“BYU prof FEARS SECULARISM”

I appreciate Peggy Fletcher Stack’s and the Salt Lake Tribune’s interest in our new initiative at Meridian Magazine, a page labeled “Expand” (as in Alma 32: “your mind doth begin to expand…”) and in the thinking that led me to take this initiative.  We certainly welcome the publicity for this important and still fledgling venture.  Peggy does us at Expand and her readers the service of quoting and paraphrasing parts of my argument for undertaking this new online publication.  Moreover, although she apparently could not find another scholar to quote who would actually support Expand’s aims in print, she does supply summary evaluations of our enterprise from three serious and reasonable scholars: Richard Bushman, Richard Davis, and Adam Miller.

As is practically inevitable in a short article written by someone who does not share the point of view of the subject of the article, I who am the subject find that the arguments for this initiative undergo some distortion in the article’s presentation.  The distortions are not malicious, but are in fact quite common and in a way natural, and I am indeed happy to have in Peggy’s article the occasion to correct them and thus to clarify the argument behind the establishment of Meridian/Expand.

First, consider the title.  Do I “fear?”  and is “secularism” what I fear?

Liberals ascribe “fear” to conservatives, a nice contrast to their confident embrace of whatever is in the offing (as long as it’s not conservative).  As FDR so cagily put it: “We have nothing to fear but … fear itself!”  (And conservative fear-mongers, by implication.)

Then do I “fear”?  No, I am not afraid.  I have nothing personally at stake.  Unfortunately for those who find me annoying, I am pretty securely tenured.  I am content in my job, I have a great family, more good and supportive friends than I deserve.  In any case, even if the world keeps surprising me by how quickly it is going to hell in some respects, I’ll be gone (I truly hope and do not fear) to a better place before it gets there.  So I do not live in fear.

I am not writing out of fear.  In fact I ask myself why I am bothering to raise the hackles of those who fear “conservatives,” since neither the spiritual nor intellectual level of discussion that generally results is very satisfying.  I have much greater intellectual pleasures available to me in my more purely philosophical pursuits, writing my next book on the history of political philosophy or researching the relations among nature, grace and politics.

So I do not write out of fear.  Nor, as I have explained, do I write on such controversial topics for pleasure.  So it must be out of duty.  I care about the university, and about the LDS community more broadly.  And I believe that integrating the life of the mind with the religious life is important not only for the individual soul but for the health of the community. (The Soul and the City – get it?)

So I am not afraid.  But I am concerned.  I am concerned because BYU’s mission to combine the fullest development of the intellect with that of the eternal soul is facing tougher and tougher challenges in our contemporary cultural environment, and I find that overall we have been much too complacent, much too satisfied with business as usual.  (As I have written earlier on this site, I do not include our new BYU leadership in this assessment.)

In this respect, I am not a conservative, but an agitator.  It is not I but the comfortable ones who are fearful of my agitation and want to conserve a comfortable status quo.  They respond by trying to reduce my concerns to an irrational fear.

Now, is what I am concerned about best described as “secularism”?

I suppose that one word is not a bad start.  But the word plays into liberal complacency by suggesting that the alternative before us is simply that between obedience to authority or some “secular” openness to rational knowledge.  But no, that’s not it.  See what I said above: BYU’s mission is to “combine the fullest development of the intellect with that of the eternal soul.”  I do not believe the reason Mormon scholars and intellectuals too often fall short is because they are too rational and not obedient enough to authorities (although we can certainly all afford to be more obedient).  No, what I think is something much more offensive and fearful for liberals and progressives:  I think we are selling our eternal souls short because we are not rational enough.

(To be continued.)