Many Professors that teach at BYU trouble me big time. I know the Prophet and Apostles are men of God and they hire the many Professors, CES Teachers, Scientists, and Historians, but that does not mean that all of these educators that are hired, teach the full principles of the true gospel. Many of them are wolves in sheep’s clothing and we members of Christ’s true church must discern truth vs. error. It is part of our calling as Christians. We shouldn’t judge, but it is certainly righteous to call out evil when we see it. It is wrong to judge the Church based on intellectuals who don’t follow the doctrine of the Savior.
“I do not know all of the providences of the Lord, but I do know that he permits false doctrine to be taught in and out of the Church and that such teaching is part of the sifting process of mortality.” Bruce R. McConkie, McConkie’s 1981 letter to BYU
Troubled Secularism
I continue to be troubled by the amount of secular learning our children are learning at elementary, junior high, high school, and especially at college. The Critical Race Theory (CRT) is happening everywhere and it is not good. It teaches the Black race of people as always victims and the White race are always aggressors and guilty of racism. There cannot be a unity if there is always racism. This is wrong. The Savior said that we should become one just as He and His Father are one. I have no white guilt and I love all people regardless of their race or creed. Let’s come together in Christ, not become divided.
I do not have a degree in higher education but I have been around the block a few times and have studied hard about life and politics and religion. I am a life long and in good standing member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I am thankful for a strong testimony of our Savior and His scriptures, especially the Book of Mormon. I have always loved BYU and especially their sports. My father graduated from BYU in 1954. I have become more and more critical of many of the secular doctrines that BYU teaches. It hasn’t affected my testimony or love of the Prophet and Apostles by any means, but my concern is, are children strong in spirit enough to withstand the many secular teachings at BYU?I am not judging the school but I am worried there are so many Professors not just teaching theory such as evolution, but teaching it as doctrine. This is easily provable. BYU Provo and Idaho are certainly fantastic institutions, but don’t expect your children to be shielded by Church doctrine at these schools. There are many wonderful professors but I believe there are are nearly an equal amount of professors that care more about their own intelligence than about sharing Christian values with our children.The downfall of the Church will never be between those who tout the Mesoamerican Theory of geography, vs. the Heartlanders who witness of a North American geography, but between the truth of the gospel and the great and spacious building who think they are smarter than the Brethren. The so-called smart intellectuals are leading us to the separation of the wheat and tares. Of course, I am not saying all intellectuals, but so many historians and professors are teaching the philosophies of men on purpose. For example. Nowhere in the scriptures does it say anything about Joseph using a single seer stone in a hat to translate the plates, and yet there are over 8 scriptures and the firsthand testimony of Joseph and Oliver that testify the spectacles and breastplate or Interpreters, were used to translate.Click the link below to get my list of 16 quotes here and it will help you with that argument as you study and pray about it. https://www.bofm.blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Book-of-Mormon-Hard-Evidence-Proper-Translation.pdf See my free pdf of information about how the breastplate and spectacles were used for the complete translation. HERE: https://www.bofm.blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/The-Key-Short-Version-a.pdf
Academics
“I have come to believe that it is the tendency for many members of the Church who spend a great deal of time in academic research to begin to judge the Church, its doctrine, organization, and leadership, present and past, by the principles of their own profession. Ofttimes this is done unwittingly, and some of it, perhaps, is not harmful.” The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect Elder Boyd K. PackerElder Packer also said, “This problem has affected some of those who have taught and have written about the history of the Church. These professors say of themselves that religious faith has little influence on Mormon scholars. They say this because, obviously, they are not simply Latter-day Saints but are also intellectuals trained, for the most part, in secular institutions. They would that some historians who are Latter-day Saints write history as they were taught in graduate school, rather than as Mormons”. The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect Elder Boyd K. Packer
Advocacy
“..We have to be careful that love and empathy do not get interpreted as condoning and advocacy, or that orthodoxy and loyalty to principle not be interpreted as unkindness or disloyalty to people. As near as I can tell, Christ never once withheld His love from anyone, but He also never once said to anyone, “Because I love you, you are exempt from keeping my commandments.” We are tasked with trying to strike that same sensitive, demanding balance in our lives.” Source: https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/elder-jeffrey-r-holland-2021-byu-university-conference
Honoring our Stewardships
“As members of the Church we have some close quarters to pass through if we are to save our souls. As the Church gets larger some men have increasing responsibility and more and more duties must be delegated. We all have stewardships for which we must account to the Lord.
Unfortunately some men who do not honor their stewardships may have an adverse affect on many people. Often the greater the man’s responsibility the more good or evil he can accomplish. The Lord usually gives a man a long enough rope and sufficient time to determine whether that man wants to pull himself into the presence of God or drop off somewhere below.
There are some regrettable things being said and done by some people in the Church today. As President Clark so well warned, “The ravening wolves are amongst us, from our own membership and they, more than any others, are clothed in sheep’s clothing because they wear the habiliments of the priesthood…. We should be careful of them.”
Sometimes from behind the pulpit, in our classrooms, in our Council meetings and in our church publications we hear, read or witness things that do not square with the truth. This is especially true where freedom is involved. Now do not let this serve as an excuse for your own wrong-doing. The Lord is letting the wheat and the tares mature before he fully purges the Church. He is also testing you to see if you will be misled. The devil is trying to deceive the very elect.” https://www.latterdayconservative.com/ezra-taft-benson/our-immediate-responsibility/
How a New Instagram Page is Exposing Apostate BYU Professors
I love BYU. My parents met at BYU. My older brother went to BYU, I grew up in Orem always dreaming about the day I would go to BYU and graduate, and if it was not for a crystal clear personal revelation I had to go to UVU, I would be a senior at BYU right now. Within that context, it breaks my heart to share with you the grave apostasy that is taking place among the faculty and staff at BYU. My wife goes to BYU and over the past year, she has shared with me the apostate teachings of her professors. One professor taught her that it is 100% okay to masturbate if you have the goal of trying to find out what pleasures you so that you can share that knowledge with your spouse. It broke my heart to hear that her professors were teaching this. But tonight one of my friends shared a new movement called “Keeping Faith at BYU” with me. (https://www.instagram.com/keeping_faith_at_byu and https://twitter.com/KeepingFaithBYU on twitter).
These social media pages are an anonymous place for BYU students to expose the apostate nature of their professors. At first, I figured it would be professors who were progressive/liberal pushing political ideology. But when I looked up the posts they were sharing, it is much worse than simply pushing politics, there is full-blown apostasy going on in Provo. These apostate BYU professors are teaching against the Family Proclamation, denouncing doctrines like personal responsibility, agency, or the law of chastity, and they are using their position within the church to speak out against the Church authorities. I want to share just a few of their posts.
Reading these posts made my stomach curl, what has happened to BYU? I don’t believe all the professors are apostate, but the house needs to be cleaned. We must demand that the gospel is the center and framework for all teaching at BYU. The gospel contains all truth of every field of study, no truth exists except it is embraced by the gospel. The purpose of BYU is to allow for the study of any given topic from the foundational understanding that restored gospel truth brings. Joseph F Smith taught, “There is no truth in any other religious society or organization, which is not included in the gospel of Jesus Christ as taught by Joseph Smith, the Prophet, and after him by the leaders and elders of this Church; but it requires some effort on our part, some exertion, some devotion, to learn of and to enjoy these things.” Yet many times BYU students feel like they can’t mingle the gospel with their studies, for example:
This ought not to be at BYU! We must have teachers who embrace the gospel truths in their respective fields and teach the gospel perspective of their fields to their students. John Taylor addressed the need to have good teachers when he said: “Whatever you do, be choice in your selection of teachers. We do not want infidels to mold the minds of our children. They are a precious charge bestowed upon us by the Lord, and we cannot be too careful in rearing and training them. I would rather have my children taught the simple rudiments of a common education by men of God, and have them under their influence, than have them taught in the most abstruse [or complex] sciences by men who have not the fear of God in their hearts.” These professors are not just rogue professors at a state university, they are not even just members pushing their ideas as doctrine, these professors are practicing priestcraft, they are being paid with the tithing funds of the Church. Think about that, the widow’s mite is paying professional apostates who are actively teaching the philosophies of men, mingled with scripture! Prophetic are the words of Harold B. Lee that perfectly describe these professors: There are those in the Church who speak of themselves as liberals who, as one of our former presidents has said, “read by the lamp of their own conceit.” (Joseph F. Smith, Gospel Doctrine [Deseret Book Co., 1939], p. 373.)
One time I asked one of our Church educational leaders how he would define a liberal in the Church. He answered in one sentence: “A liberal in the Church is merely one who does not have a testimony.” Dr. John A. Widtsoe, former member of the Quorum of the Twelve and an eminent educator, made a statement relative to this word liberal as it applied to those in the Church. This is what he said: “The self-called liberal [in the Church] is usually one who has broken with the fundamental principles or guiding philosophy of the group to which he belongs. … He claims membership in an organization but does not believe in its basic concepts; and sets out to reform it by changing its foundations.
As members of the Church, we need to speak up and speak out against the apostate faculty and staff at BYU. We need a cleansing of the inner vessel. Am I calling for these professors to be fired? Yes, I am 100% advocating that BYU fire any and all faculty and staff that are actively teaching against the very organization that they belong to! Not only do I believe those who teach against the gospel should be fired at BYU, when warranted I believe they should be excommunicated for using their position of authority within the church to destroy the testimony of the youth and lead them into apostasy. To quote President Benson, “Watchmen—what of the night? We must respond by saying that all is not well in Zion. As Moroni counseled, we must cleanse the inner vessel (see Alma 60:23), beginning first with ourselves, then with our families, and finally with the Church.” Cleansing the inner vessel, General Conference, April 1986.
So what can we do? We can stand up and make our voices heard. If you have stories of apostate professors share them, You can follow the social media accounts for Keeping Faith at BYU: Keeping Faith at BYU on Twitter Keeping Faith at BYU on Instagram Keeping Faith at BYU on Facebook You can sign the petition to have BYU retrench (return the roots of the gospel). The petition to retrench at BYU is on change.org You can also share this blog post, and these pages with your friends and family and raise awareness about what is happening at BYU. If you are sending your children to BYU, you can encourage them to stand for truth and against professors. Teach them to think critically and value standing for truth more than a grade. There are things more important than GPA’s. Encourage them not to simply drop the class with rogue professors and let them preach their false doctrines unopposed, but to stand for truth and challenge the professor. You can pray for the brave students are standing against their professors, and also pray for the students who are not standing out of fear that they will find the courage to stand up for truth. I believe in BYU. I believe in its mission. Let us cleanse our personal vessels, family vessels, and then let us do our duty stand up and speak out to help cleanse and maintain the purity of the Church and BYU. If you liked this article, you might like these other articles about BYU and Brigham Young.
Dear Brigham Young haters: Leave my prophet alone!The three underlying issues behind the BYU honor code protests.
At a recent post over at BCC, a tenured BYU-X professor communicates some anxiety about CES’ new direction, which is certainly their right, but in doing so the author calls the people who made this decision (i.e. the brethren, if that wasn’t clear from Elder Holland’s talk) autocrats, and prominently displays the fasces at the top of the post. Now, I don’t know if this is a weird attempt at a “they who have ears to hear” thing, but the fasci is a well-established symbol of fascism. Implying that the people who actually have the power to do anything about this are autocratic fascists isn’t going to help their case. While as a matter of principle I think non-inflammatory rhetoric is generally best, for what it’s worth I’m on the other side of this. However, I’m actually skeptical that the new direction will achieve much, although I might be wrong. It doesn’t matter if all the deans are on board with the church’s “teachings on marriage, family, and gender” (which they aren’t, in at least one case I’m aware of); I suspect that the faculty who fundamentally disagree with the Church on hot button social topics and are in part at BYU to “reform” the Church through its institutions will just lay low and continue to hire the kind of people who also fundamentally disagree with the Church and are trying to reform it. I suspect that the concern over arbitrariness, while valid, is also in part simply masking a concern that the Church is putting their foot down on the expectation that faculty’s primary ideological loyalties lie with the Church when its teachings directly conflict with another ideology (usually the predominant ideology of the academic discipline). For example, a less “bishop roulette” and more “one size fits all” alternative that I suspect would cause even more gnashing of teeth is for the Church to ask more direct questions (e.g. do you support the Church’s theological position that only a man and woman married together can be exalted? Do you believe that President Nelson is God’s most authorized representative on earth? For non-members maybe replace “support” with “respect”) that don’t leave any wiggle room like the current wording does. Then, the Church is very public and open about asking these questions, so eventually word gets around the relevant academic professional organizations that every BYU professor has signed a faith statement to that effect, essentially forcing BYU professors to be more transparent about where they stand instead of being coy about where their primary loyalties lie when the Church’s position conflicts with the predominant ideology in the field. If that makes it so BYU can’t recruit enough to field a full department, then so be it.
There are a lot of other places the widow’s mite can be spent, because at the end of the day BYU is not the gospel or the Church, and the mission of the Church is less dependent on recruiting a theorist from a top ten school than some academics think. The implicit threat that the departments will be hollowed out if the Church presses these issues does not have much leverage, as I suspect the Board of Trustees would be fine if the English Department was operating at half strength. (Although I have no idea where the BYU English Department is on these issues, for all I know they’re all Molly Mormons who never skipped seminary). Of course, it’s not my place to tell the First Presidency what to do here, but I’m making the point that from some perspectives the new direction is less restrictive than it could, and possibly should be in order to get BYU faculty on-mission.
“I love being a part of the diversity committee in the College of Life Sciences. Helping students to become actively antiracist is one of the most important things I’ve done as a BYU faculty member. The affirmation Black Lives Matter has helped me see the importance of working towards a more inclusive BYU for all its students.” Steven Peck COLLEGE OF LIFE SCIENCES DIVERSITY COMMITEE BYU Impact Magazine page 27
This troublesome Newsweek article by Steven Peck still disturbs me after all these years. Read it below.
Also a very concerning article in LDS living is from an intelligent member of the church who affiliates with Bok of Mormon Central and other apologetic groups, here called 5 Answers to Difficult Questions About Noah and the Flood. Do not yield your faith in payment for an advanced degree or for the recognition and acclaim of the world. Do not turn away from the Lord nor from his Church nor from his servants. You are needed—oh, how you are needed! It may be that you will lay your scholarly reputation and the acclaim of your colleagues in the world as a sacrifice upon the altar of service. They may never understand the things of the Spirit as you have a right to do. They may not regard you as an authority or as a scholar. Just remember, when the test came to Abraham, he didn’t really have to sacrifice Isaac. He just had to be willing to. The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect Elder Boyd K. Packer
and acclaim of the world. Do not turn away from the Lord nor from his Church nor from his servants. You are needed—oh, how you are needed! It may be that you will lay your scholarly reputation and the acclaim of your colleagues in the world as a sacrifice upon the altar of service. They may never understand the things of the Spirit as you have a right to do. They may not regard you as an authority or as a scholar. Just remember, when the test came to Abraham, he didn’t really have to sacrifice Isaac. He just had to be willing to. The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect Elder Boyd K. Packer
