[Mbioguy]

You're being disingenuous and attempting to deflect from real issues. It's not only the text of the honor code that matters, but also the social context and how it is applied.

If you attend BYU as an LDS member, you need to maintain an ecclesiastical endorsement. Part of this includes paying tithing and attending at least some services. If you do not maintain your ecclesiastical endorsement, you can have a hold put on your account to where you can't register for additional classes, graduate, and possibly can't even apply for a transcript. In short, they can keep you from transferring schools unless you are willing to start from scratch, in order to get you to comply. Yes, that is mandatory religious worship, just with extra steps between point a and c. I should know. I attended BYU within the last decade and stopped believing at that time. You are not free to cease being a practicing LDS member. As it is a private school, I would have been fine had they simply asked me to pay the non-member tuition, or requested that I transfer schools. Instead they held my transcript as punishment. I had to grovel and go through a family friend to get an ecclesiastical endorsement to get a transcript. What rubbish. Surely you would be upset if Notre Dame treated a student who converted from Catholicism to Mormonism similarly?

The Honor Code Office has a whole history rife with abuse. In 2015, student Madi Barney was raped. She reported this to Provo police. She was placed under investigation by the Honor Code Office and was barred for a time from enrolling in classes. Unlike previous victims of this institutional abuse, she fought back and went public, ultimately forcing the Title IX office to formally separate from the Honor Code office. Previously information had been shared freely between the two.

https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=4732048&itype=CMSI...

And it's not just the Honor Code Office and the Title IX office. BYU's campus police department was and is complicit in the institutional abuse of authority wielded to keep students in line. Earlier this year the BYU police department was sanctioned in a move to decertify the entire police department. This happened because they failed to investigate misconduct where campus officers were accessing and sharing information using external police databases.

https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2019/02/26/utah-moves-d...

In my own personal experience, I and friends disclosed information to religious leaders, which was subsequently disclosed to the honor code office and used to justify academic probation and punishment. Yes, this was absolutely a blatant violation of priest-penitent confidentiality.

Think about that for a minute. Think about the sharing of information between religious authorities, school's honor code office, title IX office, campus police, and external law enforcement. All in a direct line. Institutional abuse of power and crossing lines that should not be crossed.

The social implications of student body awareness that the Honor Code can be used against you as a student, has been taken advantage of by predators. During my time on campus, talking with victims of sexual assault, the following was explained to me. Would-be predators would attempt to target individuals, like women or closeted gay men, and manipulate them into breaking the honor code in some manner. And have a recording of this. And then assault them or attempt to coerce them. If the victim then went to the police, the campus would become aware that they had previously broken the Honor Code and would have action taken against them. This was used to try to silence victims and prevent them from turning to the authorities for help. And you know what? It worked in a number of cases I personally knew of, allowing predators to victimize multiple individuals before being stopped.

I'm no longer a believer, but reading this comment, I assume you are. Is this how you believe Jesus would want his church, and a school supposedly run in his name, behaving?

[Digory]

FWIW, What you described as your personal experience doesn’t strike me as all that abusive.

If my (non Mormon) pastor was told someone was violating title IX (sex assault), I’d expect them to report to various other authorities. Mandatory reporting laws mean most information communicated to religious leaders abouse sexual harm isn’t all that confidential.

Maybe Mormons have a relationship to clergy more like Catholics do to priests?

[Mbioguy]

You've got it backwards. This has nothing to do with mandatory reporting laws. You are assuming something is said about person B during person A's confessional. That isn't what is being described.

A student confesses to their religious leaders that they have done some sin. Fine, go through the religious repentance process. That's how things normally work in other religions too. A religious leader doesn't have authority to academically punish someone. What doesn't normally happen, is that this info gets shared with a school authority that does. And then the school authority shares info with campus police, from where it can also go into state or federal databases.

Or it goes the other way, where info given to city police ends up in the hands of academic or religious folks who use it abusively.

A student like Madi Barney is assaulted, she goes to city police. City police share detailed info with campus police, who share it with title ix and honor code office, who share it with religious authorities. She was not the assaulter, she was the victim. Yet, because a part of the police report includes a history of some breaking of the honor code, even though as in my original response predators manipulate folks into doing this, she ends up being investigated and punished academically and religiously. City PD ends up functionally an investigation and enforcement arm of academic and religious authorities. That is ABSOLUTELY institutional abuse of power.

I didn't share much of my personal experiences, just enough to rebut the claim that religious attendance is not mandatory, that was the purpose of paragraphs 1-2 so I don't know what you are going on about. The rest of the response was what detailed the abusive system.

I didn't even touch on how this is used against LGBT students.

[Malician]

If there are no barriers between the police, the sexual assault investigation department of the university, the honor code enforcement of the university, and what the religious leaders hear during private confessional (what the poster above describes):

1. Anything said to the police, the university, or during confessional can get you, the victim, in trouble with the honor code department.

2. Predators know this, so they intentionally work to get victims to break minor rules that will bring major honor code punishments down - preventing the victims from reporting real crimes, or even talking about them to anyone - the police, the relevant university departments, or even their religious leader.

This isn't about the pastor reporting evidence of a crime to authorities, this is about the honor code department destroying the integrity and value of every other law enforcement or authority and effectively protecting predators.

This happens outside BYU with drugs: predators rape victims after getting them under the influence of minor drugs which will get the victim in trouble if they go to the police.

[lobotryas]

While you are right that having and endorsement is a hard requirement, if seems BYU makes it as easy as they can for a religious-backed university to get it. I found nothing so far that says you must pay tithe or must attend some services so you’ll have to provide sources for that.

I think the biggest thing you understate in your post is the percentage of students who attend BYU and are active Mormons. Figure I found says that this number is close to 98%! I feel bad for your situation, but you should have switched universities when you discovered your atheism before things got that bad.

Simply put BYU is not for non-religions and non-conservative people. With so many other great choices in the US and the world it feels disingenuous to once again attack Mormons for simply trying to do their own thing.

[Malician]

A lot of people are willing to do what's convenient to keep from causing a social furor or losing connections and support. Ironically, and sadly, it's having the integrity to be forthright about your (lack of) belief that is damaging. But having your school career come crashing down on you shouldn't be one of those consequences with a federally funded institution.