History
DeMille was born and raised in Hurricane, Utah and attended Brigham Young University on an Air Force ROTC scholarship. He took a two-year hiatus from his studies to fulfill an LDS mission in Barcelona, Spain, and subsequently married Rachel Pinegar in 1989. He and his wife have eight children.
As an undergraduate student at Brigham Young University, DeMille undertook additional outside studies in search of greater rigor and depth to his education. He was personally mentored by and worked independently with Cleon Skousen and submitted this work to Coral Ridge Baptist University (CRBU), an unaccredited school which awarded him a B.A. (Biblical Studies) and M.A. (Christian Political Science) in 1992, and then a PhD (Religious Education) in 1994. CRBU was a Bible college with a philosophy of close mentorship and intense studies, and the objective to train its graduates for service in military chaplaincy, education and ministry.
In 1994, DeMille returned to BYU and completed his B.A. in International Relations from BYU.
On his eponymous website, DeMille characterizes his educational history as "a search for a truly great education – experiencing private and public universities, religious schools, corporate and international educational institutions, prestigious colleges and worthless diploma mills; he literally sampled the best and the worst that modern education has to offer, and virtually everything in between." He described his work with personal mentors as the "best," and relates the "worst" by detailing his experiences of being defrauded.
According to his personal blog, DeMille submitted coursework to the Technical Institute of Biblical Studies (TIBS), which awarded him a PhD. Upon learning that TIBS was a diploma mill that had not actually reviewed the merit of his academic submissions, he publicly acknowledged that he had been duped, and called himself "an idiot."
DeMille also states that he studied law at LaSalle University (Louisiana), which, based on its familiar name and credible marketing, he believed to be a well-known and established school. He learned later that its founder, who was no longer associated with the school, was jailed for running diploma mills in several states. Although under its new ownership the school continued to operate as a legitimate institution for several years, it never recovered from the taint of fraud and ultimately shut down.
DeMille has said that he "unequivocally regret" his interactions with TIBS and LaSalle, and that he is "glad that 'controversial' choices, both good (leaving a successful private university experience to work with a personal mentor) and bad (learning first-hand about the way students can waste their time and even be taken advantage of by straying too far from the beaten path) were motivated by an earnest search for an education."
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