Stretching the Heavens

Two decades after the untimely death of the essayist, educator, and public intellectual Eugene England, two major figures in Mormon intellectual life independently decided to write about his life and legacy. In 2021, Terryl Givens published a biography framing England's career as a Greek tragedy, marked by his devotion to his church and clashes with leaders. The same year, Kristine Haglund published a contextualization of England's writings for the Introductions to Mormon Thought series at University of Illinois Press.Why the sudden wealth of interest in a late twentieth-century professor whose primary academic field, Mormon literature, never really took hold in the academy? For both Givens and Haglund, England bridges worlds. Both authors are drawn to his liberalism within a faith known for its American members’ conservatism. Both see in England an intriguing transitional figure between the close-knit, primarily oral culture of nineteenth-century Mormon pioneer communities and the concerns of the twenty-first-century digital culture from which they write.Both books present the two strands as connected. “England was born in 1933, both ahead of his time, and having just missed it,” Haglund begins (1). The missed time refers to the decades before England's birth when the church's oral culture and tight relationship networks helped smooth over philosophical differences and left ample room for progressive approaches. Both authors note that James E. Talmage and B. H. Roberts died the year England was born. They further note that during England's childhood, ties between church educators and the University of Chicago Divinity School were severed. As a turning point, Givens cites J. Reuben Clark's address “The Charted Course of the Church in Education,” which drew sharp lines between spirit and reason, church and world (Haglund 1, 51–53; Givens 50–51).Both authors present England as ahead of his time in anticipating concerns that rose to prominence through the internet. If Givens's book chides England for intemperance in his disagreements with institutional leaders, it implicitly asks how those same leaders failed to embrace approaches that might have headed off later faith crises. Referencing political and generational rifts, Haglund argues that England's work “points to an expansive Mormonism that might have been” (23). Both books note that England's rhetorical stance of open dialogue and his positions on issues related to gender, race, historical nuance, and doctrinal differences showed clear influence on official church channels by the late 2010s (Haglund 1, 75; Givens 279–81).But England's 1933–2001 lifespan fits almost exactly between the progressive avenues open to early twentieth-century Mormons and the multivocal digital culture familiar to twenty-first-century Latter-day Saints. His career was concentrated in the last quarter of the twentieth century, a period both authors identify as a high point in tensions between the faith's leaders and its leading intellectuals (Haglund 101; Givens 280). Though England valued different approaches and published in venues across a broad ideological spectrum, his zealous commitment to conversation was practically bound to result in controversy during that historical window. One explanation the books provide for these tensions is that church growth strained personal lines of communication and led to increased emphasis on central authority.An additional avenue of inquiry would be examining the role of broadcast media. How much did the dominance of radio and television influence church leaders’ preference for a simplified single message over nuance and dialogue? Bruce R. McConkie's 1981 dictum “It is your province to echo what I say or remain silent” reflects a broadcast paradigm, and the presence of a television camera that caught England's outburst at the 1992 Sunstone Symposium is a key detail leading toward his ultimate dismissal from BYU. One way to understand tensions around England is not through the political, social, and theological positions he took—none of which were novel—but as a product of the distance between the prevailing broadcast culture of his time and the genres and style he embraced.Though he was also a poet and literary critic, England's favorite form was the personal essay. Givens and Haglund each independently chose to devote a chapter to England as essayist, highlighting pieces like “Blessing the Chevrolet,” “Easter Weekend,” and “Why the Church is as True as the Gospel.” England's belief that human beings are the literal children of an embodied, intervening, familial, and eternally progressing God informs the structure of his essays, which blend first-person experiences, anecdotes from the lives of fellow Saints, moral and spiritual reflections, unresolved contradictions, lyrical descriptions, and prayers. Haglund and Givens each explore England's use of the essay as form and put content from his essays into conversation with various other thinkers (Haglund 24–46; Givens 183–98). Each notes how England's work felt like a lifeline to many individuals who wrestled with the frictions of a communal religious culture they had a clear option to leave.While both books provide insight into late twentieth-century Mormonism, I suspect that many readers will come to studies of Eugene England with an eye on our own century's rough waters. How can a community preserve connection and goodwill across ideological difference? Givens, reflecting the themes of his own previous work, sees England's contribution as the product of an apparently paradoxical combination of charismatic faith and practice with intellectual rigor and skepticism (282–83). For Haglund, England's work shows the possibility of connection without conformity: “England's greatest legacy,” she concludes, “will be his example of thinking differently than his fellow Saints and loving them just the same” (192)

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