Review
Title: Dwelling in the Promised Land as a Stranger
Author: Scott Abbott
Publisher: By Common Consent Press
Genre: Non Fiction, Essays
Year Published: 2022
Number of Pages: 257
Binding: Paper
ISBN: 978-1-948218-43-6
Price (paperback): $12.95
Reviewed for Association for Mormon Letters by Julie J. Nichols
In 1988 Scott Abbott left Vanderbilt University, where he had just been tenured, for BYU. When he was asked about this by astonished colleagues, he said it was because he missed the smell of sage … or more seriously, because he believed in “principles and possibilities [he] found and still [hopes for]” (xxix) in Mormonism. He spent eleven years there as a scholar-citizen forging strong friendships with others who harbored high hopes for the potential of a university driven by a gospel of truth. But in 1999, after a number of woefully discouraging events, he left BYU for Utah Valley University, five miles to the west, where he continues to teach.
Dwelling in the Promised Land as a Stranger collects essays and other documents Abbott wrote or collaborated on from 1982 through 2017 addressing those events. The essays analyze the supposed mission and critique (and lament) the actual practices regarding academic freedom and equality at Brigham Young University. Inevitably they also analyze and critique aspects of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, BYU’s sponsoring religion, and the religion that profoundly influenced Abbott’s thinking both before and after he left its fold.
As another former BYU faculty member now at UVU, I find these essays massively courageous, much more courageous than I have ever been. At the book release reading at the Provo bookstore Writ and Vision on March 16, 2022, after Abbott read from several of the essays, he was asked by BCC Press editor-in-chief Steve Evans, “What is BYU?” There ensued a discussion among attendees—several of them colleagues named and quoted in the book—providing definitions for that institution as various as “a place for Mormons to meet and marry and get a degree” and “an experiment in Zion education, woefully failed.”
I went to BYU after high school under familial duress, and after a glowing first year in an excellent Honors program became a little afraid that what finally happened might someday happen: I would be found out, a secret scorner of orthodoxy and purveyor of my own interpretations of reality. Sure enough, it happened: I was let go after 27 years (9 as a student, 18 as adjunct faculty) because, said those who notified me, I was “unsuitable for BYU students.” Subsequently, I taught briefly at the University of Utah and then was tenured at UVU, but for years I thought of BYU with repressed anger and resentment, knowing that “they” believed themselves authorized to reject and erase me. Life in this corner of Utah felt very fragile. So this book—well, I read it with trepidation.
You, too, might read it with trepidation if you question your position at BYU or even in your orthodox ward. Not because you might be found out, but because Abbott has already found you out and fixed you with arguments very hard to refute.
The documents are organized like an excellent novel. As a fiction writer, I mean this in the most complimentary way: they set up the situation, increasingly heighten the tension, bring us to a crisis, and leave that crisis unresolved but movingly elucidated. It is not always an easy volume to digest.
The first essay, “Mickelsson’s Mormons,” was a 1982 contribution to the Sunstone Review. It analyzes Mickelsson’s Ghosts, John Gardner’s final novel. Abbott presents it here as a way to raise questions he believes literate Mormons must ask themselves about how we are seen:
Why doesn’t Mickelsson think of spirituality, intellect, wisdom, pacifism, success in the arts and education, and social consciousness when Mormons come to mind? Is the image we are spreading in fact one of dullness, thoughtlessness, organizational greyness?…. The view of Mormonism presented in the novel is a double one, combining the original, highly individual creation of order out of chaos, the stepping out of ‘normal time and space,’ with the unsuspecting, locked-together minds of a mass movement (9).
Though in the storyline Abbott has not yet made his way to BYU, by putting this essay first he establishes three important baseline tenets. First, he has always been thinking about Mormonism. Second, he intends to bring to bear upon Mormonism his intelligence and scholarly capabilities. Third, he’s committed to speaking up about what he sees, even and especially when it points out flaws in the self-proclaimed “right” story.
On this basis, we continue reading.
The second essay, a collaboration with Steve Epperson, is a poetic fusion of two highly trained minds considering the force of temple symbolism in spiritual and mundane life, via Masonry and the Washington DC temple:
[My cousin] expressed concern over the topic of my paper, suggesting that the Mason-Mormon connection might be better left untouched. Instead of derivation and congruence, why not talk about this Church’s uniqueness? Why write speculative history anyway? All history is analogical and speculative, I pointed out. Was he suggesting that history be forgotten? I tried to see things his way but had difficulties getting past my own prejudices. So did he. His faith seemed based on answers whose questions undergird my own. Although we disagreed on almost everything, we still conversed for hours…(18)
The next morning, on my way to the [Masonic] House of the Temple, my cousin kindly initiated me into urban masonry, the first order of which comprehends the computerized efficiency and antiseptic cleanliness of the new subway system. He led me down a swift and silent escalator in a vast, vaulted chamber. In exchange for a green bill bearing Masonic symbols (a pyramid capped by an all-seeing eye), we entered the subway. Conversing quietly, we made a swift car through dark passageways: from Pentagon City to Arlington National Cemetery, on to Foggy Bottom, and into the heart of the city. There we ascended from the secret bowels of the earth to sidewalks where the world’s largest contingent of lawyers and secretaries rushed to work. My cousin joined the phalanx of lawyers, and I made my way up SixteenthStreet to the House of the Temple…(19)
Every sentence in the first paragraph deserves to be unpacked. Why not focus on the Church’s uniqueness indeed? Well, because it is derivative and historically influenced. Then, how wise and good it is to keep talking even when one person gives glib answers to another’s serious questions. Continuing to talk—well, we’ll see where this theme leads.
The second paragraph above is literary and witty. Masonic influences are everywhere in America, he shows. Why should they not appear in Mormondom? Thus Abbott lays down the erudite skepticism that infuses the entire collection.
The essays/documents are prefaced by an eloquent essay in which Cecilia Konchar Farr describes the frustrations of a small but potent body of the BYU faculty in the 1980s. This is followed by William Evenson’s foreword and Scott’s own introduction, in which are outlined the schizophrenic atmosphere at BYU at the time, characterized by pleas for greater and better responsibility as scholars, but also for tightening the religious knot. So these themes shape our reading as well.
Abbott’s next two essays, written and published in the early ‘90s in Sunstone, interrogate what he perceives as BYU’s official stand on the relation between informed thought and revelation, aka between exploration toward growth and strict obedience. Those in authority at BYU extol the latter. But Abbott points out that adherence to rules and requirements may be neither the highest religious principle nor the most effective educational one. Citing increased percentages of new in-house faculty hires in the Religion Department in those days, he asks whether narrowing the field to those who are BYU-bred is in the best interests of the students. Will they not benefit from exposure to diversity and complexity of thought? Do statements from General Authorities denouncing intellectual work, he asks (65), further the mission of an institution of higher education?
He cites statements from the eighties and nineties that I (still employed there) tended to ignore as peripheral, not applicable to me when they were first made, statements opposing intellectual work to faithful membership. Abbott saw the danger of such statements. In “One Lord, One Faith, Two Universities,” he refutes the anti-intellectual stance of Boyd K. Packer and Dallin H. Oaks with quotations from such authorities as Joseph Smith in 1835 (“Thy mind, O man! If thou wilt lead a soul unto salvation, must stretch as high as the utmost heavens,” 70) and Hugh B. Brown in 1969 (“We are not so much concerned with whether your thoughts are orthodox or heterodox as we are that you shall have thoughts,” 78). These latter are statements I tended to focus on. Abbott proves (as I learned to my dismay) that administrators and trustees did not.
The essays from the 1980s, ‘90s, and early ‘00s (essays #1-10) document Abbott’s appeal when tenure was denied, report abuses against women faculty, comprise letters in support of colleagues forced from the university, and favorably review books the “Trustees” found reprehensible. To none of these did he receive sympathetic responses at the time.
These pieces are dated, yes. But they’re historically important and strikingly current. Policies and procedures at BYU still prohibit expressions of LGBTQ support. More and more, what professors may do in their private lives and say or write publicly if they are to remain employed is strictly regulated—and there is no recourse, even if pushback is attempted. Example after example of silencing, denouncing, and defaming brought back troubling memories. I repeat: I am not as courageous as Abbott. In my mind, his essays provide irrefutable evidence of error in the thought patterns and behavior of people who believe themselves above reproach. They are not.
Let us take a breather. Now is a good moment to refer to the beautiful woodcuts that grace Dwelling in the Promised Land as a Stranger. It so happens that Royden Card is married to a cousin of mine, the daughter of my mother’s oldest brother, but that only increases my pleasure at seeing his black-and-white representations of the rock landscape of southern Utah within the book’s pages, where, as Abbott says in his acknowledgments, they “evoke the spirit of a strange and promising land” (xii). BCC Press is developing a reputation not only for the highest-quality provocative content but also for stunning interior design. Card’s art is a felicitous accompaniment to Abbott’s fierce words.
Perhaps my favorite of all the fierce, finely-written pieces in this book is Essay #13, “Hermeneutic Adventures in Home Teaching Mary and Richard Rorty.” Many of the essays/documents in Dwelling are direct arguments against the institutionalized repression of free thought and expression. This set of anecdotes about an unusual home teaching assignment provides a lively narrative case for listening, for connecting in thought and mind in order to connect in spirit, and for genuinely sympathetic friendship as a way to grow together. It exemplifies what is so lacking in the previous episodes of Abbott’s BYU story.
The last three pieces bring us to the present. They include Abbott’s biting blog-post rejoinder to the 2015 policy forbidding the full fellowship of children of gay parents; a public 2016 response to then-UVU-president Matt Holland’s support of anti-LGBTQ statements; and Abbott’s own brief wrap-up of the volume. The wrap-up excerpts a 2020 sermon by his Unitarian minister friend Steve Epperson recognizing that “our well-being is social and relational; it cannot be achieved individually. To be healthy is to be whole; to heal is to make whole; and to experience that is to belong to and with and for others and the world” (253). This, I think, encapsulates the thesis of this book. Official statements about the proper role of BYU faculty and curriculum still so overtly exclude and censure without recourse or reproach that we know we must hope for more essays like these from Abbott. We are lucky to have him to speak up for us. Courage! Reason! Eyes wide open and tongue well loosed! These, dear readers, are sorely needed if the potential for a university-based on the gospel of truth is ever to be reached.