I just finished a biography of Eugene England called “Stretching the Heavens” by Dr. Terryl Givens. I loved it and felt a real kinship to Dr. England, despite having never met him. I’m excited to talk to Dr. Terryl Givens to discuss Gene’s life. I was surprised to learn that Terryl at first turned down the opportunity to write Gene’s biography but changed his mind a few decades later. Check out our conversation….
Interview
GT 00:15 Welcome to Gospel Tangents. I’m excited to have one of the big thinkers at the Maxwell Institute. Could you go ahead and tell my audience who you are?
Terryl 00:49 My name is Terryl Givens. I was professor of literature and religion at the University of Richmond for a little over 30 years. I’m now a senior research fellow here at the Maxwell Institute.
GT 00:59 Awesome. I always like to get people’s background. You kind of introduced yourself a little bit there. Where did you get your bachelor’s, and master’s and all of that stuff?
Terryl 01:07 I did my bachelor’s work here at Brigham Young University in comparative literature. Then I thought I’d switch to intellectual history. So, I went to Cornell, and did all the graduate work.
GT 01:17 So, you’re an Ivy leaguer, too.
Terryl 01:19 I was for a while. I guess I missed literature. So, I transferred back over to UNC-Chapel Hill.
GT 01:28 Oh.
Terryl 01:29 I did my degrees Master’s and PhD there in comparative literature.
GT 01:33 Did you ever get with Bart Ehrman or anything like that?
Terryl 01:35 I did not. He was just, I think, on the route to his contemporary notoriety at that point. But no, I didn’t encounter him.
GT 01:45 So, you got your doctorate in North Carolina.
Terryl 01:48 Right.
GT 01:49 Well, that’s awesome. Then, I think your first big book, at least the one I know about was, By the Hand of Mormon.
Terryl 01:55 A little before that, a few years before that was Viper on the Hearth.
GT 01:58 Okay.
Terryl 02:00 That came out in 1997. That was my first book, which was an attempt to answer a couple of questions: mainly, is there a constant theme in hostility and opposition that the Latter-day Saints have faced from the 1830s to the present? And second of all, how do we explain the strange and weird manifestations of anti-Mormonism that appeared in the popular press in the 19th and early 20th centuries?
GT 02:36 I remember my cousin, when he read By the Hand of Mormon, he was like, “Did a Mormon write this? I think it was.” To me, that was your first big break on to the scene.
Terryl 02:48 Yes, that received a lot of national press. It got reviewed in the New York Times, the London Review. I was pretty delighted that some of the reviewers actually referred to me as a non-Latter-day Saint scholar.
GT 03:01 Oh.
Terryl 03:02 I thought that that was a kind of validation that one can present with balance and fairness, the Latter-day Saint case from within the Latter-day Saint tradition.
GT 03:18 Yeah, and I don’t know whether to take that as a compliment, because a lot of times on Gospel Tangents, because we interview so many, so many different opinions, a lot of people are like, “Oh, Rick, you must be Community of Christ, or you must– you’re not Mormon or you’re not LDS.” I’m like, “Yeah, I am.”
Terryl 03:36 In contemporary scholarship, there’s a divergence of opinion as to whether or not one is obligated to establish one’s prejudices or point of orientation. It seems to me that the playing field is a little bit uneven. One very seldom reads a book in religious studies where it starts off by saying, “Well, I think the audience should know that I’m Episcopalian.”
GT 03:56 Right.
Terryl 03:57 They don’t feel any obligation to so indicate, and so I’m not sure that Latter-day Saints need to, either.
GT 04:03 (Chuckling) Well, good. I always take it as a compliment that I must be neutral enough if people can’t tell if I’m LDS or not.
Terryl: Right, right.
GT: Well, cool. We’re here to talk about your newest book. How many books have you written, by the way?
Terryl 04:18 I don’t know.
GT 04:19 You don’t keep track? I got five here I got you to sign, I know that. But your latest book, Stretching the Heavens about Eugene England. I know you actually turned that down. You mentioned that in the introduction. Tell us why you turned it down and why you decided to pick it up later.
Terryl 04:37 Well, I turned it down for a few reasons. Gene England died in 2001. It was very shortly thereafter that his widow, Charlotte, contacted me and asked if I’d be willing to write his biography. I hadn’t met her, and I had met Eugene passingly a couple of times. At that point, there were a few reasons why I didn’t want to take on that task. One, it just seemed like an awkward kind of undertaking for somebody who, at that point–for one thing, I was very junior in the profession. I was not of his generation. There were a lot of senior scholars in Latter-day Saints studies, who knew him, who knew the background, the era, and seemed to me would have been much better qualified. It also seemed awkward in the sense that Gene England elicited really strong responses from everybody who knew or interacted with him, either pro or con. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to engage in the controversies, at that point. And, I had other projects underway. So, I politely declined.
Terryl 05:55 I think first one person, and then another, and then a third, undertook to do the biography. None of them completed the task. So, around about, I don’t know, 2016, 2018, Charlotte approached me again. Maybe by that point in my life, I felt enough of a kinship with him, insofar as my life had come to parallel his in some fairly significant ways. I felt a deep affinity for his interpretations of Latter-day Saint theology. I share some of his frustrations that the culture had not always lived up to its potential and its promise. I think I also felt myself to be a kind of insider-outsider. I’d always lived outside the Mormon corridor. I didn’t associate with, didn’t know, wasn’t kind of in the mix of Latter-day Saint scholars, really.
Terryl 06:58 I had, as I said, a kind of relationship to the Church that was kind of inside, but on the peripheries, and suddenly it felt like the right thing to do. Enough had transpired in the last decade or more, that I thought, I hoped, at least it was my hope, that the Church, speaking of it as a people, had arrived at a point where they would be open, receptive to the lessons that we could learn from Eugene England’s life and legacy. It was a very vexed and troubled life and legacy. Yet, I thought that it had important lessons for us. At that period in Church history when he was most active as a scholar, there was not a great openness to self-criticism, or introspection, or asking hard questions.
GT: Is there now?
Terryl: We’ve certainly moved in that direction. In fact, we have, the uncensored, unabridged Joseph Smith Papers and the Gospel Topics Essays.
GT 08:02 Some people would say the Gospel Topics Essays are not uncensored.[1]
Terryl 08:05 Well, I guess having been involved in the process, I would have to acknowledge that they did go through a great many layers of editorial interventions. So, that’s true. But at least they’re an attempt to merge the tough questions, the sticky wickets in our past. The Saints history, I think, is by far the most open and full, unapologetic history that we’ve seen and are likely to see for a while. So, yeah, I think we’ve attained a certain degree of maturity in that regard.
GT 08:44 Cool. I have to tell you, I’m, I hate to use the word liberal, because I feel like I’m more of a moderate. But compared to the ultra-conservative culture here in Utah County, especially, I feel liberal, I guess. So, I have a real kinship, even though I never met Eugene England. I just felt like, wow, he was probably, would you say he was 20 years ahead of his time?
Terryl 09:09 Yeah, maybe more. It is unfortunate that we suffer from such a paucity of good language to describe the kind of approach to religion that Joseph Smith embodied, and that, I think, to some extent, Gene England, himself, embodied. I like expansive as a word, maybe. I mean, Joseph Smith certainly would not have considered himself a conservative in any way, shape or form, politically, or theologically. It’s all, I think, post 1960s because of social issues, then in the forefront of American politics, that the Church has veered to a political right. But Gene England, himself, hated that label.
GT 09:56 Right.
Terryl 09:57 We have a personal memo he wrote to the faculty in which he described being hurt that he was labeled as a liberal. He was a paradox, right? Because in some ways he was as absolutely committed, faithful, unapologetically orthodox as anyone can be. Again, he was just much more expansive and open in his thinking. What’s ironic is that most of the pronouncements and writings that got him into hot water, today would be considered either mainstream or even retrograde. So, he certainly was a little bit ahead of the curve, in terms of his feelings about a number of social and doctrinal issues.
GT 10:41 Well, let’s jump into his life a little bit. I know at the beginning, one of the things that interested me was he was a weatherman. I think he was also a math major, and I’m a math/statistics guy. So, I kind of glommed onto that. I thought that was pretty cool. Tell us more about his early life.
Terryl 10:55 Well, he was very good in the sciences and maths and thought that’s where he was going to go and had every intention of doing so. He says that it was his mission experience that changed his orientation. The way he put it was something about the personal interaction, being engaged with people at the human level, intimately, drew him to the humanities. Then, when he came back from his mission, he did a stint as a writer, for the, I think, it was the newspaper.
GT 11:32 Didn’t you say his father was disappointed that he chose…
Terryl 11:35 Hi father was very disappointed, never got over his disappointment. Part of that is because, well, there’s not a lot of prestige in the humanities, and it neither is it a ladder to General Authority status. There seem to be great indications that his father had those aspirations for him. You don’t see a lot of English teachers called as General Authorities. So, I think, yes, and Eugene felt the sting of his father’s disappointment, I think, all of his life. But upon his return from his mission, he very quickly learned that he had a tremendous facility with writing, with language. So, he was drawn to literature and that’s where he went in his work at Stanford, a Ph.D. in literature.
GT 12:22 Okay. So, after his time at Stanford, I believe he went to Minnesota. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Terryl 12:29 He went to Minnesota. It was St. Olaf, a Lutheran college. His whole life was characterized by kind of naive optimism, which I think is commendable, and a virtue. But he just thought, here’s a college that believes the integration of discipleship and scholarship. I’ll fit right in. And he found that he didn’t. Part of the problem was that he was very vocal in espousing his Latter-day Saint commitments. He felt and felt that he had evidence that he rubbed someone in the administration the wrong way, because students actually, some were converted to the Church, as a result of their connection and interactions with Gene. So, he did not secure tenure there at the university, to his great disappointment. There was a period in the early 1970s, where he didn’t know where he was going to end up professionally.
GT 12:35 Why did they turn him down for tenure?
Terryl 13:32 Well, it’s hard to say. He, himself, had different theories. At times, he seemed to indicate that he thought his Mormonism was the problem. He later would say, for example, I was too liberal for BYU and too conservative for St. Olaf. So, I couldn’t make a life in either place. But there were also indications that at that point in time, and that’s just a little prior to when I, myself, was entering the academy, there was a big push to hire women and minorities. He believed that as a white male, he was at a disadvantage when a tenured position opened, and others competed for that slot. So, he thought both the wrong moment in the history of the academy, as well as his religious affiliation. It’s hard to say which, maybe both were at work.
[1] For a critique of the essays, see Matthew Harris & Newell Bringhurst’s book “The Gospel Topics Series.” It can be purchased at https://amzn.to/3mqQJjS
Have you read Stretching the Heavens? How much has the LDS Church improved with regards to talking about hard topics? Check out our conversation….
[1] For a critique of the essays, see Matthew Harris & Newell Bringhurst’s book “The Gospel Topics Series.” It can be purchased at https://amzn.to/3mqQJjS
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