Gene England was one who liked to ask the hard questions at Church. It definitely caused Gene trouble with Church leaders. Has it gotten any better since Gene died? Dr. Terryl Givens is going to answer.
Hard Questions at Church
Interview
GT 25:10 Is it okay to ask hard questions in the LDS Church?
Terryl 25:13 I think it is now. I think it is. I have had experience working as a consultant with the Church History Department on a number of projects. The very direct and explicit instructions and feedback that I was party to with the brethren was, unambiguously, “Be honest. Get it all out. There isn’t any topic which we are not comfortable addressing.” To my mind, there was a watershed talk. It didn’t precipitate a watershed change. But there was a watershed talk given in 2016 by Elder Ballard, President Ballard, to the CES educators. I think it was the most important talk given in my lifetime, which sounds like overstatement, but I don’t think it is. Because in that talk, he effectively said, “We have not succeeded as Church educators in preparing our young people for the challenges in this particular moment. We need to rethink how we engage those tough questions. He was very direct and very explicit. He said, “A testimony is not an answer to a question.” That in and of itself, is a revolutionary kind of recognition, an admonition, it seems to me, to Church educators to say we have to honor and dignify and validate genuine questions and not skirt them or avoid them. He also said [that] if you don’t have the answer to a question, then go to a Church historian, or an expert in the field, who does. So, this is the first time that I have heard the Church acknowledge that intellectuals are not the enemy of the Church, but they can be powerful assets to the Church and to a life of faith. I couldn’t have been happier to hear those words. They don’t seem to have filtered all the way throughout our culture and educational system.
GT 27:16 I’m glad you say that, because I had a conversation with a seminary teacher in my stake, and I asked him what he thought, specifically, of people like you, Paul Reeve, and he was like, “You know, they’re a little edgy.” So, you’re too edgy for–and, certainly, Eugene England was, too. I kind of want to tie that back. Because while I appreciate the Elder Ballard talk, one of the problems with it is, you know, we’ve heard about it, people in the Mormon history community have heard about it. But, as you said, it was to CES employees. It wasn’t to the general church. So, it’s kind of hidden a little bit. Even, I know Eugene England, he would give some talks, or some of his articles and things to Bruce R. McConkie and Elder Packer, and they pushed back pretty hard against it.
Terryl 28:09 Yeah.
GT 28:09 So can you talk a little bit more about that?
Terryl 28:12 Well, there’s no question that arising out of a legacy of misrepresentation, and opposition and hostility by the government and by most cultural institutions in the United States, that the Church History Department began with a kind of fortress mentality. I don’t think anybody would deny that, that we were extremely protective. We sanitized our history in ways that avoided discussion of things like the Mountain Meadows Massacre, other aspects of our history that didn’t depict us in the best light. I think there were good historical explanations for that attitude, that defensiveness. I think that the Church has very deliberately and self-consciously and methodically brought us into a better engagement with our history in all of those ways that I’ve mentioned. Gene England was prescient in the sense that his principal concern was a reaction to his recognition, having worked in the Church Historical Department, his recognition that there are narratives in our past that come into conflict. There are doctrinal views that have been espoused by individual leaders that are in conflict. And that as we move forward into this data-rich information age, our young people are going to become more and more aware of these discontinuities and conflicts. His primary motivation was to think through some of these problems and complexities and work towards greater engagement and his favorite word, dialogue with these. The Church wasn’t ready to move in that direction in 1975 and 1980, and they have since.
Terryl 30:27 But his concerns, his alarm, turned out to be absolutely, as I said, prescient and has been validated, insofar as the Church has embraced exactly that course of action, which he was pleading for the Church to embrace, which was acknowledge, engage, dialogue, confront these questions and these problems. I think that, as I said, the kind of the formal manifesto of that new attitude would be Elder Ballard’s talk. Now, he gave it to the CES educators, and I think that that was the right audience.
GT 31:07 They’re the ones that needed to hear it.
Terryl 31:08 They’re kind of the custodians of the Church. They’re the ones who needed to hear it. And, they had a mandate from J. Reuben Clark, going back to the mid-1930s, the charted course of Church education, which very explicitly advocated kind of keeping the realms of the secular and the sacred, separate. And our job as Church educators is not to engage the world of scholarship and learning, but it’s to foster testimony and faith. That was appropriate and worked for a while. Then, Elder Ballard said, “We’re in a new age, and that isn’t the model we need anymore.” So, I took him to be saying, “We’re shifting gears, because of new conditions, new challenges, new access to information, as well as a genuinely new understanding on the part of a historical department that has done much more work excavating and working through sources that weren’t widely available or accessible in earlier times.”
Terryl 31:08 So, I think part of what we have to do is move beyond this kind of caricature of a bunch of old men in smoke-filled rooms, conspiring, what are we going to let out this week, right? It’s as if all of these documents were in a vault and they let them out one by one. Well, the apostles aren’t historians, and that isn’t their primary responsibility. So, I don’t think there was any kind of nefarious scheming behind the scenes to keep all of this stuff hidden. We’re discovering stuff every day, as we work through these rich, rich resources we have.
GT 32:43 I know, in your book, you talked a little bit about an issue between Elder McConkie and Eugene England. Can you tell us more about that?
Terryl 32:50 Yeah, that’s probably the most famous conflict that erupted in the public. In the late 1970s, he gave a talk in which he brought into dialogue, a certain view of God, represented by Hyrum Smith and Joseph Fielding Smith.
GT 33:13 Eugene England did this.
Terryl 33:14 Yes, Gene England did this, which emphasized the absoluteness of God, in fairly conventional theistic terms, with a competing vision of God that he associated with the King Follett discourse of Joseph Smith, and many subsequent elaborators, all the way through B.H. Roberts, that God is progressing, developing, expanding his dominions. So, this is, to my mind, Exhibit A. It’s the best example of the problems, the challenges that Gene England saw and how he thought they should be addressed. So, instead of trying to silence or deny one or the other half of this kind of bifurcation in thinking about God, he tried to bring them into conversation, and suggest how they both could be true, how we could make sense out of–we could reconcile both of them. He gave this talk to a small audience. He was asked to give it again in the varsity theater, by which time Joseph McConkie got wind of it. He saw a copy, an advance copy.
GT 34:23 He was Bruce’s son, right?
Terryl 34:24 Bruce R. McConkie’s son. And to Gene England’s credit, he invited Professor McConkie to come and provide a response, which he did with very little grace. In very dogmatic, authoritarian and insulting terms, he decried what Gene England had said as heresy, and unfaithful to our tradition and shortly thereafter, Elder McConkie, himself, made public criticism on two occasions once at BYU, once in General Conference, without mentioning Gene by name. But he referred to the notion of a progressing God as one of the seven heresies of the Church. He wrote a letter to Gene England in which he made this known to Gene, that he saw what he was saying and writing as heretical and insisted that he cease and desist. That letter was leaked to the public, not by Gene. It was leaked to the public before he even got his copy of it.
GT 35:42 Oh, wow.
Terryl 35:42 So, that is what made it a kind of public. It went viral, I guess we would say today.
GT 35:48 Did Joseph McConkie release it or do we have any idea who did?
Terryl 35:53 We don’t know. But, I mean, there were two factions, and it wasn’t Gene England or his partisans who released it. So, given the fact that it was an embarrassing, and in some ways humiliating assault on Gene, and his ideas and efforts, it seems clear that it was released by somebody who was sympathetic to the critics of his position. The whole thing was just, it was an unnecessary tragedy, because Gene wasn’t teaching as doctrine. He wasn’t proclaiming a solution. He was just saying, “Let’s acknowledge these two traditions, these two positions, and let’s see if we can’t see them as somehow reconcilable.” So, I think it was a pure-hearted effort, and it redounded to his discredit. I think it was hard for him ever to subsequently divest himself of that label.
GT 36:53 Of a liberal?
Terryl 36:54 Heretic, liberal, provocateur, because, certainly, the weight of orthodoxy in the Church at that time was pretty much going to align itself with anything that bore the name of McConkie, and that’s certainly what happened at that time.
GT 37:15 I can’t imagine being spoken about in General Conference.
Terryl 37:18 Yes. Again, one of the beautiful things about Gene is that his children would later attest that never once in their hearing, did he utter the slightest word of criticism, or negativism about Elder McConkie, or any of the brethren and that even in his journal, even after these events, he referred to Elder McConkie and others as his heroes. So, he was an incredibly meek man in that regard, at least, it seems to me.
Do you agree? Are CES employees the ones who need to hear this message, or should it be distributed more broadly? Is it ok to ask hard questions at church? Check out our conversation….
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