Spiritual challenges of Mormon scholarship

I had an experience yesterday I want to try to articulate.

As I was getting ready to head off to school, Hugo was working online, compiling the day's Mormon-related news for his work as Sunstone's news editor. Sitting on his desk was a printout of a statement by the church's public relations office, criticizing an article Peggy Fletcher Stack had written for the Salt Lake Tribune about a member of the Temple Square orchestra who was disciplined after writing a letter to the editor in support of same-sex marriage.

The statement made me livid. I won't vent about it at length here, because that's not what this blog is for. Suffice it to say that I was infuriated by the way the public relations office was spinning what had happened to make the church the good guy, and the dissenting member and Peggy the bad guys. I was so angry that I was tempted to dash off an impassioned email to my faculty advisor, urging her to reconsider her relationship with LDS Public Affairs. (My advisor agreed to be on a list of non-Mormon scholars whose names Public Affairs can give to media as outside, relatively sympathetic commentators on Mormonism.)

I didn't actually write that email; but I mention it to convey a sense of how upset I was. This is why I stopped attending church back in 1995. Frequently, things like this would push my buttons. Near the end of my time at BYU, I would sit through sacrament meeting with my eyes closed, fuming, usually about things related to BYU's academic freedom controversy or the latest excommunication of an intellectual. It's not healthy, which is why something I pray for pretty regularly (as you might have noticed in other posts) is to be less angry and more charitable.

But now here's where I'm going with this story: In less than three hours from the time I've gotten my buttons pushed by this church press release, I'm supposed to give a guest lecture on Mormonism for an introductory undergraduate course on Religion in America. So as I'm getting angry about the press release, I'm thinking, "I can't do this right now." Because when I stand in front of those students, I need to have the poise and the detachment to be able to present Mormonism in a way that will shake up the negative preconceptions that I know most of these students are bringing to the subject—whether they're conservative evangelicals who think that Mormonism is a cult, or religious liberals who think of Mormonism as backward and oppressive, or secularists anxious about Mormon political power and baffled that anyone could believe this nonsense. As someone who has embraced the vocation of a teacher, I have a professional and ethical—and, I'd add, spiritual—responsibility to help these students arrive at new knowledge. That's also true for any Mormon students in the room (though I had no reason to think there would be any this time around). If my presentation simply covers what to LDS students is familiar territory, delivered in the cadences of church correlation, then I won't have met my responsibility toward them either. They, too, need to be brought to understand their own tradition in a new way: to understand something new about how Mormonism relates to the larger American religious landscape or how the movement has changed over time. My presentation needs to bring new understanding to every student in that room, wherever they're coming from, and that means my presentation needs to shake up, in some way, what they think they already know. But obviously it's going to be hard for me to shake up the perceptions of students who think of the LDS Church as a controlling, authoritarian institution when at that moment I myself am feeling outraged about this latest demonstration of the controlling, authoritarian impulses at work in the church.

This is a major spiritual challenge I face as a scholar of Mormonism. My mission as a scholar—and this would be true whatever field I worked in—is to produce new knowledge. My gifts need to be in the service of helping God pour down on humanity "knowledge . . . that has not been revealed since the world was until now" (D&C 121:26). Line on line, precept on precept, degree by degree. If my own understanding of whatever I'm researching and writing about doesn't change as a result of that process, then I'm doing something wrong. I'm not serving as an instrument for bringing new light into the world. I'm not being sufficiently open to having my own views and assumptions and vested interests challenged by the revelatory process. (When I say "revelatory" here, I have in mind the kinds of revelation that are produced by studying things out in our mind, seeking learning by study as well as by faith, etc.) In order for my scholarship to produce new knowledge, I can't function as a partisan. This is not to say that I will ever be objective: obviously my work is shaped by assumptions and methods and commitments that I do not think to question or am unwilling to question. But my work as a scholar needs to involve conscious efforts to step back from my commitments and to write against my biases. That always requires intellectual discipline; and when I'm working on Mormon topics, especially topics where I'm likely to get buttons pushed, it requires spiritual discipline, too.

So as I made my way to the classroom where I was supposed to help shake up students' preconceptions about Mormonism, I prayed. I thought about the various negative preconceptions I anticipated students would have, and I prayed to be able to give a presentation that could produce in students a greater degree of Verstehen, a greater degree of empathetic understanding. At the same time, I wanted to be able to provide usefully frank and usefully contextualized discussion of controversies in and around Mormonism, including those students might inquire about during Q&A. And I wanted to be able to set well off to one side my feelings about that asinine church press release, so they wouldn't well up during my presentation.

Because this is a Mormon story, I have to give it closure—some concrete demonstration that my prayer was answered. So here you go: After my guest lecture, the professor praised it effusively in the gracious, extra-courteous Old World manner he praises everything you do for him. He said that it's hard to find a presenter who has the intimate knowledge of a Mormon insider but who also won't be either "antagonistic" or "protective." (I thought that last word choice was especially apt.) I told him that meant a lot to me. And I give thanks to God. The kind of treatment I gave the Mormon tradition is the kind of treatment I'd want to give any tradition I taught about; but the challenge is particularly acute for me in the case of Mormonism, given the nature of my own commitments with regards to that tradition. At the same time, for obvious reasons, Mormonism is the tradition I most love to teach about.