First Shot at BYU Studies

My first regular issue of BYU Studies arrived this week. Nice semi-glossy paper. It's like Dialogue without the poetry. Oh, and it's correlated. Really; it says so on the inside back cover: "BYU Studies is dedicated to the correlation of revealed and discovered truth and to the conviction that the spiritual and the intellectual can be complementary and fundamentally harmonious avenues of knowledge." I don't care, I'm going to read it anyway. I'll start with short comments here about James B. Allen's review of Prince and Wright's David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism, presently my featured LDS history book (sidebar, top left).

In his review, Allen calls the book "a must read for anyone interested in the history of the Church in the twentieth century." He commends the authors for their sympathetic portrayal of President McKay as well as for not soft-pedaling the various controversial episodes that marked his tenure over the Church.

Allen notes that Communism was a particular challenge, given the radically conservative line that LDS Apostle Ezra Taft Benson regularly espoused from the pulpit. McKay was opposed to Communism, but not on the terms announced by Benson. McKay relied on another LDS Apostle, Hugh B. Brown — at the other end of the right-shifted LDS political spectrum — to counter the Benson line. McKay apparently avoided making strong public statements of his own on the topic.

Given the sudden prominence of politics in LDS events of late, I found the following comment by Allen rather timely:

On other political issues, President McKay made every effort to demonstrate political neutrality, though he did not hesitate to take a stand if he thought moral issues were involved.

There's that messy political-moral distinction. Distinction? Just about every political issue has a moral dimension, so to say that LDS leaders only announce public stands on moral issues is to say they hold forth on political issues whenever they feel inclined to do so (as with the recently defeated amendment proposal). Nothing wrong with that, it's just strange to see every dose of political direction given to members prefaced by a disclaimer that the Church doesn't give political direction to its members. Of course not. Just moral direction.

Overall, Allen was very upbeat and complimentary about the book, with hardly a criticism. After having read Bushman's Rough Stone Rolling recently, however, I noted by comparison how little historical or cultural context is provided in the McKay biography. I checked out a couple of books on 20th-century American history to try and give that context as I read through the McKay biography. That should work for general themes like civil rights and Communism, but I'm not sure that approach will pick up the sort of religious themes that Bushman weaved into his cultural commentary on 19th-century Mormonism.

Tags: Mormonism | LDS

Comments

[Ben H]

Hee hee hee : ) What a timely alignment of phrases in the mission statement!

[john f.]

Amazing that you've never subscribed before this.

[Dave]

Thanks for the "Bushman trumps Prince" link at T&S, Kaimi. I'll expand a bit: Bushman is a career historian while Prince is a career medical research scientist (i.e., an MD that went into research and development rather than practice). So I would expect Bushman to write a more historical biography, meaning one that brings in all the cultural and religious history stuff that Bushman used. The scope of Prince's book is thus understandably narrower, but it is an outstanding book for anyone interested in 20th-century LDS history.

[J. Stapley]

Actually, Prince is a DDS/PhD. Especially with the forward in the book that describes how he put the book together, reading it is an organizational splendor. You can almost see him put it together. I agree that Bushman is a much better historian...not even a question. It is, however, quite refreshing to have a work that is more...shall we say, analytical.

[Dave]

J., I own both of his books and neither one gives his educational background in the dust jacket bio, but I'll defer to your confident assertion.

I don't know about analytical. I think the contribution of Prince and Wright's biography of McKay is that it presents a lot of material relative to President McKay and that whole period that had not been make available before, at least not as a coherent and published narrative.

Bushman's RSR, on the other hand, dosen't cover much new ground in terms of information but does provide a lot of ... context. And insight. Great footnotes. And a fine bibliography. If the text had been a hundred pages shorter and the notes a hundred pages longer, it would have been a better book.

[J. Stapley]

Here is a brief write up on Prince.

As far as the nature of the work, I think it is analytical in the way it was structured. But, I very much agree that the new information is what is so valuable.

[RoastedTomatoes]

To me, the Prince and Wright book at times reads like a documentary history--lengthy presentation of primary sources with relatively little analysis. But the fact that the sources presented really do break important new ground in terms of 20th-century Mormon history makes the book exciting. I'm not sure that there's been another recent Mormon Studies book that did the raw job of adding information to the discussion more effectively.

[Jim Cobabe]

While I appreciate the notice paid to such a significant channel of information, I think it would be quite interesting for you to further develop your thinking with regard to "correlation". It seemed to me that you use the term like it was synonymous with something for wrapping dead fish.

To me it seems a more honest approach for such a journal to recognize up-front that editorial content is strongly directed with a consistent objective in mind. To me that is what "correlation" is -- an effort to avoid serving cross-purposes.

Instead of providing such an honest statement of purpose, other journals and news sources tend to attempt to disguise their own editorial slant with some claim of neutrality or supposed objectivity. While this usually turns out to be wishful thinking, and few readers are really in the dark about the predisposition of such sources, it seems a rather dishonest game. But perhaps the authors are only fooling themselves.

[Adam Greenwood]

"On other political issues, President McKay made every effort to demonstrate political neutrality, though he did not hesitate to take a stand if he thought moral issues were involved."

Like you say, every political issue has at least some moral component. I too wonder what the distinction is. Maybe it just that if God has given direction on a particular political issue, taking a stance on that issue is now a question of moral commitments in a way it wasn't before?