I learned awhile ago that you can always tell when an English major got their undergrad at BYU, by how vociferously they denounce Thoreau.  I don’t just mean they roll their eyes at Walden or respectfully disagree with his “A Plea for John Brown,” no, I mean they tear into him, gleefully and viciously, as though he has personally insulted them somehow.

Serious (and granted this is anecdotally speaking), almost every last BYU English grad I’ve ever met has at some point ranted–as though they were the only students on Earth to have ever learned this–about how when Thoreau lived in his little cabin at Walden, he visited his Mom in Boston every Sunday, who in turn gave him a care package (he had a good relationship with his mother, what a scoundrel!), and had coffee with the Emersons (he wasn’t an anti-social misanthrope, how dare he!), and had visitors over galore (as though he didn’t have an entire chapter entitled “Visitors”), and spent more time promoting Walden than actually living there (as though Joseph Smith didn’t do the same with the Book of Mormon).

While his Sunday visits may slightly undermine his whole Walden project of roughing it alone in the wilderness, it still doesn’t distract from the fact that he, well, lived in a cabin the other 6 days of the week–not to mention that he really did build it all by himself, and survived not one but two New England winters therein (I mean, have you experienced a Nor’easter without central heating?). That is, even if his whole escape into the woods may not have been quite as hardcore as we initially assumed, well, it was still by a significant margin a whole lot more daring and impressive than anything any of us have ever attempted–and given how poorly so many of us handled the pandemic lockdown even just within the comforts of our modern air-conditioned domiciles, we should probably be giving more props to Thoreau anyways^[1]“So sue me if my social distancing included regular visits from a Canadian woodchopper and multiple half-witted men from the almshouse. You, my friend, are leading a life of quiet desperation, … Continue reading. To paraphrase Thoreau on John Brown, Thoreau cannot be judged by his peers because he has none–and since not one of these privileged young middle-to-upper-class American college students has ever even tried to build a log cabin of any sort, let alone survive two winters in one, then these are hardly the peers qualified to judge him.

And this from the self-professed disciples of He who regularly withdrew from the world to meditate in the wilderness as well!  (Luke 5:16, “And he withdrew himself into the wilderness, and prayed.”) Which makes this whole BYU Thoreau hostility all the more perplexing–shouldn’t we be looking to Thoreau as a potential model to emulate, one who embodies our most cherished virtues of thrift, self-sufficiency, contemplation, meditation, anti-materialism and unworldliness?  For that matter, is not “Civil Disobedience” the magna carta for the libertarian political philosophy that predominates Provo? The BYU English dept. has this long-standing tendency (which I celebrate, by the way!) to claim near every great writer as some closet proto-Mormon incognito (Emerson, Milton, Wordsworth, CS Lewis, etc.), so why not also Thoreau, who actually did seek to live up to so many of our purported values?

Maybe that’s just it: he actually practiced what we preach, he did what we only talk about, which exposes us a bit, and we resent that a tad perhaps.  Because ideally, BYU would likewise be training our students, like Thoreau, to “seek not for riches but for wisdom,” to serve God and not Mammon (the Hebrew word for wealth), to “lay aside the things of this world, and seek for the things of a better.”  

But of course in practice, BYU doesn’t actually teach that, at least not nowadays.  Its top ranked programs are in Accounting and Business.  The campus is a hotbed for Summer Sales and Pyramid Scheme recruiters.  We are instructed to “be in the world but not of the world,” but we’re actually still kinda of the world too, aren’t we.  In practice, BYU students in general do the exact opposite of what Thoreau preached, so perhaps we collectively seek to discredit him at every turn lest we be pricked by our own consciences.

But that theory still doesn’t account for the fact that the English dept. is where all the lefties and liberals, the anti-capitalist types, tend to congregate at the BYU–but again, these are the ones, not the business majors, who savage Thoreau the most. Just what’s going on here?  Is it maybe, subconsciously, they do so desperately want Thoreau to embody their most deeply held values, and so feel a palpable sense of personal betrayal when he doesn’t precisely live up to his mythology?  

Is this the secular equivalent of when some Church members learn that Joseph Smith wasn’t the flawless Saint he never claimed to be, so they turn on him viciously and throw the baby out with the bathwater?  Is this BYU Thoreau-bashing an indicator that we LDS types still have not quite figured out how to treat human beings as human beings, and not as idols?  (Idolatry is a sin anyways…)

Maybe Walden pales compared to the travails of Brigham Young and the pioneers (whom we also have not matched, incidentally)?  Maybe this Harvard alum who voluntarily walked away from such prestige punctures the careerist pretensions of those attending the “Lord’s University”?  Maybe his uncompromising principles gives them away as not nearly as nonconformist as they think they like to think they are?  Maybe the fact that he was such an ardent abolitionist during the exact same time that Brigham Young was instituting the racist Priesthood ban gives the lie to the excuse that the pioneer Saints were but a product of their time–that they could have indeed done better because Thoreau did better? Maybe we all just love out A/C and laptops too much to bear contemplating a world without them (as unsustainable as that world may be)?  Maybe the neck-beard throws us off?  Who knows.  

All I know is this: every time I’ve had to make a major move cross-country and wondered how the heck I would move all this stuff, it was re-reading Walden that reminded me to quit letting the things I own own me, and to leave it all behind.  And the last time I read Thoreau’s “Walking,” I was filled with a deep and propulsive need to go for a walk in the woods and commune with God’s wonders, like the Savior in the wilderness.