A Postscript to “On Hating BYU”

I’ve been astonished at some of the responses to my question about why a faithful member of the Church might hate BYU and wish it to do badly.

I’ve been accused of “arrogance” and “intellectual dishonesty” and of claiming that people who didn’t attend BYU or who cheer for other schools are lesser Saints or not really believers.

This is genuinely amazing to me.

The topic of BYU is plainly a far more emotional one for some folks than it is for me.  And, in certain cases, it appears to be one that interferes with calm and reasonable discussion.

Part of that, no doubt, stems from the football rivalry between BYU and the University of Utah.

However, although some appear to think that this was a principal focus of mine, it wasn’t.  For a number of reasons.

I grew up in California.  I never considered attending the University of Utah.  (I was thinking about Caltech or Stanford or going east.)  I never considered teaching there.  My only reason for being in Utah has been attending and now teaching at BYU.  I didn’t grow up with the rivalry between the U and the Y.  I don’t care much about it.  Heck, I’m not even that much of a BYU sports fan in the first place.  I can probably count the number of BYU football games that I’ve attended — over my years as both student and professor — on one hand.  Maybe two.  (I think I attended a single game while an undergraduate, and that was a Utah/BYU game at the invitation of a former missionary companion who was the student body president at Utah.  BYU won by a considerable margin.)  They take up too much of a day for my taste, and the traffic and parking are too bad.  Sometimes, but rather rarely, I’ll watch the games on television while I’m doing something else.

I don’t hate the University of Utah.  Truthfully, I seldom think about it.  (They do have an excellent library collection for Middle Eastern Studies, though.  And I’ve served on two or three doctoral committees there, and I’ve had a number of friends on the faculty.)

I expressly said that I understood and had utterly no problem with the idea that faithful Latter-day Saints attend and love and cheer for other schools.  Yet I’ve been accused of damning such people as not real Latter-day Saints.

I was absolutely not questioning the faith of Latter-day Saints who are non-BYU fans.  I explicitly said that the question I was interested in was why a few faithful members of the Church might hate BYU and wish it to do badly, to be ranked poorly, etc.  (Not merely be disappointed in it or critical of it, but really despise it.)  I’m not particularly interested in or puzzled by why the faithless — e.g., anti-Mormons or ex-Mormons or disaffected Mormons — might hate it.  Their reasons aren’t difficult to grasp.

Sometimes, the internet is unspeakably depressing.  It’s really frustrating when some readers seem to make little or no effort to understand what was actually written, angrily insist on their misreading even when assured that they’ve gotten it wrong, and then leap to personal insults on the basis of their misreading.