Anti-intellectualism

In Stretching The Heavens, anti-intellectualism names the organizing tension of Eugene England’s life: a mid-twentieth-century Latter-day Saint culture that had retreated from its intellectual heyday into an orthodoxy of doctrine-over-theology and deference to institutional authority. The book sets England’s “passion to translate church doctrines into a more organic, coherent framework for discipleship” against “a Mormon cultural commandment: Do not act in defiance of prevailing church norms of thought and behavior.” England, the page notes, “had not questioned church doctrine or authority, but he had challenged” that cultural commandment — and paid for it in conflicts with figures like Boyd K. Packer (“The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater than the Intellect”) and Bruce R. McConkie (the “Seven Deadly Heresies” talk).

The book frames this as a fall from an earlier openness. It recalls that “Joseph Smith’s commitment to the life of the mind, personally and institutionally, was absolute” — he studied German, Hebrew, and Egyptian, organized a School of the Prophets, and declared “Intelligence is the great object of our holy religion.” Smith “bridled at orthodoxy tests,” wanting “the liberty of believing as I please.” England’s project, as the wiki reads it, was to recover that founding intellectual confidence against a later institutional retreat — the central paradox of “personal autonomy and intellectual freedom contending against prophetic authority and institutional power.”

Context: Anti-intellectualism is hostility toward or devaluation of intellectual life and expertise. Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) is the classic study of the term in the American context; here it is applied specifically to mid-century Mormon religious culture.

Where this appears

• Stretching The Heavens — the church’s retreat from its intellectual heyday into doctrine-over-theology orthodoxy, the tension Eugene England spent his career resisting