{"id":50153,"date":"2025-06-07T18:00:41","date_gmt":"2025-06-08T00:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=50153"},"modified":"2025-06-07T18:35:33","modified_gmt":"2025-06-08T00:35:33","slug":"anti-latter-day-saint-stigma-in-academia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2025\/06\/anti-latter-day-saint-stigma-in-academia\/","title":{"rendered":"Anti-Latter-day Saint Stigma in Academia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anti-Latter-day Saint stigma in academia is one of those things for which there is no solid data, so all that anybody has to work off of are anecdotes. However, given that 1) we know that people in general<\/span> don\u2019t really like us<\/span><\/a>, 2) we are associated with a conservative ideology, and 3) there is plenty of research that suggests that <\/span>academics are systematically biased against conservative applicants and papers<\/span><\/a>\u2013\u2013ipso facto nobody should be surprised at an anti-Latter-day Saint bias in academia.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But again we only have anecdotes, not direct evidence even if theoretically makes sense, so for my own contribution I thought I\u2019d give my own experience in this regard as a matter of record.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At the outset I\u2019ll note that in my own experience the majority of academics are chill about things like Mormonism. I\u2019m not making a <\/span>God\u2019s Not Dead<\/span><\/i> argument that there\u2019s some cabal of academics twisting their mustaches about how they need to fight against conservative religious believers. For example, one person in my old ward, who was in a more rigorous STEM field (which tends to lean more conservative than the softer social sciences), told me that when he visited the campus as an accepted grad student they noticed he had served a mission and had already looked up the local wards for him.<\/span><\/p>\n

That being said\u2026 That Person is also not mythological either, there\u2019s a reason for the stereotype, and the way academia is structured all it takes is one as long as they\u2019re strident.<\/span><\/p>\n

Anyway, on to my experience. While some schools and programs have fairly well-established BYU pipelines, mine wasn’t one of them. I got the sense that I was the only BYU grad or Latter-day Saint most of the faculty really knew in any meaningful way. <\/span>The first year or so (maybe it was the second or third year, I can\u2019t remember) they had graduate student review, and a presentation I gave before the department offended one of the faculty (who wasn\u2019t actually at the presentation, she was basing it off of the subject matter). It was a piece that took advantage of survey data where the surveyors rated the attractiveness of the individual, and I looked at whether parents were rated as less attractive than non-parents. I took pains to discuss this in the broader context of lookism and the sociocultural context of attractiveness, nobody who had attended the presentation saw a problem with it, and it was eventually accepted as a paper for the prestigious PAA presidential panel. After talking over it with my source at that meeting I inquired as to whether there was anything else that was raised about me that I should be aware of. She dropped her voice into a quiet tenor and mentioned something vague about my conservative religious background. I believe at this point I was doing some of my sociology of religion work, but besides that, my bevy of children, and my BYU sweatshirt I\u2019d occasionally wear there wasn\u2019t anything that immediately marked me as being particularly religious.<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know for sure, but some other things were said that suggested that the person who brought this up was the same person who took offense at my paper, and I went out of my way to avoid being in any kind of position vis-a-vis this person where they could hurt me later. (It\u2019s worth noting that I also had the sense that this individual had clearly overstepped, and everybody in the department was solicitous to me in the aftermath of the review meeting).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My other case was more directly LDS-related. A particular faculty member was semi-retired and would occasionally come into the office, so I don\u2019t think he was at that meeting. I went in to talk to him about some research project and he jocularly mentioned that we could use the Utah Population Database, but he framed it as \u201cif you want to work with the Mormons!\u201d I laughed along nervously at his little joke and didn\u2019t take it too seriously, but wondered what would happen if he found out.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It took a few weeks but he eventually did. We had a good rapport going; he\u2019d give me little assignments to work with the data and I\u2019d develop it and come back, and he was sincerely excited about the work we were doing–until one day he just completely shut off. Like, he literally wouldn\u2019t look me in the eye and would just look at his computer, giving me monosyllabic responses, grunts really, to any pleasantries or questions I asked him. Things eventually ended well after I consistently went out of my way to be pleasant with him at the watercooler and such, and then finally after a couple years when my family had come in to eat lunch with me he came over and chatted, but it wasn’t hard to see what caused it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course some people get particularly triggered when people suggest that Latter-day Saints may suffer from discrimination, as if recognizing the fact downplays the more severe historical discrimination faced by others. Others brush it off, thinking that if we do suffer discrimination it\u2019s actually our fault because we\u2019re not Episcopalians, socially speaking. I don\u2019t know how much I have to say to those people except wonder if they would exhibit the same attitude towards, say, a devout, orthodox Muslim.<\/span><\/p>\n

And finally, some may contest that the evidence presented doesn\u2019t meet the bar for clearly identifying a case of anti-Latter-day Saint animus. Fair enough, but then you also have to apply that some standard to any other kind of discrimination. Discrimination is an iceberg, while you do very occasionally have the undeniably clear cases most of it happens under the guise of some kind of plausible deniability. Given that, for every clear case of \u201cI\u2019m going to bring up his religion in a faculty meeting\u201d or \u201cI\u2019m going to make a dismissive joke about this religious group\u201d I am warranted in assuming there are dozens of other instances that didn\u2019t get to that level of clarity but that nonetheless had real-world implications.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And I\u2019m not the only one, Black sociologist George Yancey <\/span>noted<\/span><\/a> that <\/span>\u201coutside of academia, I faced more problems as a Black. But inside academia, I face more problems as a Christian, and it\u2019s not even close.\u201d My former boss Byron Johnson has <\/span>published his own account <\/span><\/a>how, a sterling publication record notwithstanding, his department head didn\u2019t even try to hide the fact that he was denied tenure because of the perception that he was a conservative religionist.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A few caveats, however. First, as I\u2019ve noted this isn\u2019t the same across disciplines. I assume astronomy graduate students in a department stacked with Turkish and Chinese professors who could care less about local American culture war issues are fine, but it\u2019s probably a non-starter to get into, say, queer theory as an orthodox Latter-day Saint. (I even thought about getting a graduate certificate in sexuality studies back before I realized that in academia \u201csexualities\u201d as a field has very little to do with actual data and mostly about who can win the competition for how many different ways you can say \u201cto heck with the heteronormative patriarchy\u201d).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Also, my experiences with academia are becoming dated. Word on the street is that academia is a little more introspective about these dynamics, if for no other reason than some of the weirder excesses probably helped lead to the current political situation, so maybe it’s different now, but the fundamentals are still there, so if you are an orthodox Latter-day Saint going into one of the stereotypically more liberal fields it is at least worth it to watch your back a little bit. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anti-Latter-day Saint stigma in academia is one of those things for which there is no solid data, so all that anybody has to work off of are anecdotes. However, given that 1) we know that people in general don\u2019t really like us, 2) we are associated with a conservative ideology, and 3) there is plenty of research that suggests that academics are systematically biased against conservative applicants and papers\u2013\u2013ipso facto nobody should be surprised at an anti-Latter-day Saint bias in academia.\u00a0 But again we only have anecdotes, not direct evidence even if theoretically makes sense, so for my own contribution I thought I\u2019d give my own experience in this regard as a matter of record.\u00a0\u00a0 At the outset I\u2019ll note that in my own experience the majority of academics are chill about things like Mormonism. I\u2019m not making a God\u2019s Not Dead argument that there\u2019s some cabal of academics twisting their mustaches about how they need to fight against conservative religious believers. For example, one person in my old ward, who was in a more rigorous STEM field (which tends to lean more conservative than the softer social sciences), told me that when he visited the campus as an accepted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latter-day-saint-thought"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50153"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50374,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50153\/revisions\/50374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}