Oh say, what is truth? ’Tis the fairest gem / That theriches of worlds can produce, / And priceless the value of truth will be when /The proud monarch’s costliest diadem / Is counted but dross and refuse.”Hearing these words, sung with devotion and considerable musical talent by acongregation consisting of two hundred mostly freshmen students at BrighamYoung University, my Catholic guest and I were moved. The students clearlybelieved what they were singing. The occasion was a regular Latter-day SaintSunday worship service (“sacrament meeting”). But for me this was a specialmeeting, my last Sunday with such a student congregation, having served forthree years as the bishop, or lay minister, for one of more than a hundred suchcampus wards. We were gathered as always in a law school lecture hall justlarge enough to accommodate our congregation, almost every member of which waspresent that and every other Sunday. That same Sunday morning, all across thecampus, every available large lecture hall was similarly occupied, and almostevery student was attending a similar worship service. (More than 90 percent ofBYU students are Mormons.)
The Victorian lyrics are quaint, but the central idea is oneanchored deep in Latter-day Saint belief and in the founding purposes ofBrigham Young University: the unity of truth, revealed and rational, to bepursued at once “by study and also by faith.” Brigham Young himself waspersistently emphatic on the spiritual and eternal value of intellectuallabors: “All our educational pursuits are in the service of God, for all theselabors are to establish truth on the earth . . . that we may become fitsubjects to dwell in a higher state of existence and intelligence than we nowenjoy.”
Mormon students come to BYU well acquainted with both sidesof this statement from the Book of Mormon: “To be learned is good if [we]hearken unto the counsels of God.” And on the whole these students are at leastas committed to the religious proviso as to the endorsement of learning. Inorder to be admitted, students must be endorsed as morally worthy andreligiously committed by their local church leaders, and the endorsement mustbe renewed every year. I am convinced that the level of moral obedience andreligious practice is extraordinary. The level of religious practice amongfaculty—almost all of whom are Latter-day Saints—is, if anything, even higher,and it is not left to chance: All BYU employees must be certified by theirlocal church leaders as religiously fit for their educational responsibilities.
In a word: BYU is a massively, intensely, and,notwithstanding inevitable human lapses, sincerely Latter-day Saint institutionof higher learning, and the broad and deep religious commitment of students andfaculty is by far the greatest asset the university possesses, and the chiefsource of the deep gratitude I feel for the privilege of serving on its facultyfor the past twenty-seven years. It is a genuinely and pervasively Mormoninstitution, and this must be kept in mind as we attempt to weigh its promiseagainst the daunting challenges it now faces.
Our alumni magazine recently republished a statementdelivered in 1975 by then–president of the Latter-day Saints (whom we hadsustained as Prophet) Spencer W. Kimball. Sometimes, he had said, “we must bewilling to break with the educational establishment (not foolishly orcavalierly, but thoughtfully and for good reason) in order to find gospel waysto help mankind. Gospel methodology, concepts, and insights can help us to dowhat the world cannot do in its own frame of reference.” The university musthelp the world when it “has lost its way on matters of principle.” Mormons“can, as Brigham Young hoped we would, ‘be a people of profound learningpertaining to the things of this world’ but without being tainted by what heregarded as the ‘pernicious, atheistic influences’ that flood in unless we arewatchful. Our scholars, therefore, must be sentries as well as teachers!”
At a recent faculty meeting, I asked my colleagues whetherwe did not need to pay attention to his concerns. I did not expect most of thefaculty and administrators to attach the same urgent importance I do to hiswarning, but I was still somewhat startled by their casual dismissal ofKimball’s concerns. In their responses, his lack of credentialed expertise inspecialized matters of higher education was noted, and it was argued that hewas then addressing the social upheaval of his time and it no longer was ofconcern to us. The call to be distinct from the academic mainstream did notapply to us.
And in case the practical conclusion was not clear to allfaculty, particularly to untenured professors concerned to keep their jobs,what was expected of us was spelled out plainly: Your job, we were told, is tobe good scholars and teachers as these functions are defined by the broader(secular) educational establishment by which we measure ourselves. Should youchoose to break with this establishment by seeking to fulfill some distinctiveLatter-day Saint mission—well, there you are on your own, and you must assumefor yourself the professional risks involved. It was pointless for me to pressthe question of BYU’s mission any further.
For some decades, BYU had managed a compromise between theacademic mainstream and its own aspiration to a distinctive mission. It must besaid that there have been reasonable arguments for this “mainstream” strategy,which so far has served us well, and that those who promote it do so with thesincere interests of BYU as a Mormon institution at heart.
Nothing could be better for our students, and for thereputation of the church as whole, than for us to prove our excellence in thescholarly communities in which we participate. The strategy has helped protectus against the inevitable temptation to use our distinctive religiouscommitments as an excuse for sloppy or idiosyncratic thinking: The only way toshow we’ve got the right stuff is to compete vigorously in the existing academicmarketplace. The policy of increasing alignment with the academic mainstreamthus reflects legitimate concerns.
One must sympathize as well with colleagues who, with fullrespect to Kimball’s authority, do not see what it would mean to apply hisprophetic language to the article they need to write or the class they need toteach. Just what “pernicious, atheistic influences” ought we to guard against,and just what are the “gospel methodologies” that might serve as alternatives?In 1988, Jeffrey R. Holland, then BYU’s president, proposed a positive linkagebetween our educational and religious missions when he urged the faculty toresist hyper-specialization, by which we seek merely to “imitate others or wintheir approval,” and instead to assume the responsibility of “those educatedand spiritual and wise [to] sort, sift, prioritize, integrate, and give somesense of wholeness . . . to great eternal truths.” But the machinery ofspecialization was already in place, and it has only accelerated.
While the mainstream academic suppression of all questionsof transcendent purpose and of associated moral limits was taken as a givenacross the disciplines, and while most researchers and teachers deferredintellectually, in their specialized professional capacities, to the authorityof a rationalist and reductionist framework of understanding, they were not forthe most part concerned to draw the moral, political, and religiousimplications. The authority of a reductionist scientism and an ethic oflimitless personal freedom grew steadily in the human sciences and humanities,but most BYU professors were happy to consider their scientific or scholarlywork as “value-neutral” and to compartmentalize their religious and moralbeliefs in a “private” domain supposedly exempt from the ordering paradigm oftheir discipline. Even the relatively few professors knowingly committed to themoral and political implications of the secular–progressive paradigm often feltno urgent need to convert less enlightened students.
During this period of compromise, faculty and students wereoften encouraged by church and university leaders, beginning with Kimball, todevelop a capacity for “bilingualism”: an ability to speak both the language ofthe academy and the language of revealed truths. It was generally stipulated orassumed that the language of faith would be the primary idiom that reflected ascholar’s deepest understanding. But the risk was always present that thelanguage associated with academic prestige would, often quite surreptitiously,become the dominant or default language, and religious language secondary andeventually subordinate. There comes a point where the secular framework, havingbeen purged of old, integrating questions concerning the moral and religiousdimensions of the human condition, can no longer be translated into thecommunity’s authoritative religious idiom. When this happens, faith is leftspeechless, defenseless, resourceless.
In the larger Western academic culture, the truce betweenreason and faith has been broken. Only at the cost of all that is trulydistinctive in its mission can BYU pretend to continue on as if the oldconditions were still in force. Religion classes will still be taught and infact required, and a few teachers may occasionally lapse from theirprofessionalism and resort to the old dialect of faith, but BYU scholars andteachers will have lost all access to a more holistic understanding of theintellectual enterprise that once made possible a fruitful dialogue betweenreason and revelation.
Most of my colleagues will surely be surprised, not to sayappalled, by my suggestion that on the whole they are succumbing to a secularparadigm. Many teach in pre-professional, technical, and natural-scientificfields that can for the most part be safely insulated from the questions ofultimate purpose that condition our understanding of the meaning of education.It is in the social sciences and humanities that the tension manifests itselfbetween a specialized and reductionist view and a more holistic understandingof human existence, social, moral, and political. Even in these disciplinesonly a minority of faculty, perhaps a very small minority, espouse a paradigmof knowledge they know to be incompatible with their ostensible religious commitments.
Our disciplines and ever more specialized subdisciplines aredesigned to bracket and ultimately to suppress the larger, integratingquestions that once defined liberal education, but it is comforting, not to sayprofessionally advantageous, to imagine that no paradigm or assumptions frameour approach to psychology or sociology or political science or literarycriticism, or at least that it is not our job to exhibit or to question thoseassumptions. A teacher “progresses” (produces articles, accumulates citations,gains tenure) by suppressing the perennial questions about human nature and itspurposes and proceeding on the basis of the accepted methodologies, as if thesewere neutral and had no bearing on such questions.
BYU professors, much like most others who are well“professionalized,” or integrated into the ascendant disciplines, assentexplicitly not to the content of any secular worldview but to the ongoingprocess of specialization and its attendant imperative of methodological rigor.But the secular, reductionist assumptions are implicit in the specializedmethodological form. If the humanities and human sciences at BYU are succumbingto these assumptions, it is because they assent to the technical specializationdriven by the academic mainstream rather than assume the responsibility toexcavate and engage first principles.
The norms and incentives of the specialized disciplinesexert a usually subtle but relentless and almost irresistible influence on therecruitment and professional development of BYU faculty. Most faculty trust implicitlyin the authority of a prestigious doctoral program and so find it almostincomprehensible when I ask whether a well-credentialed young candidaterecruited to join the faculty has received the kind of education in moral andpolitical philosophy that would equip him or her to question the regnantsecular liberalism and thereby to guide our students in engaging thecontemporary world from a faithful Latter-day Saint perspective.
Once a colleague took the argument a step further, arguingthat the whole field of moral philosophy is being replaced by neuroscientificexplanations of the moral choices people think they are making, and thattherefore we social scientists have no responsibility for educating ourstudents in moral reasoning but should leave this wholly to dogmatic religiousinstruction (which apparently works just fine with neurons). If any of mycolleagues found this embrace of thoroughgoing naturalism and derogation ofreason’s moral responsibility appalling, they chose not to say so. We cannot besurprised that few BYU faculty are now prepared or inclined to question suchnaturalism by engaging the large, integrating questions that touch on our moraland spiritual commitments, because the faculty over decades has been selected,developed, and paid to pursue quite different objectives.
An unorthodox research program would almost certainly ruin aprofessor’s chances for success in the mainstream and tend to lower BYU’sstanding in the eyes of the larger profession. And so what seems to be the ideologicallyneutral imperative of professionalization has the effect of stacking allincentives on the side of ascendant cultural forces and marginalizing allscholarly efforts to articulate and defend goods and principles fundamental toa Christian and Latter-day Saint view of the world.
This unilateral disarmament comes at a moment when more andmore of our students and our larger audience in the church are being formed byschools and by a general culture deeply invested in secular liberalassumptions. We now see a strong tendency among a confident and vocal minorityof Latter-day Saints, especially younger, more educated, or more intellectuallyand professionally ambitious members, to reread the Gospel from an ethicalstandpoint decisively shaped by the ascendant secularism and progressivism.
Of course the church has long been at peace with politicalliberalism in the generic sense—that is, with the practical benefits of asociety encompassing diverse religions and tolerating many differences of “lifestyle.”But now we see a strong and rapidly growing tendency for liberalism to migratefrom politics and to penetrate and reshape ethics at the deepest level, andthereby to transform religious understandings. The new Mormon liberals makethe liberal principle of toleration or nondiscrimination—which they hear in thescriptural teaching “all are alike unto God”—into the most fundamentaltouchstone of religious truth. To be truly religious is to be compassionate,and to be compassionate is to acknowledge the legitimacy of each individual’sview of his own good. Every individual therefore has a sovereign right todefine his own “good” and, in particular, his own idea of the meaning ofsexuality and “family.”
It follows that the Family Proclamation, a statement firstpublished on the authority of the highest church leaders in 1995, must bediscounted or relativized. The Proclamation teaches, for example, in theplainest terms, that “the family is ordained of God. Marriage between man andwoman is essential to His eternal plan. Children are entitled to birth withinthe bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honormarital vows with complete fidelity.”
For the still small but vocal and increasingly influentialgroup of Mormon progressives, this statement may be dismissed as the prejudiceof a passing generation: After all, it’s not actually “scripture,” they argue,and in any case its tradition-bound teaching is clearly less compellingethically (to say the least) than the progressive commitment to “equality,”which reflects the very heart of Christianity. If it seems that this newprogressive–liberal ethics is at odds with plain church teachings on sexualityand the family, the new liberals recur to a progressive recasting of the doctrineof continuing revelation to explain away any contradiction: Church leaders willcatch up with the progress of equality eventually.
BYU on the whole is by no means favorable to emancipationfrom traditional moral restraints. But, as a highly professionalized—that is,specialized—institution, neither is it well equipped to counter liberationistor reductionist arguments by critiquing fundamental ideas. One student remarkedto me: “I have noticed in my classes that it is almost taboo to defend a conservativeposition on issues that align with church doctrine. I feel like I am being boldby stating my opinion on issues that are supported by the doctrine. I wonder ifother students feel similarly.” Without engaging the ideas underlying the moraland political forces of secular progressivism, BYU can only cooperate bydefault with the dominant movement. To acquiesce to the authority of thesecular academic establishment is effectively to endorse it and to bolster it,even if most do not intend this effect.
This endorsement by BYU faculty of an essentiallysecular–progressive viewpoint has up until now been mostly subtle and implicit,but it is already becoming more public and straightforward. Previous irruptionsof unorthodoxy or dissidence at BYU—for example, the feminist discontent oftwenty years ago—have been localized and containable.
Now, however, the collapse of the working compromise betweensecularism and other languages of learning opens the possibility of theliquidation of all learned resistance to the secular establishment. Under theunchallenged dominance of this secular academic establishment, most BYU facultysimply defer to its authority over the profession, while a few of the mostintellectually prestigious or ambitious celebrate it and seek to discredit anyremaining backwaters of faithful learning supportive of older moral and familialnorms.
A prominent lecture by a BYU professor, recently publishedand featured in BYU’s flagship scholarly journal, addressed the question ofsocial and moral change across the ages. The lecture, titled “What Happened toMy Bell-Bottoms?: How things that were never going to change have sometimeschanged anyway, and how studying history can help you make sense of it all,”was charming, often amusing and, for most listeners, I’m sure, withoutcontroversial moral or ideological content. The point was that we shouldrecognize that much that once seemed permanent has changed, and so we shouldnot resist further change. Religion once defended slavery, so we shouldn’t maketoo much of religion’s current defense of heterosexual marriage. You may beuncomfortable with gay marriage, but that discomfort is based on a transitoryhistorical trend, no better grounded than the 1970s fashion of bell-bottomjeans.
A plainer statement of historical relativism cannot beimagined: We were clearly given to understand that the authority of historysupports our emancipation from traditional moral restraints. Although thecontrast with the recent and repeated emphases of church leaders on permanentmoral standards could not be greater, few seem to question the distinguishedauthor’s dismissal of enduring principles or limits. History is a rational,objective discipline, and history teaches us that resistance to “change” in thename of some supposed higher principle is pointless.
The tragic result of BYU’s movement from its distinctive,countercultural mission is that many good young Latter-day Saints feel thatthey have to choose between being thoughtful, reasonable, and well-informed andbeing loyal to fundamental moral and religious principles. Happily, manyfaculty provide living counterexamples to this generalization, but few take upthe task of providing an intellectual alternative. The secular cultureintimidates some of the best of the rising generation by presenting them withthis alternative: You can be counted among the smart people, or you can clingto your groundless and cruel prejudices. BYU shows little interest inarticulating a third choice: an intellectual defense of openness tounfashionable truths.
I call this situation tragic because the power of thisrelativistic liberalism depends fundamentally upon the illusionof anunimpeachable rational basis. An institution of higher education, especiallyone with a substantive religious mission, ought to make it a high priority todevelop the capacity to dispel this illusion and thereby to increase students’confidence in the intellectual respectability of traditional restraints andstructures. But little footing for the work of such dispelling is provided inthe present array of specialized disciplines.
What, then, is to be done? First, many significant attemptshave been and are being made at BYU to reach a perspective beyond thespecialized disciplines and the reductionist assumptions that underlie thatspecialization. Most important are continuing efforts by individual faculty intheir research and teaching, despite the structural disincentives, toarticulate and defend alternatives to the dominant reductive secularism. Anumber of institutional resources support such efforts. For example, theFaculty Center and the Richard L. Evans Chair of Religious Understanding havepromoted faculty discussions relating directly or indirectly to BYU’s distinctivemission that have ranged from close readings of Emmanuel Levinas to colloquiesof James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World.
The university hosts high-profile speakers several times ayear, and some of these have broached fundamental questions very relevant toBYU’s highest aspirations. A few years ago, large audiences were exposed tochallenging remarks on the problem of religious freedom in contemporaryAmerican society, first by Robert P. George of Princeton University and thentwo years later by Francis Cardinal George, archbishop of Chicago and, at thetime, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The WheatleyInstitution, a broadly conceived policy center at BYU, regularly hosts speakerssuch as Daniel Robinson, Michael Novak, and Roger Scruton (and will soon behosting David Bentley Hart). I might also mention, with gratitude, that I havetwice been the recipient of BYU research grants established to encourage thearticulation of Latter-day Saint perspectives within the academic disciplines.
All these inter- or transdisciplinary initiatives providesignificant opportunities to BYU faculty interested in the integration ofreligious and intellectual life, but their effect is limited by their beingcompletely disconnected from the career incentives that shape the faculty’spriorities and therefore the opportunities open to their students. Any time ascholar might invest in learning about Daniel Robinson’s Aristotelian critiqueof the paradigms of contemporary psychology, or about Roger Scruton’s critiqueof the reductionism of neuroscience, it must be regarded as a sacrifice of hisown professional interests and not as constitutive of his BYU functions, for heis effectively getting paid to publish as much as possible as quickly aspossible in the organs sanctioned by the scientistic and specializedmainstream.
If I had a detailed strategy to redirect the inertia nowleading BYU toward a potentially disastrous collision with its religiousmission, this would not be the place to lay it out. Let me just make it clearthat a radically separatist strategy, one in which we simply turn our backs onthe academic establishment, is not only impossible but incoherent. If webelieve the development of the spirit is in some way bound up with thedevelopment of the mind, then the only way beyond secular philosophies isthrough them—with the guidance, to be sure, of scripture, prophecy, andpersonal revelation. The task of transcending the world is inseparable fromthat of understanding and appreciating what is good in it, including the goodreasoning of people with whom we ultimately disagree.
There is no way, moreover, for a university to be auniversity without participating in the meaning of a university in our largersociety. If this shared sense has dissolved, or if it has evolved in adirection that obliges us to secede, then all hope of an institutionalsynthesis of faith and reason dissolves as well. Such dissolution is far fromimpossible, alas, but we must hope that it is not yet inevitable. Any hope thatremains for a university aspiring to integrate faith and reason depends oncooperative alliances with academically respected and influential individualsand institutions (other universities and colleges, accrediting agencies,scholarly associations) outside the secular mainstream.
Fortunately, such individuals and institutions exist. Thereare scholars, colleges and universities, and other organizations, rogueresearch programs or vestiges of ancient intellectual traditions, that cancontribute to the articulation and implementation of standards of academicrigor while pushing back against the secular and reductionist mainstream invarious ways and to varying degrees. There is every reason to hope that BYUwould find significant allies should it apply itself seriously to the task ofhonoring its distinctive mission.
Unfortunately, however, our progress in building suchfriendships is retarded by our addiction to the respect of the mainstream andby our lack of courage and insight in opposing intellectual trendsfundamentally averse to our deepest religious and moral commitments. In weaningBYU away from its dependency on the secular mainstream, the cultivation of suchalliances would have to be joined with the application of substantial resourcesto a vision of faculty development carefully attuned to the distinctive natureof the institution.
BYU’s distinctive mission has already been seriouslycompromised by indulging the illusion that we can accept without reservationthe understanding of humanity that is implicit in the academic mainstream. Acultivation of alternative intellectual frameworks open to our essentialreligious commitments is urgently needed if the currents of contemporaryintellectual culture are not to carry the university irreversibly away fromdistinctive religious moorings. Leadership as courageous and perseverant as itis wise will be required over the next generation to meet the challenge of thesecularization of the academic world. We may not want the culture wars, butthey want us. To pretend to neutrality in today’s moral and intellectualenvironment is in effect to endorse the ascendant secular and reductionistorthodoxy.
In the face of the confusion sown by contemporary secularismand relativism, the deeply rooted Latter-day Saint belief that eternal truth is“the brightest prize” to which any spiritual being can aspire still provides afirm foundation for the edification of a Mormon university seriously devoted tolearning “by study and also by faith.” To preserve what remains of BYU’s legacyand to build a truly distinctive and enduring university on this foundation ofopenness to Truth will require much of BYU’s faculty and administration in thevery near future.
Ralph Hancock is professor of political science atBrigham Young University.
