Well, I regret it

In my last post I said I suspected I might regret having expressed so freely my ambivalent feelings about how to respond to church leaders' teachings and politics around homosexuality. It didn't take long. In a couple weeks, I'm scheduled to give a public lecture on Mormonism as part of a series on American religious history, and an LDS individual who saw that blog posting has raised concerns with some of the event's sponsors, fearing, I suppose, that I would use the forum to criticize the church.

I feel... well, ambivalent about the situation. I can certainly understand the individual's concern. What I do on this blog is not what I do in my professional capacity as a scholar. People who have seen me present or have read my work can attest that I favor a nonpartisan style of scholarship quite different from the more emphatically "committed" discourse you'll read here. I work hard to write against my own biases when I'm doing scholarship, in the hope that by stepping back from the usual partisan orientations, I can provide a helpful, analytical map of what's going on. In spiritual terms, I'm convinced that writing against my biases in that way is how I put my scholarship at the service of making new knowledge about a subject and thus of advancing light and knowledge (D&C 121:26).

At times that means actually writing against my own political interests as a Mormon insider. At the last Sunstone symposium, I was explaining this to someone, and he asked me if I worry that by going so much out of my way to be fair to positions I'm predisposed against (the apologetics of FARMS, for example), I may actually give them more credit than they're due. It's a significant critique—and precisely the opposite concern expressed by the individual who responded anxiously to my last post. I'd like to think that if people on both the left and right ends of the Mormon theological spectrum are worried my scholarship isn't going to serve their interests, that means I'm doing something right.

Then again (ambivalence, remember?), I certainly stand somewhere on the left end of the spectrum myself. I'd hoped that this blog—unlike my scholarship—could be a place where I think aloud through issues in a way that openly reflects my commitments as a very liberal Mormon who is very opposed to certain things the LDS Church teaches and does. But given the public nature of being a scholar, perhaps that kind of freely expressive public platform isn't something I can have.