Kathleen Flake

Kathleen Flake is a historian, writer, and attorney. She is the Richard Lyman Bushman Chair of Mormon Studies at the University of Virginia. She is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

She was a professor of American Religious History at the Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion at Vanderbilt University. She holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, a law degree from the University of Utah, a master’s degree from Catholic University of America, and a bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University.

Flake researches in the area of American religious history and focuses on the adaptive strategies of nineteenth and twentieth-century American religious communities and the effect of pluralism on religious identity. She also studies the influence of American law on American religion and the theological tensions inherent in the First Amendment religious clauses.

She is the author of The Politics of Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (2004) and The Politics of American Religious Identity (2004). She has written book chapters and journal articles. After the Washington Post’s news story “Mormon Church has misled members on $100 billion tax-exempt investment fund,” Flake responded with an article for the University of Virginia entitled “Mormonism and its Money.”[1][2]