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Over the weekend, a Salt Lake Tribune article highlighted an enormous problem at the BYUs: the annual ecclesiastical endorsement process means that bishops can circumvent the amnesty clause that BYU added to its sexual misconduct policy.[fn1]

And why is that bad? Richelle Wilson gave us an excellent explanation of the problems with weaponizing the ecclesiastical endorsement process, and Angela C. explained clearly some of the dangers of a view of sin that leads to disregarding others’ welfare. So is it bad that a bishop can get a student expelled for something the Honor Code Office explicitly wouldn’t? Absolutely; Richelle and Angela have made an airtight moral and ethical case for it. And I would add, as a policy matter, that it is bad, too. BYU has made the explicit decision that encouraging students to report sexual assault is more important than disciplining them for breaking the Honor Code. This “loophole” will chill the reporting that BYU wants (rightly) to encourage.

So what can BYU do about it? The short answer is, I have no idea. But the longer answer is, I have several ideas.

What Is the Purpose of the Annual Ecclesiastical Endorsement?

I have no idea what BYU should do because I have no idea what its goal is in requiring an annual ecclesiastical endorsement.[fn2] BYU’s website provides guidance for how to get an ecclesiastical endorsement [here and here], but it doesn’t explain why.

It is clearly neither necessary nor sufficient for ensuring that BYU students comply with church standards. It’s not necessary—plenty of Mormon students attend non-Mormon schools and manage to follow church standards. (From personal experience, I can tell you that I didn’t know of any Mormons who drank, did drugs, or had extramarital sex when I was at BYU. I also didn’t know of any Mormons who drank, did drugs, or had extramarital sex when I was a law student at Columbia, in spite of our no longer having an ecclesiastical endorsement requirement.) But it’s also not sufficient: some BYU students do stuff they shouldn’t do.

And that’s a huge problem: the BYUs have delegated a lot of power to bishops, including the power to effectively expel students (and fire faculty). These bishops don’t have any responsibility to BYU, though, and BYU doesn’t have any authority over them.

But I’d be shocked if BYU’s administration has articulated precisely why they’ve delegated this kind of power to bishops, other than that it’s always been that way.[fn3]

If BYU wants to keep the benefits of an annual ecclesiastical endorsement, while not discouraging students from reporting sexual assault, it needs to figure out what the benefits of the ecclesiastical endorsement are. Once it has articulated what precisely those benefits are, it can craft a policy that will allow it to provide those benefits (or something close to them) without chilling reporting. (Or maybe it will discover, as it tries to articulate the benefits, that there aren’t any; if it’s unable to articulate benefits, maybe it should eliminate the annual ecclesiastical endorsement.)

But honestly, until BYU has articulated precisely what the purpose of an annual ecclesiastical endorsement is, there is no way to fully reconcile it with the amnesty it has crafted.

Some Ideas Anyway

Although I want to reiterate that, without knowing why BYU requires an annual ecclesiastical endorsement, we can’t come up with a full solution, there are several things that BYU could do that would resolve this particular conflict between the amnesty policy and bishops. (Note that, for purposes of these proposed solutions, I’m assuming that there’s a reason for the ecclesiastical endorsement, without knowing what it is.) Here are a couple:

Online Ecclesiastical Affirmation. We could require students to affirm (online or, if we’re dinosaurs, on paper) that they have followed the Honor Code and that they pledge to continue to comply with its requirements, then take them at their word. This actually strikes me as the optimal solution. We do self-reporting at church all the time. I mean, that’s basically what the temple recommend interview is: self-reporting our worthiness. And I’m pretty sure that I’d be hard-pressed to find a member who thinks attending BYU is somehow more spiritually significant than attending the temple. If we take members at their word during the temple recommend interview (and, for that matter, baptismal interviews and priesthood ordination interviews and everything else), why not for an ecclesiastical endorsement/affirmation?

But what if a student lies?, you may ask. To which I answer, fine. I mean, it’s not the student won’t be expelled for honor code violations if she shows up to class drunk. In fact, the same culture of tattling that Angela wrote about could still exist—heck, you could still report to the Honor Code Office that a student was drunk when she was sexually assaulted. And then, in accordance with BYU policy, the Honor Code Office could ignore that.

Ecclesiastical Endorsement Administrator. The thing I really like about the online affirmation is that it doesn’t create any significant additional marginal cost to administer. But if we really want someone to look deep into a student’s eyes when he says he’s attending church, BYU could always hire someone(s) to administer the ecclesiastical endorsement.

Essentially, doing this would split the pastoral from the administrative. Bishops would be free to act in the manner they felt best for their congregants. If they were convinced that a member of their ward needed to face some sort of disciplinary proceeding for that member’s spiritual benefit, they certainly could. But their pastoral care would have nothing to do with the congregant’s academic standing.

The administrator, on the other hand, would have no ecclesiastical or pastoral role to play with the student. The administrator could not affect a student’s church standing, only her academic standing. Because the administrator would be an employee of BYU, BYU could train her so that she understood the amnesty policy and other school policies. The school could ensure that the purpose underlying the ecclesiastical endorsement (whatever it is) was met, while maintaining control over its processes.

Hiring people to administer the ecclesiastical endorsement would be expensive. But if it’s worth having, presumably it’s worth the cost.

Alternate Clergy. Along the lines of the previous example, BYU could also allow students to get an ecclesiastical endorsement from someone who is not their bishop. Non-Mormon students already do something like this: they can get an endorsement from their own clergy or a Mormon bishop. It gives them the ability to affirm their compliance without taking away their pastors’ ability to provide pastoral care.

Who would this alternative clergy be? It could be a bishop from another ward; it could be clergy from another religion; it could be community leaders. BYU could choose—if it wanted, it could even provide a whitelist of acceptable endorsers (be they individuals or classes). This provides similar benefits to the Ecclesiastical Endorsement Administrator, but without adding costs to BYU. The one potential downside is that BYU would still be delegating power to non-employees, but that isn’t any worse than the current way ecclesiastical endorsements work.

Mandatory Appeal. If the school is unwilling to take back academic power from bishops, at the very least, it needs to set up an appeals proceeding that can revisit a bishop’s withdrawal of an ecclesiastical endorsement. Again, this appeals proceeding would apply only to the academic side of things—it wouldn’t have any pastoral or ecclesiastical authority. But it would have to have the power to overrule the academic effects of a bishop’s withdrawal (or denial) of an ecclesiastical endorsement.

This solution would be a little trickier to construct. We’d need to establish who had the burden of proof and persuasion. We’d have to decide who was on the panel, and when it could overrule a bishop’s denial (only where the revocation was related to a sexual assault? anywhere where the bishop was overstepping?). And frankly, the appeal should be mandatory and automatic. We shouldn’t place the burden on young students (and especially young students who have been sexually assaulted!) to know what the proper administrative procedures are. We should probably provide some sort of advocate to the students who can guide them through the process. But a mandatory appeals process would at least diminish the ability of bishops to circumvent BYU policy through the ecclesiastical endorsement process.

So can the ecclesiastical endorsement process be fixed? Probably. But to fix it, we need to know what it plans on accomplishing, and it’s far from clear that we have any idea.

[fn1] In short, the amnesty clause provides that BYU won’t discipline honor code violations of victims or witnesses who report sexual assault, unless someone’s health or safety is at risk.

[fn2] You don’t know either, unless, perhaps, you’re BYU administration, and even then, I kind of doubt you know.

[fn3] (Though, fwiw, it apparently hasn’t always been that way.)