How Harvard Divinity School became a hub for Latter-day Saints

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts — On a recent September afternoon, inside a vaulted-ceiling chapel at Harvard Divinity School, a group of professors and students joined together in an unusual sing-along. They belted out: “Popcorn popping on the apricot tree” and motioned explosions with their hands. Some attendees exchanged glances of amusement and confusion, but to one group in the room, the song and the hand movements were second nature. They grew up with them as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
This Wednesday Noon Service, a weekly worship gathering hosted by different religious communities at the divinity school, was organized by Latter-day Saint students who decided to structure their service after a typical children’s — or “primary” — class.
“We wanted to invite people to experience what it means to be part of the Latter-day Saint culture,” said Maddison Tenney, a master’s candidate and Latter-day Saint. “We wanted to create an accessible service, where everyone could participate.”
While Latter-day Saint students have long been a large and well-known contingent at Harvard Business School — with famous graduates like Utah Sen. Mitt Romney and the late Clayton Christensen — their presence at the Ivy League divinity school wasn’t always so prominent.
But this year, the group of 10 Latter-day Saint students is larger than it’s ever been, according to Harvard Divinity School faculty and staff. Last year Brigham Young University was one of the top two schools in terms of sending students to Harvard Divinity. This year, BYU is the most represented.
“In my opinion, they are the most thriving group on campus,” said Terry Dixon, a divinity school student who is studying to become a Unitarian Universalist minister.
So why are Latter-day Saints suddenly coming to Harvard Divinity School in greater numbers?
Harvard Divinity School’s multi-religious approach distinguishes it from other divinity schools in the U.S., fostering a broad and inclusive exploration of diverse religious traditions. There are over 350 students at the divinity school, a number that includes both master’s and doctoral students, who represent 46 religious traditions, and non-religious students, too.
“It’s probably the only place in the world where you can walk into a building and see a Buddhist monk, a Hindu priest, an Episcopalian minister and a Catholic scholar sitting at the same table and chatting about TikTok or current events,” said Tenney, who came to Harvard to study what it means to be a queer person of faith.
This pluralistic model is especially well-suited to be welcoming to Latter-day Saints, said Kyle Belanger, another Latter-day Saint student at Harvard. “When I came here, there was such an emphasis on situating yourself in your roots and also in the lived and applied dimensions of theology and in bridging the gap between scholar and practitioner,” said Belanger, who studies theology and religious thought.
Along with Tenney, he’s been spearheading a recruitment effort to bring more Latter-day Saints to the divinity school. They have been reaching out to universities in Utah, hosting Zoom information sessions for students interested in applying and helping them with applications.
At the divinity school, a Latter-day Saint student group meets for weekly gatherings that are open to everyone. They all take a course in “Latter-day Saint/Mormon studies” taught by David Holland, a professor of American religion and an associate dean at Harvard Divinity School, who is a Latter-day Saint and the son of President Jeffrey R. Holland, acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.
Holland’s position, too, has made the school more attractive to Latter-day Saints, students told me. “He has been really path-breaking,” said Taylor Petrey, a professor of religion at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, who got both his master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard Divinity School.
In the early 2000s, Petrey, along with other Latter-day students at the school, started the first Latter-day Saint Student Association and ran the first Latter-day Saint Noon Service. He recalled singing hymns like “The Spirit of God” and “O My Father” with other people who came to worship. The divinity school offered a place to examine his faith, he said, and religion in general, through both academic and spiritual lenses, and to engage in challenging conversations with believers from a range of traditions.
“We were all working out what it meant to be a religious person in the modern world,” Petrey said.
Last year, Belanger, Tenney and others rebranded the old student group with a new name: HDS Mormonisms, seeking to emphasize its inclusivity toward the broader Latter-day Saint tradition.
The history of Latter-day Saints studying religion at prestigious institutions can be traced to the 1930s, when The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sent a group of scholars to study theology and biblical studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School. The hope was to train religious educators who would serve in the church’s seminaries and institutes of religion.
As a result of what’s known as the Chicago Experiment, some students became enamored with the elite academic environment, while others came to strongly oppose the modernist teachings. For instance, T. Edgar Lyon, one of the students, wrote: “All religion is taught as a product of social growth and development, and anything supernatural is looked upon as merely a betrayal of one’s own ignorance and primitive mind.”
The tensions that emerged between more orthodox and liberal-minded students raised questions about whether elite educational training could be compatible with a fervent faith. Amid these tensions, J. Reuben Clark, then a member of the church’s First Presidency, gave a speech in 1938 titled “The Charted Course of the Church in Education,” which became a blueprint for church educators, emphasizing the need for a firm commitment to teaching core Latter-day Saint doctrine.
Philip Barlow, who entered Harvard Divinity School in 1977, recalled an open and warm environment, even though some then viewed the Latter-day Saints as “quaint” and “eccentric.”
“The officials and professors were open to diversity, and I represented probably an odd kind of diversity,” said Barlow, who is currently a senior research fellow at the Maxwell Institute at Brigham Young University. He described feeling “divine envy” when he heard about Harvard’s program from a friend after Barlow graduated from Weber State University. The encounter ignited his interest.
During his studies, Barlow taught at the Latter-day Saint Institute of Religion, befriended members of the Unification Church, and worked as a “Downton Abbey”-esque butler for two widows. He also wrestled with challenging questions about God and his faith.
“I didn’t have anyone immediately around me from my faith community to process these questions with,” he said. But the experience broadened and deepened his faith and understanding, he told me. “I learned to treasure the questions and that I didn’t need to be defensive about them.”
In 1988, Barlow graduated from Harvard Divinity School with a doctorate, becoming the first Latter-day Saint to receive one from the school.
At least five alumni of Harvard Divinity School now work and teach at BYU, according to the list that Taylor Petrey created to keep track of Latter-day Saint alumni.
Jenna Carson, who graduated with a master of divinity from Harvard in 2018, is now the first female Latter-day Saint chaplain in the United States military. “HDS has become a major hub for Latter-day Saints,” said Petrey, who returned to Harvard Divinity School as a visiting professor in 2016. “It’s nice to see that there is a resurgence.”
At the recent noon service at Harvard, Tenney read one of the “articles of faith,” a set of core tenets of Latter-day Saint belief. “God will yet reveal many great and important things,” she read. Thomas McConkie, a Harvard Divinity master’s student and a Latter-day Saint, led the group in a short meditation. Belanger gave a sermon, quoting William James and reflecting on what the Book of Mormon reveals about knowing Jesus Christ “flesh-to-flesh.”
Knowing there are other Latter-day Saint students made it less intimidating for Grace Chipman, who said she had never imagined going to Harvard. A Canada native, she was studying history at BYU, and she had known Belanger, who became her “guru” when it came to filling out applications. “It was cool that most of the time, I could share with someone about my faith and not feel embarrassed about it,” said Chipman, who is studying religious women’s history.
Students come from a variety of fields — English, literature, classics, political science, Middle Eastern studies. Many have intersected with the interfaith program at Brigham Young University, said Andrew Reed, who teaches comparative religion and church history at BYU and who has recommended students for Harvard Divinity School over the years.
“Harvard is a place where Latter-day Saint students can thrive even though it hasn’t always been perceived as a place where that could happen,” said Reed, who is also the chair of Council for Interfaith Engagement. Although Harvard Divinity School is not for everyone, he said, for those who are going there, it’s a place where they can “invest in deepening their understanding and the way they engage with their faith.”
McConkie said it was moving to watch his classmates from other faith traditions sing hymns he had grown up with.
“HDS has a really strong culture of taking sacred things to others,” said McConkie, who is studying human development and contemplative practices in various religions. “There is that willingness to enter someone else’s context and to experience the sacred through their senses. That’s one of the great strengths of HDS.”
Perhaps paradoxically, it’s here in Cambridge that McConkie, a native of Salt Lake City, has learned about the sense of place from one of his professors and a fellow Utahn, Terry Tempest Williams, a writer-in-residence at Harvard Divinity School. Williams’s writing explores the connections between the environment, spirituality and identity in the context of the American West. “She showed me what it means to break your heart over the place you’re from, and to not look away from it, no matter how painful it is,” said McConkie.
There is often skepticism about the intellectual rigor and value of religious studies at Harvard, he told me. But he sees the school’s distinctive approach as a strength. “I like the way that the divinity school complicates a flatland understanding of scholarship,” he said.
“People are confessional here, they have faith in what they study, and that used to be an anathema in academia, but it’s actually just human. Everybody has faith in something.”