Stretching the Heavens: The Life of Eugene England and the Crisis of Modern MormonismEugene England: A Mormon Liberal

In the summer of 2017, I happened to sit next to one of Eugene England's former ward members on a flight from Salt Lake City to Chicago. When small talk revealed that I had majored in English at Brigham Young University, she immediately wanted to know if I had taken a class from Gene England. Alas, I told her, I just missed him—I entered BYU in 2004 and he had passed away in 2001. I knew of him, of course. I read his essays “Why the Church Is as True as the Gospel” and “Blessing the Chevrolet” in a freshman writing class, and I was vaguely aware of his public exchanges with Bruce R. McConkie in the early 1980s. “Well,” the woman responded, “I know a lot of people at BYU had mixed feelings about him, but he was the best bishop I have ever had. I've never met anyone before or since who emanated such Christlike love.”The polarizing effect England had on various sectors within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints throughout his life, and the impact of his work on contemporary iterations of Latter-day Saint thought and practice, are of primary consideration in two timely biographies of England, both published in 2021—exactly twenty years after he lost an intense battle with brain cancer. The first, Terryl L. Givens's Stretching the Heavens: The Life of Eugene England and the Crisis of Modern Mormonism, is a deeply personal project commissioned by England's wife. Givens notes that with England's passing he had lost not only “a powerful voice in my religious tradition . . . [but] a promising mentor and someone I would have cherished as a personal friend” (xiii). His more traditionally chronological account depends heavily on England's personal records—published work, certainly, but also the many private papers, letters, diary entries, and recorded interviews to which he was provided access.The account begins, in good Latter-day Saint theological fashion, before Eugene England was born. In the book's first half, after establishing England's pioneer roots, Givens chronicles England's social and intellectual development through childhood and adolescence, his marriage and mission to Samoa, and his educational and professional academic pursuits. The second half, while still chronological, slows dramatically as Givens details the highs and lows of England's experiences as an English professor at BYU before concluding with a brief overview of England's personal and professional dénouement. The result is a moving portrait of Eugene England's charismatic public persona and the internal striving soul that produced it.By contrast, Kristine L. Haglund's slimmer account, Eugene England: A Mormon Liberal, is something of a memorial to England's mind. As the inaugural volume of Matthew Bowman and Joseph Spencer's edited series Introductions to Mormon Thought, Haglund's book is more intellectual history than personal history, and after the first chapter is not at all chronological in structure. Her chapters focus on England's role as a deliberately Latter-day Saint essayist, as an editor of an institutionally fraught journal (Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, of which Haglund is also a former editor), and as a theologian with political impulses that diverged into multiple paths and projects.The intellectual focus of Haglund's approach is most evident in her inclusion of a bibliographic essay that functions as an addendum to the biography. The essay includes brief explanatory commentary on England's work related to teaching and pedagogical values, feminism and gender, Mormon literature, pacifism, race, and poetry, and a short list of published work relevant to each topic. In the series forward to Haglund's book, the editors describe England as “among the most prominent of Latter-day Saint intellectuals of the twentieth century,” whose approach to Mormon thought “survived as a powerful alternative to the orthodox conservativism that flourished after the mid-twentieth century” (viii). Haglund's account validates their assessment by demonstrating the lasting impact of England's life and work on contemporary creative and intellectual pursuits within Mormon studies.Each biography is effective as a stand-alone work. Reading them in tandem, however, is frankly more satisfying because doing so provides readers a more comprehensive understanding of England as a person who is at once bright and energetic, as well as peculiar and conflicted, caught in the crossfire of an equally peculiar cultural moment in a conflicted religious history. Both Givens and Haglund situate England in relationship to his religious and intellectual communities and explain his beliefs and behavior in terms of the cultural and theological shifts those communities were navigating in the latter half of the twentieth century. Givens, for example, purposefully positions England as a tragic hero whose personal and professional crises are part of the collateral damage left in the wake of Mormonism's transition from a collection of close-knit, mostly agrarian communities to a modern religion with global influence. Haglund takes a less dramatic approach, suggesting instead that England's sensibilities marked him as one born “both ahead of his time, and having just missed it” (1). Despite minor differences, Haglund and Givens agree that England was a loyal Latter-day Saint and an utter enigma in his religious community, and their accounts establish that fact in surprisingly complementary ways. Givens, for example, provides an almost exhaustive amount of detail to demonstrate the paradoxes of England's life, while Haglund adopts a more formal, objective tone and opts for brevity concerning England's personal background.Givens's detailed accounts of England's experiences and relationships in Stretching the Heavens become something of a double-edged sword. For example, his thorough integration of England's personal writing reveals a dynamic, compelling, and charitable personality—one reminiscent of the man my seatmate on the airplane remembered. It also reveals the intensity of England's conflicted desires and ambitions. Time and again, England's expressions of optimism and commitment to humble service are undermined by what appears to be an almost desperate desire for approval from men in power. At the conclusion of my initial reading, I was completely baffled by what appeared to be England's dual nature: brilliant but unwise, confident to the point of arrogance and yet terribly insecure, deeply spiritual, and consistently defiant. England is undoubtedly, as Givens describes him in the introduction's subtitle, “a polarizing disciple.” But the book also characterizes him as a person of seemingly innumerable internal contradictions made manifest in occasionally erratic and often inexplicable outward behavior, particularly in his relationships with church and university leaders. How, I wondered, can any one person be both that prescient and that naive?At one point, even England's wife poses the question that is surely on every reader's mind: “Why [do you] keep seeking to know what the General Authorities think” (137)? Givens's biography offers two possible responses, one of which is that England was “a true believer” (283) whose total trust in the divine calling of his religious leaders led him to seek and value their insight and counsel. Another is England's fraught relationship with his father—a man who, following the biblical example of Hannah, had promised “the Lord that if he would bless us with a son, I would dedicate him for the work of the kingdom” (9)—powerfully influenced his need for male approval, and approval from church leaders, therefore, perhaps substituted for the approval he did not get from his father. Unfortunately, due to what Givens characterizes as a willful naiveté regarding the possibility for authentic dialogue with institutional authorities, England regularly found himself in varying degrees of opposition with the very authorities he most wanted to please.Givens's meticulous review of England's public and private disagreements with religious authorities and academic administrators emphasizes the excitement and passion with which England seemed to approach almost everything. But, after reading the gritty details of disagreement after disagreement, admonition after admonition, and apology after apology, Haglund's brevity is a welcome change of pace. She locates England's personal and professional strife in what she describes as the “quintessentially Mormon . . . collapse of social, political and ecclesiastical worlds” (2) and accurately concludes that “the simultaneous fact of his twinned, sometimes opposing commitments—to his interpretation of Mormon doctrines that impelled him toward political and cultural liberalism, and to the conservative church that he loved and saw as a vehicle for progress, even when it moved haltingly—was the challenging and enlivening tension of his life and thought” (4). Haglund's four-page overview of the historical era through which England lived aligns in both fact and assessment with Givens's, but in her case, enough really is as good as a feast.I finished Eugene England: A Mormon Liberal with a much clearer sense of not only why England may have responded to church authorities as he did, but what the broader historical forces were that made the intensity and regularity of his engagement make sense. Her book also made clear that part of my initial response to Stretching the Heavens was an effect of having come of age at the turn of the century. Unlike England, who grew up in an era when lay members were more likely to maintain personal connections with general authorities, I grew up in an era when I primarily saw my upper-level religious authorities on television, and usually only during general conference weekends. It would have, therefore, made sense to England to write a letter to an apostle regarding issues that I would be encouraged to discuss with my local bishop.Both biographies are well-written, and their research does credit to their portrayals of England's personality, his intellectual interests, and his personal and professional relationships with church leaders and others. They are less successful in their efforts to provide a comprehensive, straightforward account of the religious and academic turmoil that shaped England's professional career. That is to be expected, as England's experience is merely one chapter in a very long story of the tension between individual agency and institutional authority in the Latter-day Saint tradition. Moreover, to keep narrative focus, Givens emphasizes—and probably overemphasizes—England's role in departmental and university disputes, particularly as they apply to issues of academic freedom. Haglund's assessment that England's involvement in some of the more memorable events, including the publicized firing of two feminist scholars from his department, was “mostly indirect” (19) is more realistic, and her description of him as an academic who “rarely wrote formal or heavily theorized literary criticism; . . . [but] focused on the ethical and personal themes of the literature he studied” (24) may account for some of the criticism he received from colleagues invested in department professionalization.I hesitate to weigh these insufficiencies too heavily, however, as Givens and Haglund are writing about an unsettling moment in BYU history. Considering that England's life and methods of defining or shaping Latter-day Saint identity are tangled up in many debates over authority and freedom, and so few of those who lived through the events are amenable to revisiting the specifics, what could England's biographers really provide other than an overview equivalent to the tip of an iceberg? Despite the limited information available to them, both biographers try to be honest and fair to England and to church and administrative leaders (though their sympathies do lean toward England). Perhaps most importantly, both books effectively demonstrate England's influence on contemporary Latter-day Saint intellectual culture, particularly the degree to which he contributed to the growth of Mormon studies that former church historian Leonard Arrington and others had started.While neither book is likely to change opinions of Eugene England—his friends will continue to defend and seek to redeem his reputation and his critics will still feel justified in their distaste for his ego and academic idiosyncrasies—both accounts should remind readers that, devoted or disruptive, earnest or egotistical, we all live far beneath our best aspirations and, considering that, we would do well to maintain empathy for everyone involved in the events that transpired during England's life. I hope we are at the point where we can agree with England's friend Lavina Fielding Anderson that the era through which England struggled was simply “a time when truth and courage meant very different things to very different but equally honorable people” (Givens 281; emphasis mine). And if there is any way in which readers might want to emulate Eugene England, it is in his “example of thinking differently than his fellow Saints and loving them just the same” (Haglund 102).