on being glad BYU wasn't hiring when I was on the job market

I can’t remember why I had a version of this post bouncing around my head several months ago—maybe a Times and Seasons post? probably a message from an acquaintance at BYU who isn’t up to date on my religious situation?—but I never got around to writing it. With Clark Gilbert’s call to the Latter-day Saint Quorum of the Twelve Apostles today, it felt like a good moment to actually get those thoughts out of my head and into a text file.

My time as an undergraduate at BYU was mostly (maybe even overwhelmingly, with a few exceptions) good, but I didn’t bother applying there for my PhD program, and I can’t say that it was at the top of my wish list of places to work when I started applying for faculty positions near the end of that program. At the same time, though, I knew that as a practicing Latter-day Saint with academic aspirations, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that I’d return there to start my career. Over the course of my graduate studies, I met a lot of the students and faculty in the program I could have studied in if I hadn’t gone off to MSU. If that program had been hiring when I was on the job market, I definitely would have applied. I had a strong research record coming out of grad school, and I had plenty of connections in that program—I don’t think it’s too self-serving to say that there’s a good chance I could have been offered a job there.

It was during my first year in my new job at UK that Mormonism started to crash down around me. This came as something of a surprise—I had been experiencing a slow and steady deconstruction over the course of several years, but I never imagined a life not as a Latter-day Saint who would fit the bill as BYU faculty. It’s not hyperbole to say that this was one of the most difficult and painful experiences that I’ve ever gone through. In January 2019, I wrestled with and ultimately turned down a calling as Young Men’s President of my ward. The night after I first received the call, I could hardly sleep, because I already knew that I wasn’t going to be able to continue on the path that I’d imagined my whole life following. I spent much of the next day on campus trying to nap at my desk but mostly just feeling lost and exhausted. So much of my life and identity was tied up in the church that I’d grown up in, and the idea that the rest of my life would not follow the rough outlines of the future I had so often imagined and expected was terrifying. I cried through a lot of church meetings and a couple of temple sessions, I repeatedly felt like a failure, and it felt like my whole life was being upended. It sucked.

It’s hard to imagine that experience being more difficult than it already was, but if I had been hired at BYU—where my employment would have been explicitly tied to my Latter-day Saint identity and practice—it’s clear that it would have been so, so much worse. Over the course of more than a year, while getting used to faculty life, I made the difficult-but-necessary decision to transition into another faith transition. It was a hard, painful decision, but there were two things I had learned during my life as a Latter-day Saint that convinced me that it was the right thing to do: to put the well-being of my family first, and to study and pray about difficult decisions. I’m not trying to be clever when I say that distancing myself from my Latter-day Saint upbringing is one of the most Mormon things I’ve ever done—I brought all of my Mormonism into that decision, even if it brought me elsewhere.

No matter how true to my faith that decision felt to me, it couldn’t have flown at a BYU where higher powers were becoming more and more insistent that to be a good faculty member at BYU was to toe the line on Latter-day Saint teachings and not show any deviation. It’s not impossible to imagine an alternate reality where 1) I did get hired at BYU and 2) the institution would be cool keeping me on even after my joining Community of Christ. In that alternate reality, I think I’d still be respectful of the faith tradition of the institution I was working for. I could even teach a class on the Book of Mormon and give it a different spin. Even setting aside that BYU wasn’t hiring when I was looking for a job, though, that’s clearly not the BYU that exists.

I have a certain amount of respect for BYU wanting its faculty to embody its mission—both in the abstract and as someone whose Mormonism still means a lot to him. At the same time, though, I think back to the incredible difficulty of my first couple of years on the UK faculty as I was trying to get used to my new job and also navigate a painful religious transition at the same time. If those had been the same thing instead of two different things, it would have been so much harder. Could I have been honest with my bishop or my co-workers? What charades would I have had to play so that I didn’t put my job in jeopardy? How much time would I have had to spend looking for other jobs simply because my religious views were changing?

Whatever respect I can muster up for BYU’s unique identity and mission, whatever real respect I have for the institution and so many of the faculty there, whatever lasting respect I have for what the institution gave me during my time there, I cannot find any respect for a set of policies about faculty conduct and loyalty that would have made one of the most difficult experiences in my life even more miserable. I wonder how many faculty there are now stuck in the hellish position that I could have been stuck in if a few things had been different the year that I was on the job market. I still have a lot of good feelings about BYU, but I am so, SO glad that they were not hiring when I was on the job market.

• BYU
• faith transition
• Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
• Clark Gilbert
• Community of Christ