less common at religious schools in non-Protestant traditions. I could point to many examples of Jewish and Catholic institutions, but I’ll focus here on one: The Catholic University of America (the only Catholic university in the nation chartered directly by the Vatican) does not ask faculty to agree to such statements.

The university instead asks prospective faculty members how they might best support the school’s religious mission. Catholic professors reflect on their faith in an open-ended way. This pushes them to think about faith as something that happens in the community around them instead of inside their heads. The Catholic University of America sees the work of Catholicism as a conversation and invites people on many sides of that conversation, including non-Catholics, to teach at the university. According to Andrew Abela, a former provost there, diversity of belief on campus can “advance the dialogue between faith and reason.” That dialogue helps Catholic faculty members better understand their own tradition by virtue of seeing it from other perspectives.

The value of community

Don’t mistake my point as arguing that fidelity to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints should not be important at BYU. That is not the case. Rather, there are ways to promote faith beyond requiring affirmations of orthodoxy.

James Heft, a Catholic priest and founder of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California, calls the model at The Catholic University of America the “open circle.”

“Faculty and the student body,” he argues, “need to be sufficiently distinctive to sustain a community on common discourse but open enough to examine a wide variety of ideas.”

Faculty members at religious universities have a distinct mission, a job different from clergy or missionaries. Catholic educators have called that mission “creative fidelity,” exploration of the possibilities a faith tradition might offer in a changing world. The cardinal and great Catholic educator John Henry Newman, maintained that the purpose of Catholic education was “enlargement” of one’s mind, moral compass, faith, sense of possibility. “There is no enlargement,” he famously said, “unless there be a comparison of ideas one with another.” That is why the university’s mission was to bring together distinct points of view.

Religious universities also have a mission distinctive from nonreligious ones. At a religious university, the faith tradition should be valued. Within that environment the tradition can be pondered thoroughly, held up to the light and examined in love.

Requiring faculty members to assent to statements of orthodoxy can betray fear that the faith is fragile. That fear can, in turn, create anxiety. And that anxiety can choke out love. Thus, the work of creative fidelity starves.

Catholic higher education can help us see some assumptions that might be otherwise invisible to Latter-day Saints. Orthodoxy assumes that religion is foremost about specific propositions one believes. But Catholicism has long emphasized that religion is first about belonging to and participation in the sacred community the church creates. When Catholics bring a multiplicity of voices to the campus, it is an illustration of confidence that truth is made manifest through community.

Possibilities for BYU

This brings us back to some of the possibilities Clark Gilbert has already invoked. For example, religious scholars might ask specific questions inspired by their tradition. But religious education should also encourage us to think beyond the assumptions our society takes for granted.

One way BYU might think about distinctive religious education has to do with the incarnation of Jesus Christ, which many Christian universities cite as a model for education. Jesus, they say, was both fully divine and fully human. Therefore, education should explore how the mind and the spirit and the body interact with one another. It should emphasize doing as well as thinking, application as well as theory. This is why many Catholic universities (like the one I attended) expect students to engage in service, to enroll in classes that will take them off campus, and to complete assignments that require them to go to places other than the library.

The Latter-day Saint tradition, of course, has a special place for the body, and BYU’s leaders and professors might explore how service learning there could help students think about their faith.

There are also distinctive aspects to the Latter-day Saint tradition that BYU could explore. The Family: A Proclamation to the World, for instance, teaches that we are social creatures at a basic level. That fact invites us to think about how relationships shape us. It implies that our identities are shaped in ways far distant from our contemporary society’s language of individual autonomy. All of these are questions ripe for exploration in the fields of history, sociology and family studies.

Creating a religious university merely through imposing orthodoxy embraces the individualist assumption that religion is no more than a set of ideas fighting other ideas. Instead, a Latter-day Saint education can invite us to ponder what the life of faith actually looks like, worked out on the communal world of the campus.

Matthew Bowman is the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University and the author of 2023′s “The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America” and 2012′s “The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith.”