Mormonism's Pragmatic Theologian
Like Wendell Berry, Simone Weil, and Henry David Thoreau, Lowell Bennion lived into the question of right living
Lowell L. Bennion: A Mormon Educator, George Handley’s addition to the University of Illinois Press’s growing “Introduction to Mormon Thought” series, is a thought-provoking and inspiring review of Bennion’s life and teachings. Importantly, Handley identifies Bennion as Mormonism’s foremost ethicist. For Bennion, he writes, “the value of thought . . . was measured by its capacity to provide the ethical grounds and motivations to improve life.”
Lowell Bennion was born in Utah in 1908 in a suburb south of Salt Lake City. His father, Milton, served as dean of education at the University of Utah from 1913 to 1941, and Lowell was “indelibly shaped by Milton’s example as a believing and humble intellectual who gave his gifts to the quest for social improvement of others.”
While his parents’ examples helped cast Lowell’s character, one of the most significant contributors to Lowell’s thought was Max Weber. After serving a proselytizing mission in Switzerland and Germany between 1928 and 1931, Lowell—reunited with his wife Merle—stayed in Europe to begin studies at the University of Nurnburg in 1931. It was there that he first encountered sociology, and specifically the thought of Max Weber. As Handley writes,
Weber suggested to Bennion reasons to worry about the risk and challenges of bureaucratization, what Weber described as the rationalization of culture, but also the ways in which values and ideals can be used creatively to mitigate those risks and achieve real and beneficial social results.
Essentially, Weber asserted that the very religious values that gave rise to modern institutions are eventually supplanted by bureaucratic norms and the “iron cage” of bureaucratic rule. To counter this, Weber suggested that values, “including religious values, might help to mitigate the very conditions that they had once helped to create.”
After returning from home from Europe, and following the tragic loss of his first child, Laurel Colton Bennion, Lowell accepted an offer to found an LDS institute at the University of Utah. From 1939 to 1962, Bennion was a beloved and influential institute director who believed that “students no longer involved in church activity have not enjoyed the true religious experience. Religion has just not been integrated into life and thought.” After being pushed out in 1962 for his theological flexibility, Bennion was offered the position of assistant dean of students at the University of Utah and director of a government-sponsored program to assist juvenile delinquents. Around this same time, he also founded a non-profit boys ranch in Victor, Idaho for boys ages twelve to fifteen years old that emphasized hard work, service, and a commitment to excellence. Handley, who attended the ranch as an adolescent and later worked there as a camp counselor, writes that the ranch was a “harbinger of Bennion’s growing preference for praxis rather than theory” (p. 25). Towards the end of his life, he also published a string of “little books” including The Things That Matter Most (1978) and How Can I Help? (1996).
Bennion’s Legacy
A few questions come up in evaluating Bennion’s legacy today. Although some consider Bennion to be one of Mormonism’s greatest communicators, we hardly speak of him at all. He has not entered the pantheon of twentieth-century church leaders whose names—Kimball, Maxwell, McConkie, McKay—are readily recognizable to a Mormon audience. Handley suggests that that is in part due to institutional and cultural change in the church. Bennion believed in a creative spiritual life and came of age in a church with more leeway for individual adaptation—he helped write Sunday school manuals and even spoke twice in general conference as a lay member. But as the church grew rapidly in the mid-twentieth-century, standardization was emphasized as a way of maintaining theological and organizational consistency throughout an increasingly dispersed institution. This in turn diminished the space church members had to make their religion their own through creative adaptation.
The irony is that although Bennion’s ideas were at odds with the emphases of the late-twentieth-century church, many of the crises facing the modern church could be addressed by returning to Bennion’s vision and approach.
Although I had heard of Lowell Bennion, I was unfamiliar with the particulars of his teachings and philosophy before reading Handley’s introduction. When I picked up the book, I was searching for a job, and now, months later, I’m a few months into a new one. Questions of ethics—the righteousness (or not) of one’s work, one’s dedication to a cause larger than themselves, and more—naturally follow, and even the job application process itself is a seemingly never-ending process of involuntary introspection. The onboarding process is slow and tiresome, and you only gradually realize that some weeks you may spend more time with your coworkers than with your family and friends.
Especially during this time of transition and adjustment, the beauty, as I see it, of Bennion’s thought is that he makes Mormonism specifically, and the religious life generally, relevant to life’s little problems. Mormonism, like any religion, is only as compelling as it is applicable to one’s lived experience—even the tiny frustrations and passing boredom that may not feel worthy of discussion.
I feel the compulsion to ethical living, to structuring my life in accordance with fixed principles, but I also acknowledge the temptation of inattention and my own personal tendencies towards distraction, and the distance that criticism (of others and institutions) both requires and creates. Bennion is yet another model, but one that both Mormonism and Utah can lay claim to, of living that is both “high-minded” and pragmatic. In the vein of Wendell Berry, Simone Weil, Henry David Thoreau and others, Bennion lived into the question of right living through a focus on behavior and real-life outcomes. But his was not a utilitarian focus on the dry mechanics of life, but rather a poetic emphasis on beauty through virtuous simplicity.
In some ways, Bennion was an anachronism (both in Mormonism and in American society), and his emphasis on prioritizing the full flourishing of individuals was both genuinely Mormon and positively transcendental. The Mormon emphasis placed on the individual, however, can evolve in two related but somewhat opposing directions. Bennion hoped that the value placed on the individual would inspire people to pursue the abundant life—protecting them “against the dehumanizing tendencies of dogmatism, authoritarianism, and ennui.” However, the emphasis on the individual, as Bennion himself observed in American political and cultural shifts around him, could also lead to selfishness and endless competition as one’s life becomes measured by lone (and lonely) achievements.
This parallels the historical rupture in transcendental thought between (1) those whose belief in the sanctity of the individual led them to emphasize the liberation of the individual from the collective and (2) those who stressed the individual’s responsibility as a member of society to liberate the oppressed and work towards a more enlightened state of relations. Libertarianism and rugged individualism—as advocated or expressed by some church leaders (historically) and many church members (both historically and currently)—isn’t as much something borrowed from surrounding American culture as it is a mistranslation of Mormonism’s focus on the sanctity of human life and the lauding of the agency of humankind.
Throughout the book, Handley makes frequent reference to Catholic sociologist Thomas O’Dea’s mid-twentieth century observation that Mormonism finds itself caught between its push toward education and its pull towards its supernatural truth claims. Bennion’s answer was to draw on and develop “what was best” in Mormonism’s great variety of doctrinal sources, “laying special emphasis on a belief in a personal God and the personal immortality of man.” Pivoting from rote standardization to these fundamental values—the values that can free us from the iron cage of religious routine—offers Mormonism a positive, if still complex, way forward into the second quarter of the twenty-first century.
Fantastic!