Lowell Bennion

Revered mid-century Mormon mentor and the single greatest early influence on Eugene England, as recounted in Stretching The Heavens. The book describes Bennion as the scholar who published the first English-language study of sociologist Max Weber, founded the Latter-day Saint Institute of Religion adjacent to the University of Utah (only the church’s fourth institute), and also founded Utah’s first food bank and homeless shelter and the Teton Valley Boys Ranch — “an open-armed humanitarian and a practical Christian” in a church that tended toward insularity and dogma.

His decisive influence on England came through a Socratic challenge. In a 1953 class, when a student asked why God’s church distinguished between Black members and others, England gave the traditional answer about pre-existence valiance; Bennion simply asked how he knew Black people had not been valiant, and — finding England had no answer but tradition — gently suggested the God revealed in Christ would not merely punish without explanation. The book calls it impossible to exaggerate the impact of this exchange on England’s future as a writer, thinker, and interrogator of church teachings. Bennion’s “common-sense approach to lived religion” instilled in England the drive to translate doctrine into a coherent framework for discipleship, and his teaching that the atonement “actually gives us the power to repent in the first place” shaped England’s major doctrinal contribution.

Bennion recurs as a figure of principled dissent within the LDS Church: he publicly challenged apostle Mark E. Peterson’s defense of the “Negro Doctrine,” belonged to the intellectual circle known as the “Swearing Elders” (with Sterling McMurrin, T. Edgar Lyon, and others) who floated an independent scholarly journal, and during the anti-intellectual retrenchment Leonard Arrington lamented, Bennion was named among those constrained. After England’s controversial work drew furious reaction, even “the universally admired, saintly Lowell Bennion” declared, “It is a poor religion that can’t stand the test of thinking.”

Context: Lowell L. Bennion (1908–1996) was a Latter-day Saint educator, humanitarian, and writer who helped build the LDS seminary and institute system and was widely admired for his service-oriented, undogmatic faith.

Where this appears

• Stretching The Heavens — Eugene England’s formative mentor; his Socratic question on the priesthood/race doctrine reshaped England’s career and worldview, and he recurs as a model of faithful intellectual dissent.