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This article in the Beast doesn’t IMO do non-believers a lot of favors. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/31/lose-your-faith-get-expelled-at-byu.html But I can envision a BYU in which non-believers aren’t rooted out. They are just kids after all. I don’t love that the Y requires such strong professions of belief to be repeated ad nauseum. I know we’ve been told we’ll find our testimony in the bearing thereof, sometimes that’s just not correct. Sometimes that backfires. In short, I don’t want to turn BYU into some sort of sanctuary for non-belief where people walk around sharing their untestimonies and trying to convince people not to be sheep (on the downlow, in the humanities building is fine). But the current environment is simply toxic, rewarding tattling, modesty shaming, mission-age-policing, enforcing the profession of belief even if people are just struggling, expelling people who don’t have a testimony. Let our testimony struggles be inner ones. Don’t “out” people who don’t believe through incessant interviews and hyper-vigilance. Let them be. The worth of souls is great, but we’ll never get these souls back because we create an all-or-nothing situation and they feel forced to leave when in reality they are still just figuring things out. It’s not necessary. I have seen the enemy, and the enemy is us.
hawkgrrrl wrote:I have seen the enemy, and the enemy is us.
Indeed, I couldn’t agree more. I really can’t fathom how it’s perfectly OK to be an atheist and attend BYU, but don’t become one while you are there and a member. Yes, I know students there agree to live by the honor code –
but so does the non-member. My current BYU student son, a believer, says his boss says something to him almost every day about going on a mission. He does plan to go – but he should go when he’s ready, when he wants to, not because his boss hounds him about it.
I could really get on the soapbox about this Hawk – but you have said it well.
I’ve often thought about this with regard to (the frequency of) F&T meetings and TR interviews also. I don’t like the spontaneous requests to bear testimony at all. What’s wrong with letting people share what they want to share when they want to share it? I don’t mind being asked a Y/N question in a TR interview, but I’ve had leaders ask me to bear testimony of the questions on the spot. I don’t like that. Interesting article – nothing I didn’t expect to see from an “outsider”. Interesting that many of the comments are more, “what’s the problem with non-Mormon’s being kicked out of a Mormon school?” I know it’ll never happen, but the total pretzel that BYU is in over this stuff reinforces my belief that the whole thing should be shut down. Send everyone back home to pay their own tuition at whatever school they choose, fill up those institutes, stop skimming off the “best and the brightest” for coveted BYU-Provo slots.
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