A Stranger in a Strange Land

Two weeks before the spring break of my freshman year at Brown, I had a difficult choice to make.

My father had offered to me the opportunity to spend the break in Cancun with my stepmother and their three children. While the prospect of finally exposing my skin to sunlight after a long tenure in the Northeast was inviting, the idea of doing the things that I would want to do in Cancun under full parental supervision certainly wasn’t. That prospect aside, I had one other option. My high school buddy Mike had invited me to spend the break at his school, Brigham Young University, in Provo, Utah. Mike was especially eager to see me because, due to his upcoming two year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints (hereafter LDS), we would not be able to meet again until I turned twenty. And so, I accepted my friend’s invitation, not knowing what I was getting into. As it turned out, I thoroughly enjoyed my break, gaining appreciation for the wholesome parts of this otherworldly place yet also acknowledging where its purism went too far.
Before flying out, I did have some idea of the restrictions on my behavior that would be required at a Mormon university. Mike had already warned me that he would give me a good punch in the jaw every time I mentioned anything sexual. Also, I was told that I would have a “0% chance” of “getting any” while within a fifty mile radius of BYU’s campus; half-jokingly citing the almost crippling innocence of the BYU student body, Mike said that it would be to my advantage not to speak about almost any aspect of Brown social life.

After my plane landed at the Salt Lake City airport, I had to take a shuttle to Provo. Along the way I struck up a conversation with the driver about the LDS Church and life in general. The driver’s name was John, and he and his family had emigrated from England to Utah in order to be closer to the center of the LDS Church. He revealed to me that in fact, while the Temple is still in Salt Lake City, Provo has become an equally important nerve center of the faith: the population in Provo is 95% Mormon, and BYU puts out thousands of young LDS graduates every year. Although it might be hard to believe, given the already huge proportion of Mormons in the city, Provo actually has the highest conversion rate of any place in the world. As we were continuing to discuss the many differences that Mormonism has with contemporary Christianity, the driver pulled in to the BYU campus. I had to cut off our conversation as I took my suitcases out of the van. He departed, and I waved goodbye to a man whom I had the distinct impression was one of the happiest I have ever met.

I was glad to see Mike. Though tired, I was eager to take a tour of his part of the campus. When I arrived at his dorm room, I already had my first question: why were there no girls in this building except on the bottom floor? Mike explained that men and women are strictly segregated while in BYU residential buildings. Each sex is allowed to go no further than the bottom floor of the opposite sex’s dorms, except during established visiting hours, throughout which all doors have to remain open. But perhaps more remarkable than the regulations themselves is the fact that they are strictly adhered to, even in the absence of supervision. Not once in my entire visit did I observe a rules violation; BYU students view the many constraints on their actions as directives from God that cannot be disobeyed, rather than arbitrary guidelines set down by the administration.