How religion affects USU
Of freshmen students on campus, 86.8 percent choose Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints as their religious preference according to the Cooperative Institutional Research Program, CIRP, survey taken in 2006. The next highest religious preference was “none” at 6.7 percent Does having such a high population of one specific religion affect the level of religious tolerance on campus?
In the Faculty Code policy 403.1, it states that “the University community values individual rights and freedoms, including the right of each community member to adhere to individual systems of conscience, religion, and ethics.”
Nathaly Lambert, senior majoring in biology, said, “People are afraid to interact with people of different backgrounds and so may unintentionally exclude others.”
Joseph Stone, sophomore majoring in liberal arts, said that during Day on the Quad when “looking for a specific group, I walked past the religious clubs and when I refused to take a flyer of one, that club member shouted at me ‘You’re not going to hell for taking a flyer.'”
Stone said this experience showed him how persecution and intolerance goes both ways and people need to be accepting of others even though they may not share the same beliefs.
Professor Javier Dominguez-Garcia teaches an honors humanities class that focuses on the conflicts and coexistence of religions in medieval Spain. To help students have a better understanding of the material, he has “spanned the topic of Christianity to include Mormonism” and although Dominguez-Garcia finds students are able to separate their own beliefs in class, he said students appear to be more receptive if certain analogies are made to connect the class material to the prominent LDS culture at USU.
“We are trying to create better world citizens, and in order to understand the world in which we live in now and the conflicts that are taking place, that there is no better place to look than medieval Liberia, and by making connections to the LDS religion, we are able to get students more interested in the material,” Dominguez-Garcia said.
English professor Charles Waugh said because of the moral implications in one of the texts he uses when teaching, he tries to “give students the opportunity to choose for oneself” as to whether or not it is something that they want to expose themselves to. He gives this opportunity to his students by announcing at the beginning of the semester that the text used may contain aspects that are “conflicting to one’s own personal morals” but that it is through “living vicariously though novels, that people expose themselves to situations that they would not encounter in life.”
Waugh said “the class is structured for freshmen and sophomores and some students have not had exposure to the types of situations presented in the text,” and so by telling students beforehand it actually helps students be open minded about the material presented in class.
Though the demographics show that students are prominently LDS, this does not seem to affect the level of tolerance on campus specifically.
“Students appear to be tolerant as far as my experience shows,” Waugh said.
For more information on the topic of religious tolerance, Dominguez-Garcia advises students to pick up a copy of his latest book “Memories of the Future.”
– heather.c.griffiths@aggiemail.usu.edu