There’s a chant that has rattled through some college arenas that’s staining the rafters when BYU rolls into town.
The phrase is crude. It’s unmistakable. And it targets an entire religion and faith tradition by name.
You know the one: “(Expletive) the Mormons.”
It’s happened during football games at USC, Oregon, Colorado and Cincinnati. Last year, it happened at the McKale Center in Tucson, Arizona — where BYU returns Wednesday for a college basketball game against the Arizona Wildcats.
These fans aren’t railing against a missed call, a coaching decision, or mocking a player they judge as overrated.
They’re defaming a faith.
The phrase has been picked up on broadcasts and social media. It’s been repeated, debated and, by some, dismissed.
It’s that callous dismissal that should concern us most.
Religious mockery isn’t some hot fad. What’s trending and troubling is how casually it’s become acceptable.
From the beginning of history, religious believers have been mocked before they were marginalized, and marginalized before they were mistreated. Ancient Jews were ridiculed by Greek and Roman writers as strange, anti-social and backward. Early Christians were caricatured as ignorant for worshipping a crucified man. Roman graffiti depicted Jesus with a donkey’s head nailed to a cross. Muslims were portrayed in medieval Europe as violent idolaters despite Islam’s monotheism.
Mockery has always been the warm-up act for exclusion.
The story of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints fits squarely into that pattern. From the moment the church was organized in 1830, its members were ridiculed as gullible, dangerous and un-American. Newspapers lampooned the man who restored the church, Joseph Smith. Converts were depicted as fools.
In Missouri, that ridicule rippled into violence, culminating in an extermination order that declared an entire religious community enemies of the state.
Later, 19th-century political cartoons reduced Latter-day Saints to grotesque stereotypes. They were lecherous men, imprisoned women, a cartoonish cult. Nothing more.
The message was clear: If this group is strange enough to mock, they’re safe to dehumanize.
In the 20th century, the tone softened but never disappeared. Church members continued as punch lines. Belief in modern revelation was treated as quaint at best, laughable at worst. The mockery was no longer violent, but it was socially permissible, persistent and painful.
And now the chant.
There’s a reason some people, even those of other faiths, bristle when they hear it. It isn’t because they think members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are fragile. It’s because sensible, fair-minded folks should instinctively recognize the double standard.
Try swapping out the target at the end of that line.
What would happen if a stadium erupted with the same chant ending in Jews, or Muslims … or Catholics?
There would be no debate. No hedging about intent. No shrugging it off as atmosphere. It would be condemned immediately and unequivocally as antisemitism, because it would be. The same would be true if the chant targeted virtually any other faith community.
So why is this religion different?
Thankfully, some have taken action. Schools have issued apologies. Recently, the Big 12 fined Oklahoma State for “inappropriate chants which referenced the Mormon religion” — albeit modest by the standards of college sports budgets. This all acknowledges the line exists, and that crossing it has consequences.
But enforcement alone doesn’t address the deeper question: How did we arrive at a cultural moment where such a chant needed to be punished in the first place?
At some point, especially in Western secular culture, religion stopped being viewed as an identity deserving respect and became a belief system deemed fair game for ridicule. Faith was reframed as a lifestyle choice, not a core part of a person. And once a particular belief was categorized as optional, outdated, or unserious, believers themselves became acceptable targets.
Mocking religion began to signal sophistication. Skepticism became virtue. Dismissiveness passed for intelligence.
Contempt is rarely spontaneous. It is cultivated.
None of this suggests religion is beyond critique. Healthy societies depend on disagreement, debate and even satire. But there is a meaningful difference between challenging ideas and degrading people, between questioning doctrine and chanting obscenities at an entire faith community.
When the target shifts from beliefs to believers, from arguments to identity, we’ve crossed a line.
What makes the current moment especially revealing is not that some fans crossed that line, but how many people have explained it away. Online comments on media coverage are a digital trash bin of excuses, justifications and hatred.
Take this user comment on coverage from FoxNews: “Students have for decades had vulgar chants against the other team. Not sure BYU is any different than other schools on the receiving side.”
Another from the same story referenced early church members being forced west. Then the user added, “Their beliefs are a bit unusual and we protect free speech so again who cares.”
A comment on the AP’s coverage is neither funny nor clever: “Maybe it was meant as a pickup line?”
Reddit users offer more of the same, with hundreds of comments amounting to a collective shrug. “The chants change the message from ‘we think your team sucks’ to something else, but it’s mostly just angry college kids.”
That reflex tells us something about what we’ve normalized.
We rightly understand that words shape culture. That public language teaches private behavior. That repeated contempt becomes permission.
Religious belief, for millions of Americans, is not a hobby. It is inheritance, identity, conscience and community. It shapes how people love, serve, forgive, vote, marry and raise children. To pretend otherwise is to misunderstand both faith and history.
The question before us isn’t whether Latter-day Saints can handle being mocked. They can. They always have.
The question is why we’ve decided mocking faith is normal and expected — perhaps even a sign of progress?
Empathy does not require agreement. Respect does not require conversion. But a civil society requires both.
Because every society that decides some people are acceptable to demean eventually learns the same lesson. The list never stays short. And it never ends where you think it will.
You don’t have to be a person of faith to recognize the danger in mocking faith itself. You don’t have to be Latter-day Saint to understand that today’s acceptable target becomes tomorrow’s precedent.
All you have to be is someone who refuses to let contempt become the culture.
That’s not religious. It’s just human.