Former Senator Bob Bennett

Joe Cannon, the principal opponent whom he defeated in order to gain the Utah Republican nomination for the United States Senate in the first place, has been a friend of mine for many, many years.

With a friend, I had lunch with Mike Lee, who eventually defeated him and took his place in the Senate, while Mike Lee was still considering whether or not to run.

And yet, that said, I think extremely highly of Bob Bennett.  I like him very, very much.  I would be content were he still serving in the Senate.  I regretted his unceremonious dumping by the Utah Republican Party.

For one thing, while he served in the Senate he was a strong and helpful supporter of the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative and the Islamic Translation Series, BYU projects that I conceived and founded and that I led until my expulsion from BYU’s Maxwell Institute in 2012.

But that sounds merely self-interested.  I admire him for much more than merely his help to a project that I valued.

Twice, I’ve heard him speak extemporaneously and at some length, without advance warning, about Islamic history and civilization — and his grasp of the subject was genuinely remarkable.  (It impressed the ambassador of Jordan at one small home-cooked dinner that we shared in the Washington DC, and, on another occasion, it impressed a number of Arab diplomats who were gathered for a formal dinner at the Embassy of Saudi Arabia.)  After 9/11, he said, he was appalled to recognize how ignorant he was of the Middle East and Islam, so he undertook a self-conceived program of reading to bring himself up to speed.    And he did.

I was also privileged to read the manuscript of his 2009 book Leap of Faith: Confronting the Origins of the Book of Mormon before it was published.  Candidly, I expected to be unimpressed.  Senator Bennett was a busy politician who made no pretense of being a scholar, and I anticipated that his manuscript would be mostly devotional and fairly shallow.  Okay.  Not memorable.  I read it as a favor to the person (not Senator Bennett) who had asked for my evaluation of it.  But, as it turned out, I thought the book excellent.  Really, very good.

I was sad to hear some time ago that Brother Bennett was struggling with pancreatic cancer, and I’m saddened, now, to hear that he’s suffered a stroke.  My prayers and best wishes are with him and his family.