Has BYU Canceled a Leading Historian of Mormonism?

By Jana Riess | Religion News Service

(RNS) — I’ll never forget when I learned I had been blocklisted* at Brigham Young University.

This was years ago, after I had published the comedic memoir “ Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray, and Still Loving My Neighbor .” The book was, unexpectedly, a modest hit, and I did a lot of bookstore appearances and signings to promote it. One of those was tentatively scheduled to be held at the BYU Bookstore — the usual friendly meet-and-greet, where an author reads a couple of excerpts from the book and then spends an hour or so signing copies for customers.

This time, though, I found out a week before my trip to Utah that the store had canceled on me, to the embarrassment and regret of the kind employee who tried to explain. “Unfortunately, we did not receive approval to host a signing ... I am very sorry for the delay in getting this information to you. Much of the process is out of our control,” the bookseller wrote.

It ended up being fine; a friend and I rescheduled the signing at the last minute for another location in Provo. But the whole experience was unsettling, especially because BYU never provided a reason for the cancellation.

“They don’t give reasons and are not receptive to us asking,” the bookseller responded when I asked. “We’ve tried. It is a very strange period right now. One that we hope will resolve itself soon.”

I think we all hoped the “strange period” of blocklisting at BYU would indeed be of short duration and would “resolve itself soon.” But given recent news about historian Benjamin Park’s erasure from BYU’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute, it seems the strangeness is alive and well.

In 2018, Ben was a summer fellow at BYU’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute, researching and writing his excellent book “ Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier . “ The Maxwell Institute gave him funding and an institutional home for the summer, interviewed him for its podcast and trumpeted his involvement on its home page. The participation of a Cambridge-educated, nationally recognized historian of early America was a feather in the institute’s cap.

Until last week, when the news broke that all record of Park’s fellowship and involvement with the Maxwell Institute had been systematically erased from its website. On Twitter, @TheGrandScoobah shared screenshots of what the site had looked like in 2018, when Park was a fellow, and what it looks like now.

Desaparecido. But why?

Was this because Park objected to a speech two weeks ago by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, taking to Twitter to point out the ways the talk was harmful to the LGBTQ+ community (and to academic freedom)?

Or was it his recent piece in The Washington Post, in which he noted the deep fissures that now exist between LDS leaders who have actively endorsed mask-wearing and vaccination against the COVID-19 pandemic and some U.S. Mormons who have followed the anti-mask trajectory of right-wing politicians and pundits rather than the counsel of the prophet?

note: the article author writes of the use of "blocklist": "This term is preferred as a racially neutral alternative to 'blacklist'."

Read entire article at Washington Post