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Quite a few friends have been talking recently about a petition by two current BYU students that asks the school to consider whether or not the university is living up to their mission statement. I want to add some context to the petition.
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Hanna Seariac transferred abruptly to BYU as an undergraduate student for the fall 2017 semester. As late as June 27, 2017 she was still working as the Chief Web Editor of the then-named school newspaper, The Crusader. Hanna had a busy spring semester.
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Besides presenting at a Junior Classics League meeting for high schoolers and teachers, taking I presume full-time classes, and being the web editor for the paper, Hanna took on the role of defending the mascot and name of the paper, The Crusader(s),
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when the school entered a public discussion about the propriety of the name Crusader and its connections to both the brutality of the crusades as well as its use by the KKK. In fact, the KKK's paper was also named The Crusader.
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Seariac argued at a public event against changing the name. "Personally, I would be offended if we changed the name because I see it as a de-christianization of the school; I see it as part of a process of systematically removing Catholicism from the school," said Seriac.
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A few weeks later Seariac posted her argument in full at the student paper's website. Although she said that she spent time in "extensive research on the Crusades," her write-up does not provide the reader with that impression.
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Seariac: "The fact the Ku Klux Klan named their newspaper The Crusader does not deter my conviction to the term Crusader, in fact, it amplifies it, because they are using the term incorrectly. They are using the term to represent racism, which the Crusaders would have despised
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Later: "...we shouldn’t sacrifice our history, tradition, and definition of the Crusades because of one group’s misinterpretation of the word. Do you know what one group who misinterprets another group of people sounds like?"
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"To me, it sounds like racism, stereotyping, and the like. I do not wish to give into racism and stereotypes, therefore I do not wish to change the name."
10/ https://hcspire.com/2017/04/06/my-crusade-for-the-crusader/
10/ https://hcspire.com/2017/04/06/my-crusade-for-the-crusader/
According to Seariac, not only were the crusaders not racist, the way that the KKK is misusing the name is racist. Or is that what she means? It is possible that Seariac was in fact not describing the KKK as being racist in misunderstanding the term but her critics.
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Recent scholarship has shown that the crusades "played a fundamental role in the creation of a concept of Europe and the European predatory ethics against both non-Europeans and non-Christians." This created modern racial ideas and the justification of human enslavement.
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Ana Monteiro-Ferreira, "The Creation and Concept of Europe and the Ideological Germs of Racism," Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, Vol. 11, No. 8 (June 2018), 46–63.
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If that reading is correct then she is angry her critics lump her in with other white nationalists. And white nationalist Mormons, "DezNat," make up the majority of her followers on Twitter. She has defended the use of the hashtag DezNat similar to her defense of the crusades
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It appears that Seariac's experience that spring and summer, as well as other changes in her life, led to her shift away from the College of the Holy Cross. Her crusade for The Crusader was ultimately not successful, since the school changed the name to The Spire in 2018.
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Seariac makes other slips in logic and method throughout her current corpus of online publications. In a recent podcast she tried to argue that the historical study of religious texts—which would normally be focused on academic questions about dating and composition—
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should be focused not on the wholistic evidence that supports later dating of texts, like the Book of Abraham in the 19th century, but, according to Seariac, that small pieces of evidence should be enough to accept the whole text as historical.
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All of this is to say that this is not Seariac's first time trying to reform a religious school she has attended. I would have advised her against going after her university in between finishing an undergraduate program and starting an MA, especially since it is obvious
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that the department she is calling out for heresy is her own—the same department that just offered her a home in a graduate program. It seems clear what Seariac is doing is politically motivated, more so than the religious tensions she claims are driving her and her co-author
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And, maybe more importantly, it seems clear that this is a part of Seariac's history and BYU should expect to see more of it in the future. I assume that this will cause problems not only for her own department but also for her work as an MA student.
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I have friends and acquaintances that fall into vastly different categories on the political spectrum, but it shouldn't surprise anyone that if you have a tendency to target others negatively for their political stances they probably won't want to spend time with you.
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