Part II of the Sunstone Classics series

Eugene England was a founder of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and a professor of English at BYU before becoming Writer in Residence at Utah Valley University where he started the first Mormon Studies program. He published this excerpted article in 2002. The whole article starts on page 31 in issue 121. 

My twenties were a conservative period. I married a saint, which tends to help anyone focus his or her life on central, conservative values. Charlotte and I went, soon after we were married, on a mission to Samoa and concentrated, for two and a half years, on teaching the fundamentals of the gospel and seeing lives change profoundly as a result. We started our family, which confirmed us, through experience, in conservative family values, and I served three years as a weather officer in the Air Force, which confirmed me in patriotism. But I felt powerful liberal currents developing as well. Coming from rather cold, emotionally reserved, largely Anglo-Saxon families and Church culture, Charlotte and I were positively bowled over by the passionate openness and directness of much Polynesian culture. I felt what I imagine being inebriated is like at its best—emotionally freed and elated—and I had a huge culture shock coming back to Salt Lake in the middle of winter to emotional bleakness and reserve.

I realized more and more that culture is relative, not absolute, that Mormons can have quite different cultural ways, some better, some worse than those of others but mainly different—and that the quality of our religious life is not obviously a function of cultural values. That may seem obvious, but it was a revelation to me.

I began to learn how the conservatism of some Mormons could lead them to act in destructive ways because it would keep them from seeing that their ideologies were culturally constructed and relative, not doctrinal and absolute. Some of the most prominent Palo Alto landlords were Mormons and took it as a religious affront that I would campaign to get them to rent to Blacks. I taught institute part-time, where we discussed some of these matters quite thoroughly in a Mormon ethics class. The parents of one of my students, who had applied for conscientious objector status, blamed me for his supposedly going astray. They contacted Institute authorities in Provo, who directed me not to talk about the ethics of violence if I wanted to keep my job.

Yet I was, of course, still basically conservative. I helped start Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought for the express purpose of helping young lds students, like those I taught each day at Stanford, build and preserve their testimonies. I know they faced many academic and ethical and cultural challenges, of the kind that going to college and moving away from Mormon cultural centers inevitably brings. I served in the Stanford Ward bishopric and there also was fully engaged in building testimonies and teaching basically conservative values.

As I served in these capacities, I saw more and more how relative are the terms liberal and conservative. I found I could change from one to the other simply by walking across Stanford Avenue from the university to the Institute building. On campus, among graduate students and anti-war and civil-rights activists, I was that strange, non-smoking, short-haired, family-raising conservative; at the Institute, I was that strange liberal who renounced war and worried about fair-housing and free speech. Of course, I was the same person both places; those terms reduced me to a stereotype, often marginalized me, and sometimes caused me real harm—but they did not touch my real self.

When I left Palo Alto to become Dean of Academic Affairs at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, I learned even more clearly how important those principles are. Within a week of arriving, I was called as president of the little branch in that area and in the next five years learned in new ways the values of conservative religion and Church involvement. At Stanford, much of my religious life had been involved with understanding and defending the gospel and applying it to social questions. I had been mainly idealistic, abstract, and critical—in a word, liberal. Now I was in charge of twenty families scattered over seventy-five miles, ranging from Utah-born, hard-core “inactives” with devastating marital problems to bright-eyed converts with no jobs or with a drunken father who beat them. Of the seventy or so members I got to know, at most four or five were ones I would ever have chosen for friends when I was at Stanford—and with whom I could have easily shared my most impassioned political and religious concerns and views, the ones that had so exercised me before. Fortunately, with Charlotte’s good advice and prodding, I did not begin by preaching about my ideas or promoting my crusades. I tried very hard to see what the immediate problems and concerns of my flock were and to be a good pastor, one who fed and protected them. As I did that, a remarkable thing happened. After six months, I found that my branch members, at first properly suspicious of a liberal intellectual from California, had come to feel in their bones, from direct experience, that indeed my faith and faithfulness to them was “stronger than the cords of death.” And the promise of the scriptures followed, for there flowed to me “without compulsory means” (D&C 121:36) the power from the Holy Ghost to talk about any of my concerns and passions and to be understood and trusted, even if not agreed with. I only wish I could have found a way to be that successful in my stewardship at byu.

Paul tells us that “charity suffereth long, and is kind, . . . is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil” (I Cor. 13:4-5). We have been quick to see evil and seek punishment. We liberals sometimes forget that, if we have not charity, we can bestow all our goods to feed the poor and it is nothing. We conservatives sometimes forget that prophecies fail, knowledge vanishes away, but charity endures, that it is even greater than faith and hope—certainly greater than political or cultural correctness.

“Conservative” and “liberal” are (or at least should be) merely neutral terms describing two different approaches to questions of social organization or cultural emphasis—approaches that may be simply a matter of temperament. Conservatives tend to want to maintain existing institutions or views, to oppose change, preserve safe boundaries, take few risks. At their best, I believe, they are, like Captain Vere in Billy Budd, of steady integrity, unswayed by every wind of doctrine; in Irving Howe’s words, “not inclined to easily overthrow the human institutions and values won from the blood and mire of history.” The word liberal derives from the Latin “to set free” and means “pertaining to a free man.” Liberals tend to value freedom from the authority of tradition and autocratic institutions, from bigotry or narrow-mindedness, even freedom from orthodoxy and conventional external restraints imposed on private conscience. They seek change. At their best, they are like those in Alma 1:30, who “did not set their hearts upon riches; therefore they were liberal to all, both old and young, both bond and free, both male and female, whether out of the church or in the church.”

I see nothing here to indicate religious superiority either way. Indeed, as I have tried to show, both the gospel and the Church include many elements that could be characterized as liberal (such as our concepts of the nature and the destiny of human beings and continuing revelation and our lay organization) and many that could be called conservative (such as our code of personal morality and our strong loyalty to our leaders). Joseph Smith was certainly a liberal, Brigham Young and Spencer W. Kimball very interesting mixtures, Ezra Taft Benson a conservative, and Gordon B. Hinckley gloriously indecipherable.