Philosopher and theologian Martin Buber in 1963. Wikimedia Commons.

ABSTRACT: This article argues that effective religious education at Brigham Young University must move beyond a content-centered approach to one grounded in relational care, drawing on Nel Noddings and Martin Buber. Reflecting on classroom experiences amid student faith crises, the author critiques treating education as mere information transfer and instead emphasizes the teacher–student relationship as central to learning and spiritual development. By situating Latter-day Saint doctrine within a relational theology, the author connects care ethics with Buber’s I–It and I–Thou framework, warning against objectifying students and reducing God to abstraction—the “eclipse of God.” Meaningful education occurs through dialogue, presence, and mutual care, where students are encountered as whole persons and relationships become the primary medium for cultivating knowledge and faith.

KEYWORDS: religious education, teaching, testimony, personal relationships

When I first started teaching in Religious Education at BYU in 2013, I had just come from working for the Joseph Smith Papers Project. Swirling around in my head were new ideas developed by researchers at the Papers. New discoveries, like the earliest copies of Joseph Smith’s revelations, enabled the Church to update many section headings of the Doctrine and Covenants in 2013. Those researchers also helped write and research the Gospel Topics Essays and publish countless new manuscripts and journals. I was loaded with not only a PhD in history but years of research at the Papers under the tutelage of some of Church’s best historians.

When I started teaching in Religious Education, there was also a pandemic of students having what they called a “faith crisis.” I had students lining up at my office door every week to discuss the relationship between their own faith crisis and the history of the Church. Most of the questions were prepared by websites or blogs, and students would simply ask me to respond to them. By 2013, Mormon Stories with John Dehlin and Letter to a CES Director had become very popular and very detrimental to at least some of the students at BYU. The questions these media outlets posed were either intellectual or designed to play on popular social issues to the detriment of the Church’s message. They constructed a narrow dialogue with difficult questions, most too complex to answer in a short conversation or even within a fifty-minute lecture. Many questions contradicted a basic Latter-day Saint doctrine or historical event that students had been taught at church or by their parents.

When students began asking these questions in class, I felt a need to answer them with well-supported data during my lectures. The focus of my classrooms transformed into lectures delivering the data and the content. I tried to deliver the best data available to make sense of their questions, including using all the Gospel Topics Essays. In doing so I was addressing at least part of their need to find answers and participating in Elder M. Russell Ballard’s call for religious educators to be prepared to answer such questions.[1] In this scenario, though it didn’t take me too long to realize there was a problem, many of my lectures were shaped around the negative tone of the internet, which placed me in a defensive state of mind. Most importantly, although I was focusing on the data and the content, answering questions with detailed and responsible data, I was neglecting personal and spiritual relationships with my students.

There was also an even deeper problem with what my classrooms had become. My stand-and-deliver posture as a teacher fell into the trap that assumed education was a formal collection of ideas. I was trying to fix their faith crisis by answering their questions with lots and lots of data. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), educator and philosopher Paulo Feire popularized the cautionary analogy that the more coins (or knowledge) we stuff into our piggybank (mind), the more education we will obtain. Taking this analogy one step further, I was teaching as if the students’ testimonies would be secured if they had all the answers to their gospel questions. I imagined that ideas, doctrines, and history were the answer to their faith crisis and that the accumulation of them was the teacher’s duty to provide. While this approach was not completely misguided, I misjudged my role as a teacher for someone who delivers specialized content. I’d like to challenge that notion in this short essay by thinking about the teacher-student relationship, without letting the data take over the classroom.

Care Ethics

Over the past several years, I have been obsessed with education, especially the philosophy of education. One scholar of educational philosophy that all students of education eventually read is Nel Noddings, a founder of care ethics in moral philosophy. She considers care an essential part of what it is to be a human being since everyone cares about something and human life begins in relation to others.

In care ethics, relation to others is more important than the individual and the collective. The starting point for this moral philosophy begins with the carer and their essential relationship with the cared-for.

Let’s think about the idea with a very real example. Every semester I get dozens and dozens of accommodation letters. In the past I have had mixed feelings about the letters, and I hear my colleagues tell stories about how they deal with each person and their accommodations. Most of the time there is a dilemma for us as teachers when we think about the collective, or whole group of students, when thinking about accommodation. For example, I have heard statements like this: “It’s unfair if one person does not have to turn in their work on time, while the rest of the class will be penalized for the same.” In this case we have turned the whole class into victims rather than focusing on the well-being of each student and our relationship to them. These dilemmas can be settled by focusing on the relationship in which the teacher is the carer and the students are the cared-for. This simple example gets at the heart of what Noddings is arguing: “My contention is, first, that we should want more from our educational efforts than adequate academic achievement and, second, that we will not achieve even that meager success unless our [students] believe that they themselves are cared for and learn to care for others.”[2]

BYU Mission Statement

What appeals to me about this philosophy is that it not only captures what it is to be a Latter-day Saint but also helps emphasize the mission of BYU. Most importantly, it also helps focus on the education that can be done by fostering relationships as part of our education.

While many universities, especially state and secular universities, focus on personal achievement and financial wealth as the primary goals of higher education, Brigham Young University and other faith-based universities do more because they do something different with faith. BYU’s mission statement emphasizes the relational “Other”—including God—as an essential part of social relationships:

All instruction, programs, and services at BYU, including a wide variety of extracurricular experiences, should make their own contribution toward the balanced development of the total person. Such a broadly prepared individual will not only be capable of meeting personal challenge and change but will also bring strength to others in the tasks of home and family life, social relationships, civic duty, and service to mankind.[3]

The mission statement goes on to state, “Certainly all relationships within the BYU community should reflect devout love of God and a loving, genuine concern for the welfare of our neighbor.”[4] What a beautiful statement.

Christ and Scripture as Relational

These ideas don’t germinate from BYU alone, since the core of Latter-day Saint doctrine and scripture depends on relations to articulate who we are and God’s nature. Learning about Jesus Christ is relational in nature. To know him is to know his relationship with us and even to know his relationship with the Father and to the Church.

To understand the Atonement, for example, is to know that Christ is the Son of God. The scriptures emphasize the central importance of relationships to understand the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. The Book of Mormon demonstrates this perfectly: “The Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost are one.” Their oneness is relational. “I am in the Father, and the Father in me, and the Father and I are one” (3 Nephi 11:27). Just as engaging the Book of Mormon requires holding it and sifting through its pages, relationships require more than just knowledge.

Perhaps the best example of the centrality of relationships in the Church of Jesus Christ is found in the Family Proclamation, the exemplar for fostering these relationships. It proclaims that “marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and that the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children.” It declares further: “All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny.”[5]

If relationships matter, then showing up and participating in those relationships matters even more. Here’s an example. I’ve held on to very few memories of my childhood, but what’s interesting about my memories are that they all include my parents showing up to events that I was excited about. Being there matters. One potent example of this is going to the temple, where I built relationships with my family and my heavenly family through attendance, prayer, getting a recommend, and performing ordinances. In fact, doing ordinances is educational. Men and women, brothers and sisters are sealed together to sustain the kingdom of God, the Church of the Firstborn, and most importantly the family of our heavenly parents. Think about this kind of education. It is not founded centrally on learning new ideas, though that is important, but instead it is about ordinances and creating and sustaining covenant relationships.

Martin Buber and Essential Relations

This sacred emphasis on relationships marks the essence of humankind and how we should teach as educators. According to philosopher John Macmurray, “Teaching is one of the foremost of personal relations.”[6] Relationships of care and trust are established by listening, dialogue, critical thinking, reflective response, and making thoughtful connections.

In Religious Education we teach all students at BYU—that means tens of thousands of students each semester. One of the biggest problems we face is that we cannot have direct personal relationships with many of our students. I have seen this go awry many times in classrooms and for many of our faculty who teach hundreds of students in large lecture halls. We don’t have majors, so a personal relationship with faculty members is threatened by students’ lack of need to connect to their professors for vocational purposes. This can cause the content of the class to become more important than relationships with students. It comes at the risk of making assumptions and generalizing about students. Wondering how to best deal with this issue, a colleague and I came up with numerous answers like “If they know the gospel, it will all turn out well,” or “Don’t worry about the students; just worry about the Spirit.” Though both answers are virtuous in their own right, they miss what Noddings was getting at about education. She reminds us that “we will not achieve even meager success unless our [students] believe that they themselves are cared for and learn to care for others.”[7] Remarkably, in Religious Education professors find ways to do this even with three hundred students in one room. For example, I have colleagues who memorize hundreds of students’ names every semester and find ways to make personal connections regardless of the number of students in the classroom. We have professors who gather students to help with their research, we host student symposia, maintain clubs and associations as faculty mentors, publish student essays, organize study abroad, do summer interfaith trips, and support many more activities that foster positive teacher-student relationships.

Even before Nel Noddings, Martin Buber was the founding figure of care ethics in education. He might also be the most well-known Jewish social and religious philosopher of the twentieth century. In 1923 he authored a famous book called I and Thou. In this book and others, he worried deeply that humanity had become incapable of addressing God as a person, since God was constantly referred to as an idea, an object of veneration, an unapproachable thing articulated by theologians and philosophers. God and theology was an idea, a coin stuffed into our piggy banks.

He called this “the eclipse of God,” an idea that can be juxtaposed with what is happening to human beings, who are also treated like objects—the eclipse of God accompanied by the eclipse of humankind. For example, this happens when students become a collective or when teachers have no names. This is a little complicated but very important. Buber explained that the undeniable condition of our time is buttressed by alienation and divestment (we are ever distanced by technology), causing God to be absent and humankind to be incomplete. God is never present in this eclipse. While his characteristics vibrantly represent his absence, we never draw him into our presence. Buber wrote, “Eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God—such indeed is the character of the historic hour through which the world is now passing,”[8] as if the world was passing through a digital age of education.

Buber imagined education focusing on the relationship of real people to real people. Technology was just a way of holding something in reserve; for example, Google allows us to place knowledge in reserve, accessing it at any point on our phones while never internalizing it. ChatGPT enables us to outline anything we ask, again holding knowledge in reserve. To Buber this kind of thing is what causes the eclipse of God, and humankind and would be a marker for the piggy bank analogy. Buber wanted face-to-face relationships and personal connections with students.

In a commencement speech at BYU, President Kevin J Worthen addressed this issue head-on in his talk called “The Propinquity Effect.” Propinquity is “the state of being close to someone or something,” and President Worthen spoke of this as “nearness.” He explained that propinquity was the tendency of individuals to form close relationships with people they repeatedly encountered. He cited research stating that “residents of an apartment building living near a stairway . . . tend to have more friends from other floors than those living further from the stairway.” From this research he gave three pieces of advice: (1) seek in-person contact with others, (2) seek positive in-person interactions with those with whom you disagree, (3) seek to have these interactions with the Savior too.[9]

I-Thou

With propinquity in mind, let’s return to Martin Buber. His ideas have shaped my care for students at BYU and have made me wonder whether helpful communication tools like Zoom, though important and even essential, are always secondary to face-to-face interaction. Buber argues that to find God and humankind, we must understand the nature of humankind as being in relation. This speaks to my intelligence as a Latter-day Saint. From this assumption about human nature, Buber narrows human experience to two fundamental relational modes—those between people, including God (I-Thou/You),[10] and those between people and objects (I-It).[11] These are the elemental variables whose combination and recombination structure all experience as relational. Let’s take a look at these relationships.

The most common relationship in the world is the I-It relationship, or what Buber calls the objectified world. Its essence is a relation to objects that entails experiencing and using them. This relationship draws out the facts of life through critical analysis and the use of things, people, and places. Such things are held in reserve to be used, categorized, and labeled for one’s own purposes and means. The I-It relationship is between a person and anything or anyone else, as long as one sees the other person or thing only as an object.

An example of an I-It relationship is found in how we generalize about and identify people. In Religious Education we are constantly threatened by these kinds of generalizations. Students become problems, they become the “woke student,” the “molly Mormon student,” the “sick student,” or, as I mentioned earlier, “the accommodations letter students.” Common identities enable our faculty to talk generally about the students to each other, but if we are not careful, these labels can end up objectifying students. This kind of objectification makes them objects, not individual souls. This kind of objectification can make them objects, not complex individuals who need help and care. Students could even spend much of their time objectifying themselves in class. They create personas on social media and identify with groups, complicating a healthy student/teacher relationship. Whether they are objectifying themselves, or we are objectifying them, this is a detriment to the learning environment.

Another example of the I-It relation is when we treat people as a means to an end, instead of as the end in itself. The concept of human resource departments is a modern example because imagining humans as resources for business or school is dehumanizing. People are not a means to production; they are (as one video I use in my classes declares) “well intentioned, flawed, partially blind, but ultimately dignified and good humans struggling against enormous odds, sometimes succeeding just a little, in just a few areas.”[12] Students need more than knowledge or status—they need people. They need teachers who treat them with respect and love, not as resources. Students are not resources to accomplish a task or achieve our goals. They are the whole point of education, and education is done best when we focus on the teacher-student relationship.

Let’s consider one more example of the I-It relation. University faculty are proud of what they know and what ideas they have discovered for the world, but that is only a small portion of what is offered at a university. Ideas, facts, and figures can be found on the internet, but the classroom is a place for relationships to flourish and education to be as complex as it needs to be. It should foster love, kindness, respect, and faith in God—before the knowledge of brilliant faculty members ever matters. I have heard of professors at the university who take pride in limiting student comments in class. Though these may be talking points more than reality, this rumor is a helpful example, especially since such teachers are at least partly justified in their position (in fact, student course evaluations have the potential to suggest as much). A teaching style that avoids open discussion relies on the notion that the professor is the exemplar of knowledge and that students, who are beginning their search for knowledge, have the potential to perpetuate falsehood in class. Students might complain, “I came to listen to the expert, not a student.” Unfortunately, it is very easy to fall into this trap as a student and as a teacher. It is bad education to imagine knowledge as coins one collects in a piggy bank and that the more one has, the more educated that person will be. One would be wise to imagine teachers learning alongside students, being a guide but also enabling them to take responsibility for their own education through a positive teacher/student relationship.

Furthermore, education is not simply about obtaining a vocation. My classrooms offer no vocational training, nor a certificate, a minor, or a major in religion. For well over a decade, I occasionally have heard students complain about religion classes being a waste of time because they will not help them become doctors, engineers, nurses, politicians, or counselors. Just imagine the problem we have here. In this scenario our students are like robots, downloading only the relevant information so they can become a cog in a machine to keep the world running properly. What we really need is compassionate, hardworking, kind, loving human beings participating in the world after graduation. Education should not objectify; it should make the student more human and provide skills of building relationships of love, especially in the student’s new vocation. We all need to learn how to be good human beings so that our vocations can be meaningful and foster a society predicated on positive relationships.

I-Thou/You

The I-It relationship contrasts with an I-Thou/You relationship, which, as noted earlier, is the relationship of a carer to someone who is cared for. In this relationship others are not used for one’s own benefit, but are ends in themselves. Care and the ethics of care define this relationship between the I and the Thou. This relationship develops when one can recognize the other person, seeing them as a whole person and never as an object. The other person is heard and understood. In this way, God is made real—a living presence, just as a friend or loved one is made real through our showing them respect and understanding and valuing their perspective.

In my classes in religious education, I have students who struggle with orthodox material. Sometimes it is because they are concerned about social issues that push against orthodoxy, or they have situations in their lives that don’t allow them to feel completely comfortable with policies, doctrines, or practices. These students are occasionally brave enough to express their concerns in class, which can cause them to become objectified as a “problem” or labeled as “unorthodox.” Most of the time this requires deep and meaningful conversation. It always requires mutual reflection between the carer and the person cared for to evoke feelings and stories from both to engage their whole being. Often things cannot be completely resolved, but a kind and loving relationship offers the one cared for dignity and hope, as well as companionship on the road of life. Applied to the classroom, changing someone’s mind might be nice, but it is unlikely to happen if it’s the teacher’s goal. What if the teacher focused on the whole person rather than on a student’s particular opinion? What if our goal is establishing positive eternal relationships?

The care ethic that marks this kind of relationship can specifically define the relationship between teachers and students as an I-Thou relationship. This relational mode is clearly superior to the I-It mode in which people are objectified by being defined and limited to language, tropes, races, or vocations. The objectification of people seen in social media is an apparent reality, but so are the limited and impaired relationships in life that make a person a means to an end. People become objects when other people don’t care about them, comfort them, or show up in their lives.

Teachers at BYU are afforded unique opportunities to connect with students. In fact, the curriculum facilitates this. For example, BYU is one of the most accomplished universities in the United States when it comes to study abroad. The same might be said for BYU’s more localized study programs. In Religious Education every summer, instructors take students to the sacred sites of the Restoration in New York, Ohio, and Illinois. The students are not only taught about the Restoration, but they also experience it and reflect with their mentors about its value in their lives. Experiential learning enables the I-Thou relationship to develop as teachers and students open themselves to one another at these sacred sites through conversation, experience, and reflection.

Education offers freedom and independence, much like the I-Thou relationship in which one sees other people for themselves, leaving them free to become what they please. The caring that occurs is not one-sided, and it does not develop inside just one side of the relationship. The mutual caring forms much like our covenant relationships do. Caring allows the other person to reveal themselves. In education, as with the I-Thou relationship, care must be intentional and offer grace. It is also characterized by openness and reciprocity. The care ethic that develops avoids objectifying other people, remains open to their grace, and accepts that others can offer revelation and grace to the carer in trying to maintain a state of I-Thou. Because students often find God through other people (including our prophets and local leaders), teachers, who are ideally situated to be influential in their students’ lives, would do well to exemplify the care ethic.

Buber wrote, “The relation in education is one of pure dialogue,” with genuine caring freely operating between two people.[13] Like my classes in 2013, classes at BYU need to cultivate interpersonal relationships of “pure dialogue.”[14] The dialogue we should foster focuses on these relationships with a goal to build eternal relationships with all of our brothers and sisters on earth and beyond the veil. We need to make our relationships with our students part of our covenant relationships with God, never objectifying God or our students. The eclipse of God may be happening throughout the world, but we can be part of the world that fosters a care ethic. We can be part of the world that fosters love and kindness in our classrooms at BYU.

Notes

[1] M. Russell Ballard, “By Study and by Faith,” Ensign, December 2016, www.churchofjesuschrist.org.

[2] Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (University of California Press, 1984), 5.

[3] “BYU Mission Statement,” https://aims.byu.edu/byu-mission-statement.

[4] “BYU Mission Statement.”

[5] “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” www.churchofjesuschrist.org.

[6] John Macmurray, “Teachers and Pupils,” The Educational Forum 29, no. 1 (1964): 17.

[7] Noddings, Caring, 4.

[8] Martin Buber, Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy (Harper & Row, 1952), 37.

[9] Kevin J Worthen, “The Propinquity Effect,” commencement address, Brigham Young University, April 21, 2022, https://speeches.byu.edu.

[10] It may help readers to clarify that there is no substantive distinction between translating Buber’s central concept as I–Thou or I–You; both render the same German terminology and refer to the same relational mode. The older English Thou is often retained because it preserves the dialogical and personal nuance of Buber’s language, but it should not be taken to imply a different concept from You. It is also worth noting that Thou in Buber does not necessarily refer to God. While Buber does speak of the “eternal Thou” in relation to the divine, I–Thou encounters can occur in human relationships, with nature, and with the world more broadly. I will use I-You for the rest of the paper.

[11] Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Scribner’s, 1970), 53–54.

[12] “How to Narrate Your Life Story,” The School of Life, YouTube, June 21, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Brpk26Oq4aE&t=1s.

[13] Martin Buber, “Education,” in Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor-Smith (Macmillan, 1965), 115.

[14] Buber, “Education,” 115.