I was born in Provo, Utah, in 1935. I had an active Mormon mother and a humorously semi-active father. Dad took organized religion with a substantial dose of humor. He was a spiritual man. I came to realize that in my adult years. He had to be coaxed or coerced into church. He found God in the mountains.
On horseback, we took a frying pan and coffee pot any Sunday he could because he worked twelve-hour days, six days a week, at Penney’s and then later the Firmage store. So there was conflict between Mom and Dad in that regard. I always felt deeply close to God. I never doubted. Not a Mormon god particularly, just simply God. But I didn’t have any particular interest in theology in my young days, and didn’t read scripture, including Mormon scripture, until my honeymoon. I was called on a mission when I was on a honeymoon. It wasn’t as astounding as it sounds in that it had been sort of planned. I became engaged to my former mate after one year at Brigham Young University. I always planned on a mission. I’d grown up in such a totally Mormon environment that one didn’t even think of a choice. It was not would you go, but when would you go. On my honeymoon I got a mission call to England. And in that two-week honeymoon I read all the standard works. It’s an interesting way to spend a honeymoon, but I did actually read all of the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Doc[218]trine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price, the Book of Mormon—all essentially for the first time with any seriousness.
And you’d attended all your services regularly?
I’d been a pretty active attender except when I was off with Dad.
Was there ever any open discord between your mother and father about your going off with your dad?
Oh, yes, frequently. I remember being recruited by Mother to try to help convince Dad to stop smoking; he smoked a pipe—thoroughly enjoyed it. I approached him when I was just a little kid, three or four. Mother was a very artful, manipulative woman who, for all good purposes, didn’t want him smoking. So he stopped. He still enjoyed a cold beer every now and then. But due in part to my letters, mainly from the mission field, Dad became a Mormon bishop of two student wards at BYU and was a superb bishop because he was a very humane, kind man and didn’t care too much for the rule book. He simply spent his time counseling, giving good sage counsel to young people about life. Dad excelled at the sunny side of the haystack “reasoning together” on religion, and did extremely well. He was a very loved bishop. But I think he viewed God as a great mystery—he didn’t doubt God—but felt that many of the strictures that organized religion placed upon human beings (not the Mormons particularly more or less than others, but it was the Mormons he experienced) were rather severe and sometimes unfeeling. The trouble he got into as bishop was always with a superior, who wanted a harsh verdict of some sort. Dad also leaped over them occasionally and appealed to N. Eldon Tanner or Grandfather Hugh B. Brown on behalf of a young kid. For example: A youth going on a mission whom the stake president wanted to keep from going for doing something that 99 percent of young men have done (and the other 1 percent are liars). Dad wouldn’t go along with them and got Eldon Tanner to agree and that irked his stake president. Dad was released. But he was always very friendly toward the Mormon church and modestly active in it.
You mentioned Grandfather Brown. He was your mother’s father?
Yes, Mom’s father. When I came back from the White House after service with Vice President Hubert Humphrey, I lived almost next door to Grandfather, and so for the last decade more or less of his life we [219] were very close. We’d been all of our lives; he was a loving father and mentor in my childhood and youth. I’d worked with him when he was in Canada. I was in my mid-teens. I worked as a young man roughnecking the long end of a shovel on an oil rig. We had long talks in the evening, and there was never a censure or a harsh kind of ecclesiastical, authoritarian “this is the way it is and so you better believe” sort of thing, but rather he took seriously relatively childish questions. “Who’s God’s father” type questions—if that’s childish, it’s pretty profound really— and give them serious attention. I always saw reflected in his vast library and in the way he conducted his own life, a very humane, broad-gauged man, who didn’t fit comfortably within the conservative, authoritarian structure in which he worked. He was the odd man out. I grew up Republican because my parents—being mercantile types— were. And in Utah County and Provo, what else could I be? I always wondered why Grandfather was a Democrat among so many Republicans. I once asked Grandfather, “Why are you a Democrat?” His answer at the time seemed simple-minded. Since then I’ve found it rather profound. He said, “Eddie, I think the Democratic party is more sensitive to the poor.” He didn’t say anything else, no big theological or political thing ... just “they’re more sensitive to the poor.” I now think that’s a pretty good way of judging politics and religion.
What comes first, the liberalism or the inactivity? I’ve talked to many people in the course of this project who are liberal and inactive, more so than of conservatives who are inactive. Any thoughts on why this may be the case?
I think it can be both. For me it was both simultaneously and before I knew either was happening. You could date a liberalizing influence when I was a young boy with Grandfather Brown having religious talks, and borrowing books from his library, most of which I never returned. As I consciously look back, it began for me probably in the mission field because I smuggled into my digs in England and Scotland the writings of the early Fathers, Greek and Latin Fathers— Origen, Tertullian, Clement of Rome, Clement of Alexandria. (And quickly thereafter, the writings of others—living people whom I would view as Christian disciples, like C. S. Lewis and Tolkien.) And the writings of Fredrick W. Farrar on Jesus and Paul. As I read these writers of the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh centu[220]ries, I felt that they had been touched by God. I was too unconscious of what was happening to understand the awkwardness of what I was teaching as opposed to what I was reading. As far as I was concerned, I was strengthening my Mormon testimony. But I was laying the groundwork, laying some mines that would be detonated later, because the idea of preaching an apostasy and a restoration were antithetical to concluding that there was an unbroken line of writings from the gospel writings on; that there wasn’t any huge chasm between the end of the first century and the nineteenth. The idea that God was sort of snoozing until 1820 now seems to me absurd. Many deeply spiritual people were living, and I came increasingly to feel a deep affinity with them—like I knew them. That continuity increasingly came to be terribly important to me. The Mormon explanation for it seemed to trivialize God, and them.
I read a speech of Grandfather’s as I did a biography of him. Grandfather bought into this too, seeing all this as prologue, a great big drum roll for 1820. Years ago I finally said, “My hell, that’s a long drum roll.” Seventeen centuries of apostasy or at best prologue trivializes enormous actors on the stage: From Origen, Tertullian, Clement of Rome, Clement of Alexandria to St. Augustine to Thomas Aquinas; Wesley, Luther, and the entire Protestant Reformation. These people were not a Greek chorus, prologue to Hamlet walking out on the stage. All of them had more impact than Joseph Smith in reality, in my mind now, in Christian history. But the more I read and the more I pondered and the more other life events began to hit me, my fundamental Mormon paradigm began to show fissures and then finally it cracked wide open. That is where political liberalism and theological and spiritual inquiry joined.
By 1960 Ezra Taft Benson had returned from Eisenhower’s cabinet and had begun preaching a powerful John Birch line, often disguised as if it weren’t, but it was—it was straight out of Robert Welch and his American Opinion magazine. Grandfather was the checkmate to this as best he could be. And I worked with him. I was a young law student just beginning my first year at Chicago when Benson had first raised the John Birch thing. Grandfather asked me to do a report for him on that subject. “Eddie what is this John Birch Society?” So I did a research paper for grandfather in 1960-61. Benson had returned and his son would become a coordinator for New England or some area for [221] the Birch Society, and a lot of this stuff was being infused by Benson into Mormon speeches and teaching. Grandfather was busy trying to checkmate this. About the same time I had just moved from the BYU environment to Chicago’s South Side. I’m asking myself theological and sociological and political questions exactly at the same time.
Why did you go to Chicago?
I was going to the University of Chicago Law School. Rex Lee and myself and a fellow named Larry Wimmer, who was a missionary companion of mine in Manchester, England, had all decided to go to the same school. We applied to Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, Utah, and Chicago. We were accepted by each of them and had money offered by most of them. Chicago offered us the most dough, and as young marrieds, we followed the scholarship funds. We also felt that Chicago was perhaps the premiere law school in the country. Larry Wimmer wanted to join the economics department at Chicago to study under Milton Friedman.
I took the Goldwateresque political views that I had acquired in a Provo environment to Chicago’s South Side, and that paradigm collapsed. I couldn’t see reasonable social and political answers coming through a sort of, “If you had any gumption, you’d inherit your own department store” sort of mentality. Though the university had an impact, Chicago’s South Side had a lot more.
After graduation and the acquisition of a few graduate degrees, I taught for a year at the University of Missouri Law School and then went to work on the staff of Hubert Humphrey in civil rights. The president had given Humphrey two big mandates: one over civil rights and the other was over relationships with the mayors and the governors. I ended up working with Roy Wilkins of the N.A.A.C.P., Whitney Young of the Urban league, and Martin Luther King, Jr., of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. And, particularly with Roy Wilkins of the N.A.A.C.P., I formed an intimate friendship. We often talked and he talked about the blacks and the Mormon priesthood and his sadness at that policy. He believed that both groups had much to give the other. He even offered to fly secretly into Salt Lake and meet with Grandfather and church leaders about this topic and not make any public to-do about it, make it absolutely secret.
[222] So those things were festering in me: what about the blacks? What about the priesthood? What about the constant, reactionary drumbeat of Mormon ecclesiastical teaching as it interfaced with politics that I was by then deeply involved in at the White House. For example, I spent a good part of my time planning the White House Conference on Civil Rights. Tickets to it were like gold. University presidents were turned away, governors were turned away; there was very limited seating capacity for it, although hundreds and hundreds would be there—everybody wanted to come. There had been no invitations to Mormons sent. Now the president and the vice president have what you call “night reading.” That is, they will read overnight some portions of the thousands of letters and memoranda that they didn’t write but bear their signature. Humphrey would take this correspondence home each night and glance through it. He saw a memo that I’d written to Clifford Alexander, who was the president’s man on civil rights (I played a similar role for Humphrey), saying, “Look, there isn’t a Mormon in this whole group. I admit that this group will not contribute to the cutting edge of debate on this topic—they’re way behind. But part of governance is not simply getting the best and the brightest to create new law, but also to bring the country with you through dialogue with many groups as you move into a radically different time— so won’t you invite two or three Mormons?” Humphrey happened to see this memo sent over his imprimatur—my name but on his stationery. He wrote back on it, “Eddie, I will support you. Tell me who you want invitations to go to.” So I chose four youngish Mormon general authorities whom I thought were up-and-comers at the time. Tom Monson was one and two or three others. [Marion D.] Duff Hanks received an invitation. But the word came down from the top: no Mormon general authority would be allowed to go. I know that Hanks would’ve come. They sent Milan Smith who was, as I recall, stake president in the area of the Capitol. The other major religious traditions had national and international church functionaries attending. You could multiply that incident a hundred times and those were the things I was bumping into.
Up to this time, did you have a basic bedrock testimony of the Joseph Smith story?
Absolutely. The whole thing. I was deeply disturbed by the black [223] and the priesthood issue, but I don’t choose my religion by a particularly disturbing single issue. Whether it’s the ordination of women or blacks or a more authoritarian structure than I feel comfortable with, I don’t leave, even de facto, an organization on the basis of some level of discomfort on one issue. There’d be no home that one could institutionally find if one did that. It was more fundamental things like Christian continuity. Increasingly I felt the need of continuity. I just felt uncomfortable with an 1820 beginning. I felt enormously deprived, spiritually hungry. When I got into the literature of other churches at a later time, I saw how thirsty I truly was. When I discovered in 1980 the writings of Thomas Merton and Francis of Assisi, it connected back with my meeting (through their writings) Lewis, Tolkien, Bonhoeffer, in the 1960s, and Farrar and the Fathers of the early church in the 1950s. But they came to have a deep impact on me. I felt the need institutionally to connect those centuries, and this feeling was utterly at odds with the Mormon response of apostasy and restoration; all those people in all those centuries were but a prologue to the Restoration. That idea for me disintegrated.
What happened at that time was a critical point in my exodus. The MX missile debate. Paradoxically so, because while I was chasing air force generals around the desert (debating MX), I was meeting wonderful religious figures, many of them Franciscans. I had long dialogues with Mormon leaders which lead to three Mormon messages by the First Presidency: a Christmas message, an Easter message, and finally an MX message, all dealing with nuclear weapons. The first two statements essentially condemned the nuclear arms race and expressed horror at such weapons ever being used. In addition, whenever KSL would editorialize in favor of MX, I’d be allowed KSL air time to rebut. Gordon Hinckley at the time was the head of the Public Affairs Committee, a euphemism for the “church-state committee.”
The “church-state committee”?
I’d call it that, if you scraped away the euphemism. Its jurisdiction concerned the relation between church and state. I’d been meeting with and writing Gordon Hinckley long memoranda based on the teachings of the Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, and the Doctrine and Covenants, and the teachings of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, et al., on force and violence and the Christian gospel [224] of love. There was great disharmony between those teachings and having a base in Utah and Nevada of the greatest collection of genocidal power that had ever been known. There was almost dark humor in basing such weapons in an area seen by the original settlers as “Zion.” Finally, I was asked to brief the First Presidency on this, which I did. I spent two hours with Spencer Kimball and Presidents [Marion G.] Romney and Eldon Tanner. I’d gone in with long memoranda. I knew but didn’t emotionally remember or realize that they were functionally nearly blind in old age. I had to tell them the story of MX and why I thought it was such a threat. I was due to fly off to make one last effort to dissuade Jimmy Carter from supporting MX. It was the one time in my life when I single-issued a candidate. I was on his reelection committee, and I said to members of his staff that if they went ahead with the MX, I couldn’t support his candidacy. Eldon Tanner called and said, “Delay your White House trip. We’ve found a later flight for you. We want you to come in and brief the Quorum of the Twelve and tell them what you told us.” So I did. This was the culmination of a year of private meetings with Gordon Hinckley. I briefed the quorum and the First Presidency (the First Presidency joined the Twelve in their meeting room). I wrote a draft statement that I hoped would be of some use. A week later the church’s statement on MX was released. I was then ready to start a nationwide speaking tour with a navy vice admiral, John Marshall Lee, and one of the heads of the Western Shoshone and the head of the Nevada Cattlemen’s Association— a four-person truth squad, in our view of truth, at least, going across the country preaching against MX. I was just at that time going to brief the L.A. Times religion editor, John Dart, when the church called and read the statement to me. I said, “That’s great.” My interview with John Dart came out banner, front-page headlines: “Mormon Church Comes Out Against MX.” I think formal Mormon opposition is without a doubt what killed it, given the proposed MX location. Had it been located in New York’s Central Park, the Mormon First Presidency statement wouldn’t have found the obituary page. But given the location in the heart of the Mormon Great Basin, the idea of forcefeeding a missile down the throat of a group now utterly opposed was politically not possible.
The whole culture, basically.
[225] It’s simply not acceptable in a democratic state. I believe the First Presidency statement killed MX.
Long before that, I put together what was called “Utahns United Against MX.” It included our then new Roman Catholic bishop, William Weigand, and our Episcopal bishop Otis Charles, the Jewish rabbi, AFL-CIO leader Eddie Mayne, Maestro Maurice Abravanel, Chase Peterson of the University of Utah, and about seventy other luminaries. In this process I also had met people who’d change my life dramatically. They were more simple folk, mainly the Women Religious of Roman Catholicism. I met some spectacular nuns who were at the forefront of MX opposition in their communities; Franciscans in the main, but not always. A Franciscan sister in Las Vegas, Rosemary Lynch; Mary Luke Tobin of the Sisters of Loretto, who’d worked closely with Thomas Merton earlier in an abbey near his at Gethsemane, Kentucky. One of the few women invited to Vatican II. She introduced me to the writings of Thomas Merton. Rose introduced me to the writings of Francis of Assisi. By that time I was also into more secular writing—but writing directly relevant for me and my own pilgrimage— and that was the writing of Carl Jung—depth psychology. I was into a form of depth spirituality and depth psychology simultaneously from 1980 on. This was new to me, utterly new, without a Mormon counterpart. The “inner journey” rather than seeing simply a transcendent God out there sitting on some star near Kolob. There was another aspect of spirituality, I learned—God wasn’t only the transcendental “ultimate Other.” He was also a subjective God, in my heart, the Imago Dei. I’d been speaking without a means of spiritual, emotional, and physical renewal, almost alone, for over a year. The governor was still in favor of MX. He later became a valued opponent of the MX, but in 1979 he’d send a letter inviting MX to Utah.
That would’ve been Scott Matheson.
Scott Matheson, friend and colleague. He did a wonderful turnaround and became a powerful opponent of MX, but at an earlier time he was in favor of it. As were all of our Congressional delegation, my own party’s president, and the Congress which was Democratic. So it was a very lonely war. For a long time I was meeting privately with Gordon Hinckley, but other than that I was speaking around the state, doing everything I could to help people see not only the genocidal na[226]ture of this weapon, but also to see the deep spiritual and moral issues central to this question. I came to a point where I was really burned out. I needed a source of renewal. And I don’t think my Mormon tradition gave me the teaching or the tools to renew. Maybe this is my fault, not any institutional fault, but as I saw my institution it didn’t provide an obvious way of renewal. Subjective spirituality wasn’t emphasized in Mormon teaching. We could make a desert blossom as a rose, but our own heart could be an arid desert. And the idea of meditation, of contemplation, of an inner journey, of Christian mysticism—or for that matter Buddhist spirituality or Hindu spirituality or Sufi spirituality— were utterly beyond my horizon.
Were you conflicted by this?
I was intrigued, fascinated, drawn by the rich mixture of history and spirituality. Of course, a lot of this was overcoming fearful stereotypes. Brick by brick a paradigmatic structure that had worked well for me for a long time was being dismantled. I couldn’t see Catholics through the lens of older stereotypes after Sister Rosemary. I couldn’t preach apostasy from the readings I’d done even as a young Mormon missionary. Lutherans, Jews ... I mean, it all seemed like there was one huge central truth—and that was our common humanity. Then there was a secondary truth and that was the wonder of our individuality. This secondary truth could sometimes be controlling. For example, if I were single, which I am, I’d want to marry a woman, so the fact that I’m a man means that I’d be looking for a woman, and our common humanity, though a larger truth, wouldn’t control my decision to date women rather than men. But in human rights you could never have the secondary truth as being controlling. Whether I was black, or Catholic, or Mormon, or male, or Hispanic, an alien, or legitimate, or illegitimate—these ways we categorize ourselves in law and sociology— shouldn’t overpower for human rights’ purposes the primary truth of a common humanity. I saw this universality preached better by different organizations than my own.
I have to go back now because I’ve missed one terribly important man in my life. Other than Jesus—and that’s unfair competition, to compete with God—it would be St. Paul. I wrote a little book on Paul; it was meant as a little morality play for my brothers and sisters of the Mormon church. I first read Paul as a young missionary in England in [227] a version of the Bible that wasn’t King James (and I think that was important because I needed to see it afresh without a sing-song familiarity). When I read the second chapter of Ephesians and Paul talked of a universal humanity, it blew my mind. Here’s this provincial young man from Provo, Utah, never seen a black guy, and Paul is talking in Ephesians about an absolutely universal humanity. He’s fighting the problem of whether a gentile must first become a Jew before becoming a Christian. In the earliest period of Christianity, all Christians had also been Jews. But then the Christian church had to confront the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon of gentile Christianity. By then you’re having this phenomenon of gentile Christianity and it would foment the first Christian Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15. Paul wins. The gentile Christian need not be circumcised or obey any other of the Jewish law to become a Christian. Jesus becomes the door for the gentile Christian convert.
Paul’s vision of universal humanity makes him one of the four or five great people in history. Though for Paul, it didn’t extend to women. (Even here, however, Paul’s personal practice must have transcended his traditional notion of the role of women in religion. We owe to Paul and his traveling companion Luke almost all of the names of women we have in the New Testament.) This Pauline vision of universality made it possible to evangelize the whole world.
This universal statement to this Provo boy simply blew my mind. Later my experience in Chicago, then falling into the arms of Hubert Humphrey and Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young and Martin Luther King would explain my growing sense of human universality. Later I’d begin to meet, through literature, Francis of Assisi, Thomas Merton, Mahatma Gandhi, and Carl Jung. These would be my guides to the center of my own soul.
Now I have to qualify all this. As I’ve aged, I see the reality of the objective God, the ultimate Other. I don’t think the inner journey is the whole story; it’s simply a yin and yang. I believe in an objective God who’s different from me, utterly different than me, and who’s somewhere. I believe that Jesus is Christ, God’s son, and somehow God incarnate himself. I believe that historical fact and that objective reality. I also believe, as Jesus said, that “the kingdom of God is within you.” There’s the need of an inner journey, of creating one’s own myth, the story of subjective spirituality. And there I had no Mormon help, no [228] theology, and no institutionalization for me to go out on a dream quest, to go inside. Yet in the MX controversy I desperately needed it because I was burning out. A sister in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Francis Russell, who was a Franciscan and who headed opposition to MX right there under the noses of the air force, introduced me to the retreat process, as did Sister Mary Luke Tobin. I met Mary Luke when I was the house-Mormon in an ecumenical service opposing MX in North Dakota, sponsored by the Methodist and Catholic bishops of the state. Mary Luke and I were the keynote speakers at the ecumenical service. She introduced me to Merton. (She runs the Thomas Merton Center for Creative Exchange in Denver.)
The Episcopalian and Catholic view of history, of continuity, deeply appealed to me. I feel the need for connection of centuries. Episcopal practice, for me, performs the necessary though awkward precarious job of accepting the Christian teaching through every century before the Reformation, and equally accepting the central teachings of the Reformation.
Mormonism didn’t give this to you?
Mormonism didn’t do that. I read one of Grandfather’s speeches again. At one point he’d talked of the importance of the Reformers and the importance of what had gone before. But again, to him, it was a big drum roll. A big drum roll for the restoration in 1820. And I thought, My hell! Augustine isn’t a drum roll! You know, the great Protestant reformers, the Church Fathers; this isn’t a prologue to something else. Christian teaching and spirituality have continued from the beginning through the centuries. God is speaking in every century in a magnificent fulfillment in and of itself—not as a prologue to something else. I thought, How tiny we make God. And how tiny we make these figures. Could I really worship a God that snoozes around from the end of the first century until 1820? What the hell was he doing?
At the same time, going back to your original question—it was happening simultaneously, these things were interacting, like an antiphonal chorus. For example, after my work with Martin Luther King, Ezra Benson sent a statement directly after Martin Luther King’s death, attacking that great religious leader, to the general authorities. He referred to King as an agent of the Communist conspiracy and all this horseshit. I’d worked with the man. So at the time I’m having deep [229] theological questions, deep centerpieces of Mormon theology are coming unglued for me. Simultaneously the radically reactionary, almost paranoid conservatism, of Mormon politics and sociology was also alienating me.
You can’t get a more secular issue than MX. And yet in God’s wonderful paradox, it’s the process of fighting a war against the MX and the decision by the air force and the president to base the MX in the Great Basin that would become the springboard for an enormous spiritual awakening for me: meeting Francis of Assisi, Thomas Merton, Carl Jung, and another big name for me, Gandhi. In preparing for the Reynolds lecture in 1987 in Canterbury, I took mainly Gandhi, Jung, Francis, and Thomas Merton; those were the big four.
