The cover of Terryl L. Givens's Stretching the Heavens: The Life of Eugene England and the Crisis of Modern Mormonism lends its biographical subject a striking, Kennedyesque allure. A young Gene England—best known among those affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as one of the faith's most progressive voices from the 1960s to the 1990s—looks pensively to the skies, with a tuft of strawberry blonde hair, a well-defined jawline, and a smart, professorial pairing of a beige turtleneck and tweed sport coat.
For England, whose cultural orientations were toward Palo Alto (he earned a PhD in English literature from Stanford) as much or more than Provo, staking out this kind of image and identity for himself at a time when the church was careening rightward culturally, politically, and theologically marked him as a kind of male Jezebel, someone dangerously “heterodox” and “liberal.” The importance, and the drama, of Stretching the Heavens derive from this fundamental, even existential, tension in England's life and soul. As someone who condemned war, racism, and sexism in the 1960s and 1970s but also cared deeply about his good standing in the church, England seems to have been destined for a life of prolonged anguish and struggle.
Terryl Givens is uniquely positioned to tell this story because England's widow, Charlotte, entrusted him with Gene's private papers and the larger biographical project. That commission may explain the devotional character that the biography assumes at the start, following an established pattern in Mormon biography of describing the general wholesomeness of England's boyhood, mission, and early family life.
More consequentially, the book adopts a tone of spiritual admonition, apparently toward younger members and scholars of the church who might be tempted to see England's passion for justice as exemplary and even prophetic. Givens cites and worries about recent data indicating a generational drift toward doubt and “attrition” from the church (75; see Jana Riess's excellent work on the subject The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church, published in 2019 by the Oxford University Press). He laments “the clash with secularism that has taken such a toll on the church's youth” (280), while praising England for (barely) withstanding the “secular onslaught” (xiii) of his era and for ensuring that “the liberalism of his progressive social conscience did not infiltrate his simple faith” (282).
In Givens's estimation, England was at best a “theologian out of season” (109), at worst a “radical” (95) directly responsible for his painful exile from the important journal he co-founded (Dialogue) and his academic post at Brigham Young University. Indeed, England possessed a social conscience that was, by the standards of the era, mature and substantially countercultural. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., who asserted that the “three evils” of racism, poverty, and militarism were poisoning the soul of the United States and white Christianity, England was persuaded that “the litmus test of true Christianity. . . was consistency with three New Testament themes: regard for the marginalized, antimaterialism, and a compassion most perfectly manifest in pacifism” (97). Convictions like these led England to challenge the church's long-standing policy barring Black men from holding the priesthood years before the ban was finally lifted in 1978, in addition to making space in the pages of Dialogue for feminist scholars who would soon be legendary, such as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Claudia Bushman.
England's refusal to back down on matters of conscience was largely unwelcome, to say the least, in an ecclesiastical “culture of harmonious acquiescence” (117) that heavily reinforced hierarchy, white supremacy, and patriarchy. At BYU in the 1990s, amidst controversies over academic freedom that drew strong criticism from the national press and the American Association of University Professors, England again put his career and reputation at risk by not sufficiently distancing himself from feminist scholars such as Cecilia Konchar Farr, whom Givens characterizes as “unapologetically,” “conspicuously,” and “provocatively” positioning herself as a “radical feminist” in the English Department of the church's flagship university in 1992 (237).
The moral implication and upshot for Givens are clear: a rising generation of Mormons and Mormon scholars would do well to avoid enshrining Eugene England as some sort of prophet, visionary, or martyr. I can see how they would; to the bitter end, England suffered dearly for taking the pressing social issues of his time seriously, and he did not live to see the church, in 2013, finally admit that its long and painful history of racism was the result of being captive, for generations, to a broader culture of white supremacy.
Stretching the Heavens makes an essential contribution to the study of Mormon intellectual history since the 1960s. It complements the University of Utah Press's recent edited collection of essays about Sterling McMurrin, Obert Tanner, and Lowell Bennion (Conscience and Community, published in 2018), as well as Kristine Haglund's introduction to the thought of Eugene England (Eugene England. A Mormon Liberal, published in 2021 by the University of Illinois Press). A broader history, more deeply engaged with recent secondary scholarship, remains to be written of Mormon intellectual life in the midst of the Cold War and Reagan Era; the heydays of feminism, black and queer liberation movements; and the long-stonewalled diversification of higher education in the United States.
By his own admission, Eugene England was no saint; he was deeply human and deeply flawed. Yet he possessed an admirable, abiding determination to develop a robust social conscience in an ecclesiastical, political, and cultural environment that tended to gaslight, despise, and even demonize the left. As Stretching the Heavens so vividly illustrates, the ideas and legacy of Eugene England will be matters of concern and debate for years to come.
