Some interesting documents are coming out of Canada these days. Because it’s registered as a charity, the LDS Church is required to report statistics about its spending. (Love the transparency. America, you could work on this.)
This caught my attention:
3) In 2009, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Canada gave $40,000,000 to BYU Provo. In other words, 57.9% of the money received from the wards that year.
Wow. Forty mil per year going to BYU, and that’s just from Canada. I wonder how much it’s netting in total.
One might wonder why the Mormon Church sees fit to pour that kind of money into a university. You could argue it’s to promote the fiction that faith and science are somehow compatible. I know that sounds like a strange principle to spend so much money on, but the Templeton Foundation spends big money just to promote that view. But in BYU’s case, I don’t think that’s the reason.
I think it’s about ‘Bubble creation’.
This is a good intro to bubbles.
Beliefs don’t last long in isolation, especially false ones. They need constant propping up. Communities of belief typically use some form of communal reinforcement — they constantly affirm the group’s beliefs, telling each other how true they are, and to some extent controlling the information available to members of the group.
I call this “the Bubble”. Inside the Mormon Bubble, it’s comfortable and non-challenging. Criticisms from the outside are muted, and affirmations amplified. The Bubble is absolutely vital to maintaining religious faith, especially for uni students, who are just being exposed to new ideas and (le gasp) scientific inquiry.
So BYU functions as a Mormon Bubble for uni students who have just left their parents’ home (which is often a Bubble itself) or transitioning to or from the mission field (another Bubble). You also find yourself in a largely Mormon dating pool, from which you may select a mate and create another Bubble in the form of an LDS home. That kind of Bubble can last for the rest of your life, and serves to propagate LDS memes as more people are raised in Mormon Bubbles.
Without a Bubble Factory like BYU to take young Mormons through that transitional period in their lives, I don’t know if the Mormon Church would survive. Certainly its leaders see it as vital enough to pour millions into it, and I don’t think it’s all for the benefit of science.
18 March 2011 at 3:24 am
I've wondered the same thing now, a few years after graduating from BYU, and as a student there. We know it's the largest single tithing expenditure. At BYU students are constantly reminded of the 'widow's mite' that is supporting their education and how a blessed an opportunity it is to study there.
Local leaders at BYU told us over and over that BYU was the training ground for the church's leadership. The student wards were there as a boot camp to learn ward and stake leadership and function. I held pretty much every ward council position while in those singles' wards.
BYU students are then to go prop up the church out in the 'field' with their priesthood leadership experience. Their children are inspired by their parents' experience at the 'Lord's University' and the cycle continues.
So I say your hypothesis is not just conjecture, but stated fact!
18 March 2011 at 4:28 am
I don't think the church tries very hard to hide the fact that BYU prioritizes indoctrination over education. (Much like the mission system prioritizes indoctrination over proselytizing.)
18 March 2011 at 8:26 am
You mean I just wrote something totes obvious?
Oh, darn.
But isn't it odd that the Church's biggest educational expenditure really has a social function?
I could also say that it's ultimately devoted to the opposite of education, but Mark Davies' work in corpus linguistics is tempering my cynicism.
20 March 2011 at 7:02 pm
Not odd at all. The last thing any hierarchical organization wants to encourage is critical thinking; the first thing it wants to do is encourage "buy-in" into the organization's purported ideals. A university provides the perfect means for indoctrination, if excessive education can be safely avoided.