Mormonism Meets the Academy

Dr. Kathleen Flake on building a Mormon studies program

photo courtesy of Kathleen Flake

From 2013 until 2024, Dr. Kathleen Flake served as the inaugural Richard L. Bushman Chair in Mormon studies at the University of Virginia. In this conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Flake talks about her circuitous path to academia, the institutional and public-facing roles of a Mormon studies chair, and how both the study of Mormonism and Mormonism itself have evolved over the past few decades.

Could you tell us a little bit about your path to this role, and what led you to Mormon studies in the first place? I know you were a lawyer initially, so what pushed you this direction?

Well even as a member, I’ve always been intellectually interested in Mormonism. I think it’s an extraordinary religious tradition. When I got to a point in my legal career where further promotion meant more administration and less law, and also a point where because of liberal-conservative politics I was relatively frustrated at how things were turning, I decided that I had the freedom and the opportunity (I was living in D.C.) to pursue it as a hobby. So I didn’t ask myself when I went into it, “do I want to make a career change?” I didn’t even know what a career would mean, and being a Latter-day Saint, I just assumed there was no way to make a living doing this. 

So I applied to Catholic University, which was not far from where I lived, and would allow me to keep working at my law job and go part time getting a master's in religious studies. Like so many others, if not all, who come to religious studies, I really didn’t know what that was; I just had an interest in religion. So because I went part time and I was working, I had the luxury of studying this leisurely. I took four years to do a master’s. Often we’re pushing people through a master’s in a year, and that’s a huge difference.

So I got a just beautiful education at Catholic University in two thousand years of history and philosophy and anthropological methods applied to religion. Largely Catholicism, but that was the comparative dimension for me, because I could write my papers about Mormonism in light of these two thousand years of Christian history, Catholicism, liturgical studies. I liked it and I was good at it, so I decided that I would see about a career change. I applied to the University of Chicago—that was the only university I applied to—half hoping they turned me down. It was a pretty risky move because I was already making a lawyer’s salary, but I was walking away from it entirely.

And they accepted me. There’s more to that story, of course, about how I ended up in history, instead of in their version of religious studies, which they call history of religion, which adds a new level of confusion to this whole thing. So anyway, I went to the University of Chicago and then I applied for a job, and I got one at Vanderbilt. And Vanderbilt’s a great school. It was modeled in its organization on the University of Chicago, so its divinity school also offers the PhD, which is a secular degree. So the faculty taught in both tracks: they taught people preparing for ministry and also doctoral students. And I was really happy in that mix. And then I was asked to apply for the University of Virginia position, which I did, and I came here. 

That’s a neat story. Thank you for walking us through that initial pivot. I think it’s fascinating. It seems like one of your informal roles as a chair of Mormon studies was to explain Mormonism to the news media, as in you were one of the people journalists would call for an authoritative take on the latest Mormon news. Could you talk a little bit about performing that role?

I did do it as a chair, but I also did it at Vanderbilt. When Romney ran in 2008 and 2012, that Mormon moment, as they call it, I had a lot of phone calls. I haven’t had as many calls lately, which is a good thing, because more people have come into the field who can answer those questions to the extent that they arise. Nothing like they did between, you know, 2007 and 2013; those were extraordinary years. Although other issues still come up, political issues where people want commentary. The part of the role I like is explaining things. That’s the teacher in me. Often when journalists call, they’ve done enough research that they know what the angle of the story is, and to the extent that there’s a strategy on either side, the challenge for the academic is not to get caught into that strategy so much that you’re just you being used to rubber stamp. The other difficulty for the journalist is that they can’t write a treatise, and their work has to be done by 5 o’clock. They don’t want people to say “well let me think about that,” and they want at most two sentences, maybe three if it’s really interesting. 

You were also interviewed for the PBS documentary The Mormons, correct? 

Yes. When Helen Whitney, who was the director—and she’s an extraordinary artist when it comes to documentaries—gave it to the public broadcasting folks in New York, they said it wasn’t critical enough, and they also wanted her to label every interviewee who was LDS. She refused to do that because it just undermines the credibility of the people who are speaking from the inside. I even ran up against that with the New York Times. They solicited an op-ed from me, which I wrote, and then they realized that I was Latter-day Saint, and one of the little junior editors called me back and said “we’d like to say that you’re a member of the church.” And we went back and forth on that, because I asked about their reasoning, and finally I said “if you will say who’s a Jew and who’s not every time you publish an op-ed on Israel, then you can identify me as Latter-day Saint in my op-ed,” so they didn’t do it. 

Could you talk about how the Mormon studies program came into being here at UVA? I’m from Virginia, and it’s not necessarily the first place that comes to mind when I think of Mormon studies. So how did a Mormon studies program end up here?

The University of Virginia has a very robust religious studies department. At least today, they have more than thirty faculty, which is extraordinary. You usually find that size of a faculty only at the legacy divinity schools. And divinity schools differ from academic religious studies departments, and the latter are typically relatively small. They tend to be part of a philosophy department or a liberal arts program, right? The University of Virginia has dedicated an entire large department to the study of religion, and that is extraordinary, but among its diversity, there was a relatively small showing for American religion, which is strange when you think about the University of Virginia and what it means with respect to America’s religious history. 

Around 2011, Kevin Hart was department chair. He saw that Claremont Graduate University was getting a chair of Mormon studies, and that there was also one at Utah State. He reached out to Richard Bushman, who was then serving as the inaugural chair of Mormon studies at Claremont, and asked if it would be possible to have one at the University of Virginia. What was amazing about the contact was that Hart was able to say to Bushman that the faculty had already approved such a position, and that all that was needed was the money to fund it. Usually it takes administrative appointments a couple of years to get put in place, but since the faculty had already voted for such a position, after a few Latter-day Saints stepped up and funded the chair, the deal was struck. So the offer was made to me in spring 2013, and the program began when I arrived that fall.

What was it like trying to get the Mormon studies program off the ground here at UVA? 

The university was very welcoming, and I had a tremendous amount of freedom to design a program. My first task was to ascertain what would fit at the University of Virginia, what would bolster its religious studies department. Because we want to show that we’re bringing something to the table. So what would facilitate conversations with my colleagues? And then as those kinds of opportunities increased within the program, then to start turning outwards to how to invite others beyond the university to participate in that conversation. Understandably, people think that I’m a chair of a department and that I have faculty working for me; that’s not the case. 

The Richard Lyman Bushman Chair of Mormon studies is a research appointment, not an administrative appointment. You don’t get a degree in Mormon studies. You cannot get a degree in Mormon studies or Catholic studies or Islamic studies. What you have is a degree in religious studies with a research emphasis in Mormonism or Islam or religious philosophy or New Testament. Those are research specialties, and the degree is in religious studies. So this is a chair and this is a research professor. And this is a little unusual. It has a bunch of activities associated with it that the chair will administer. They’ll administer the budget associated with those programs. So for example, most notably, the Joseph Smith lecture. This is hosted every year, and it’s an outward-facing event that’s designed to engage the study of Mormonism and issues that are of significance. 

Could you help me better understand what your marching orders were when you got to UVA? And I know you had lots of leeway, but when you got here, did they tell you, like, “Hey, we want you to work with x number of students in Mormon studies per year”? Or was it more “Do your research, do what you want, and if students come to you with a dissertation idea or whatever, then mentor them”? 

No, the first conversation you described wouldn’t have happened. The academy sees itself as creating knowledge: this is both the highest value and the point of highest criticism of the academy. Sure, graduate students are part of that, but they’re not the object of it. So especially in named chairs, what you expect is that they push the field. And you’re looking for people who have a research agenda and who will grow a body of knowledge—in this case, about our understanding of the human condition of being religious.

It’s probably a little bit early to write twenty-first-century Mormon history, but in twenty years or so when scholars are looking at, say, the period from 2000 to 2020 within Mormonism, what do you suspect will be some of their main takeaways? 

That there was a huge bump in the availability of materials that should not be underestimated when you look at the history of Mormon studies—the Joseph Smith Papers project, the increasing sophistication of the Church History Library and accessibility to its materials online. And then the professional training, the various chairs of Mormon studies (e.g. Patrick Mason and Matt Bowman), and the people like David Holland and Ben Park who are teaching in other areas in other universities. And then of course, Richard Lyman Bushman will be the voice that you would follow between the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century that did so much to bring public knowledge about the study of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the fore. He’ll always be the icon. 

Just a follow up—beyond the history of the discipline, what do you think will be some takeaways about Mormon history itself during those years? 

I think that as a people, the Latter-day Saints have become like the rest of their culture, skeptical about religion and they brought that skepticism to their own religion. They have also become completely captured by scientific methods applied to religion, and the confusion caused by those two things is significant. Some among us think that religion is something that ought to be proven if it can be proven, and I think there’s a whole moral discourse that’s arisen in the late-twentieth/early-twenty-first century, a shift in morality, of what matters, that has caused a radical reinterpretation of history and we think that has to do with history and not with us. So I guess generally I’d say we’ve missed how important the reader has been to the reading of the past.