There’s a topic that I’ve been avoiding on this blog—and that, of course, is religion.
To say anything about religion is to position oneself relative to innumerable creeds, philosophies, spiritual orientations, practices, taboos, and relationships. Especially where I live. My native Utah is a very religious society, and I say that not just because there are churches everywhere. Social scientists talk about one’s “membership” in any number of groups. In Utah, if someone says they’re a “member” or “non-member”, there’s only one group they can be referring to: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (“the Mormon Church”, “the LDS Church”, or here, just “the Church”).
Religion has been a huge part of my life since the beginning. I grew up in a faithful Latter-day Saint home to two incredible and devout parents. I lived in Denmark for two years, from 2019 to 2021, as a full-time proselytizing missionary for the Church, and I attend Brigham Young University, which was the one school I applied to when I was preparing for college at sixteen. It’s owned and operated by the Church, and it’s a strange and fascinating place—largely, I think, because of the creative and messy interaction between young adults and the Church.
Identities and beliefs are constructed in relation to existing identities and beliefs—never in a vacuum—and are only magnified under pressure. College is the time when many young adults decide what role their religious beliefs will play in their futures. Policies such as those that students who leave the Church are expelled and gay students are subject to discipline for going on dates or holding hands inevitably create pressure that facilitates the creation of strong identities both aligned with and opposed to that of the Church—not to mention a home for underground journalism. BYU’s faculty have also undergone a directed recommitment to orthodoxy with a strengthening of religious requirements for new hires, and I heard one administrator tearfully defend his faith in the character of his employees—a defense that would never have needed to be made had there been no fear as a consequence. Campus does feel like a battleground some days.
In such a climate, I hope I can be forgiven for my trepidation at staking my flag anywhere when it comes to religion. Confusion, anger, and obscurity seem to be associated with religious issues at BYU just as often as faith, hope, and charity. Yet that isn’t to say I haven’t found nuggets of goodness at BYU and its hybrid world of orthodox apologetics and coffee shop heresy. Some of my favorite professors have been the purveyors of religious ideas, like the kind Dan Becerra and the excited and knowledgeable Matthew Grey, and even professors in other disciplines, like Norm Evans, whose calm kindness and love is woven together with his religious faith.
Anyway, all this introduction is to provide a little context and qualification for this first foray into religion. The upcoming parts of this post (part two | part three) are an essay I wrote for one of BYU’s required religion classes (“Foundations of the Restoration”), in which I summarize a work of history by a figure in early Latter-day Saint history, John Corrill, and comment on what his experience tells us about the history of dissent among the Mormons. I hope you’ll find something interesting in it!
(Or you could just read Corrill’s history himself on the Joseph Smith Papers website here. It’s probably about an hour’s read, and the writing is lucid and direct.) ∎