My most vivid memory of Eugene England goes like this: In the early 1990s, I was a teaching assistant in the BYU English Department—a position that, under certain circumstances, and only when accompanied by the professor I teaching-assisted, permitted me to enter the faculty lounge on the second floor of the old JKHB. Once when I was in these hallowed halls working on final grades for a Victorian Lit class, Gene was there doing the same with his American Lit TAs. My group was using a calculator to compute points from quizzes, tests, and papers, using attendance and participation points to raise or lower a close call. Gene was leading his TAs in prayer.
This was not a general, “please help us be sensitive to our students’ needs” kind of prayer. They were going through the class list in alphabetical order, and Gene was asking God for inspiration about every student by name. Even at BYU in the 1990s, this was a little bit strange—made even stranger by the fact that the prayers were completely sincere. Gene was not playing to a crowd. He really, genuinely wanted to know what God thought about his students’ grades.
I left the faculty lounge that day with a certain knowledge that Eugene England—whose allegedly heterodox ideas and conflicts with general authorities had already become legendary among the English students—was Mormon to his core. And not just culturally. Gene believed in the Church, its scriptures, and its leaders with the same sincerity that he believed in the value of open-minded inquiry, dialogue, and the power of communities to come together to discover and shape truth. For Gene, all of this was part of the same concrete belief system.
In Eugene England: A Mormon Liberal, Kristine Haglund captures, better than anybody else ever has, this essential paradox of England’s life and work. The paradox is wholly contained in the book’s well-chosen subtitle: “A Mormon Liberal.” A “Mormon liberal” is not the same thing as a “liberal Mormon.” A liberal Mormon is two things: someone who is liberal (theologically, politically, culturally, or any other way) who is also some sort of Mormon. A Mormon liberal is one thing—a person who sees both the Mormon tradition and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as inherently and necessarily “liberal” in some significant way.
Haglund rises brilliantly to the task of defining what kind of liberal Gene thought that Mormons should be. He was not, she argues, a theological liberal in the way that most Catholics and Protestants would understand the term. Nor can his liberalism be described as a position along the American political spectrum. Even the classical liberalism of Locke and Rousseau doesn’t quite fit when talking about Dr. England. To understand him, we must understand what a fundamentally Mormon variety of liberalism might look like.
As a Mormon liberal, Eugene England believed that Mormonism itself—its core doctrines and its spiritual tradition—both demanded and created an ideal environment for what might be called a liberal approach to things like beauty, truth, and meaning. In such an approach, members of a spiritual community meet together, as spiritual equals, to create meaning together. The community values open dialogue, epistemic humility, and continual growth.
England perceived these same values in the academic world, and he saw both Mormonism and academia with charity and goodwill. He assumed—even when faced with copious evidence to the contrary—that both were capable of facing the world as their best selves, which he loved with all his heart.
Haglund focuses her analysis of England’s life and work through the illuminating lens of a Mormon liberalism that is both fully Mormon and fully liberal. She analyzes his work as an essayist—one of the founders and early practitioners of a distinctively Mormon style of theologically infused, spiritually grounded personal essay. She explores his role as a co-founder of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, which has been published continually for 55 years and remains the periodical of record of the intellectual and creative life of the Mormon people. And she examines his deep and lifelong commitment to a concept of atonement that brings people together and provides the opportunity for spiritual growth.
In the process of explaining Eugene England, Kristine Haglund also explains a lot about modern Mormonism as both the comprehensive spiritual tradition that England saw more clearly than anyone else of his time—and as the collection of correlated, bureaucratized institutional practices that he never saw quite clearly enough. Haglund concludes—correctly, I think, if depressingly—that England was the last of his kind. Mormonism has become too correlated, and academia too specialized, for somebody like Eugene England to emerge and combine their two world views into a single method of inquiry. As Kristine writes,
It will never again be possible for an earnest Mormon with academic ambitions and liberal political inclinations to believe that her religion, her scholarship, and her activism belong integrally to Mormonism. The aspirational wholeness of England’s life, fractured by evolutionary shifts in the late twentieth-century church, points to an expansive Mormonism that might have been. (23)
Eugene England was perhaps the most visible and influential Mormon intellectual of the last 50 years. If Kristine Haglund had merely written a book about his life, it would have been an invaluable contribution to the burgeoning field of Mormon Studies. But she has done much more than that. By setting England in conversation with the religious and intellectual spaces he inhabited, Haglund has created one of the most important guides we have to the development of Mormonism as an intellectual and cultural force in the 20th century. This book is a rare gift to those who knew Eugene England and a perfect starting place for those who want to know him better.
By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog 
Great review. Thanks, Michael.
Hugh Nibley fans everywhere may take issue with the first sentence of your final paragraph, Michael, but this is a superb, reflective take on a book that much deserves reading. Thanks for writing it, and congratulations again, Kristine!
I do not know if this will really be seen as relevant, but it also sadness me to think that Eugene England might be the last of is kind. I do think that Michael Austin is similar in many ways, but I do not know if he is correlated enough to be welcome with the same type of institutional church stature the Dr. England may have enjoyed to at least some small extent. Can it be that once the church is called out of the wilderness that it Faces the danger of not being able to be the church for an expansive World? I do note that Dr. England faced the same questions in his time. Thank you for the review Michael
Lona,
It IS sad! I think the hopeful thing is that there will continue to be folks like Michael and dozens of others I could name, including BYU professors and people who work in the COB, who understand the gospel in much the same way England interpreted it, and who likewise feel called to advocate for causes that are not popular with the largely conservative majority of Church members. And I think it’s even possible that there could be a time again when the Church reemphasizes the progressive strains of its doctrine. But the organic sense of belonging conferred as birthright on those who grew up in the Church’s geographically isolated, largely agrarian past is probably gone forever, and the sense that membership is defined ideologically is becoming pervasive and will be hard to uproot. Here’s the rest of that paragraph Mike cites, for a little more detail of what I was thinking:
“Few of the next generation of Mormon scholars grew up in the “safe valleys” of England’s youth—in a largely agrarian Mormon world where fathers prayed over crops and General Authorities regularly came to visit. The seamless Mormon consciousness that England retained through all of his experience of dialogue and paradox seems impossible to cultivate in the twenty-first century. Mormons have scattered, and even the tight-knit clusters of Mormon graduate students in the diaspora have grown to the point that few of those students will be able to return to BYU as professors. Academia has changed—cutthroat competition for jobs requires specialization and the kind of publication record that precludes graduate students and junior faculty from starting journals in fields unrelated to their academic specialties. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has changed, too—it has grown from a small, regional sect to a worldwide church with fifteen times as many members as it claimed when England was born, with a large cadre of middle managers and an increasingly aged Quorum of the Twelve whose energies are consumed largely by administration. While the ugliness of the 1990s conflicts between Mormon intellectuals and the church’s hierarchs is fading from consciousness, it will never again be possible for an earnest Mormon with academic ambitions and liberal political inclinations to believe that her religion, her scholarship, and her activism belong integrally to Mormonism. The aspirational wholeness of England’s life, fractured by the evolutionary shifts in the late twentieth-century church, points to an expansive Mormonism that might have been.”
And thanks, Mike, for this exceedingly generous review!
“It will never again be possible for an earnest Mormon with academic ambitions and liberal political inclinations to believe that her religion, her scholarship, and her activism belong integrally to Mormonism. The aspirational wholeness of England’s life, fractured by evolutionary shifts in the late twentieth-century church, points to an expansive Mormonism that might have been. (23)”
I would like to add a phrase: “and could still become.”
That is if a few of the best amongst us could stretch across the fault lines of this evolutionary shift, and all its various aspects, to a place where Eugene would have been, had he been blessed with the longevity of our current prophet. He was 9 years YOUNGER than President Nelson and would have a least 7+ more years to live from right now.
Why not me? All of you should ask yourself that question.
My FIL double dated the girl who became my MIL and Eugene England and Charlotte before their mission to Samoa. They told me once I reminded them of Eugene in the rough and with an edge. But, unlike Eugene, my instinct was to express ideas with diatribes that more closely emulate J. Golden Kimball. (For example, the response I didn’t want to share: The high brows in the church need to get off their asses and do their part in building the kingdom before the low brows run it all the way to hell.) Seriously, one of my disappointments is how little real effect this, one of the best sites in the Bloggernacle, has on Mormonism in general.
$100,000,000,000
Mission accomplished.
“England perceived these same values in the academic world, and he saw both Mormonism and academia with charity and goodwill. He assumed—even when faced with copious evidence to the contrary—that both were capable of facing the world as their best selves, which he loved with all his heart.” I still believe such a thing is possible but perhaps not in my lifetime. Thanks Michael and thanks Kristine for a finely drawn portrait.
We miss you, Eugene!
We should never be afraid of gaining new knowledge, even at the risk of changing our minds.
JCS – You should try wearing Crocs, they are super comfy.
love that opening scene. those kinds of moments made me love Gene and exasperated me to no end.