The BYU men’s basketball team beat the University of Arizona in February in Tucson, in a game that featured a wild — and controversial — ending. After the game, fans at McKale Center directed a derogatory chant at the BYU team, including an expletive and the word “Mormons.”
There was a similar incident involving the BYU basketball team earlier in the season when they played a road game against Providence College. Athletic directors at both the University of Arizona and Providence College apologized for their fans’ chants.
Matthew Bowman, the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University and professor of history and religion there, joined The Show to discuss what he makes of these kinds of incidents and what they might say about broader public perception of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Full conversation
MATTHEW BOWMAN: Yeah, you know, unfortunately, they are not uncommon, and I think they reflect reality of what many members of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints, some who many people often call Mormons, have been experiencing for almost the entire time their religion has existed in the United States.
MARK BRODIE: Why is it like that? Why do people seem OK chanting epithets like that at this particular group of people when they maybe wouldn't feel that way about other groups of people?
BOWMAN: Sure, yeah. I mean, there are other groups than we might imagine, right? Roman Catholics, Jewish people, right? This sort of thing would be really frowned upon if it happened to one of them. I think there are a couple of reasons. The first is, I think it's simply size. There simply are not a lot of members of the LDS Church in the United States, somewhere around 7 or 8 million.
There are about as many members of the LDS Church in the world as there are Jews, which is not a large number. So most people just simply don't know members of this church. That means they get their information from them, from things like reality television shows, stuff like that, which are often not really terribly reliable.
The second reason is that there is really a long history of suspicion of this church in the United States going back into the 19th century. And I think a lot of the accusations, the fears, the anxiety around the church that is expressed today reflects common patterns that have been repeated and repeated and repeated for decades and decades.
BRODIE: When you talk about suspicion of this religion that of course, also exists with other faiths. So why is it still OK to talk to people from the LDS church this way, when if fans said what they said in these incidents to just about anybody else, it seems like it would have been seen as a much bigger deal?
BOWMAN: Yeah, absolutely. And I think what's really interesting is that a lot of the suspicion of the LDS Church is really similar to the kind of suspicion that Catholics face, right? The accusation you often hear about people who are LDS is that they're in a cult, right? And cult is really just sort of a word that means a religion I don't like, or a religion I don't I don't really trust, but a lot of the same reasons that Americans were suspicious of, say John F Kennedy being elected president. That is to say the pope was going to tell him what to do. He is part of this sort of tyrannical religion that dominates and controls its followers. Those are similar things that you hear about members of the LDS Church.
Similarly, accusations levied against Roman Catholics even today, right, that the church is very patriarchal, that it's socially conservative. That's also true of the LDS Church today as well. I think the reason why this has faded somewhat for Roman Catholics is that, frankly, there are just simply a whole lot of Catholics in the United States. Around a quarter of the country is Catholic. We have elected two Catholics president. A good number of the justices on the Supreme Court are Roman Catholic, right?
People have gotten to know Catholics. And it turns out, when you elect a Catholic president, he doesn't just turn the country over to the Vatican, right? Members of the LDS Churches simply aren't as many, and so people tend to believe the stereotypes that they know, rather than the people whom they don't really know.
BRODIE: Does some of that have to do also with the fact that maybe you know, as you say, there aren't, aren't that many people in this church, relatively speaking, but also they're not a ton of them, sort of in these high profile positions? Of course, Mitt Romney ran for president but did not win. There aren't necessarily, like, high profile people from the LDS Church as there are who are Roman Catholic or really, many other faiths.
BOWMAN: Yeah, Romney is the most well known, right there have been. There's a lot of entertainers and people, well, like French and David Archuleta and, of course, the Osmond family back in a somewhat earlier generation.
But a lot of, I think the people that people do see who are members of this church are on, for instance, like the "Secret Lives of Mormon House Wives," these sort of reality TV shows that are really exist to play up sensationalism and to be hyper dramatic, and to paint this really, I think, a portrait of what lie the lies of these people are like that just really don't have a lot to do with the reality of most LDS people in the United States.
BRODIE: Is there anything to say about the relative newness of the LDS Church and how you know some of the parts of it that you know were in place, that are not in place anymore, didn't happen religiously speaking, all that long ago?
BOWMAN: Yeah, absolutely. And you might be alluding there right to polygamy?
BRODIE: Yeah.
BOWMAN: Anything anybody knows about this church is that they used to practice polygamy, right and, and this is to say right for a lot of reasons. I think the LDS Church, especially in the 19th century, welcomed difference. It wanted to be different. It wanted to be set apart. Joseph Smith, the founder of the church, gathered his people together in one place, unlike most Protestant churches, where you might become a Methodist, but you just stay living where you are and go to a Methodist Church.
If you were a member of the LDS church in the 19th century, you would move. Wherever the headquarters of the church was, that led to fears and suspicions of being clannish, of being insular, which were indeed, to some degree true. And then, of course, Joseph Smith began practicing polygamy for a lot of religions, having to do with his desire, I think, to reenact the Bible, and to people like Abraham, right, who had multiple wives in the Bible. But this also really created a real divide between members of this church and the rest of American society.
Similarly, in the 19th century, leaders of the LDS Church embraced some racist restrictions. They restricted the ability of Black people to become full members of the church, and that lasted until 1978 right? So there certainly were a lot of reasons why members of this LDS church were separated culturally, even geographically, from other American citizens, and that generated a lot of suspicion and a lot of fear and a lot of the sorts of accusations that get repeated today.
BRODIE: I’m wondering if it is possible that in these two incidents — the one at the UA in Tucson and the other at Providence College, these were both after basketball games, after sporting events — is it possible that these aren't necessarily as abhorrent as these incidents are maybe not indicative of an anti-Mormon sentiment? It's just at least at the game, at the UA was kind of a difficult ending to the UA loss. People were kind of upset. You know, a lot of a lot of fans were very passionate. Just maybe they just said something stupid in the heat of the moment. That doesn't really reflect how they feel about this group of people?
BOWMAN: Yeah, you know, I think there's certainly some truth to that, right? People get really worked up at these sorts of events, and they unleash a sort of passion in ways that they might not at other points in their lives. But I think it's also true at the same time, right, as some people say, right when, when people do express themselves in this way under real stress, under real passion, under real kind of moments in which they feel really, really strained, sometimes that's when you let out things that you might secretly hold to that you would not say in polite company.
