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Last week, the new president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Dallin Oaks, picked his second apostle. For observers, there's always a bit of intrigue about these decisions. They look for clues about what the pick tells us about the Church president or the Church itself. Oaks picked a man named Clark Gilbert to replace Jeffrey Holland, who died in December. Holland was beloved for his poetic rhetorical approach. Gilbert is known for something else. He was the Church's education commissioner. He's a former head of the Church media, and he made his reputation by practicing this business world philosophy called institutional disruption. It's the idea of shaking up stagnant systems: you refocus the mission, you cut what doesn't serve the core.
As a church functionary, Gilbert worked to make sure that institutions stayed tightly aligned with official teaching and these clear boundaries. Supporters say he brought focus. He brought discipline, but others say Gilbert actually narrowed the space. He created tension, even some fear among faculty and employees. Now, as he moves from running systems to shaping belief, there's a question about how his style will influence policy and the direction Oaks takes the Church.
People saw this coming, by the way. The historian Benjamin Park did.
I remember where I was in August of 2021, teaching on my campus here at a public school in Texas, when I started getting a flood of text messages from my friends who teach at Brigham Young University. Most of them were attending an all-faculty and staff meeting that's held every year before the semester starts, and Jeffrey R. Holland was addressing them.
Those of you who know me are aware that I cry at the opening of supermarkets.
Now, Elder Holland, of course, has a deep and rich and long history with BYU. He served as its president. He had previously served as the dean of the College of Religion. He was on the faculty there. He served as commissioner of education, and he expressed, as one might expect, his deep love and appreciation for the school and its mission.
Thank you for every day trying to make this university what it's supposed to be.
But in his remarks, he also took a bit of a more cynical view, saying that there are some within the community who are not happy with some of the directions that campus is taking. He specifies that recently a commencement address had been commandeered, in his words, by a graduating senior who came out as a beloved gay son of God.
If a student commandeers a graduation podium, intended to represent everyone in getting diplomas that day, in order to announce his personal sexual orientation, what might another speaker feel free to announce the next year, until eventually anything goes.
And he even read a letter from one donor and alumni saying that I worry that BYU is becoming too much like the world. It seems that some professors, at least the vocal ones in the media, are supporting ideas that many of us feel are contradictory to gospel principles. This is a common critique, worrying that universities have gone too woke.
And then, of course, following those remarks by harkening to a mythic story of Mormonism's past, when the people building the Nauvoo Temple back in the 1840s would go to bed with a shovel in one hand and a musket in the other so that they were ready to defend the kingdom from the onslaught of the Church's many enemies. Then Elder Oaks said, "Challengingly, I'd like to hear a little more musket fire from the Temple of Learning." He said this in a way that could have applied to a host of topics in various departments, but the one he specifically mentioned was the doctrine of the family and defending marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
Now, most people remember those remarks, but what's often forgotten is those remarks were just one example of a much larger agenda that Holland was trying to press. That was quite clear was coming from the First Presidency as well, that BYU was losing its footing, that American culture was becoming too assimilated, that Latter-day Saint professors, intellectuals, and students were becoming too cozy with the wider world.
And it's in that same setting, that same speech in fact, that Jeffrey R. Holland introduced the new Commissioner of Education, Clark Gilbert, who had most recently served as president of BYU-Idaho and the BYU Pathway program, who was now going to be overseeing the entirety of the Church's education system, including all their BYU campuses and their seminaries and institutes programs.
You may be certain that Clark loves this institution, his alma mater deeply, and brings to his assignment a reverence for its mission and its message. I think it's not a stretch to assume that that same musket fire language or agenda that Holland laid out for BYU faculty that day was probably a very similar mantra or a mission statement given to Clark Gilbert to oversee BYU campuses and Church education writ large, that this is a moment the Church and its institutions need to return to their fundamentals, their foundations, and so it is likely that that became the driving focus of Clark Gilbert as his time of Commissioner of Church Education.
So five years later, now that Jeffrey R. Holland passed away, and Clark Gilbert is called to replace Jeffrey R. Holland in the Quorum of the Twelve. In a way, this seems like the culmination of the five-year voyage from that point, where we see retrenchment ascendant, that we see that that vision has moved from just the peripheries of Mormonism or just secluded in the religious education spheres now to the Church writ large, that just like we saw the retrenchment in church education, we might need to see that retrenchment in all matters of the faith.
This is Radio West, I'm Doug Fabrizio. Today in the program we're going to talk about the newest LDS Apostle and why it matters, and it's important to say that Clark Gilbert's calling to the Quorum of the Twelve isn't just about him, it's what his selection tells us about the Church's new president, Dallin Oaks. Oaks himself has a record of defending doctrinal boundaries and resisting what he sees as cultural drift. So part of what we're talking about is whether Gilbert's appointment signals a kind of consolidation of that vision, you know, a leadership team preparing for sharper cultural conflicts ahead.
Let's go back to Benjamin Park. He's an associate professor of history at Sam Houston State University, author of the book American Zion: A New History of Mormonism, and we started with his own reaction to Gilbert's new calling.
I was very surprised. I thought that he was a possibility in the way that there are only a few general authorities below the level of the Quorum of the Twelve who have such a reputation that their names come to mind for these new openings, but I thought Clark Gilbert had become a name that was seen as perhaps a bit too controversial, as perhaps a bit too divisive, and setting aside the fact that he was a bit younger than what might be seen as a prime age for an apostle. And so I thought that he was a possibility, but not a likelihood, especially given the trend in the Church to appoint international apostles, apostles of color, to represent the growing international body of Saints who probably would like to see their backgrounds reflected in the highest echelons of the Church.
But in hindsight, you can see the breadcrumbs leading up to this moment, even if it might have been surprising at the time.
And it tells you what?
It tells me the priorities of where the Church believes they need to reaffirm, where they want to go from here.
Now notably, and it needs to be said, that Latter-day Saints genuinely and sincerely and fervently believe that these calls are made by revelation. That God speaks to Dallin Chokes, and Dallin shows through that revelatory process calls one of these new apostles, which is then validated by the Quorum of the Twelve in spiritual meetings.
And I don't want to deride that at all, but as an external, you know, scholar trying to provide an academic neutral analysis, we kind of read between the lines of these callings. And I think it makes it clear that Dallin Chokes, he sees as, at least one of the dominant themes of the Church right now, is trying to reaffirm our religious orthodoxy, trying to define our boundaries and make it clear that our growing international religious body needs this message.
Now, there are other themes that he could have focused on at this time. He could have chosen to focus on the growth of the Church in South America. And right now, they only have one apostle from the southern hemisphere, despite the fact that a majority of conversions are coming from South America and Africa at this point. But I think the fact that he chose someone whose primary background is in church administration, especially university administration, shows his interest in reaffirming these religious boundaries, which makes sense. I mean, that's where Oaks himself came from. So I think he saw in Clark Gilbert a very similar background and pedigree to say, him and even Jeffrey R. Holland.
Do you think Oaks and Clark Gilbert are friends in some way? Because he gets to another question I wanted to ask you about. As you said, the Church teaches this is a revelatory process, that God chooses these men. But from the outside, there are those who see other kinds of patterns like family connections—a lot of that. I mean, long-time associations, leaders who've moved through these key positions, ideological alignment with a particular church leader. So what do we know about Gilbert and his relationship with Oaks if anything?
Yeah, I don't know anything personally between those two. But I think it's fair to say that Gilbert has rubbed shoulders with church leaders for several decades by this point. I mean, he was raised in a very well-established, successful, faithful, devoted family that had connections to church leadership. He served in the BYU student body presidency with Mike Lee. When he went to Harvard University for his doctorate of business, he then got in with this very large and very influential circle of Mormon business professors and business scholars like Clayton Christensen and Kim Clark and Henry J. Eyring who really have reshaped the Church in the last few decades. And then from that point on, he is pulled into church administration for serving in leadership at BYU-Idaho for a few years before being put in charge of the church's entire media arm with overseeing Deseret Book and eventually Deseret News, and then becoming president of BYU-Idaho, then overseeing the Church's global Pathway program, and then finally Commissioner of Education, that Dallin H. Oaks and Clark Gilbert would have known each other for two or three decades by this point.
And as much as Latter-day Saint believers will insist that these callings are made by revelation, that they have divine inspiration and that they're genuine in their calls to follow inspired dictates—and I don't begrudge that at all—it's also true that church leadership, especially if you look into history, including the records that are left by many of these church leaders, it's also a workplace. It's also people who follow their own types of proclivities and interests and work with people with whom they get along and reaffirm their own biases and assumptions just like any other workplace. So I guess we probably want to have a cringe comedy on NBC about the brethren like we do The Office. But you could do a similar type of study of how church leaders know each other and how that then leads to new callings and that then reaffirms the cycle of privilege at these highest levels.
What do we know about Clark Gilbert's early life, born in, I think, Oakland, grew up in and around the Phoenix, Arizona area? You talked about he went on a mission to Japan. Do you see anything, any particular experience, that tells you something that might have defined his worldview or shaped his ideology?
All I have is what he has said himself. But I think what's telling is he emphasizes that from an early age, he did not see any conflict between education and his faith, that he believed that getting a higher education, thriving in schools, participating in further learning—that that is a way to build the kingdom. And in turn, those types of skills, those tools, that vocation should be used to build the kingdom. And so I think that's why he has such a devotion to blending those two spheres and denouncing those who do not see those things as in tandem. Because to him, he always believes that extending the fruits of your labor, the intelligences that you receive in this life, have to be working toward the kingdom. And that has definitely been a through line, at least in how he narrates his own background.
You were talking before about the impact of this concept that he learns and adopts at Harvard, along with, as you said, Kim Clark, Clayton Christensen, among others, the idea of disruptive innovation. Talk a little bit more about it, about what it is. Because I want to move to how he then will start to apply it to the Church, but also to, as you said, the Deseret News and to the Church's education system. So what is it? Give us a sense of that.
As far as my reading of work on disruption theories, it's a focus on how corporations fail. And that corporations fail when they become too stiff, when they become too rigid, when they don't listen to the public interests, and when they have so many obstacles within their way that it does not allow the ruthless and innovative approaches necessary to refine their institutional practices. And so disruptive innovation is meant to go out and overturn traditional assumptions, introduce a more streamlined message, emphasizing a strategic alignment, and differentiating our vision with competitors and things like that.
And so you see this play out when venture capitalists take over a corporation, they strip it down and they find what are our foundations, and we build from that foundation in a sustainable way for long-term gains in which we listen to our shareholders in order to build the bottom line. And this message, this disruption theory, has since been tried to be installed across different types of arenas and corporations and businesses, universities, churches, with mixed results we'll call them, because it often dehumanizes a project. It often emphasizes fidelity to the central mission rather than personal expression. It prioritizes correlation over individual diversity of expression. And so you see this play out as different corporations purchase public media companies like newspapers or radio companies, now with universities, and there's often a major conflict of disciplines as a result, where humanists will often denounce these types of approaches for turning us all into robots. And I think in return, of course, the disruption innovators will be like, well, you are misunderstanding how the world works. You are not being receptive enough to the type of change that the world needs. You need to be able to get with the program so that we can have sustainable long-term growth; otherwise, no one's going to have these types of expressions.
And so I find the roots of those types of ideas—of a correlated message, a streamlined mission, a nimble corporate strategy that allows a top-down intervention—as something that then plays a crucial role in what Clark Gilbert brings to his later jobs within the Church.
Well, let's talk about how he then takes this philosophy and applies it. Talk about the Deseret News. What does he do there? How does he apply the principle of disruptive innovation to a news organization?
So he took over Deseret News at a time when almost every newspaper was struggling in the nation, trying to adapt to the new age. This was the very type of problem that disruption innovation was addressed to try to solve. And one of the first things he does is he slashes the newsroom staff by something a little over 40%, saying that this is just dead weight that's not going to meet the current moment. He instead draws from a volunteer effort of these people writing in from their own varieties to get neighborhoods involved, to prioritize the common interest. And further, he wants the newspaper to focus on ideas and principles that A) set them apart from their rivals, and B) supplement the Church because the Church is supplementing the Deseret News, and so therefore it should be seen as an extension.
So you see an actual radical change in Deseret News where before Deseret News was seen as much more neutral on matters, even those related to the Church, is trying to provide an old-fashioned mainstream view of the world rather than just being an appendage to the Church's message. And now Clark Gilbert says, "No, that's misunderstanding the role of Deseret News, that we have to be responsive both to the institution that's sponsoring us as well as responses to the needs of our communities."
And so he even lays out a set of priorities, of ideas that we should focus on: fiscal responsibility, the family, the faith in the public sphere. All these things are going to reaffirm the Church's role, unique mission within an increasingly secularized society.
And didn't work. It was quite successful.
Okay, so by objective measures, you could say it kind of worked. Yeah, they increased subscriptions. They were able to brand their message in a lot cleaner way. They were able to return to financial success. I don't know all the bottom lines, and I know that their subscription counts have been challenged by others. But in general, he and the Church at least saw it as a success.
That's the historian Benjamin Park. He's an associate professor of history at Sam Houston State University. And as Park said, Gilbert's approach seemed to work in media. And then he turned his attention to the Church's education system. He became the commissioner of education. But there are questions about whether it actually worked there.
Last year, the Salt Lake Tribune reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack wrote a story about this growing climate of unease and fear that had settled among the faculty at Brigham Young University because of Gilbert's philosophy. We talked to Peggy about her story and we'll hear some of that conversation when we get back from a break. You're listening to Radio West.
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This is Radio West. I'm Doug Fabrizio. Today in the program, we're talking about Clark Gilbert, the newest apostle for the LDS Church. He's the former education commissioner, known for institutional disruption. Last year, we spoke with Peggy Fletcher Stack about her story in the Salt Lake Tribune. She reported that Gilbert had created a climate of fear in his efforts to bring professors into line. She reported that Gilbert had tightened the rules around faculty conformity and imposed what the article says is a loyalty oath, where professors were expected to state their allegiance to the Church's doctrines on marriage and family and gender.
We're going to play a part of that conversation. This was in January of last year.
Part of his agenda seems to be to implement what people would call a conservative or orthodox agenda. I can't say that he's spoken out about politics, particularly, but definitely about orthodoxy. What does it mean to be an orthodox member? I think it's fair to say in that way, culturally conservative. Definitely the Church itself is anti-same-sex marriage, but the Church has given members wiggle room on those issues. It is not part of a temple recommend process. People definitely can support same-sex marriage, and more and more are, and without consequence in the Church at large. But Clark Gilbert has taken that a step further into a zealousness that doesn't exist at the Church.
I was going to ask what in particular is he worried about by rooting out disloyal members of the faculty? It sounds like it could be said that it's mostly connected to gender and family, and that adds up to professors who, where they stand on LGBTQ issues, is that right?
Yes, because he implemented a new, what they're calling, a loyalty oath that is in addition to a temple recommend. All BYU professors are expected to have temple recommends. That's a list of questions about sustaining the leadership, living a moral life, following the health code, all that stuff. But it never asks about LGBTQ or women or anything like that. This new form that has been implemented, and it's on top of the recommend, specifically mentions marriage, family, gender. Do you have a "testimony" of the Church's beliefs, doctrine, policy of marriage, family, and gender? A testimony, not just do you agree not to disagree with them. It's like you're supposed to have a testimony.
Let me read it.
Yeah.
Does this member have a testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and of its doctrine, including its teachings on marriage, family, and gender?
That's right. But it never defines what those are. Clark Gilbert apparently is defining them in the most rigid way. So if you have to have a testimony that marriage is only between one man and one woman, you have to have a testimony of the proclamation on the family that says women are the main nurturers and gender that would speak to trans. So all those culture war issues can be seen in that language. And so many of the people that I talk to, faculty, have gay children, gay relatives, close relatives. And so they get caught in this place where if I disagree with the Church's positions on those issues, to keep my job, I have to lie. If I tell the truth for love of my family, I lose my job. That's just a no-win for some of these. And at what point isn't everyone going to have someone in their lives? Every faculty—maybe it won't be a child, maybe it'll be a brother or sister or cousin or somebody close in—and all of a sudden they're in this dilemma.
One of the issues you raise in the article is whether these standards are kind of arbitrary or capricious. Explain what is Gilbert's black box?
So the way hiring typically goes is that a candidate gets cleared by their local leaders, religious leaders. They wouldn't even apply if they didn't have that. Then they get interviewed by their department and then their names are put up the line. So then they go up to a department chair or dean or something, all cleared. Then they have to be interviewed by a general authority. And then, and I talked to so many candidates who were told by their general authority, "Oh yeah, you're a great candidate," essentially, quote, "clearing them." Now this is coming from the candidate, so the general authority could have said something else. But then at the final is Clark Gilbert's ecclesiastical clearance office. And all these candidates who believed they'd made it through didn't get hired—no reason given. And they would argue, you know, we don't have to give reasons, precedent, or whatever. But the candidates know this is not an academic rejection. This is a religious rejection. And I don't know what I did wrong. And so many of them desperately want to teach there. They want to know, "What did I do wrong? What can I repent of? What can I do better?" And that's why it's called the black box, because there's no reason given. And it's clearly a religious rejection, not a scholarly rejection.
There's this interesting kind of conflict or paradox that you bring up in your article. You say that Latter-day Saint leaders are ditching checklists in favor of choice and personal accountability on how to be a righteous member. So on one hand, they're like, all right, we don't need to sort of go down this litany of rules. Like, you guys figure it out. You know what it's like to be righteous, right? But this seems to be going in the opposite direction of that, is that right?
Yes, that was so stark. The LDS Church implemented this new ministering system, which is—I call it do-it-yourself discipleship, and from a previous program that required every month, then do sort of bring in lesson, whatever. So this new ministering program is not like that. The new For the Strength of Youth instructions: be modest, but it doesn't tell you don't wear two earrings. It's not, it's about principles, not actual checklists. At BYU, this seems to be going the other way to, this is what it means to be a disciple. You do these ten things. You sign off on the Church's positions on marriage, family, and gender, even though, again, it's a black box. I talked to professors who said they were worried about attending someone's same-sex marriage and someone else posting their picture on social media and them being in trouble for attending someone's same-sex marriage. And that's not paranoia, because it has happened, but at a level that is definitely kind of a checklist.
What are the professors you've been talking to and others, what are they telling you about the consequences of this on the institution itself? I mean, one of the things that you mention is, it seems to be that there's this choice going on. Should BYU be like Notre Dame, or should it be like Liberty University? I think most people understand the distinction between those two, right? So what are you hearing about that? What do you make of that? What do we understand about what Clark Gilbert may want? Does he want BYU to be—not that it's a binary choice in his mind—but what would he make of that question? Like, what are you hearing about that part?
I think it's pretty clear that Clark Gilbert and the top leaders would like the reputation of a Notre Dame, a Catholic university, Yeshiva University. He uses these as examples of how he sees BYU fitting as a religious institution that also is a very well-regarded university. And many of the faculty would love that. But the way you get there, the way those schools have gotten there, is by affirming their religious mission and standards and then giving faculty freedom to pursue it as they see best. And that includes the freedom to sometimes disagree with their Church, and sometimes do it differently than Church leaders would expect, whereas Liberty University has a very strict code of conduct, a strict set of doctrinal affirmations that they have to sign, and constant sort of monitoring of their professors' publishing to make sure it's all in line. That seems to be the way that this university is going under Clark Gilbert, and the faculty I talk to—I mean, all of them love BYU. Well, I talked to one guy who said, "I don't know any open foes. I don't know anyone who's writing openly, writing criticism of the Church leaders. That's not happening." These are men and women who love the school, love their faith, and love their students. And they are heartbroken to think that their discipleship is somehow unacceptable.
Let me ask you finally, can a person discern from Clark Gilbert's efforts here, this initiative, sort of weeding out the malcontents or whatever—can we discern a larger concern from higher-ranking Church leaders? Because surely it's just not Clark Gilbert who has these concerns about faculty members and their opinions on gender and LGBTQ issues.
I don't have hard information, but I would be shocked if Clark Gilbert was a loose cannon and that, in fact, the general authorities are not supportive. I think it has to be the case that he is a reflection of some of their concerns at the top. I just honestly don't think he's just doing this on his own. I also think, as we just said, I think there's contradictions even among them. How much should we push? How much should we push back? The Church itself has been praised for coming up with compromises on LGBTQ issues. They try to navigate that world in a very careful way. Again, they don't demand that Church members oppose same-sex marriage. So there's that thinking and then there's this thinking. And so I think he's in the middle of these different pushes by general authorities, but I definitely don't think he's acting alone.
Peggy Fletcher Stack, thank you very much.
Love being here.
Peggy Fletcher Stack, she's a religion reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune, co-host of the podcast Mormon Land. Her article about Gilbert's influence on BYU was published in January of last year. We'll put a link to it on our website, radiowest.org. We'll take another break and come back in a moment. You're listening to Radio West.
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This is Radio West. I'm Doug Fabrizio. Today in the program we've been talking about Clark Gilbert, he's the newest member of the LDS Church's Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and he's a practitioner of a business concept known as institutional disruption. But now he's moved from administration into spiritual leadership. So we're talking about what his appointment tells us about the Church's new president, Dallin Oaks, and how he's leading the Church into the future. And let's go back to our conversation with the historian Benjamin Park and how Gilbert's ideas influenced BYU.
I don't think there's as much of a large morass of BYU alumni and community who are upset with BYU going liberal anymore. There was this really large outcry by some conservative wings of the Church a few years ago that BYU had become irredeemable, that it had just become like the rest of the world. And I think Clark Gilbert and the BYU presidents in the last few years have largely succeeded in quelling that revolution. So maybe that has been a success. But if you go to campus now, according to the Salt Lake Tribune's reporting, according to anyone who has friends with lots of people on BYU campus, the feeling of fear and despondency is very prominent. BYU professors just don't feel like they're trusted anymore. As a result of this crackdown, as this relentless rhetoric has come from Church administration and these new policies and Ecclesiastical Clearance Office, the mission outlined to professors is not as far from unanimous. BYU has as variety of perspectives as you'd find anywhere in the world. But there are large contingents of BYU faculty who are just demoralized by constantly being ground down by this type of culture war rhetoric and a deep distrust for what they're doing.
So can you apply this theory outside of the education system to the larger Church? Because there's some question it seems that by calling Clark Gilbert, President Oaks might be wanting to emphasize boundaries and orthodoxy, even a kind of return to a stricter doctrinal clarity. So is this also about reining things in, keeping the Church from drifting, making sure members stay within clear lines?
Yeah, I often think back to the wonderful sociologist of religion, Armand Mauss, who passed away a few years ago and he published a really crucial book titled Angel and the Beehive, in which he argued that Mormonism in the 20th century is constantly fluctuating between two poles represented by either the angel or the beehive. The angel represents Mormon exceptionalism, their unique truth claims, their separating from the world with the angel Moroni declaring that the end is near. Zion has to gather to face off against Babylon. And then on the other hand, you have the beehive representing industry, assimilation, hard work, the principles that have allowed Latter-day Saints to better assimilate into American culture. And there are times when Latter-day Saints move much closer to that beehive, and they are being embraced by America, but the boundaries between the Latter-day Saints and their neighbors become exceptionally blurry. And that will often worry Latter-day Saint leaders to the point where they're like, okay, we need to reaffirm our angel aspects, a retrenchment aspect, and pull ourselves closer to that end of the bargain, until the distance between Latter-day Saints and the rest of the world is becoming too wide, and they're being seen as too distinct, and all the problems that come with that, and then the pattern repeats.
So I think the calling of Clark Gilbert, at least based on the things that he has become known for over the last few years, might imply that some Church leadership, especially Dallin H. Oaks, might have worried that the LDS Church is becoming too cozy with the wider culture.
One of the things you've done in making this case that we may be headed into another period of retrenchment within Mormonism is you draw this parallel between the culture wars of the 1930s and this current conversation that's happening about secular scholarship and doctrinal loyalty. Will you talk a little bit about that time, because you've written about J. Reuben Clark, for example, and the part he played, and bring us up to date with where Clark Gilbert fits in the picture?
Yeah, in the 1920s and 30s, BYU as a university took some massive strides toward wider academic acceptance. They had recently become accredited. They have a new president, Franklin Harris, who was devoted to proving that BYU can be a true university. They taught lots of different types of classes. Religion became a popular major, but mostly the religion classes weren't even in LDS doctrine, and they're even sending some of their best and brightest students to the University of Chicago, the hub of what was known as modernist theology.
But then J. Reuben Clark gets called to the First Presidency in 1933, and he and Heber J. Grant, who was going through his own kind of cultural evolution during this time, come to worry that, again, the Church is becoming too cozy with the wider world. They're becoming too assimilated, and especially at BYU they are adopting all these modern secular ideas. So J. Reuben Clark delivers this famous address in 1938 titled "The Chartered Course," where he says that Latter-day Saint education, especially religious education, should be based on the fundamentals. It should reject the new-fangled ideas of the modern academy, and it should instead reassert our uniqueness: that there is something about religion that can offer a profound critique to the modern world. And so he laid down the law, and that address, "The Chartered Course" address, then became gospel for religious education in the Latter-day Saint tradition. It became the calling card that all Latter-day Saint educators had to follow—that we are going to follow the fundamentals, not the threats of modern secular scholarship.
And so I think it's quite poetic that after Clark Gilbert became the Commissioner of Church Education, BYU introduces this new class: "Envisioning BYU," "Belonging BYU," I forget the exact term, in which students are taken in their first semester to kind of learn not just how to be a student, but to learn the proud tradition of BYU. And one of the first texts that they have to read is J. Reuben Clark's "Chartered Course" address.
What's the connection to Oaks that you've been able to see? I mean, we can assume the connection here that the reason he appointed him or called him was for these reasons, but are you hearing anything from his language, from his speeches, that tells you he may be interested in the idea of retrenchment in the Church?
I think it's relevant that Dallin H. Oaks gave his first public address since he became president of the Church at BYU. In those remarks, among his other things, he laid out what can be called soft retrenchment. It wasn't as deep or partisan as some retrenchment addresses, but he did emphasize that if you're dealing with problems of doubt, if you're wanting to go along the path of wrestling with difficult questions, the best way to do that is to surround yourself by other believers and go to approved sources, which shows a deep skepticism of non-approved sources. And including those remarks, he said, don't let secularism limit your horizons or secular education limit your horizons—meaning that don't allow secularism to dictate what should be and what can be believed, but instead, we have our exceptionalist truth claims that should be the foundation of our ideas.
Clark Gilbert is a lot more explicit in denouncing secular education and the need for religious universities to proclaim their unique messages, but I think they're at least of the same tenor.
He probably won't be as explicit as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, I'm guessing. Is that right? And I wonder, how much does the role, the position, temper—if not their ideas, the way they express them?
Yeah, I think there's a few things that go on. One is, if you take the perspective from what they often narrate is that the weight of such a profound spiritual calling, that you are called in the same way as Peter, James, and John in Jesus Christ's time, that that is some spiritual heft that can change an individual. And often they will say that the mantle of that calling will lead them in new directions, it will humble them, it will open them up for more guidance. And we have examples of some apostles who might have been a bit more of a firebrand before being called to the Quorum of the Twelve, and then, you know, softening, in part because—and as a second point—they have lots of obligations.
Clark Gilbert for the last, let's see, ten years since he became president of BYU-Idaho has thought nothing but Church education. Now he's going to be assigned to likely oversee Church participation in Asia or overseeing humanitarian efforts in the southern hemisphere. So I think he is going to have a broad range of duties that might open up his mind to other possibilities.
Well, it does raise the question of how much it really matters where an apostle comes from—you know, his background, his experience, even his priorities—outside of the man who called him. Like what kind of influence can Clark Gilbert actually assert on his own? I mean, he may have these strong convictions or a particular vision, but isn't any agenda just ultimately shaped by the current Church president?
Yeah, and at the very least it's shaped by a majority opinion of Church leadership. And usually they bend their will to the Church president because they want unanimity in all things. So I think it will be a bit of a shift for Clark Gilbert, who for a decade now is used to being the administrator, and now he's the most junior leader of this leading quorum. But on the other hand, every apostle has almost veto power because they want everything to be done in unanimous fashion. That typically means that every apostle has a chance to say no.
Now granted, the realities of these working conditions often mean that apostles will go along with the majority and support the Church leader who they sustain as prophet and apostle. So he might only have one-twelfth of a voice, but he's going to have one-twelfth of a voice on every major decision for the next 40 years, which is a long time. And as those decades go along, he's going to rise in seniority in the Quorum of the Twelve. He's going to learn the ropes. He's going to make the connections so that his voice becomes much more influential. And because he's on that escalator to the top in Church leadership, if he just outlives every apostle above him in seniority, which is likely given he is quite young, he will eventually be president of the Church before he dies.
Have you heard anything significant in what he's said, which hasn't been much, I guess I should say, since his calling to the apostleship? He gave an interview to Peggy Fletcher Stack of the Salt Lake Tribune. I don't know, but a few notable things: he told her he wouldn't say clearly whether members, for example, who support same-sex marriage or question parts of the family proclamation should get a temple recommend—seemed to kind of demur on that, which I guess makes sense, he's trying to be careful. He also said, "I'm not the arbiter of orthodoxy." What are you hearing so far, I guess?
His comment that "I'm not the arbiter of orthodoxy," I thought was interesting for a few things. One is that he wasn't denying that he's the enforcer of orthodoxy, he's just saying that I'm not the one that creates orthodoxy. I'm just enforcing the orthodoxy that's established by doctrine and the leadership, and the way he then went on to define orthodoxy I thought was quite revealing, because he defined it not as the mainstream church teaching or the teaching from the scripture, but he defines it as what the president of the Church is currently teaching. And he specified by saying that when Russell M. Nelson passed away, I then had to shift what I define as orthodoxy to Dallin H. Oaks, which I think is just the perfect encapsulation of how he defines orthodoxy along an institutional allegiance.
Now, a lot of BYU faculty and students will often respond that yes, he's claiming he's not the arbiter of orthodoxy, but it seems quite coincidental that what he defines as the orthodoxy of the Church is also his own narrow definition of orthodoxy.
When will we know what kind of influence someone like Clark Gilbert will have? It seems like the arc of change within this Church, which is sort of tempered by seniority and unanimity and collaboration, lots of, I think, dynamics to sort of play into all of that. Is it a long game, or do you think you'll start to see some changes in church talks, if not policy decisions?
I think with the bureaucratization of the Church in the last few decades, it's very hard for individual apostles to stand out. And when apostles do stand out, it's usually not the best thing. The fact that Dieter Uchtdorf has stood out in the 20-aughts and 20-teens—that led to one of the reasons why there might be some friction within church leadership. So I doubt we're going to see him standing out from the rest of the Twelve, because now the Twelve are understood to be trying to be seen as in lockstep, as a unanimous front. I imagine he'll be making his influence known behind the scenes. All apostles are given a set of assignments where they will oversee certain departments, so it's very possible that he'll be exerting the same type of influence, because maybe he'll be placed over the Commissioner of Education, and whoever replaces him in that position will be having to respond to him. And so I think, visually in public, it's not likely that he's going to be as big of a figure as he's been in recent years, which is one of the ironies. But in the long term, I think his impact is going to be much more consequential as a result of this call.
Benjamin Park, thank you very much.
Always a privilege.
Benjamin Park. He's an associate professor of history at Sam Houston State University, author of the book American Zion: A New History of Mormonism. You can also find him on YouTube at Benjamin Park Historian.
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Our intern is Aiden Onida, the program produced by Benjamin Bombard and Tim Slover. I'm Doug Fabrizio.
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