Is BYU a good school for other Christians?

Dave Banack of Mormon Inquiry at BeliefNet had this to say in a push for BYU’s Darwin Week, emphasis mine:
As reported at the Mormon Organon, Brigham Young University is hosting Charles Darwin Bicentennial Week, running February 9 through 13. A schedule of the presentations, including one by the Dean or Religious Education, is posted at the site. This highlights one of the advantages of BYU over other Christian universities: in Mormonism, Science is not the Enemy.Christian students who are serious about academics as well as their religion really ought to consider BYU. The skiing isn’t bad either.
I’m not going to say much about his protology & science claim, only that I think he’s off. Non-LDS Christian protology is all over the place and Mormons certainly aren’t the only ones who can agree with theistic evolution. I can’t imagine that all or even most Christian colleges have anti-evolution science departments, though I can’t say since I have never attended one.
What I have done is attended BYU as a non-LDS Christian, and Banack’s suggestion that BYU is a competitive option for Christians who are serious about their religion concerns me.1 I personally believe that there are only 3 reasons BYU allows non-members to attend:
  1. They need talented athletes and performers for their sports and dance teams.
  2. They hope the non-member will convert to Mormonism.
  3. They hope the non-member will have a good experience there and give the university a good non-LDS review.2
As far as I’m concerned, they get the third one from me. As an evangelical Christian, I loved my time at BYU and I have very few regrets about going to school there which could have been remedied by the university itself. However, I was also an unusual case, having already gone through the missionary discussions, attended a year’s worth of LDS high school Seminary and Institute, and annoyed at least a dozen LDS apologists on the Internet before I enrolled.3 I had conducted extensive personal study for my age and non-member status, and I never met a single non-member there who had my experience and background. I was an anomaly.
I only knew four kinds of non-members at BYU, Christian or non-Christian, and sometimes a person could be more than one of these types:
  1. People who were there on scholarship.
  2. People who were there for a specific program of study.
  3. People who were there because they wanted to go to a school with a morally clean environment and didn’t mind Mormonism
  4. People who had no idea what BYU really was and hated it when they got there and found out.
My goal in writing this is to dissuade people from becoming #4. If you are a Christian who is thinking of attending BYU, please understand what BYU is. It is a Mormon college, and what they teach there is Mormonism (*GASP!*). Your science classes will be filtered through Mormonism. Your religion classes will be filtered through Mormonism. Your terribad American Heritage class which you’ll take in an auditorium with 500 other students and come to loathe more than Pauly Shore’s films will be filtered through Mormonism. Even your religion classes on the Bible and your classes on other Christianities will be on what Mormons think of the Bible and what Mormons think about other Christianities—hai apostasy!
Furthermore, only ~1.5% of the school is non-LDS, and those non-members come from all sorts of religions. That means friends from your own religion or denomination will be few and far between. Most of your friends will be Mormon, and they will call the missionaries to see you, invite you to LDS ward activities, and generally try to convert you. You’ll also have to watch out for those seductively good-looking Mormons (of which there are legion) who will want to date and convert you; see the links in my sidebar if you want to know how this worked out for me.
Yes, it is a clean moral environment. Yes, the professors there are wonderful, intelligent people who know their trade and are very good at what they teach. Yes, you will get a top-notch education, and if you’re open-minded enough to listen to the LDS folks, you will probably be spiritually edified by them.
But it will not be the same level of spiritual edification you would get if you went to one of your own Christian colleges. It will not be anything like it. If you aren’t prepared to deal with everything I just listed above, BYU is not the college for you.
And just to clarify, I am not attacking BYU for any of the above. I expected all of it when I signed up to go there, and I don’t fault the university for being what it was designed for. However, I knew Christian people there who came because the Latter-day Saints in their lives made it sound like BYU was “just another Christian college,” and it is not. It was never meant to be.
1 Please note that for brevity’s sake, in this article, “Christian” refers to all possible types of non-LDS Christians and “LDS / Mormon” refers to Latter-day Saint Christians. I am not implying that Mormons are not Christians; please see my IAQ here if you need to know what I think on that subject.
2 Obviously I’m guessing here; I’ve never actually sat in on a BYU admissions committee meeting to discuss allowing a non-member to come. However, if you consider cui bono, I think my guesses are pretty educated ones.
3 Meh, I don’t really know how many of them I annoyed. It was fun though.

Comments

Is BYU a good school for other Christians? — 4 Comments

  1. Voted most likely to remain Gentile?
    Even as a member of the Church, I’m not sure how well I would have stomached BYU. As fate would have it, I converted the summer after I graduated from high school and was already locked into the University of Utah. My best friend (who now teaches at the Y), used to bemoan the gung-ho whack jobs around him and the horribly butchered movies at the Wilkinson Center.
    For me, a former party slut, it was interesting to be squeaky clean on a campus that so painstakingly strove to be the antithesis of the Y (Oh, you didn’t have a Beer Drinking Engineers Student Union, too?). I thought it was actually good for me to flex my faith in Babylon. On the other hand, the girls didn’t all look like the hot granddaughters in Saving Private Ryan. Ah well, the price you pay…
  2. Voted most likely to remain Gentile?
    Mmm, mebbe. I think that underneath it all I really am just an evangelical, and I like the way I am. My LDS friends can hope, but there is no hidden Mormon here; what you see is what you get.
    I can understand what you mean about being squeaky clean in a more secular school. I did actually go to the U for a year of aborted grad school. Very, very different from BYU.
    There’s probably plenty to bemoan about BYU, but what can I say, I try to be positive.
  3. Ha! I am LDS and didn’t go to BYU. I’m not a hater, but it just wasn’t for me at the time. Non-LDS who choose to go there have always been super-mysterious to me, so thanks for the peek at a real live one. ;-)
    Your terribad American Heritage class which you’ll take in an auditorium with 500 other students and come to loathe more than Pauly Shore’s films will be filtered through Mormonism.
    LOL. just lol.
    This is a fun and informative blog, I’m glad I ran into it.
    Cheers,
  4. Wow, a BCC blogger dropped me a comment, I must be moving up in the world!
    I’m pleased that you like the blog, Cynthia, and that somebody gets my jokes(!). I did like your analysis of the True Woman Manifesto v. the Proclamation on the Family which I linked to a few days ago.
    Drop by anytime, I usually read BCC even if I don’t often comment.
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