In our final conversation with Dr Matthew Bowman, we’ll talk about the tensions between LDS Church leaders and BYU faculty. Is there academic freedom at BYU? Should there be more academic freedom for faculty if BYU wants to become the Harvard of the West? Sign up for our free newsletter at https://gospeltangents.com/newsletter to check out our conversation…
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Academic Freedom at BYU
Interview
GT 00:28 One last topic I want to cover and then I’ll let you go. There was an article in the Salt Lake Tribune earlier this year that talked about a crackdown at BYU. I know Casey Griffiths wrote an amazing article on The Chicago Experiment, it was called. Basically, in summary— Casey talked about it on one of my interviews, but [here is] just a brief summary/thumbnail. It seems like the LDS Church was embracing Divinity School for seminary teachers. And they sent a few to the University of Chicago, a liberal theological school. They didn’t like the results. J. Reuben Clark came in, cracked some heads, started firing people that were way too liberal and pulled back [the Church] towards anti-evolution, things like that. It seems to me there’s been this roller coaster of, okay, we’ll allow some liberal. Now we’re going to go conservative, liberal, conservative. And it seems like and tell me if you agree with the statement. At BYU right now, and I love that you’re an outsider, that you’re at Claremont and can look at this from a faraway position. There’s a little bit like this J. Reuben Clark time where they’re retrenching. We’re going more conservative at BYU. Can you comment on that?
Matthew 02:03 Yeah. So the first, and this may not be a surprise at this point. The first thing I would say is I push back on the liberal/conservative polarity there.
GT 02:11 I can’t help it, I’m sorry.
Matthew 02:13 Yeah, there’s a lot of things going on. And I think with the Chicago Experiment. It wasn’t simply kind of liberal versus conservative. It was outside scholarship versus no outside scholarship. The question being, when we talk about religion, when we teach about religion, do we rely on these Protestant Divinity School professors who have written books about the Bible? Or do we rely on prophets and revelation? Now for many, I think, Latter-day Saints today, and even over the past 100 years, the equivocation there might be, if we rely on just repeating what the prophet said in revelation, then that must mean we’re going to be against evolution and for creationism and all of that. But that’s not necessarily the case. There were a lot of Church leaders in the early 20th century, who were pro-evolution and who…
GT 02:16 Widtsoe, Talmage. They were all non-American though. Right?
Matthew 02:42 Yeah, who were really interested in this. And it’s an interesting accident of history, that within the LDS Church, that the idea of orthodoxy came to be associated with conservative…
GT 03:23 The opposite happened in the Community of Christ. They’re all liberal, and they kicked out all the conservatives.
Matthew 03:27 Right, again, simplification. But, nonetheless, this shows that the idea that you’ve got maybe two vectors here, the idea of friendliness to the outside world, the idea of loyalty to church leadership. Those two things cross in interesting ways, and then go in one direction in the LDS Church, as you say. But I think this give and take at BYU has been pretty interesting. A lot of it has to do with, I think, and I should say that some of this is speculation on my part. But it appears to me, that what may be happening is that there is a worry among the leadership in the Church Educational System, about these processes we’ve been talking about [with] disaffiliation among younger people. And a new worry about what can we do to address this? How can we solve this problem? And it appears to me that given some of the policy changes that have been happening at BYU recently, among these, we know that increased strictness about who was hired, about questions asked in interviews, even to some degree about where the scholarship of people who teach religion at BYU should be going. There is worry among the educational leadership of the Church, this process of disaffiliation among young people is largely an internal problem, which is to say it’s something that is caused by and happening because of processes within the Church. The way to correct it then, is to teach the doctrine of the Church more clearly and more explicitly. And I don’t know if that’s right. I think this, as we’ve said, the problem with disaffiliation among young people is not simply an LDS Church problem. It’s happening across all religious bodies in the United States. I think it’s the result of a wide range of much broader cultural factors that are affecting the LDS Church, but don’t have a cause or a solution within that Church. So, I don’t know if some of the tightening policies at BYU are going to be successful in averting this problem, because they aren’t happening only because of processes within the Church.
GT 06:05 Any advice?
Matthew 06:06 Here we go again. Third run on this question. Honestly, I think the best thing for people making policy choices at BYU and policy choices that they hope will aid young people to be more committed to the Church would be: First, I think, to properly understand the problem, which is to say this is a broad cultural trend. It’s not the cause of anything singly that’s happening within the Church. It’s happening across American culture, writ large. And secondly, I think, and this may be something they’re trying is to give young people a sense that the Church is a really dynamic place, a place where the spiritual quest that young people are on can be answered and can find fulfillment. That may be, I think, something that some people in Church leadership have spoken about, is a deep sense of what it means to create an LDS style of education. What does it mean to be educated as an LDS person? What can the theology and the doctrine of the LDS Church say about Shakespeare or history or economics? There are some really exciting intellectual possibilities there that I don’t know that BYU is teaching, I think, in part because BYU has largely thought about a religious education as being education in many topics infused by LDS cultural values, which is to say, dress codes, honor codes, things like that
GT 07:47 High-demand?
Matthew 07:48 Yeah, if there were a room, and you mentioned Jesuits earlier. Jesuit philosophy education is really deep and really expansive, and really thoughtful. I’m speaking as someone who was educated at a Jesuit university.
GT 08:01 Georgetown.
Matthew 08:01 Yes, there are Jesuit ideas about education, about economics, about history, about philosophy, about all of these things. I would love to see what would an LDS economic theory look like? I don’t think we really know.
GT 08:14 Well, I think I love Pope Francis, because he is a Jesuit.
Matthew 08:18 Yeah, right. And he’s interested in these questions. So, think broadly about what it means to offer an LDS education at BYU, not narrowly. See these problems as being wide-ranging, not singular.
Is Big Tent Possible?
Interview
GT 08:32 So, is it a way where we can embrace the miracles as well as the education? Is that something that we could broaden the tent, maybe?
Matthew 08:44 Maybe, although, as I say, there’s complications in miracles, too. Because, frankly, a lot of the sorts of people that many white members of the Church in the United States are hanging out with now, that is to say, the educated middle and upper class, they think miracles are weird.
GT 09:01 But you still have the Denver Snuffer types that just crave the miracles. They want to have a personal relationship with Jesus.
Matthew 09:03 Yeah, absolutely.
GT 09:03 I mean, it’s hard to keep these two groups together.
Matthew 09:04 Well, and you will note, the Denver Snuffer people also tend to withdraw from broader American society in other ways, too. They’re creating a smaller, more insular community. Yeah, it’s a really—here’s the thing. I think Armand Mauss, a great LDS sociologist, spoke about religion in America as being an oscillation. He said, “It’s a constant tension. How assimilated is too assimilated? How separate is too separate?” And he said religion and the church are always trying to find that balance, but it’s a little bit like being on a teeter totter. You’re never perfectly there. You’re always moving backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, being pushed and pulled by various cultural forces. And so maybe this is why I’m not giving you like, they should do things, one, two and three and everything will be fine.
GT 10:10 I’ve been trying hard.
Matthew 10:11 Because there’s no way to know that. And if you do things, one, two, and three, then you might find in 10 years, that your numbers are going down the other way. And you got to pull back and do things a, b, and c at that point. It’s a constant, ongoing tension. It’s an ongoing problem that will never actually be solved.
GT 10:28 Well, and one other thing that you had said last week that I just want to point out. Bill Russell, on my podcast, was famous for saying that Frederick Madison Smith, the prophet for the Community of Christ was the quote, ‘worst prophet ever.’ Mark Scherer didn’t want to endorse that. He said that was a value judgment. But one of the things that you said was Fred did more to; I’m trying to remember the words you used, was to Protestantize the Community of Christ or the RLDS Church at the time, I guess it was. Am I saying that right?
Matthew 11:05 Not necessarily Protestantize, but modernize.
GT 11:08 Okay.
Matthew 11:08 He really threw himself into the Progressive Era, which was when he was raised and educated. And he was a real believer in a lot of progressive ideas, at the time, which had a lot to do with sort of scientific organization of society, scientific organization of organizations, and trying to bring, then, religion into consonance with the other great modernizing institutions in America: government, business, academia, education. So, he really built a lot of bridges between what was then the RLDS Church, and a lot of these other institutions. He put, I think, the church, what became the Community of Christ, on track to be what it is today, in many ways, which was to say, embrace scholarship, embrace academia, embrace the intellectual work going on in divinity schools and find ways to incorporate that into the church. He was very much an advocate for that. There were some of those in the LDS Church, as well, most prominently Amy Brown Lyman, who was really pushing for the LDS Church to follow a similar track. Now she was stopped in her tracks by some other leaders of the LDS Church who were not comfortable with that, who did not want to modernize the LDS Church as fully in that way.
GT 12:26 Her husband was an apostle. He was very pro-modernism, as well.
Matthew 12:30 Yes he was. And they both knew. They both studied at universities outside of Utah, as many of the Chicago Experiment people did, and were in favor of those things. And then they ran into other people like, well, J. Reuben Clark, famously, who was very much an exclusivist. So, if we think of the spectrum again, Lyman, Frederick Madison Smith, they’re over on the assimilation side of the spectrum. Clark is very much on the exclusive aside. We are separate. We are different. We don’t want to be like them. And that’s a somewhat different question than conservative versus liberal, or miracles versus no miracles. You can see how these various vectors might overlap and intersect with each other. But they’re not always quite the same thing.
GT 13:21 Whichever direction we went, we’re still going to be stuck in the downhill side of people in the seats.
Matthew 13:30 Maybe. But I think it’s key to realize there that the denomination, as a manifestation of religion, this idea of having a society with a bunch of churches that compete, and that’s a fairly recent invention. It’s 200 years old. It’s not what religion looked like in 1500. It’s not what religion looked like in 1000 A.D. Religion is always changing. And I think thinking of the denomination as the way that it has to be all the time, that could end up being an anchor.
GT 14:02 Yeah. But Fred was very much into central authority. Was that a mistake? Or do you think he needed to do that to push the RLDS Church that way?
Matthew 14:02 I mean, that’s an all or nothing question. Was it a mistake, or was it necessary? Maybe neither. {both laughing} It was the choice he made at the time. It’s very, I think, evident, given the world that he lived in, why he was doing it. He was following trends that were very popular at the time. He was following the major intellectual fashions of his time. He thought that was a good thing, because he thought it would modernize his church. It would bring his church into the 20th century. It would make it what it is. And it did make it what it is now. And is what the Community of Christ is now a good thing? I think that’s an odd value judgment to make. It’s smaller than the LDS Church, but is size everything? Is size the same thing as success? Some people think so. But notice, that way of thinking, saying more members equals better. That’s a deeply, deeply consumerist, capitalist way of thinking.
GT 15:17 God’s on our side. He made us the biggest. {Rick chuckling}
Matthew 15:21 Yeah.
GT 15:23 All right. Well, any last words?
Matthew 15:25 Oh, thank you for this. It’s been fun.
GT 15:27 Oh, it’s been a blast. So we’ll have to get you on [again.] What other projects are you working on after this UFO book?
Matthew 15:32 Ha ha ha. You’ll like this. I am starting a project that uses the career of Stephen R. Covey as a way to think about the changes in the LDS Church from the late 19th to the late 20th century.
GT 15:45 Wow. That’s very modern.
Matthew 15:47 Yeah, yeah. That’s what I’m interested in, what happens to religion and modernity.
GT 15:52 You can still talk to him. He’s still alive, right?
Matthew 15:54 Oh, no, he died in 2012.
GT 15:55 Oh, he did die. Okay. He was a big deal on my mission.
Matthew 15:59 He was a big deal, generally, in the late 20th century.
GT 16:06 All right. Well, Dr. Matthew Bowman, I really appreciate you for being here on Gospel Tangents.
Matthew 16:11 Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for having me.
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Except for book reviews, no content may be reproduced without written permission
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