Bishop Roulette
“Welcome to your freshman year here at BYU! As part of your commitment to keeping the Honor Code, you will be required to attend church each week. Luckily, you will have a ward family to help you maintain regular church attendance and hold to the gospel standards. At the head of this family is your bishop, who is your most important resource while attending the Lord’s university.”
That is the version of reality presented to all BYU students when they first enter school. But is it true? For some, bishops have fortunately been a boon to testimony and an aid to an excellent BYU experience. For others, experiences with bishops have been less than satisfactory. And, sometimes bishops have been just…straight up weird.
The reality of these three genres of experience presents a dilemma for any student, but especially for those who struggle with any aspect of the Church. So, what are these students to do? How does one ensure a positive bishop experience while at BYU?
How do you play bishop roulette?
To answer this question, let’s do some imagining. You’ve just moved into your new Provo YSA ward and you are ready to mingle! But before you can do much elbow-bumping, you need to speak with your bishop about moving your records. You set your first interview with Bishop Rick next Sunday right after church—11:15 a.m.
The day of your meeting has come. You sit on a black swivel chair in one of the back rooms of the Eyring Science Center, biding your time. You aren’t nervous—there’s no reason to be. This is just a getting-to-know-you interview after all. Bishop Rick opens the door, walks in, and offers you his hand. He’s got a firm handshake! He settles into his seat.
“So, tell me about yourself.”
There are many ways to proceed from this point on. I’ll present you with three different directions, all sourced from people’s real experiences with their own YSA bishops.
You talk for a minute about your major and hobbies and hometown. Then, Bishop Rick catches you completely off guard: “After taking a whole sixty seconds to get to know me, the interrogation began. He asked me all of the normal questions, to which I answered honestly…[but] I could tell he didn’t believe me. ‘Do you follow the word of wisdom?’ I told him I did. ‘Are you sure?’ I told him I was. ‘Do you drink alcohol?’ I told him again I didn’t. ‘Well, do you smoke?’ I told him I [didn’t] smoke. ‘So not weed or vaping?’ I began to grow irritated with his pestering questions. I had just told him I followed the Word of Wisdom which encapsulates all of these things, so why was he trying to pry at the exact details? He had mistaken my nervousness of being alone with a man I had never met as the Spirit telling him I was lying. I wasn’t” (-Anonymous).
You’re currently going through a faith crisis and you want some guidance. After introducing yourself, you ask for some advice from the religious leader you’ve been told to trust: “All he [says is], ‘That tends to happen at your age’” (-Emily Hail). You leave the interview shocked, feeling much more lost than you did before. Aren’t BYU bishops supposed to be encouraging?
Recently, you’ve admitted to yourself that you’re like suuuuper gay. You still want to be an active Church member, and you’d rather not deal with being closeted anymore, so you decide to open up to Bishop Rick. He seems friendly enough! Luckily, you are right. You tell your friends, “Bishop was so kind to me when I came out. He then immediately called me to be a [Relief Society] teacher” (-Evie Mecham).
Phew! Regardless of the outcome, your first meeting is over. What a relief.
It’s now about a month into the semester, and things are just starting to heat up—academically, socially, spiritually. This Sunday is a fast and testimony meeting. With a grumbling stomach and a mind ready to receive the words of your peers, you sit down in your roommates’ regular row, center back left. After the sacrament is passed, Bishop Rick gets up to share his own personal testimony. Curious to hear from Bishop for the first time over the pulpit, you sit back and settle in.
Bishop Rick strides up to the pulpit and peers out over the congregation. He starts speaking, “telling a story about a high school dance he took a girl to, but she ended up kissing his friend that night somehow. He related this to him being Christ, his friend being the devil, and the girl [who] was swayed away from Christ . . .[being] turned to the devil” (Anonymous). You leave sacrament meeting feeling unsettled, questions swirling in your mind: Why would Bishop Rick commandeer the pulpit to compare himself to Christ? Why on earth was this relevant to a YSA ward? Why was he demonizing a simple kiss?
Bishop Rick smiles gently as he shuffles up to the stand. He cracks a joke about his age and gets a few sympathy laughs from the row of eager elders and starts bearing his testimony about the importance of following Jesus Christ. He quotes 1 Nephi 11:17: “I know that he loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things.” And then, he says something especially surprising: “If it ever comes between choosing the Church and Christ, choose Christ” (-Nathan McLaughlin). Bishop Rick then closes his testimony, opens up the pulpit to the rest of the congregation, and takes his seat on the stand. You look at your roommates with teary eyes and find similar reactions in their faces. You can’t believe your luck with this wonderful, understanding bishop.
Recently, you’ve been really worried about your roommate. Earlier that week, “she disappeared and told everyone she was trying to kill herself.” You’ve been distraught about it for days, especially after this roommate told you that her suicidal ideation was your fault. Just last night, your mom “tried to call the Bishop so that he would come help,” but he didn’t do anything about the situation. With raw nerves, you watch as Bishop Rick takes the stand to bear his testimony. He starts off normally, then veers into talking about straying from the covenant path. To give an example, he says that “the evening before, he had received a phone call that was a ‘distraction from Satan’ that would’ve kept him from going to the temple” (Aubrey Dickens). You sit there, feeling absolutely stunned. Bishop Rick just said that your mom’s attempt to get your roommate some mental health help was a distraction from Satan! You leave the meeting in tears, wondering how you are ever going to be in a room alone with this man again.
Well, how’s that for your first fast and testimony meeting? Bishops sure do love to come up with their own personal doctrine and impose it upon everyone!
Now it’s time for your yearly ecclesiastical endorsement interview. You decide to get it done early in the season so you aren’t constantly worried about it or forget to do it before you need to register for classes again. Once again, you walk into Bishop Rick’s office and take a seat, the rumors you’ve heard about these interviews echoing in your head.
Group 1: You are always generally nervous about your ecclesiastical endorsement interviews. It’s not like you are doing anything wrong…you just never know for sure how your new bishop will feel toward the LGBTQ+ community. You are queer yourself, and you worry if you disclose that, it might be a problem for Bishop Rick.
As a transgender person, you are even more nervous about this interview. Despite your cordial small talk, he keeps looking at your outfit with suspicion. Then, your heart drops. Bishop Rick says that he heard from someone in the ward that you were trans, mentioning your new name and pronouns. You confirm them and brace yourself for what comes next. Bishop Rick seems sympathetic (if also mildly disgusted) when he says that “‘we all have inner demons’ regarding [your] experience” being trans (-Leen Lindsey).
After being out as gay for a few months, you are finally starting to feel more comfortable about it. Bishop Rick already knows about your identity, and it hasn’t ever seemed to be a problem before. However, when you get into this endorsement interview, you are completely shocked. Bishop Rick spends almost the entire interview giving a “two-hour lecture on how ‘gays’ should be institutionalized” (-Ellie Moss). He tells you that “gay people are sex offenders and diseased since birth” and that “GSAs [Gay Straight Alliances] in schools were making people queer” (-Plexi Glass). By the time he’s about halfway through this rant, you’re sweating bullets. He finishes up the interview with a few intense, prying questions about your “same-sex” romantic behavior and finally lets you go home. You leave the interview and head straight to the bathroom to sob.
You are a fairly active member of your ward, so you aren’t extremely worried about this interview—aside from the fact that you plan to come out to Bishop Rick. It’s time to get it off your chest. When you walk in, Bishop Rick offers you a Werther’s Original hard candy. You open it, pop it in your mouth, and fuss with the wrapper as you tell him that you are bisexual. Then, he asks you what you mean, and you say, “‘Well…I’ve had feelings for boys and girls and find boys and girls both physically attractive’ and [then he says,] ‘I’ve heard this a few times and I think that just because you find boys attractive or have had feelings for them doesn’t make you bisexual, I have had a crush on a boy or two and I’m not bisexual’” ( Luke C). You have no idea how to respond, so you sort of just sit there in silence for a minute. That’s the last time you’ll come out to a bishop!
Group 2: You generally aren’t nervous about endorsement interviews. You are an active member of the ward, and you even attend weekly FHEs. This should be a breeze.
This is going to be the first ecclesiastical endorsement interview for you since you were sexually assaulted. You still feel pretty distressed about the experience, and you are looking to confide in Bishop Rick. After you both get through all the interview questions, you start to tell him your story. Midway through, after you mention that you were drunk at the time of the assault, he interrupts you to say that the “sexual assault was [your] fault because [you] were drunk” (-Anonymous). You feel hurt and blindsighted by his comment. You walk away from that interview with a deepening mistrust and dislike for Bishop Rick and stop going to ward activities you know he will also attend.
You sit down in Bishop Rick’s office. He goes through all of the regular questions but then pauses on the one about the law of chastity. He starts pontificating about sexual sin and then quickly slides in some of his own doctrine, “compar[ing] masturbating to ice cream: ‘God doesn’t want us to have too much, but it isn’t a sin!’” (-Anonymous). To you, this seems doctrinally dubious. But, you don’t want to argue, so you try to end the interview as quickly as possible and go home without hearing any other of Bishop Rick’s original takes.
You are recently engaged and very excited about it. During your ecclesiastical endorsement interview, Bishop Rick asks you about your special someone, and you respond by talking about how happy you are to have found your eternal companion. Bishop Rick smiles unsettlingly. He then asks “if [you are] going too far…He advise[s you] to not spend time alone [with your fiancé] in [your] apartment––to not be on the couch together late at night. Then, he [gives] a stern warning: ‘If you go too far, your membership is on the line. Don’t forget that you can be excommunicated if you have sex and violate your endowment covenants before you’re married’” (-Anonymous). You leave that interview feeling violated, confused, and angry. You just barely eke out with your endorsement and are really shaken by Bishop’s words. Why did he just assume that you were breaking the law of chastity?
Alright, you can stop imagining now.
As you can see, YSA bishops are unpredictable. Bishops have so much power over BYU students counting on an endorsement to continue their education. Some bishops, in their crusade to preserve the uniqueness of BYU, sacrifice students’ well-being and academic progress on the altar of the honor code—sometimes for things those students didn’t even do.
You never know exactly who you’re gonna get behind that pulpit. Will your bishop put you on a special list for not serving a mission? Or will he accept that you didn’t serve with a smile and a nod? Will he come harass you at your apartment door for skipping a ward activity? Or will he send a warm text asking how you and your roommates have been? Will he make uncomfortable comments about your race? Or will he preach about the importance of supporting Black Lives Matter? Maybe he’ll advise you to start going on queer dates. Maybe he’ll listen patiently to your struggles with the church and invite you to ask him about whatever questions are plaguing you. Maybe he’ll just be happy that you are coming to church. Maybe he’ll be kind.
There isn’t much of a choice for you when playing Bishop Roulette—and I think that’s kind of the point. It’s really not a fair game, is it? You don’t have much control over any part of it—you just have to hope and pray and worry. That’s the real game. The stress and anxiety of wondering. It makes you think: do you really get to play, or does it play you?