Americanist Approaches to the Book of Mormon 0190221925, 9780190221928

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Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon

 

 

Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon E D I T E D B Y E L I Z A B E T H   F E N TO N and JARED HICKMAN

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1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–​0–​19–​022193–​5  (pbk.) ISBN 978–​0–​19–​022192–​8  (hbk.) 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America

 

CONTENTS

List of Contributors  vii

Introduction: Learning to Read With The Book of Mormon  1 Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman

PART I   PL ATES AND PRINT

1. Books Buried in the Earth: The Book of Mormon, Revelation, and the Humic Foundations of the Nation  21 J i l l i a n   S ay r e

2. The Ghost and the Machine: Plates and Paratext in The Book of Mormon  45 R . John Williams

3. Orson Pratt’s Enduring Influence on The Book of Mormon  83 Pau l G u t j a h r

PART II   SCRIPTURE AND SECUL ARIT Y

4. The Book of Mormon and the Bible  107 Grant Hardy

5. An American Book of Chronicles: Pseudo-​Biblicism and the Cultural Origins of The Book of Mormon  136 Eran Shalev

6. “To Read the Round of Eternity”: Speech, Text, and Scripture in The Book of Mormon  159 Samuel Morris Brown

 

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7. “The Writing of the Fruit of Thy Loins”: Reading, Writing, and Prophecy in The Book of Mormon  184 L au r a T h i e m a n n   S c a l e s

8. Nephite Secularization; or, Picking and Choosing in The Book of Mormon  207 Grant Shreve

PART III   INDIGENEIT Y AND IMPERIALISM

9. Kinship, The Book of Mormon, and Modern Revelation  233 Nancy Bentley

10. How the Mormons Became White: Scripture, Sex, Sovereignty  259 Peter Coviello

11. Nephites and Israelites: The Book of Mormon and the Hebraic Indian Theory  277 Elizabeth Fenton

12. “Great Cause to Mourn”: The Complexity of The Book of Mormon’s Presentation of Gender and Race  298 K i m b e r ly M . B e r k e y a n d J o s e p h M . S p e n c e r

13. “We’re Going to Take Our Land Back Over”: Indigenous Positionality, the Ethnography of Reading, and The Book of Mormon  321 S ta n l e y J.   T h ay n e

PART IV   GENRE AND GENER ATION

14. The Book of Mormon and the Reshaping of Covenant  341 Terryl Givens

15. “Arise From the Dust, My Sons, and Be Men”: Masculinity in The Book of Mormon  362 A m y E a s t o n -​F l a k e

16. “I Lead the Way, Like Columbus”: Joseph Smith, Genocide, and Revelatory Ambiguity  391 Z achary McLeod Hu tchins

17. Book of Mormon Poetry  420 E d wa r d W h i t l e y

Index  439

 

CO N T R I B U TO R S

Nancy Bentley is Donald T.  Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her publications include The Ethnography of Manners (1995 and 2007) and Frantic Panoramas: Mass Culture and American Literature, 1870–​1920 (2009). She coauthored volume three of The Cambridge History of American Literature (2005) and is currently writing a book entitled New World Kinship and American Literature, a study of the way the novel and other genres mediated the multiple forms of kinship in the Americas in the nineteenth century. Kimberly M. Berkey is a doctoral student in theology at Loyola University Chicago, where she works in continental philosophy of religion. Berkey holds previous degrees from Brigham Young University and Harvard Divinity School, is the author of several articles on The Book of Mormon, and currently sits on the board of the Mormon Theology Seminar. Samuel Morris Brown is associate professor of medical ethics and humanities at the University of Utah. This piece is drawn from a book project on the metaphysics of translation in early Mormonism, with an eye toward the nature of the Mormon encounter with secular modernity. He and his wife, Kate Holbrook, are raising three beloved daughters in Salt Lake City. Peter Coviello is the author of three books, the most recent of which is Long Players: A Love Story in Eighteen Songs, appearing in 2018 from Penguin Books. His next book, Make Yourselves Gods:  Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism, will appear in 2019 from the University of Chicago Press. He is professor of English at the University of Illinois-​Chicago. Amy Easton-​Flake is associate professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University. Her research focuses on nineteenth-​century women’s reform literature and biblical hermeneutics. Her work may be found in the New England Quarterly; Women’s History Review; Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary vii

 

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and Cultural Relations; American Journalism, Journal of Mormon History; Journal of Book of Mormon Studies; and multiple edited volumes. Elizabeth Fenton is professor of English at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Religious Liberties:  Anti-​Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth-​Century US Literature and Culture (Oxford, 2011). Terryl Givens did graduate work in intellectual history at Cornell and in comparative literature at UNC Chapel Hill, where he received his PhD. He holds the Jabez A. Bostwick Chair of English and is professor of literature and religion at the University of Richmond. His several books include a two-​volume history of Mormon thought, Wrestling the Angel and Feeding the Flock, a history of the idea of premortal life in Western thought, When Souls Had Wings, and By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a World Religion. Paul Gutjahr is the Ruth N. Halls Professor of English at Indiana University. His numerous books include An American Bible:  A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777–​1880 (Stanford University Press, 1999); Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy (Oxford University Press, 2011); The Book of Mormon:  A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2012); and The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in America (Oxford University Press, 2017). Grant Hardy is professor of history and religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. He has authored Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo: Sima Qian’s Conquest of History; The Establishment of the Han Empire and Imperial China (with Anne Behnke Kinney); and Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Guide. He has also edited The Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Edition, the Maxwell Institute Study Edition Book of Mormon, and coedited the Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. 1. Jared Hickman is associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2016) and coeditor (with Martha Schoolman) of Abolitionist Places (Routledge, 2016). Zachary McLeod Hutchins is associate professor of English at Colorado State University. He is the author of Inventing Eden:  Primitivism, Millennialism, and the Making of New England (Oxford University Press, 2014)  and coeditor of The Writings of Elizabeth Webb:  A Quaker Missionary in America, 1697–​1726 (Pennsylvania State University, 2019). His essays on literature and Mormonism have appeared in collections published by Cambridge University Press, Northwestern University Press, and the University of Massachusetts Press.

 



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Jillian Sayre is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University-​Camden, where she teaches American literature and literary theory. Her recent work appears in Early American Literature, Inventing Place: Writing Lone Star Rhetorics, and Networked Humanities: Within and Without the University. Her work on The Book of Mormon and early Mormon Church history forms part of her current monograph Mourning the Nation to Come (LSU Press, 2019). Laura Thiemann Scales is associate professor of English at Stonehill College. She has published essays on Nat Turner, Joseph Smith, and the rise of Mormonism. Her current book project examines prophecy and narrative voice in nineteenth-​ century American literature and culture. Eran Shalev is chair of the history department at Haifa University and author of American Zion: The Bible as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2012)  and Rome Reborn on Western Shores:  Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic (Virginia University Press, 2009). Grant Shreve is an independent scholar and writer living in Baltimore, Maryland. He holds a PhD in American literature from Johns Hopkins University. His work has previously appeared in Religion & Politics, Religion Dispatches, American Literary History, and American Literature. Joseph M. Spencer is assistant professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University, where his research focuses on both Mormon scripture and contemporary European philosophy. He is the author or editor of several books and numerous articles and is currently the editor of the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies. He serves also as the associate director of the Mormon Theology Seminar and is series editor, with Matthew Bowman, of Introductions to Mormon Thought, published by the University of Illinois Press. He and Karen, his wife, live in Provo, Utah, with their children. Stanley J. Thayne is a visiting assistant professor of anthropology and religion at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Edward Whitley is professor of English at Lehigh University. He is the author of American Bards:  Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet (University of North Carolina Press, 2010)  and the coeditor of Whitman Among the Bohemians (University of Iowa Press, 2014) and Walt Whitman in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2018), both with Joanna Levin. With Robert Weidman, he codirects the website The Vault at Pfaff’s (lehigh.edu/​pfaffs).

 

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R. John Williams is associate professor at Yale University where he teaches in the departments of English and film and media studies. He is the author of The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology and the Meeting of East and West (Yale University Press, 2014). His recent work has focused on new theories of time that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly in the rise of futurology and theories of “presence.” An article from this new project has appeared in Critical Inquiry and another is forthcoming in a volume titled Futures (forthcoming from Oxford University Press). He is also a participant in the program for Public Theologies of Technology and Presence at the Institute of Buddhist Studies.

 

Introduction Learning to Read With The Book of Mormon Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman

The Book of Mormon has simultaneously been all too difficult and all too easy for Americanist literary critics to engage. This catch-​22 is evinced by the clockwork reiteration, at least once every generation, of a specific scholarly gesture that combines dutiful nomination of and practical inattention to The Book of Mormon as an object of Americanist literary study.1 To be blunt, professors of American literature seem to have recognized they have every reason to devote their best efforts to what is arguably “the only important second Bible produced in this country” and “the foundational document” of what is undeniably “one of the nation’s most successful, domestically produced religions”; but they evidently have had just as many reasons not to.2 This predicament has much to do with the story of The Book of Mormon’s emergence, which, by now, thanks to the likes of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Broadway musical, is a relatively familiar feature of the American cultural landscape. In September 1823, Joseph Smith, Jr. reportedly received a visit from an ancient American prophet named Moroni, who informed Smith that, 1,400 years earlier, he had buried the sacred record of his people in a hillside near Smith’s home in upstate New York. Four years later, in September 1827, after various experiences scrying for treasure with a “seerstone,” Smith claimed to have recovered that record in the form of golden plates, as well as related artifacts, including an apparatus (called “the interpreters” or, using biblical terminology, Urim and Thummim) understood to enable Smith to “translate” the plate text from a language called “reformed Egyptian” into English. After a false start involving the loss of 116 manuscript pages, The Book of Mormon as we have it seems largely to have been produced at a remarkable pace between April and June 1829, with Smith dictating the text—​typically with the aid of his seerstone Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, Introduction: Learning to Read With The Book of Mormon. In: Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon. Edited by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190221928.003.0001

 

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and without any direct consultation of the ostensible original, the plates—​to his main scribe, Oliver Cowdery.3 The final product, published in March 1830 by E.  B. Grandin in Palmyra, New York, was a 600-​page tome narrating, in the main, the 1,000-​year history of a group of Israelites who, in advance of the diaspora forced by the Babylonian invasion, escaped to the Americas around 600 BCE. Although The Book of Mormon adduces additional Old World migrations to the New, the primary story it tells begins and ends with a single family, led by the visionary patriarch Lehi, whose progeny divide into two opposed factions—​Nephites, named for his obedient son Nephi, and the Lamanites, named for a son who rebels, Laman. This spiritual distinction is underscored in the text in two ways: by privileging the Nephite perspective—​they are the narrators of The Book of Mormon; and by racializing the Lamanites as undesirably nonwhite—​the Nephite narrative describes them as “curs[ed]” with “a skin of blackness.”4 However, the text also undermines this distinction: by depicting phases of Lamanite righteousness and Nephite wickedness, but, above all, by having the Lamanites eventually emerge, within the narrative frame, as the victors of a millennium of intermittent warfare and by making their descendants—​widely understood by early Mormons to be contemporary Native Americans—​the narrative’s most pertinent addressees.5 By relating this saga of a “broken off ” “branch” of the house of Israel (1 Ne 10:12, 15:12, 19:23–​24; 2 Ne 3:5, 10:22), The Book of Mormon recenters Judeo-​ Christian sacred history in the Americas, most overtly in its account of the personal ministry in the Western Hemisphere of the resurrected Christ, who reveals that the New Jerusalem of his Second Coming will be headquartered in the New rather than Old World.6 Furthermore, The Book of Mormon constructs its own “coming forth” as an eschatological event: an inauguration of a millennial American present by way of a revelation of the American past. And—​crucially—​ not to forget: By the time of Smith’s death just fourteen years later in June 1844, this kingdom of God on earth was being actively built—​much to the unsettlement of many Americans—​by as many as 25,000 people.7 On the basis of that brief description, one can perhaps readily see why The Book of Mormon has been deemed by many Americanist scholars as either too hot to handle or unworthy of handling with care. Since its appearance, The Book of Mormon has been inextricably entangled with the project of appraising the religious movement whose most familiar name, not coincidentally, is drawn from the text:  Mormonism8. More specifically, Joseph Smith’s prophetic legitimacy has been understood by many to hinge on the authenticity of the claims he and others made about the text’s provenance—​namely, that it was a divinely aided translation of a genuine ancient document relaying actual historical events. Evidence of Book of Mormon antiquity has been mobilized to vindicate Smith on two fronts: more weakly, in the negative, to disprove allegations of malfeasance

 

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and misrepresentation in his account of the plates and their translation that might call into question his character; more strongly, in the affirmative, to posit that the only explanation for apparently antique elements in The Book of Mormon is ultimately a supernatural one proving Smith to have been miraculously touched by God in some way.9 By the same token, evidence of Book of Mormon modernity has been made to incriminate Smith as, at best, a “pious fraud”—​someone who came to justify, perhaps even partly believe in, what is understood to be, fundamentally, the lie that the text was other than a mundane contemporary composition, his own and/​or others.10 Because of these particulars of the text’s publication and dissemination, The Book of Mormon has tended to neatly demarcate “religious” and “secularist” interpretive positions along a temporal axis: To accept the antiquity Smith and others seemed to allege for The Book of Mormon was (and often still is) to recognize oneself as a believer, a “Mormon”;11 to commonsensically assume the modernity of the text was (and often still is) to call Joseph Smith a deceiver in some measure and mark oneself as a disbeliever, at times even an anti-​Mormon of some stripe.12 This hermeneutical dualism has tended to transform all discussants of the text into either debunkers or defenders of the Mormon faith. Consequently, academic study of The Book of Mormon typically has been cowed or co-​opted by the charged theological questions surrounding the text’s historical status. In this scheme, the Americanist who might think of putting The Book of Mormon on her research agenda or syllabus is placed in either the uncomfortable or the all-​ too-​comfortable position of taking a polemical stance: To historicize The Book of Mormon as nineteenth-​century American literature may seem to entail a secularist dismissal of Mormonism’s faith claims. The consequences for The Book of Mormon are bad either way: The Americanist scholar disinclined to resume the allotted role of philosophe discrediting a text sacralized by a religious community probably just won’t read it; and the Americanist scholar keen to resume that role is likely to produce an ungenerous and shallowly topical reading presupposing the moral and aesthetic thinness of the text. On this last point, one might discern how The Book of Mormon has, on the other hand, been all too easy for nineteenth-​century Americanists to take up. Insofar as reading of The Book of Mormon has largely been mediated by questions about the marvelous historicity Smith and early Mormons imputed to it, a preeminent form of “secularist” reading of the text has been to see it as an indiscriminate catch-​all of nineteenth-​century Americana. This precedent was set in one of the earliest sustained critical engagements with the text, competing Christian restorationist Alexander Campbell’s 1832 Delusions, which argued The Book of Mormon contained “every error and almost every truth discussed in N. York for the last ten years. [Smith] decides all the great controversies—​infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the

 

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atonement, transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government, religious experience, the call to the ministry, the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the question of freemasonry, republican government, and the rights of man.”13 More than 100 years later, in what registers as one of the first mainstream recommendations of The Book of Mormon for serious scholarly study, Fawn Brodie struck the same note, although she altered somewhat its timbre: The Book of Mormon, she wrote, “can best be explained, not by Joseph’s ignorance nor by his delusions [here she is certainly conversing with Campbell], but by his responsiveness to the provincial opinions of his time. He had neither the diligence nor the constancy to master reality, but his mind was open to all intellectual influences, from whatever province they might blow.”14 Under this paradigm, Joseph Smith is a tabula rasa for the nineteenth-​century American context at large and The Book of Mormon is not Smith’s translation of plates engraved by ancient American prophets but rather a record of his own inscription—​indeed, his overwriting—​by the history immediately around him. Much of the scant Americanist work on The Book of Mormon has proceeded on this model, treating the text piecemeal as a kind of handy prooftext for whatever one’s historical thesis about nineteenth-​century America is, as though it’s somehow all in there. There’s no denying that The Book of Mormon can indeed seem like something cooked up after hours at a conference of nineteenth-​century Americanists, an object almost too good to be true. Just consider: At a fraught postcolonial—​and neocolonial—​moment of the US’s world-​historical arrival, at the opening of the era of literary nationalism, here comes an epic history of the Israelite inhabitants of ancient America, endowing the New World with Old World heft, supplying not only a millennial present (these were a dime a dozen) but an extravagant ancient past that presages that millennial present; and then consider that these ancient American Israelites were taken to be the ancestors of contemporary American Indians, thereby registering the complex links between settler and Native nationalisms.15 From such an angle, The Book of Mormon almost too brazenly serves itself on a platter to Americanists. Notably, these two hermeneutical poles—​of “religious” conviction in the robustness of the text’s antiquity and “secularist” considerations of the repleteness of the text’s modernity—​align in denying Smith and the text any complex agency in representing and intervening in history. The text is either Smith’s mere reading-​off of words God projected onto the seerstone in order to recover more or less wholesale a long-​lost ancient world or a simple relay via Smith of garden-​ variety nineteenth-​century American discourses.16 To put this in literary–​critical parlance, The Book of Mormon has until quite recently been subject to the crudest kind of “symptomatic reading.” By symptomatic reading, we here mean a basically historicist mode of interpretation that understands texts to be definitively shaped, in the final analysis, by the societal structures within which their authors

 

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produce them and their readers take them up. In the finest versions of symptomatic reading, these societal structures are specified with real acuity:  Texts are convincingly made sensitive barometers of their contexts—​of incipient contradictions in the socioeconomic order or of emergent discourses aiming to discipline reality through the forceful performance of language and gesture. But because of the basic source problems attending its transmission, The Book of Mormon has not elicited such subtlety. Rather, symptomatic reading has been solicited and riveted by the grossest historical question: Which of these wildly disparate contexts—​ancient indigenous Meso-​America or the modern settler-​ colonial United States—​does The Book of Mormon symptomatize? The resulting tendency has been to mine the text for evidence of either context, heaping facts to establish a foundation on which analysis of the text qua text should proceed. Common to these approaches, as Grant Hardy puts it, is “the urge to start with something outside the Book of Mormon.”17 As such, Book of Mormon criticism might be seen as exposing the elementary assumptions of symptomatic reading by staging an extreme and thus elucidating demonstration of what historicizing a text may, in the end, entail—​reducing a text and its author(s) to their context. By now it should be clear that at least one merit of The Book of Mormon is how the peculiar history of its production and reception provokes reflections on literary–​critical method:  What constitutes a text? Its context? Its author? Its readers? Hence, it perhaps should not be a surprise that the most recent developments in Book of Mormon criticism have taken a correspondently extreme form of the interpretive ethos Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus have polemically opposed to symptomatic reading:  “surface reading.”18 Common to the range of approaches they group under its aegis—​from big-​data digital humanities projects to intensely self-​conscious affective engagements—​surface reading involves a recommitment to the text as a knowing and forthcoming rather than self-​deceived and cagey source of information about its provenance and intended effects: “texts can reveal their own truths because texts mediate themselves; what we think theory brings to texts (form, structure, meaning) is already present in them . . . . The purpose of criticism is thus a relatively modest one: to indicate what the text says about itself.”19 Although not necessarily anti-​ historicist—​and, indeed, arguably compatible with an ostensibly more inductive historicism that takes the text to immanently mediate its own historicization, surface reading is explicitly presented by Best and Marcus as a deflection of the famous dictum of their symptomatic reader par excellence, Fredric Jameson: “always historicize.”20 At the least, then, by suggesting one might sometimes not historicize, surface reading leaves the door open to the formalist reading practices against which symptomatic reading, in its Marxist and poststructuralist variants, arrayed itself: that is, reading texts as (though) independent or at least insulated from their contexts (a mode associated with the terms “close reading” and

 

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“practical criticism”). (And indeed the so-​called new formalism is one of the interpretive strategies Best and Marcus gather under their umbrella term.)21 In typically ultraist fashion, an emergent strain of Book of Mormon criticism has expressed this tendency by reverting to a rather arch form of such close reading precisely in the name of evading the historical controversy that, we have seen, has surrounded The Book of Mormon from its appearance.22 Importantly, the premise of this criticism is The Book of Mormon’s evident meaningfulness as scripture to what has arguably become a “world religion.”23 The historical fortunes of The Book of Mormon and its eponymous denomination—​the fact that the text, unlike other modern scriptures, has lived on through a devoted readership—​are leveraged toward affording The Book of Mormon a special nonhistoricist treatment reserved for other such religious texts within certain sectors of the academy. As part of a canon of world scripture, The Book of Mormon, like the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita, is made available for reading “as literature,” apart from the specific historical and theological claims its pertinent religious communities have attached to it. Put another way, The Book of Mormon’s demonstrable achievement of scripturality becomes a platform for projecting the text’s presumptive aesthetic and moral value (i.e., if so many people have found such meaning in it, mustn’t there be something to it?). Having equipped readers with the expectation of finding such value, such criticism can then invite those outside the communities who revere the text as scripture to invest and even participate in the process of elucidating that value. The Book of Mormon is thus transformed into a text that will reward serious “literary” reading, regardless of the reader’s relationship to the text’s namesake religious tradition, Mormonism. In this arrangement, the historicity question that has defined and confined discussion of The Book of Mormon is theoretically “bracketed,” to use Grant Hardy’s term, and a newly rigorous and freshly vigorous formalist anatomization of the text can proceed from various quarters.24 In sum, a new regime of surface reading the text—​of reading the text unburdened by “a theoretical or historical metalanguage”—​is seemingly made possible.25 However, as many critics of Best and Marcus’s surface reading thesis have intimated, it is not clear that reading should or even could suspend the historicizing impulse.26 Symptomatic and surface reading might be better understood in a richly dialectical rather than flatly opposite relation.27 In other words, these two modes of interpretation might be seen as feeding into each other in a manner analogous to or convergent upon Hans-​Georg Gadamer’s classic account of the “hermeneutic circle” as a constant shuttling between two different positions on two different scales: one, between the constituent part of the text and the whole of the text; and, two, between the text’s and the reader’s respective historical horizons.28 Further, rather than permanently polarize these approaches, one might see how each is arguably called for at different times

 

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in a particular text’s reception history—​that when certain established ways of reading a text are perceived as having obscured key elements of the text, a recommitment to the primariness of the primary text is justified, which of course skews the secondary field in different directions, requiring subsequent recommitments to the primary text. Indeed, this seems a working description of how the business of literary criticism actually works.29 Hence, in the case of The Book of Mormon, the argument can be made that the avowedly historically agnostic close reading modeled by Hardy is a salutary corrective at a particular moment insofar as it opens up space to see new things in and say new things about the text. But the process should not—​and perhaps cannot—​stop there. In fact, as some reviewers of Hardy’s work have observed, his own keen narratological and characterological explorations of The Book of Mormon often seem tacitly to presume or even slyly to project the antiquity of the text—​in other words, to decide rather than defer the historicity question.30 But it is actually a stronger point we’d like to make here. Book of Mormon criticism again epitomizes, or uncannily hyperbolizes, broad movements in literary theory by pointing the way toward a more dialectical reading practice. In some of the work produced under the new regime of surface reading The Book of Mormon, for instance Joseph Spencer’s, which, like Hardy’s, predicates itself on the treatment of The Book of Mormon as scripture and purports to privilege—​as Earl Wunderli has put it—​“what the Book of Mormon tells us about itself,” a paradoxical truth emerges: A surface reading of The Book of Mormon is bound to foreground rather than foreclose the historicity question by showing just how constitutively the text itself is engaged in a bold experiment in historicization.31 The thesis here is simple: An attentive surface reading of The Book of Mormon shows that it arguably never portrays itself as an ancient text, that is, a text in any conventional sense composed within and thus conditioned by the limited spatiotemporal context of seventh-​century BCE Palestine or third-​century CE Central America. Rather, The Book of Mormon is a remarkably assured and comprehensive prolepsis. Its anachronism is unembarrassedly integral. After all, the book’s point of departure is Lehi’s visionary apprehension of the imminent Babylonian captivity, which is revealed to him in the pages of a book that is given to him by twelve angelic figures who, we are told, appear following “One descending out of the midst of heaven . . . [whose] luster was above that of the sun at noon-​day” (1 Ne 1:9–​11). In other words, Lehi is warned of the Babylonian captivity thirteen years before it happens by way of a book given him by men who will not be born for another 600 years—​Jesus and his apostles. The Book of Mormon is a wormhole right from the get-​go—​its temporality is never anything but extravagantly nonlinear. Just consider:  By the end of the 32nd of 239 total chapters (in post-​1879 editions) and only 40 or so years into its 1000-​year main narrative, that is, only

 

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1/​8 of the way into the text and 1/​25 into the time span of its main narrative (around 560 BCE, according to the text’s internal chronology), the Nephite narrators can already do the following:  (1) worship Jesus Christ by name (2 Ne 10:3), which includes foreknowledge of his birth by a virgin, baptism, crucifixion, and resurrection, and a thoroughly developed Christian soteriology (a conception of how Jesus is “the savior of the world”); (2)  anticipate their own extinction at the hands of their “brethren,” the dark-​skinned Lamanites, 1,000  years later around 420 CE, thereby “spoiling” the narrative, for this is how it inevitably ends (1 Ne 12:19–​20); and (3) foresee the eventual recovery of their record 2,500  years later by a “seer” named “Joseph,” an event that is imagined as transforming nineteenth-​century America (2 Ne 3). The Book of Mormon is a sustained exercise in—​to borrow a phrase from one of its prophetic figures, Abinadi—​“speaking of things to come as though they had already come,” and this formal feature, apart from what it might suggest about Book of Mormon authorship, defines the text (Mosiah 16:6). This effect is fascinatingly compounded by the apparently nonlinear dictation of the extant text, which began around what is now Mosiah 8 and then doubled back to 1 Nephi.32 A strong reading of The Book of Mormon’s comprehensive prolepsis might even lead us to suggest that the text itself supplies as the context of both its reception and production a spatiotemporal frame that far exceeds that of the ancient Near East or a diaspora of ancient Near Eastern peoples in the Americas. Pertinent here is the opposite bookend of Lehi’s vision in 1 Ne 1: Moroni’s peroration upon burying the records. “O ye wicked and perverse and stiffnecked people,” he writes, I speak unto you as if ye were present, and yet ye are not. But behold, Jesus Christ hath shown you unto me, and I  know your doing. And I  know that ye do walk in the pride of your hearts .  .  .  . For behold, ye do love money, and your substance, and your fine apparel, and the adorning of your churches, more than ye love the poor and the needy, the sick and the afflicted. (Morm 8:33, 35–​37) What is suggested here is that the narrators of The Book of Mormon foresee the American nineteenth century with such clarity as, in some sense, to inhabit it and to be formed by it. Implicit if not explicit in this passage is that the moral and narrative content of The Book of Mormon is shaped by the narrators’ professed foreknowledge of the American nineteenth century into which their book will come forth. If we provisionally embrace the ethic of surface reading, the forthrightness, even the flamboyance, of The Book of Mormon’s anachronism can be taken first and foremost as the book’s own instruction for how it is to be read. That is, the text is self-​consciously and committedly anachronistic

 

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and asks to be entertained as such. This interpretive possibility explodes the hermeneutical dualism that has until now largely prevailed, for many Mormon readers and most non-​Mormon readers have often operated on the premise that the text’s anachronism is at odds with rather than at the very heart of the text’s claims. More precisely, both have regarded the text’s burden to be to validate its alleged antiquity and assumed that The Book of Mormon asks to be read as an ancient text. This anachronism becomes a certain sort of non-​Mormon reader’s proof of The Book of Mormon’s nonantiquity and that which has to be explained away as nonexistent or nonessential by a Mormon reader who is invested in The Book of Mormon’s antiquity. What we are suggesting, by contrast, is that The Book of Mormon, in its ostentatious anachronism, may not be asking to be read this way at all. If this premise is granted, the historicity debate suddenly looks quite different. Specifically, arguments for The Book of Mormon’s modernity become depolemicized to the extent it is conceded that the text actually does not pretend to be ancient or artifactual but rather flaunts the fact that its narrative form and content are ultimately determined by an implied reader—​or, more strongly, a prophetically presenced reader—​that is modern. The question of how the text comes by its modernity—​whether through the acuity of ancient American prophecy or the fecundity of Joseph Smith’s modern American creativity—​ need not overshadow the fact that the text asserts with perfect candor that its implied readers are nineteenth-​century Americans. A  reading of The Book of Mormon as nineteenth-​century American literature thus need not be either an uncomfortably provocative or all-​too-​comfortably skeptical reading against the grain but might also be an earnestly interrogative reading in the grain. A consideration of The Book of Mormon as a nineteenth-​century text suddenly ceases necessarily to lapse into the juvenile mode of exposé. Sensitive and circumspect Americanists—​or less charitable and patient Americanists simply put off by the thicket of controversy surrounding The Book of Mormon—​can reconceptualize their default approach to the text not as a resistant reading against the grain but as a respectful reading in the grain. One could say that Americanists are only doing what The Book of Mormon asks by reading it as a text that speaks primarily to the American nineteenth century in which it knew, so to speak, it would come forth. More precisely, Americanist approaches to The Book of Mormon might be seen as entirely justified by The Book of Mormon’s own approach of the Americanist enterprise—​understood as an attempt to make sense of something called “America.” For even as The Book of Mormon refuses to be read as a text squarely anchored in an ancient context, it also eschews a normal relation to its modern context—​that is, as just another cultural product of its particular swath of empty homogenous time. Rather, it articulates and embodies a strong reading of Joseph

 

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Smith’s America as an eschatological prism through which the past can be seen to be seeking its fulfillment in the present and the present finding its fulfillment in the past. In other words, following Walter Benjamin’s construal of the messianic, The Book of Mormon openly aspires to be metahistory—​a radical rewriting and alternative enactment of history in light of a specific defiant fact: the persistence of Native legacies and lives in the face of Euro-​Christian settler colonialism in the Americas.33 The Book of Mormon is a portal to a new historiography and inhabitation of time constellated around the world-​historical event of indigenous survivance of genocide in the Western Hemisphere. It is Americanist work of an especially ambitious—​and, more than ever, relevant—​sort.34 Hence, there is no escaping historicity when it comes to The Book of Mormon, but the specific historicity question that has dominated the text’s discussion—​is it a raging symptom of the ancient milieu its narrative world may seem to evoke or the modern milieu in which it came forth?—​can be radically reframed by way of a surface reading of the text’s fruitful obsession with tracing time’s movement, specifically toward what is asserted to be a point of potentially clarifying culmination in nineteenth-​ century America. By revealing how actively and creatively The Book of Mormon itself historicizes, such a surface reading may in turn facilitate a finer symptomatic reading of The Book of Mormon, a more granular historicization of the profundity of the text’s own work of historicization that may teach us a great deal about the pasts, presents, and futures that might be gathered under the rubric of “America.” It is here, at this point, that the work of this collection begins. The contributors to this volume, despite their manifest differences of orientation, can be seen to join hands in realizing The Book of Mormon’s capacity to sustain the most original and searching Americanist inquiry by, first and foremost, recognizing the text’s own such inquiry. The authors of this collection’s essays approach The Book of Mormon from a variety of methodological and theological perspectives, but all share a commitment to taking seriously the book’s relationship to and impact on the culture into which it emerged. The works in this volume thus speak to each other, at times directly, in fruitful ways, and we have arranged them into sections to highlight some of their most compelling shared concerns. The Book of Mormon’s status as an object always has held deep significance to believers and detractors alike. Metal plates, handwritten translations, missing pages—​all have borne as much significance to the book’s reception as its contents. The essays in our first section contend with The Book of Mormon’s vexed materiality, assessing the relationship between the book’s various physical manifestations and the meaning it has generated over time. Jillian Sayre shows how Smith’s text and other early Mormon writings create an affective link between past and present in the service of an impending messianic future; in so doing, she highlights and critiques the tacitly secular assumptions of previous theories of print culture —​particularly

 

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those following Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities.” Demonstrating the always-​permeable relationship between “text” (the contents or ostensible “inside” of a book) and “paratext” (all of its framing, “outside” features), R. John Williams resists the notion of sidelining history when approaching Smith’s text, and he treats The Book of Mormon as a case study in the impossibility of delineating the boundaries of any book. Paul Gutjahr’s piece focuses on the role a single editor, Orson Pratt, showing that editions of the book produced after Smith’s death reflect Pratt’s investments in systematic theology and scientific epistemology. Though its status as a sacred text might seem to set it apart from human designs, The Book of Mormon never has been a static document, and the essays in this section all take revealing approaches to its textual history. Of prime importance to any understanding of The Book of Mormon is recognition of its status as a sacred text. As the essays in this book’s second section collectively demonstrate, though, The Book of Mormon’s relationship to the scriptural record is anything but simple, and its overt religiosity does not prevent it from engaging with the issue of secularism. Examining some of the book’s most explicit engagements with the King James Bible, Grant Hardy argues that The Book of Mormon not only stands as a scripture itself but also creates a world in which scriptural texts can proliferate. Intertextuality, anachronism, and wordplay, Hardy suggests, are not accidental to the text but intrinsic to its aims; at the heart of The Book of Mormon lies a notion of the divine that delights in linguistic and narrative creativity. Eran Shalev examines the tradition of biblical imitation in texts of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although it shared much with its pseudo-​biblical predecessors, The Book of Mormon fundamentally changed the landscape around these texts, because it claimed that its language was authentic rather than metaphorical—​in so doing, it may have rendered the genre obsolete. Drawing on the long philosophical tradition grappling with the distinctions between speech and text, Samuel Brown argues that The Book of Mormon generates a symbiotic relationship between the two. This merging, he suggests, simultaneously allows The Book of Mormon to suggest that all scripture requires a supplement and to bridge the distance between the human and the divine. In an essay also concerned with The Book of Mormon’s relationship to the act of writing, Laura Thiemann Scales contends that the recognition of textual mediation is central to its theory of prophecy. Through an assessment of the text’s complicated uses of narration, Scales shows that the commingling of human and divine voices does not undercut the book’s claims regarding personal revelation but instead operates as an essential component of its theological mission. Examining the world of dissent and religious argument that emerges among the Nephites, Grant Shreve shows how the text defines a public sphere in which competing voices jockey for acceptance in the absence of traditional religious institutions. Rather than simply

 

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presenting secularism as the endpoint of modernity, though, The Book of Mormon simultaneously considers how revelation might intervene in human history and convert all choices into a singular option. The Book of Mormon is undeniably and deeply concerned with the status of indigenous peoples on the American continent, in ancient times as well as the nineteenth century Smith inhabited. The essays in this book’s third section thus address The Book of Mormon’s depictions of Amerindian peoples and the ongoing efforts to grapple with its unsettling accounts of colonialism, violence, and racial and sexual differences. Reading The Book of Mormon within a larger cultural conversation about the structure of kinship—​one heavily influenced by white notions of indigenous family structures—​and the links between the living and the dead, Nancy Bentley argues that the book stands not as a relic of ancient ways of being but rather as a new expression of modern subjectivity. Peter Coviello reconsiders The Book of Mormon’s fraught depictions of race within the context of early Mormon negotiations of the nation-​state’s multilayered alignment of whiteness with particular structures of sex, gender, and secularity. The Mormon entrance into whiteness, he argues, required more than a simple adoption of “racism” and was, in fact, a brutal and perilous process highlighting the intersectionality of sex and religion with American notions of race. Elizabeth Fenton examines the relationship between Smith’s text and contemporary theories regarding the history of indigenous American populations. Focusing particularly on the theory that Americans descended from the lost Ten Tribes of Israel—​a theory The Book of Mormon explicitly rejects—​Fenton argues that the book presents Christianity as a belief system with numerous, independent points of origin while simultaneously deferring the millennial end it forcefully predicts. Focusing on Samuel the Lamanite’s reworking of Matthew 23–​24 (which appears in the Book of Helaman), Joseph Spencer and Kimberly Berkey excavate The Book of Mormon’s subtle but nevertheless present interest in the intersectionality of race and sex. Unique in this collection is Stanley Thayne’s work, which takes an ethnographic approach to contemporary Native American interpretations of The Book of Mormon. Through interviews with an LDS member of the Catawba Nation, Thayne shows how one reader grapples with the intricacies of overlapping identities to produce a reading of the text that is at once local and hemispheric, Mormon and indigenous, past and future oriented. The essays in the final section of this collection engage with The Book of Mormon as a site of cultural production, both operating in conjunction with existing genres and producing new ones in its wake. Terryl Givens situates the text within broader Christian debates about the primacy of grace and works within the framework of salvation to show how it addresses the lack of assurance endemic to most Protestant belief systems. Although the book itself does not offer certitudo salutis, it does, through an innovative literalization of covenant

 

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theology, satisfy a yearning for deliverance and a will to connect with the divine. Amy Easton-​Flake’s essay also highlights The Book of Mormon’s cultural innovation, noting that, against the grain of a society that positioned women and mothers as the moral centers of the home, it insists that men and fathers take the lead in religious instruction. Reading the text alongside conduct manuals of the era, Easton-​Flake shows that The Book of Mormon might itself be read as a kind of guide for faithful men who would assume an active role in familial religious life. Focusing on The Book of Mormon’s prophecy regarding Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, Zachary Hutchins suggests that the text uses Columbus to foreground the imperfect and always incomplete nature of revelation. Columbus’s significance within Smith’s text and the works that follow from it, including those by Mormon author Orson Scott Card, might be read as an evocation of the possibility that terrible error and fallibility are embedded within the structure of revealed religion. And finally, Edward Whitley explores the rich tradition of poetic writing inspired by The Book of Mormon. Examining a variety of poetic genres, from the elegy to the epic, Whitley suggests that Book of Mormon poetry offers readers a theory of history in which time is neither linear nor progressive. By calling forth a past to speak in the present, these poems highlight The Book of Mormon’s own construction of temporal plurality and recursive history. We have made some editorial decisions for this volume that bear mentioning. There are numerous editions of The Book of Mormon available to readers, and so in the interest of uniformity we have asked our contributors to use Royal Skousen’s The Book of Mormon:  The Earliest Text for citations. Skousen’s edition is the product of a years-​long, meticulous study of Joseph Smith’s original manuscripts, and it is the most accurate version of the text to date. It not only corrects errors that have appeared in other editions of the book (largely because of typesetting mistakes) but also stands as an accessible scholarly rendering of the work. In the interest of making our own book accessible to readers, though, we have asked our contributors to use chapter and verse format rather than page numbers when citing the The Book of Mormon; this way, readers may refer to whatever copy of the book they happen to have on their shelves. We also have opted to italicize the title of The Book of Mormon and capitalize its initial article throughout the volume. Some readers may find this typographical choice a bit jarring, as much writing about the book follows the convention of rendering scriptural titles in roman type and presenting their initial article in lowercase (as with the Bible or the Quran). Our choice reflects a desire to remain as neutral as possible on the question of The Book of Mormon’s truth claims by following the convention for printing the title of a long work of verse or prose. The aim of this collection is to assess the book within the context of nineteenth-​century Americanist inquiry, and the typography reflects this. Finally, except where it would cause confusion, the essays in this collection will follow the convention of

 

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referring to authors, editors, and other public figures by their last names. Joseph Smith, Jr. thus will appear simply as “Smith” in most cases.

Notes 1. 1945:  “Scholars of American literary history have remained persistently uninterested in the Book of Mormon. Their indifference is the more surprising since the book is one of the earliest examples of frontier fiction, the first long Yankee narrative that owes nothing to English literary fashions.” Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith (New York: Vintage, 1995), 67. 1957: “The Book of Mormon has not been universally considered by its critics as one of those books that must be read in order to have an opinion of it.” Thomas O’Dea, The Mormons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 26. 1980: “The Book of Mormon brought to the surface underlying currents of American folk thought that cannot be found in the learned pamphlets or public orations of the day. It reveals in fact just how limited and elitist our understanding of early nineteenth-​century popular culture really is. The Book of Mormon is an extraordinary work of popular imagination and one of the greatest documents in American cultural history.” Gordon S. Wood, “Evangelical America and Early Mormonism,” New York History 61.4 (Oct. 1980): 381. 1986: [In a chapter on “literary scripturism” in the American Renaissance]: “The new bible did not get written [in the antebellum United States] unless one counts The Book of Mormon” [of which there is no subsequent discussion]. Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution Through Renaissance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 183. 1989: “For all the attention given to the study of Mormonism, surprisingly little has been devoted to the Book of Mormon itself.” Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 115. 1992:  “There is no figure remotely like [ Joseph Smith] in our entire national history, and it is unlikely that anyone like him ever can come again. Most Americans have never heard of him, and most of those who have remember him as a fascinating scamp or charlatan who invented the story of the Angel Moroni and the gold plates, and then forged the Book of Mormon as a follow-​up. Since the Book of Mormon, more even than the King James Bible, exists in more unread copies than any other work, that is poor fame indeed for a charismatic unmatched in our history.” Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-​Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 126–​127. 2007: “The Book of Mormon should rank among the great achievements of American literature, but it has never been accorded the status it deserves, since Mormons deny Joseph Smith’s authorship, and non-​Mormons, dismissing the work as a fraud, have been more likely to ridicule than read it.” Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–​1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 314. 2013:  [After quoting Hatch]:  “If scholars of American religious cultures have focused on The Book of Mormon’s composition and reception, literary critics have ignored the text almost entirely.” Elizabeth Fenton, “Open Canons: Sacred History and American History in The Book of Mormon,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-​Century Americanists 1.2 (Fall 2013): 342. 2016: “Despite the intensification of interest in Mormon culture and doctrine, however, there has been very little mainstream scholarly attention paid to The Book of Mormon itself . . . [quotation of O’Dea]. To date, the academy has focused on The Book of Mormon as a historical object and as the occasion for a broader consideration for Mormon culture. There has been important work in the last two decades on Mormon doctrine, the historical place of Joseph Smith and Mormonism in early American religious culture, the origin story for The Book of Mormon, and The Book of Mormon as an object in print history. But until quite recently, the text between the covers has been largely ignored by non-​LDS scholars.” Laura Thiemann Scales, “A New ‘Mormon Moment’: The Book of Mormon in Literary Studies,” Literature Compass 13.11 (Nov. 2016): 735–​743.

 

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2. Philip L. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible: The Place of Latter-​day Saints in American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 41; Fenton, “Open Canons,” 341. 3. For broad accounts of the translation process that synthesize the relevant primary and secondary sources, see Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith:  Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005), 57–​108; Terryl L. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 8–​42; for a bold new theory of Book of Mormon translation that sympathetically regards Smith’s creative role, see Ann Taves, “History and the Claims of Revelation: Joseph Smith and the Materialization of the Golden Plates,” Numen 61 (2014):  182–​207; for the latest considerations of what “translation” may have meant to Smith, see Michael Hubbard Mackay, Mark Ashurst-​McGee, and Brian M. Hauglid, eds., Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects and the Making of Mormonism (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, forthcoming); for a useful contextualization of Smith’s treasure-​seeking activities, see Alan Taylor, “The Early Republic’s Supernatural Economy: Treasure Seeking in the American Northeast,1780–​1830,” American Quarterly 38.1 (Spring 1986):  6–​34; for a review of the particulars of Smith’s treasure seeking, see Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, 41–​52; for a more in-​depth consideration, see Mark Ashurst-​McGee, “A Pathway to Prophethood: Joseph Smith as Rodsman, Village Seer, and Judeo-​Christian Prophet” (M.A. thesis, Utah State University, 2000); Michael D. Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, rev. ed. (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1998), esp. 30–​65. 4. Royal Skousen, ed., The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 90; 2 Ne 5:21. Following Skousen’s own admission into his critical text of Orson Pratt’s 1879 editing of The Book of Mormon into chapter and verse, subsequent citations will be made parenthetically by book, chapter, and verse. 5. On race and the theopolitics of form in The Book of Mormon, see Jared Hickman, “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse,” American Literature 86.3 (Sep. 2014): 429–​461. 6. According to Bloom, The Book of Mormon’s imagination of the resurrected Christ’s ministry in the Americas is its “greatest single imaginative breakthrough . . . . The largest heresy among all those that constitute the American Religion is this most implicit and profound of all heresies: the American walks alone with Jesus in a perpetually expanded interval founded upon the forty days’ sojourn of the risen Son of Man.” Bloom, American Religion, 40. 7. See this estimate on the LDS Church’s official website: https://​www.lds.org/​ensign/​1999/​ 07/​a-​look-​at-​the-​church-​18051844?lang=eng. 8. In August 2018, current president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints, Russell M.  Nelson, discouraged the use of “Mormon Church” and “Mormonism,” but the terms have long obtained in scholarly discussions of the historical phenomenon with no disparaging implication, see https://​www.lds.org/​church/​news/​mormon-​is-​out-​church-​ releases-​statement-​on-​how-​to-​refer-​to-​the-​organization?lang=eng. 9. On the relationship of The Book of Mormon to the vindication of Smith’s prophethood and the religion he founded, see Givens, By the Hand of Mormon, 62–​88; and, before him, Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 20–​39. 10. For the most sustained application of the “pious fraud” theory, see Dan Vogel, Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2004), xvii–​xviii; for a postsecularist critique of that theory, see Taves, “History and the Claims of Revelation,” 184–​187. 11. Empirically speaking, there are many self-​identified Mormons who don’t believe The Book of Mormon is a straightforward translation of an ancient text. However, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints continues to draw certain bright lines that suggest the coupling of Mormon bona fides with belief in the historicity of The Book of Mormon. Hence, Mormon commentators like Blake Ostler and Brant Gardner, even as they acknowledge on the basis of close study of the text and Smith’s other “translation” projects, such as The Book of Abraham, that The Book of Mormon text includes a healthy dose of Smith’s nineteenth-​century thought and expression, still insist on some core antiquity vested in the indisputable artifactual reality of the golden plates. Blake Ostler, “The Book of Mormon as a Modern Expansion of an Ancient Source,” Dialogue:  A Journal of Mormon Thought 20.1 (Spring 1987):  66–​123;

 

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Brant Gardner, The Gift and Power: Translating the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2011). Revealing here is the resistance raised when some self-​identified Mormons openly proposed that spiritual commitment could be maintained even if The Book of Mormon were “inspired fiction.” See Brent Lee Metcalfe, ed., New Approaches to the Book of Mormon: Explorations in Critical Methodology (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1993); and the response in Daniel C. Peterson, ed., Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 6.1 (1994), https://​publications.mi.byu.edu/​periodical/​review-​volume-​6-​issue-​number-​1/​. 12. Work like that of Taves, “History and the Claims of Revelation,” importantly models how a non-​Mormon and self-​identified “secular” scholarly assumption that there were no golden plates and The Book of Mormon is fully a nineteenth-​century text need not entail imputations of delusion or fraud to Smith and in fact might involve substantial valorization of the text’s aesthetic and theological achievement. Taves’s trail was blazed somewhat by the Methodist historian Jan Shipps and the Jewish literary critic Harold Bloom. See Shipps, Mormonism, 38–​39; Bloom, American Religion, 79–​128. 13. Alexander Campbell, Delusions:  An Analysis of the Book of Mormon (Boston:  Benjamin H. Greene, 1832), 13. 14. Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 69. 15. The Book of Mormon might be fruitfully read in relation to Americanist discussions of the need to generate “a usable past,” or, as hemispheric Americanist critic Lois Parkinson has updated the term—​an “anxiety of origins” as opposed to Bloom’s famous “anxiety of influence.” Lois Parkinson, The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 1997). The working out of an anxiety of origins led to the indigenous inhabitants of the North American continent, and there is a rich literature on US settler-​colonial nationalism’s attempt to indigenize itself even as it displaced and decimated indigenous nations. Renée L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England); Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Cheryl Walker, Indian Nation: Native American Literature and Nineteenth-​Century Nationalisms (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1997), to enumerate but a few. On the pertinence of The Book of Mormon to the development of US literary nationalism, see any number of the quotations in note 1. 16. What might be called the transcription theory—​that Joseph Smith somehow saw and dictated the English translation of the plate text—​is based on some early accounts by assistants and spectators of Smith’s translation process that have then been strongly seconded by Royal Skousen’s interpretations of the manuscript history. For a recent, emphatic statement of this view by a disciple of Skousen’s, see Stanford Carmack, “Joseph Smith Read the Words,” Interpreter:  A Journal of Mormon Scripture 18 (2016):  41–​64. A  recent example of vaguely considering The Book of Mormon as a compendium of nineteenth-​century Americana: “[The Book of Mormon] is . . . an American work of the early nineteenth century. It has a distinctly American character. It is a story about people who crossed an ocean and settled in a wilderness. It is a story of bringing the Gospel to the Americas. It is a story that people of the Jacksonian era could easily relate to and understand because it is part of a very American tradition. Moreover, it radiates revivalist passion, frontier culture and folklore, popular concepts about Indians, and the democratic impulses and political movements of its time.” Robert V. Remini, Joseph Smith (New York: Penguin, 2002), 72. Vogel, in Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet, offers a more granular version of the same, attempting to trace every element of The Book of Mormon to a local or national event that Joseph Smith personally got wind of, suggesting that the production of the text operated by a kind of allegorical automatism. 17. Grant Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon:  A Reader’s Guide (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2010), xiii. 18. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108.1 (Fall 2009): 1–​21. 19. Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 11. 20. Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 15. 21. Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 13–​14. 22. Most salient here are Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon, and Joseph Spencer, An Other Testament: On Typology, 2nd ed. (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious

 

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Scholarship, 2016). In the preface to the second edition of his work, Spencer seems to distinguish himself from Hardy by suggesting that, rather than “bracket” the historicity question—​ Hardy’s term—​he “presuppose[s]‌the Book of Mormon’s historicity but . . . do[es] not much care about it.” In either case, the historicity question is ostensibly deprioritized in the face of a call to, first and foremost, read the text more closely. See also Scales, “New ‘Mormon Moment,’  ” 740–​741. 23. Both Hardy and Spencer make this move, albeit in different ways. Hardy simply observes The Book of Mormon’s “importance . . . in the lives of more than thirteen million Latter-​day Saints around the world” and reasons that insofar as the text “may someday take a place not only with the Bible but also with the Daodejing, the Dead Sea Scrolls . . . as one of the world’s foremost religious texts . . . a close analysis of Mormon scripture may also offer broad insights into the nature of scriptural production and human religious yearnings” (Understanding the Book of Mormon, xii). The Book of Mormon thus becomes a staple of a kind of old-​school religious studies literacy. Spencer professes not to “care” about The Book of Mormon’s historicity, but, in a kind of overcompensation, absolutely insists on the text’s scripturality, which for him seems to be bound up with its capacity to generate what he is most interested in: a theological richness that he hopes will appeal beyond the “already-​believing.” 24. Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon, xvi. 25. Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 9. 26. See the essays collected in “Dossier:  Surface Reading,” Mediations:  Journal of the Marxist Literary Group 28.2 (Spring 2015); Timothy Bewes, “Reading with the Grain,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 21.3 (Sep.  2010):  1–​ 33; Tom Eyers, Speculative Formalism:  Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present (Chicago:  Northwestern University Press, 2017); Carolyn Lesjak, “Reading Dialectically,” Criticism 55.2 (Spring 2013):  233–​ 277; Julie Orlemanski, “Scales of Reading,” Exemplaria:  Medieval, Early Modern, Theory 26.2–​3 (Summer/​Fall 2014): 215–​233; Ellen Rooney, “Live Free or Describe: The Reading Effect and the Persistence of Form,” Differences:  A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 21.3 (Sep. 2010): 112–​139. 27. Take Lesjak’s useful redefinition of “surface reading” as a critique of the rigidification of symptomatic reading:  “The very fact that  .  .  .  protocols [of Marxist criticism and symptomatic reading, more generally, can so readily be catalogued] registers their failure to be properly dialectical, as well as their attachment to old lessons already learned. They succumb to a success regarding method, whose failure surface reading aims to correct” (“Reading Dialectically,” 250). 28. Hans-​Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New  York:  Continuum, 2004); see also Orlemanski, “Scales of Reading,” 225–​228, on the pertinence of the “hermeneutic” for pushing back against “surface reading.” 29. Jesse Rosenthal, “Maintenance Work: On Tradition and Development,” b2o (Oct. 6, 2016), http://​w ww.boundary2.org/​2016/​10/​jesse-​rosenthal-​maintenance-​work-​on-​tradition-​ and-​development/​ 30. Elizabeth Fenton, “Understanding the Book of Mormon,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 25 (2016): 47–​50; for an interesting account of opportunistic uses of poststructuralist theory by some LDS scholars, see John-​Charles Duffy, “Can Deconstruction Save the Day: ‘Faithful Scholarship’ and the Uses of Postmodernism,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 41.1 (Spring 2008): 1–​33. 31. Spencer, An Other Testament; Earl M. Wunderli, An Imperfect Book: What the Book of Mormon Tells Us About Itself (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2013). 32. Brent Lee Metcalfe, “The Priority of Mosiah:  A Prelude to Book of Mormon Exegesis: Explorations in Critical Methodology,” in New Approaches to the Book of Mormon, Brent Lee Metcalfe, ed. (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1994), 395–​444. 33. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” and “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History’,” in Selected Writings, 4 vols., Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, eds. (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1996–​2003), 4:  389–​411; Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks, eds., Decolonizing Mormonism:  Approaching a Postcolonial Zion (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2018), Jared Hickman,“600 bce–​1830 ce: The Book of Mormon and the Lived Eschatology of Settler Colonialism” in Timelines of American Literature,

 

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Cody Marrs and Christopher Hager, eds. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 67–​84; Hickman, “Amerindian Apocalypse”; Jared Hickman, “The Perverse Core of Mormonism: The Book of Mormon, Genetic Secularity, and Messianic Decoloniality,” in “To Be Learned is Good”: Faith and Scholarship Among the Latter-​day Saints, J. Spencer Fluhman, Kathleen Flake, and Jed Woodworth, eds. (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2018), 131–​145; Adam S. Miller, “Messianic History: Walter Benjamin and the Book of Mormon,” in Rube Goldberg Machines: Essays in Mormon Theology (Salt Lake City, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2012), 21–​35. 34. Nineteenth-​century Americanist literary studies await further overhaul from the standpoint of indigenous critical theory. See Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

 

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Books Buried in the Earth The Book of Mormon, Revelation, and the Humic Foundations of the Nation Jillian Sayre I went unto the angel, and said unto him, Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey. And I took the little book out of the angel’s hand and ate it up: and it was in my mouth sweet as honey; and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter. And he said unto me, Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations and tongues, and kings. –​Revelation 10:9–​11 There were four major people who abridged The Book of Mormon. They were all qualified to address the future because they had seen it. –​Monte S. Nyman, I, Nephi, Wrote this Record

Empty Tombs and Tabernacles of Clay On a windy April day, in a grove just a short distance from the temple at Nauvoo, Illinois, Joseph Smith spoke to a congregation of Saints about a subject “of the greatest importance, and the most solemn of any that can occupy our attention.” That is, Smith said, “the subject of the dead.”1 The sermon is widely known as the King Follett discourse, named after the fallen Saint whose death precipitated Smith’s larger consideration of the lost. In the sermon, considered “the Prophet’s greatest” and “the very life-​blood of Mormon theology,”2 Smith outlines “the relation of man to God,” a relation that requires us to better understand man’s relation to the dead.3 “I will open your eyes in relation to the dead,” Smith tells his followers; it is a relation marked by “responsibility,” he says, “the awful responsibility, that rests upon us in relation to our dead.”4 Smith’s discourse preaches a doctrine of sealing, the work of binding mortal kinship as immortal relation, a practice that recent scholars like Douglas Davies Jillian Sayre, Books Buried in the Earth: The Book of Mormon, Revelation, and the Humic Foundations of the Nation. In: Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon. Edited by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190221928.003.0002

 

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and Samuel Morris Brown have used as central evidence of Mormonism’s grappling with and ultimate rejection of death itself.5 But while Davies and Brown focus on the theological conquest of death, I would draw your attention to the materialism of this triumph over mortality. In order for the finality and dislocation of death to be conquered, the surviving community must embrace the dead through the material of their flesh. In his sermon, Smith insists that the eternal quality of man, his soul, is not simply the disembodied spirit, freed from the mortal body, but rather a marriage of the spirit, which is always eternal, with the “tabernacle of clay” that is the human form, that which will be made eternal in the “fulness of the dispensation of times.”6 Because of their temporary absence from that “tabernacle,”7 the dead rely on the living to fulfill their embodied religious practices in their place. “The greatest responsibility in this world that God has laid upon us,” Smith tells those gathered Saints, “is to seek after our dead. The apostle says, ‘They without us cannot be made perfect.’ ”8 Salvation, Smith says, can only be accomplished in this world, requiring precisely that space of the body, the material fact of the tabernacle.9 When the conference continues the following day, Smith clarifies the physical practice of seeking after the dead: “[F]‌or men to be baptized for their dead . . . every man who wishes to save his father, mother, brother, sisters and friends, must go through all the ordinances for each one of them separately, the same as for himself, from baptism to ordination, washings and anointings, and receive all the keys and powers of the Priesthood, the same as for himself.”10 In this structure, the dead call out to the living for their continued care, not in the lamentation of kinship ruptured, but in the physical rituals that affirm, solidify, seal that relation. In the repetition of religious practices as (or in the place of) the other, the baptism and anointing of the dead require the living to identify with—​and as—​the dead themselves, to act as (and in the interest of) another. In “vanquishing death,” as Brown describes it, the Saints have to be made responsible—​to respond—​to the dead by making their bodies a shared space, a space of community, a site of restoration and reconciliation. The physical space of the body, then, is not the site of individuation, but rather a space for congregation, yoking together the past and the present in the service of a future that has already been written. But this tabernacle of clay also connects the living to the earth as the site of its origins, the raw material of its construction. In consoling the faithful on the “subject of the dead,” Smith traces out this origin story, written on the body. At “the morn of creation,”11 Smith reminds his listeners, “God made a tabernacle and put a spirit into it and it became a living soul . . . . God made man out of the earth and put into him Adam’s spirit.”12 Over and over he insists on the material realities of creation, not as a way of dismissing the body as the other of the eternal spirit, the physical matter that must be sloughed off to enter eternity, but in sacralizing the material itself as

 



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inextricable to a doctrine of divine creation, salvation, and, ultimately, resurrection. But this spatializing effect isn’t exhausted by the connection Smith draws between the mortal body and its material origins; the tabernacle of clay connects the living to their historical origins as well. The tabernacle was not constructed of clay gathered in some faraway place, but rather from the American landscape itself, the land of Zion. In 1831, it was revealed to Smith that the LDS faithful would inherit the holy land of Zion, “the land which I will consecrate unto my people, which are a remnant of Jacob, and them who are heirs according to the covenant.”13 The consecrated space functions as the ligature that binds the contemporary community with the historical one; they are a “remnant,” those who remain, who survive, who stand to inherit. Just as the living body becomes a site of communal expression in the repeated performance of ordinances, the land also functions as the site of restoration. This “land of promise” would be an “everlasting inheritance” for the community, a millennial space in which the fullness of time restores the community to the ur-​clay of Eden itself.14 When Smith returns to his “subject of the dead” the following day, he emphasizes this connection between land, body, and community. Weakened by the exertion of the long sermon the day before, Smith defers to the elders to guide the conference, but not before proclaiming “a great, grand, and glorious revelation”15 regarding the place of this communion with the dead; “there must be,” he says, “a particular spot for the salvation of our dead.”16 This place, he says, is Zion, which is no longer understood as restricted to the original revelation’s location in Missouri, but rather coterminous with the country: The whole of America is Zion itself from north to south, and is described by the Prophets who declare that it is the Zion where the mountain of the Lord should be, and that it should be in the center of the land . . . . I have received instructions from the Lord that from henceforth wherever the Elders of Israel shall build up churches and branches unto the Lord throughout the States, there shall be a stake of Zion.17 The Promised Land, the land of our inheritance, is the whole of the United States. In this essay, I  would like to connect this insistent materialism that marks the formation and sustaining of the LDS community with and through the dead with the prominent critical narrative that intertwines print culture and national culture in the New World. This connection was made famous by Benedict Anderson, who argues in Imagined Communities that much of the eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century struggles for national recognition were effects of the growth of national print cultures.18 The growth of print, Anderson argues, constructed the imagined borders of the nation, giving it a sense of enclosed space that is

 

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bounded both physically and temporally. These borders made the space imaginable and, by its limitation in time, its history inscribable. The circulation of shared texts connected the population, giving them an experience of “simultaneity,” a consumption in kind that connected readers across the geographic expanse of their community.19 Reading, particularly for Anderson the reading of regional newspapers,20 is a shared private experience in which the reader is aware “that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by . . . others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.”21 This awareness allows readers to construct an idea of a people whom they could never completely know through contact. The nation is thus imagined through the text “because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-​members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”22 Anderson argues that this new sense of community, based on the commodity culture that both includes and is encouraged by the growth of print, leads to the modern understanding of the nation as a limited sovereign community that conceives of itself as “a deep horizontal comradeship,”23 a feeling of community that depends, in Anderson’s structure, upon the shared foundation of the “homogenous, empty time” of “temporal coincidence  .  .  .  measured by clock and calendar.”24 This is marked in reading, he argues, by “the essential connection” among readers created by “the date at the top of the newspaper,” the organizing medium that lends cohesion to its narrative, a shared location in time. The shared experience that consolidates community, Anderson is careful to point out, is not the “simultaneity of the past and future in an instantaneous present,” the mark of prophecy or “Messianic time.” Instead, this is the equalizing or democratizing “meanwhile” of the un-​Event-​ful secular or scientific experience of time.25 But while Anderson juxtaposes this calendrical time to the “prefiguring and fulfillment of Messianic time,” communities like the LDS, and by extension the early national romances with which I will argue it shares its tropes, are national print communities as well, and demonstrate the potential of a readership to consolidate through the shared consumption of revelation, the messianic time of prophetic history. If the King Follett discourse effectively demonstrates a materialism that builds and sustains a community through a cathexis of bodies and land, the production and circulation of the sermon also serve as a useful example of the way in which the LDS community imagined itself through the text. Smith did not read from a prepared text that April, and there are no direct transcriptions of the sermon. Instead, what remains is the recording of the sermon by four “trained” secretaries, which demonstrates a span of textual variance. After Smith’s death just a few months after the sermon, the records of the April discourse were compared and compiled in different combinations for Church publications, first the newspaper Times and Seasons (August 15, 1844), and later for official

 



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histories like the “Manuscript History of the Church.”26 The records of the sermon and their publication in various formats speak to the importance of creating and disseminating church documents for the early LDS community, a “documania” that characterized the community as one shaped by and through the press.27 When Fawn Brodie set out to write her famous biography of Smith, she finds no “lack of biographical data, for Joseph Smith dared to found a new religion in the age of printing. When he said ‘Thus saith the Lord!’ the words were copied down by secretaries and congealed forever into print.”28 Brodie nonetheless finds it difficult to map the structures of historiography and biography, that of linear narrative time in the former and individuation in the latter, onto her encounter with the sizable Smith corpus. Brodie details the variance and contradictory conclusions of Smith biographies as evidence that perhaps Smith’s declaration that “No man knows my history,” a claim the Prophet makes at the conclusion of the same Follett discourse we have been tracing, was more prophecy than description. “The reason for these disparate opinions,” she writes, is in the form and purpose of his writing. “His story,” she concludes, regarding his six-​volume autobiography, “is the antithesis of confession,” neither singular nor private. His autobiography is the official history of the Church; it is not a personal document but a communal one. This official history of an institution is an “I” that is at the same time a “we.” Even in its production (Smith rarely wrote for himself, choosing instead to dictate or defer to secretaries), the body of and behind the text is in fact multiple. Instead of revealing the object of its study, the individual, Smith’s autobiography presents an individual identified completely with, and thus consumed by, the larger community of the Church. The reverse also seems to be true. In the autobiography of its founder and most important prophet, the community of the LDS Church is contained within, consumed in its turn, by the “I” of Smith’s writing. Brodie’s introductory analysis indicates that Smith’s church was not only a daring creation in the age of the (skeptical) press, but also that the publication and circulation of its own narratives actually formed the foundation for Church identification. The community, moving between the “I” and “we” was made possible, or given form, by this very “age of printing.” In early Mormon communities, their use of print to imagine a social relation was predicated upon the goal that this writing be “a faithful record of the signs,” the shared material trace of a shared, prophetic history. Print culture was no afterthought in Mormon communities, but itself produced by the same prophecies that guided the faithful in their daily lives. Even the central narrative of The Book of Mormon itself could be described as the drama of inscription and circulation. From its opening description of the struggle to recover the plates of Laban (I Nephi) to Moroni’s labor of recording and preserving the last words of his father, The Book of Mormon is preoccupied with the preservation

 

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and circulation of texts, populated by New World chroniclers whose holy work is to record the visions of their leaders and the events of their history in order to pass them down in written word. The early community mirrored this ancient script by connecting the holy work of the church with the work of the press. In Smith’s Revelation 57, the same prophecy that reveals the original location of Zion and gives instructions for its settlement, the Prophet declares that one of their members “be planted in this place, and be established as a printer unto the church,” while another was to serve as his editor, “to copy, and to correct, and select, that all things may be right before me.”29 Even Eden, the beginning and the end, was to be settled in part by a visionary press. These print communities come together not through the date on the page but rather by the apocalyptic “now” that marks their place as a point of fulfillment or realization. LDS foundational writings therefore demonstrate the continued deployment, rather than disappearance, of this proleptic or anticipatory narrative. They demonstrate that the modernity of social relations as defined by the constructive work of print culture need not also entail the wholesale disregard for the sacral discourse of prior social iterations. I see in the Follett sermon and in Mormonism’s central text The Book of Mormon a way of challenging that narrative to better account for the prepolitical feeling for community, one that draws together the affective work of mourning with the spatial practices of the national romance, the contemporaneous popular narratives that retold American history as a way to locate the nation in place and time. If we follow Anderson in neglecting the messianic time of print culture, we risk misunderstanding those affective structures that sacralize the land and the bodies it contains as a means of consolidating the community in time and space. By attending to the way these revelatory foundational texts cultivate communities, this argument serves as a caution against the progressivist moves that Anderson sometimes makes in separating out this messianic frame as itself lost to the past, a “dusk” in opposition to the “dawn” of print.30 In doing so, we can attend more closely to the specter of that relationship, between print communities and prophecy, that haunts Anderson’s study, a relationship that can be found in the grave sign that marks the opening of his book: the figure of death rendered legible upon the material marker of the tomb. As he begins his study, Anderson stops first at the “cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers,” which he sees as the most “arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism.”31 But even as he declares them to have no precedent, he also concedes that its concern with death marks nationalism’s “strong affinity with religious imaginings.”32 “As this affinity is by no means fortuitous,” Anderson assures us, “it may be useful to begin a consideration of the cultural roots of nationalism with death.”33 In particular, the nation accomplishes the deployment of death as a mode of transforming fatality into continuity, establishing “links between

 



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the dead and the yet unborn.”34 This yoking of those past with those yet to come is itself a notably messianic structure in which the present manifests as a future foretold by the past, what we see in the Follett discourse as the responsibility of the living to “seek after our dead” in preparation for the dispensation of the fullness of time. While Anderson will conclude that nationalism’s “new way of linking fraternity, power and time” is the flattening out of chronological experience in the “homogenous, empty time,”35 I would return again to that empty and yet powerful tomb, to its call of responsibility, that which impresses the living into its service and thus into its community. This venerative, mournful position is precisely that sacral prophetic simultaneity that Anderson marks as “wholly alien to our own.”36 It is, after all, the fear that “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy” that requires the messianic vision of the historical materialist in Benjamin’s theses.37 And it is to the past and its dead that we owe what remains in us of this “Messianic power.”38 In Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison echoes this assertion of the foundational importance of the dead and the powerful hold of the dead over the living. “Whether we are conscious of it or not,” he says, “we do the will of the ancestor.” We are their creation, “authored always from the start by those that came before,”39 and it is in our encounters with their memorials, those tombs and cenotaphs, that we are heralded by the text, the signs of their passing, and constituted by our consuming act of mourning. Harrison asserts that, insofar as we inhabit the world historically, the dead provide a material basis for new and emerging life. Society and culture, iterations of the socius that name particular community identifications, are built upon what Harrison calls a humic foundation, “one whose contents have been buried so that they may be reclaimed by the future”40 This burying [humando] humanizes [humanitas] the ground [humus], plants our history at our feet, ready to be dug up, and in this way temporalizes spatial awareness: It gives us a place, both a space and a time, in which to dwell, from which we can write a shared history, through which we can pass on our dead, bequeath a heritage for those to come. The community that gathers in and through The Book of Mormon and early Mormon Church writings not only evince these humic foundations of community, but also attach that necrogenic work to print culture itself. By attending to this corpus of Church writings, we can better understand not just how a particular historical community consolidated through the production of texts, but also how print functions in this fetishistic economy of mourning at the heart of group psychology writ large. Harrison’s acknowledgement of the authority of the dead, their constitutive hold over the living, offers us an opening onto Anderson’s cenotaph, a way to expand the sociality of print culture to include the anticipatory voice of the dead who speak the living into being, precisely that messianic voice that Anderson excludes when insisting on the secular modernity

 

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of national print culture. The dead have a “world-​disclosive power,” an ecstatic power to gather and orient a community toward a future goal.41 This is because the dead, as legible signs of death itself, are “the ultimate future possibility” of the subject. But this future possibility is also a return to the conditions that make possible the subject’s birth as well. “As human beings,” Harrison writes, “we are born of the dead—​of the regional ground they occupy, of the languages they inhabited, of the worlds they brought into being, of the many institutional, legal, cultural, and psychological legacies that, through us, connect them to the unborn.”42 The dead do not pertain to the homogeneous march of calendrical time precisely because they perdure in the “anachronic realm of the progenitors to whom the living remain beholden for their houses, their harvests, their laws, their customs, their patrimonies [and] their wisdom.”43 Mourning functions as a mode of confirming this heritage, of consuming the dead as a mode of affirming this very identification and indebtedness. The tomb incorporates the reader in its affective call, reminding her of a bond to her fellow readers, not through the simultaneity of the date on the page but rather as their shared location as the work of the dead upon the future, as the fulfillment of a foundational death that contains within it all such future iterations. Mourning, then, is necessarily prophetic in its narrative mode as the experience of loss or a passing produces the subject in the present. This is why, when Ernest Renan speaks of the sentimental side of nationalism, he produces the dead as evidence. “Of all the cults, that of the ancestors is most legitimate,” he says, “for the ancestors have made us what we are.”44

People of the Book In his “Notes on Comparative American Literary History,” John McCormick remarks that “The United States has been interpreted as a country without a pre-​ history,” because the event of its creation occurred within “a given moment in recorded history.”45 The birth of the nation irrupted onto the already written page, suffering the consequence that “a society born in a certain moment of history comes to find itself outside history; . . . [it] lacks any deep rooted consciousness of history.”46 The new nations that emerged in North and South America may not only be produced by print culture, as Anderson claims, but may also be victims of the same. These nations, McCormick’s statement implies, faced strong challenges to their communities from their emergence under the documenting eye of print culture. They were new, and as colonizers-​turned-​citizens they held only tenuous historical claims to the land they inhabited. These claims had been more recently challenged by another martial conflict, the War of 1812, which exposed the lines of fracture glossed over by narratives imagining a wholeness

 



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and integrity for the nation.47 Americans needed to identify themselves as more than simply displaced Europeans, but the recorded history of their colonial experience stood in the way of this project.48 While critics such as R. W. B. Lewis have read the answers to this challenge as a rejection or purgation of the past,49 I want to focus instead on the ways early national texts, and in particular The Book of Mormon, responded to this challenge by embracing and reinscribing prerevolutionary histories in a manner that subverted the dislocation implied by revolution and imposed upon the written record an amnesia at the moment of this rupture. The American Adam, these authors argue, is not a new creation. The American Adam, as the Mormon revelation of Zion proclaimed, has been here all along. This embrace of history and historiography offers a contrast to the revolutionary breaking with the past, what one 1842 newspaper described as “a prolonged protest against the dominion of antiquity in every form whatsoever.”50 Instead, disruption gives way to the search for origins, the sentimental education of history effected by the hereditary logic of a new family bond. If, in the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the colonial subjects divorced themselves from their parents, denying their filial loyalties, then those born into this postcolonial situation were tasked with discovering a history for this family romance that would encourage stability over rupture, that would allow for natural and nativist claims to the land that would strengthen the political identification of the state. The Mormon millennial view of the American landscape is indicative of this reconsideration of history, outlining not only augurs of an end but a restoration as well. In her study of this period in the United States, Joyce Appleby declares that because this generation of North Americans was “Never forced, like their parents, to revoke an earlier loyalty to Great Britain . . . [they] were much freer to imagine what the United States might become.”51 But in order to understand whom they might become, these second-​generation Americans needed to uncover whom they were. These early nationalists turned to the past to find stability for the present condition and their vision of the future, finding there the “foundational fictions” as Doris Sommer termed them, that laid the groundwork for a distinct national culture.52 No longer faced with the need to justify the revolutions themselves, these citizens instead faced the task of establishing a national community that transcended the political identification of the independence period, one that gave foundation to the political community in an indigenous feeling for the state. This “emotional tie” is an affective assent prior to or distinct from the conscious solidarity described by theorists of nationalism. North and South Americans during their respective periods of national development accomplished this sentimental consolidation by writing history, more specifically by romancing history, creating an affective bond between the

 

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present community and an imagined past by marrying the consuming, libidinal excitement of the national romance with the mimetic drive of identification. In this way the historical romances of the early national period used the documentary and circulatory functions of print culture that threatened to expose their novelty (implicating not only their cultural newness but also their history as fictional prose as well) in order to create a new shared cultural heritage; the books themselves not only pretended to contain but also functioned as the material foundation for a new cultural history. Through the mediatory figure of the book, these readers attached themselves to the figures of their past. Through the identifying work of their sentimental journeys, the protagonists’ loves, struggles, and, most important for the present essay, their deaths, these novels interpolate their readers as the prophetic result of their narratives. In these narratives of the past, writers discovered a cultural and even familial inheritance that superseded, in large part because they anteceded, those recent political claims of revolution and independence. The reader’s political existence is foretold in the social collectivity of the past.

Books Buried in the Earth During the night of September 21, 1823, Joseph Smith was visited by a dead man who proceeded to map out his future. The visitant told the young man, then only seventeen years old, about a burial site in the hills near his home. There he would find redemption, for himself and the world, in the form of a book. Smith writes, “He said there was a book deposited . . . that the fullness of the everlasting Gospel was contained in it, as delivered by the Savior to the ancient inhabitants [of this continent].”53 This event, which is recorded in Church history as Smith’s Second Vision, was his first encounter with the angel Moroni, the celestial form of one of these ancient inhabitants, a prophet and chronicler of America who, “being dead and raised again therefrom,”54 appeared to Smith in order to incite this new prophet to exhume Moroni’s writing from its resting place on the frontier.55 Smith would not be able to retrieve the text, what would become known as The Book of Mormon, until the end of the decade, but it is this visitation, the announcement of all that will follow, that is laid out in official history as the foundational event for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints. It is here, in this messianic moment, in which the past of Moroni, the present of Smith, and the future of the recovered text meet in “an instantaneous present,”56 and it is to this moment that the Church-​that-​will-​be returns to consume the narrative of its birth. Smith’s revelation is not the first vision that described the hills on the Western frontier as holding the redemptive remains of America’s past. For several years

 



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prior to Smith’s revelation, speculation regarding the earth mounds in Ohio and New York, as well as the Southern frontier in Virginia and the Carolinas, had become a popular topic among both professional and amateur antiquarians. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson remarks on the “barrows” in which he discovers the bones of unknown people.57 William Cullen Bryant wrote about these dead who “slumber” in the American landscape in his poetry.58 And in 1820, just a few years before Moroni appears to Smith, the American Antiquarian Society’s inaugural publication contained the first comprehensive survey of the mounds to date.59 These mounds, most often understood as both burial places and fortifications, held the American historical imagination in thrall, offering, as remnants of the past, a connection between the New and ancient worlds. “Here,” as critic Curtis Dahl points out, “were mighty ruins comparable to those of Egypt or Greece.”60 The land itself thus became “an emblem of antique grandeur.”61 This new view of American history transformed the earth itself into a tomb. Ohio, one writer declared, was “nothing but one vast cemetery of the beings of past ages,”62 and the attendant excavations and exhumations were done in the hope that hidden in the land was evidence of a civilized legacy that would “rival” the European ruins and lay to rest those skeptical of the possibility of building a civilized nation in an uncivilized world.63 The mounds offered unprecedented historical depth for the American landscape and so offered the newly established nation a chance at cultural redemption. It is not surprising, then, that those interested in the mounds discovered in them a melancholy narrative, not of a savage Indian past, but of a “slain white race.”64 Accounts of the burial mounds insisted that they were evidence that ancient America was not the untamed, unkempt wilderness now before them but rather traces of a developed polity consisting of large cities and a burgeoning population.65 And while the great mound-​builder civilization was a native American history, it was not an Indian history.66 Dahl notes that most studies of the structures agreed that “Mound-​Builders were not Indians at all but men of a different and now extinct race.”67 In fact, when the Indian did find his way into this narrative, it was frequently as the exterminating force, the violent usurpers that wiped this civilized people from the earth. The poet William Bryant, for instance, implied in his work that these builders “were not red men, for it was the red men who massacred them.”68 The mound-​builder narrative thus accomplishes the dual task of establishing America’s claim to historical grandeur and thus its potential to house a grand civilization again, while at the same time denying the feasibility of the Indian’s claim to civilization by divorcing him from that legacy, even blaming him for its disappearance, confirming his barbarity. Veneration, in this historical narrative, was thus accompanied by erasure or condemnation. In the Indian’s place, the white American, whose civilized and civilizing potential was self-​evident, rose to claim this heritage as his own, confirming his right to the

 

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land as his society expanded westward.69 “The mounds,” as Gordon Sayre writes, “made possible an imperial historiography in which western frontiersmen became the heirs to a classical civilization destroyed by invaders who were not truly native Americans.”70 These burial mounds thus became the scene of writing, not only a new past for America but a new present and future as well. When Moroni appears to Joseph in 1823, he tells him that it is precisely this history of the ancient mound builders that the buried text will reveal. Smith’s History of the Church records the announcement as “there was a book deposited, written upon gold plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent, and the sources from whence they sprang.”71 When Smith published his translation of the plates in 1830, the text contained a head note reminiscent of this announcement, saying that the text that followed was “an abridgement of the Record,” or rather records of the Peoples of Jared, Nephi, and Laman; it offers “a Record” of the past, “the Record” of the people that came before.72 The book is the “cornerstone” of the Mormon faith, and so it is often read by secular critics in the context of religious texts, but I  would draw attention to how the text embraces the character of the chronicle and history, a narrative that accounts for or makes a record of America’s past. While studies of The Book of Mormon frequently focus their analysis of the text and its production on the context of competing evangelicalisms after the period called the Second Great Awakening,73 I  want to shift that focus here to this other, perhaps similarly devout discourse taking place at the same time: the question of an American history and how it would be written. The Book of Mormon offers a new way to read the latter issue precisely because of its engagement with the first. As Paul Gutjahr explains, The Book of Mormon “appeared at a time when religiously-​bent American readers were immersed in a print culture with two basic, overarching characteristics: the culture was saturated both with the Bible and an interest in historical writing.”74 The popularity of the Bible is understandable in a period of revivalisms so strong they “burn over” New York, but it is the rising popularity of a particular fictional genre that both explains and aggravates the interest in history. This is the conquering historical romance, an incredibly popular genre that gave rise to the first proliferation of national literature in the New World.75 It is a genre developed around the model of Sir Walter Scott’s fiction and, often by close imitation of Scott, developed a domestic literary product with the help of American readers’ hunger for his texts. In James Hart’s study of popular fiction in North America during this period, the author states “from 1814, when Waverly appeared anonymously, to 1832, when the last of the Tales of My Landlord was issued, [Scott’s] novels were the most popular of all American pleasure reading.”76 Samuel Goodrich said of the Scott model, “Everybody read these works; everybody—​the refined and the simple—​shared in the delightful trances which seemed to transport them to remote ages,”77 and Catharine Maria

 



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Sedgwick said of one of Scott’s novels, “I salute it with as much enthusiasm as a Catholic would a holy relic.”78 Scott’s romances thus functioned much like Anderson argues the local newspaper did, creating a shared reading experience of popular fiction, the consumption in kind that allowed one to imagine his fellow consumers as part of a particular community. The popularity of Scott also provided American writers with a useful model for narrating their own past, supplanting his Highland history with an American heritage. This desire on the part of the reading public to consume historical narratives led to a dramatic increase in national production of historical narratives, peaking during the 1820s when “almost a third of the novels written by Americans dealt with the colonial period or the Revolution.”79 The devout readers of historical romance, taking in a text in the sacrosanct manner of a “holy relic,” thus formed the basis of a national readership and the texts that responded to their call transformed the Scottish medieval landscape into a more familiar one. While The Book of Mormon does not take as its object colonization or revolution in the traditional sense, its layered narrative does circulate around a peoples’ journey to the New World and their schisms and struggles and deaths there. This structure is instantly recognizable by the American reader as that of her own family, her own nation in its journey west to the New World and its struggle to establish a thriving, independent society. The “Golden Bible,” as it was called by its contemporaneous critics, thus explicitly engages with this interest in national history and, as a textual artifact, participated in the material scene of the book. For the Mormons, history was not a distinct interest apart from scripture; for these Americans, as Harold Bloom argues, “their history is sacred.”80 The righteous Nephites, the last of whom will visit Joseph in 1823, were not a people of the Book, but a people of the books. When Lehi receives his revelation of the Promised Land, it is a vision of a book that guides him, his divine knowledge the product of reading.81 Before his family can leave for this new land, Lehi sends his sons to retrieve another book, the brass plates that contain “the record of the Jews and also a genealogy of my forefathers” (1 Ne 3:3), in order for the family to “preserve unto our children the language of our fathers; and also that we may preserve unto them the words which have been spoken by the mouth of all the holy prophets” (1 Ne 3:19–​20). If The Book of Mormon can be characterized as a foundational text, both as the “cornerstone” of a religion and an explanation of New World origins, then it is one that rests in its turn on the foundation of the text, or rather, two texts: the brass plates of history and the visionary book of revelation. Even when the presence of a prior civilization is announced, it appears as a text, the book of Ether, which tells the story of the Jaredites who preceded Lehi and his family in settling in this Promised Land and is itself absorbed into Moroni’s record (“And now I Moroni proceed to give an account of those ancient inhabitants which were destroyed by the hand of the Lord . . . . And I take

 

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mine account from the twenty and four plates which were found by the people of Limhi,” Ether 1:1–​2). The American past in The Book of Mormon addresses itself to its future in the form of its present reader. The past creates, in advance of its coming, a space for the present, incorporating the present reader into its heritage through its prophetic voice. In her introduction to the new Penguin edition of The Book of Mormon, religious studies scholar Laura Maffly Kipp notes that “The Book of Mormon does not dictate lifestyle traits or health codes, nor does it educate readers about priesthood hierarchy, ordinances for the dead, esoteric rites, or eternal marriages. The Book of Mormon is, first of all, a story of ancient peoples.”82 The text, as Smith himself directed, was to be understood as a history, and the “curious book” was received by many as yet another iteration of the popular historical romance.83 The text itself foregrounds history and historiography, the chroniclers often speaking of this purpose and process in their record. Nephi, for example, frequently reflects on his motivations, both in his past, within the narrative he records, but also in the present of his writing. After describing his family’s flight to the “land of promise” (1 Ne 18:25), Nephi turns to consider again the work of writing. “I did make plates of ore that I might engraven upon them the record of my people,” he notes, “And upon the plates which I made I did engraven the record of my father” (1 Ne 19:1). He then quickly moves to a consideration of reception and the work of reading the history he records, writing “Now it came to pass that I Nephi did teach my brethren these things. And it came to pass that I did read many things to them which were engraven upon the plates of brass, that they might know concerning the doings of the Lord in other lands among people of old” (1 Ne 19:22). Nephi here marks the reading of history as not only instructive, but also restorative; he reads these historical writings to his community in order to recall them to their proper heritage: “[H]‌ear ye the words of the prophet, ye which are a remnant of the house of Israel, a branch which have been broken off . . . that ye may have hope as well as your brethren from whom ye have been broken off ” (1 Ne 19:24). And directly before this remonstrance to read and remember, Nephi is careful to remember his own readership, which has yet to come. He writes “I, Nephi, have written these things unto my people, that perhaps I  might persuade them that they would remember the Lord their Redeemer” (1 Ne 19:18, emphasis added). Just as reading functions as a restorative remembrance, here he reflects his own writing as a memorial act, its goal the future performance of memory. Nephi’s sense for posterity, as this pairing demonstrates, is not limited to the history that he and his brethren have inherited, but also those who will have inherited, the present reader who is enfolded into this community by the text. Emphasizing its work as a chronicle, the text is marked by an aggressive chronological structure that foregrounds the passage of time. The phrase “and it came

 



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to pass” overwhelms the opening of the text; seven of the first fourteen verses contain versions of the phrase that Fawn Brodie claims appears at least 2,000 times in the text.84 This repeated structure announces the progress of time in the text, what will become history as it comes “to pass,” and marking that history as itself a sacred, making the present community a realization of a prescribed destiny. As Robert Flanders argues, Smith saw his work and himself “as a kind of prime agent in inaugurating the new premillennial history . . . a hinge between the old profane history and a new sanctified one.”85 The book published by Smith in 1830 is a history composed of several chronicles, a single tome but multiple texts. Together, these texts told the story of two Jewish immigrant groups from the Middle East: The Jaredites, who came to America at the fall of Babel, grew into a society that numbered in the millions and self-​destructed, leaving a lone survivor to record their history; and the Lehites who came to America around 600 BCE, split into two fraternal factions, one following the righteous prophet Nephi and the other his jealous brother Laman whose descendants eventually exterminate those of the former, again leaving one survivor to record the events of the end.86 The Lamanites, debased both by their neglect of religion and civil society, physically darkened to mark their fallen state (“that they might not be enticing . . . the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them”; 2 Ne 5:21), survive in their contemporary descendants, the American Indian. The narrative is thus remarkably similar to the structure of popular mound-​ builder theories. It describes an advanced, exterminated race while condemning the Native American for its death. Like the burial mound narratives, The Book of Mormon presents its reader with familiar bodies but pushes this identification even further by making these bodies not only not Indian but white and not only advanced but Christian. The Nephite race is “white and exceeding fair” (2 Ne 5:21), marked in contrast to their dark brethren and, while they began their New World venture as part of the Jewish diaspora, they receive the ministry of Christ in America and so become Christians, distinct from the Lamanites who “have rejected the gospel of Christ” (Ether 4:3). The Nephites had, through the prophesies of Nephi and Jacob, already heard of “this Jesus Christ” (3 Ne 11:2), but Christ realizes this work of prophecy himself by appearing in the text, revealing himself to the inhabitants of the New World. “Behold, I am Jesus Christ—​ of which the prophets testified—​that should come into the world,” he tells them, inviting all to investigate his mortal wounds, confirming his identity through the signs of his death and asking them to remember the (historic) prophecy of his coming (3 Ne 11:10–​15). He ministers to all, and in doing so brings about a period of peace between the two groups, but only the fair Nephites retain their faith, and finally only Moroni remains to beseech his reader to remember. He concludes the text by saying, “I exhort you to remember these things, for the time speedily cometh that ye shall know that I lie not, for ye shall see me at the

 

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bar of God. And the Lord God will say unto you: did I not declare my words unto you, which was written by this man like as one crying from the dead, yea, even as one speaking out of the dust?” (Moroni 10:27). This prophetic cry is structured as a mournful wail from the dead, and so the text draws the ear of the reader near the earth to listen to the grave narrate its destiny. The text’s frequent invocation of the reader gives him material space on the page (“you . . . ye . . . y e . . . you . . . you”), and inscribes upon him a future accounting, not only with the figure of history (“ye shall see me at the bar of God”) but also the figure of historiography the “words . . . which was written by this man.” If the living hold the “awful responsibility,” as Smith named it of “seeking after our dead,” then this includes the dead letter, the text itself. Moroni’s is not the only grave that speaks, either. Nephi concludes his books in the same sepulchral voice. Acknowledging his impending death, he says, “I speak unto you as the voice of one crying from the dust” (2 Ne 33:13). Here the dust, that material connection between the bodies of the present and those of the past, echoes with the voice of one who bids two farewells, one to the reader who heeds—​who responds to his words (“farewell until that great day shall come”) and another to those who will not hear his cry. “Behold,” Nephi says to those unresponsive readers, “I bid you an everlasting farewell, for these words shall condemn you at the last day. For what I seal on earth shall be brought against you at the judgment bar” (2 Ne 33:14–​15). With these spectral voices, The Book of Mormon both opens and closes with writers calling out from the grave, requiring response from the living by reminding them simultaneously of a shared past and a future reconciliation. The text also posits a foundational vacancy for the Americas, a primary emptiness marked by the stories of immigration, stories that all occur within the frame of documented history. There are no shadowy, mythical beginnings for a native race. First there is nothing, and, as the texts mark upon it, the land is filled; the book thus clears the ground of any claim to immemorial nativity and leaves only the voice of these familiar dead. All here are immigrants, and it is only through the Word of God that this promised land is made available for settlement.87 It is only through the work of the prophet, who mediates between mankind and the Word, that their land can become “the land of their inheritance” (1 Ne 13:30), and it is only through the book that one can access this prophetic voice. It is into this blank page, this primary vacancy, that the dead prophets are interred; if these prophets speak from the grave, as both Moroni and Nephi assert, that grave is at the same time the earth, body, and book, and so the text functions as a memorial not only to the past but also to those who have passed. The reader is thus hailed by the dead who speak from this grave, called by bodies so familiar in their social identifications that they function as an anticipation of the reader herself. If I were there that would be me, she says, and, as he goes so will I. But even as the reader volunteers identification by mourning

 



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this familiar form, she has already been spoken into the text by its prophets. In his study of the text, Monte Nyman says that “The Book of Mormon is unique because it was written hundreds of years ago but is addressed to and for a people hundreds of years in the future.”88 The arrival of the Gentile in the Promised Land, the revelation of The Book of Mormon, and the absorption of the faithful Gentile into the New World heritage has already been revealed by the text (1 Ne 13): And it came to pass that I beheld many multitudes of the Gentiles upon the land of promise. And I beheld the wrath of God, that it was upon the seed of my brethren [the Lamanites]. And they were scattered before the Gentiles and they were smitten. And I beheld the Spirit of the Lord, that it was upon the Gentiles, that they did prosper and obtain the land for their inheritance. And I beheld that they were white and exceeding fair and beautiful, like unto my people before that they were slain. (1 Ne 13: 14–​15) Here the ancient prophet sees the Gentile lay claim to the land, removing the Indian with the blessing of divine order. Nephi also describes the Revolution, during which the Gentile was “delivered by the power of God” (1 Ne 13:19) from “their mother Gentiles” (1 Ne 13:17) and finally the coming of a book that will restore truth to the land, the adherents of which “shall be numbered among the seed of [Nephi’s] father . . . . And they shall be a blessed people upon the promised land forever” (1 Ne 14:2). The reader is already inscribed in the book, already impressed into its service, and so the prophetic history marks upon the present subject, interpolating her into this new narrative of history. Through Smith’s later restoration of the Aaronic priesthood, this prophetic incorporation becomes a corporeal one as well. While the future Saints were “cultural Gentiles,” their true heritage, Smith revealed, pertained to the same family as that of these ancient people, and therefore they were “lawful heirs, according to the flesh” as well.89 The incorporating work of these prophecies is supported by the structure in which they are spoken in The Book of Mormon. The experience of revelation in the book of Nephi repeats the event of witnessing by pairing the injunction to “Look!” with the response “and I looked” and “and I beheld” (1 Ne 11–​14). “Look! And I looked,” Nephi writes over and over: And it came to pass that the Spirit saith unto me: Look! And I looked and beheld a tree . . . . And it came to pass that [the spirit] said unto me: Look! And I looked as if to look upon him and I saw him not, for he had gone from before my presence .  .  .  . And the angel said unto

 

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me again: Look and behold the condescension of God! And I looked and beheld the Redeemer of the world . . . . And it came to pass that the angel spake unto me, saying: Look! And I looked and I beheld the heavens open again . . . . And he spake unto me again, saying: Look! And I looked and beheld the Lamb of God going forth among the children of men . . . . And it came to pass that the angel spake unto me again, saying: Look! And I looked and beheld the Lamb of God, that he was taken by the people . . . . And it came to pass that the angel said unto me: Look and behold thy seed and also the seed of thy brethren. And I looked and beheld the land of promise.” (1 Ne 11:8–​12:1) Here, Nephi describes the work of a spirit, an angel, upon him, but in his repetition of the imperative paired with the first-​person assent to the required action, he also hails the reader by pairing the command with the descriptive text. Nephi is told to look, and he does, but in doing so he reflects the position of his reader, who is also enjoined also to “look.” Like Smith’s “anti-​confessional” writings, which enfold multiple subject positions within the assertion of an “I,” this first-​ person observation point “and I looked” becomes the “I” of the reader as she witnesses the revelation as well. But the reader is not limited to the “I” of Nephi’s witnessing. This first-​person incorporation is echoed in the structure of testimony carried throughout the text. The Book of Mormon opens with the words “I, Nephi,” an identification that he repeats over and over in the hundreds of pages filled by his chronicle. When others interrupt the text, they present themselves in the same manner. “I, Jacob,” his brother’s speech begins; “I, Jacob . . . . I, Jacob” it repeats until it returns to “I, Nephi,” then “I, Mormon,” and finally to Moroni, who begins the last chapter of the text “Now I, Moroni” (Moroni 10:1). The proliferation of authors laying claim to that “I” means that these declarations do not function as assertions of autonomy or individuality but rather become through their repetition a corporate “I” of testimony. As the reader identifies with this prophetic heritage, the “I,” jumbled among the numerous narrators, becomes her eye/​I as well, her own witnessing of and testimony to the past. The Book of Mormon, as a collection of records, thus functions as a memorial akin to Anderson’s tomb, one that arrests the subject, that requires from the living an acknowledgment of their connection to those who have passed. The Mormon historical revelation bequeaths to the Americas not only a locatable native heritage, but also what Renan described as “the will to perpetuate the value of that heritage,” the responsibility of the present to pass on this legacy. In this way the consent of the community is founded on an absence that presses upon the subject and directs her actions toward a future. This is what Robert Pogue Harrison describes as the humic foundation of community, the foundational burial that renders the land habitable for human society. The dead retain

 



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ownership of a legacy inherited by the living and, whether this is the Lamanites’ suffering that is due to the iniquity of their fathers or to the Nephites’ compulsion to record and thus preserve the words of the past, the dead mark upon the living and hold sway over the future. While it may be easy, then, to place The Book of Mormon in conversation with the larger contemporaneous national concern for the past, that which emerges in both the mound-​builder writings as well as the lineages outlined in the popular historical romance, we shouldn’t do so without considering the revelatory or messianic time in which such narratives structure the reader’s relationship to the text, and through the text, to those historical communities that ground (or rather give ground) to her sense of self. Like The Book of Mormon, all of these texts revisit their national histories in order to discover traces of a shared heritage. The heritage they trace, though, does not proceed in the homogenous empty time of Anderson’s newspaper, but rather in the proleptic, anticipatory time of revelation, the coincidence of past and future in the present that marks messianic time, in which both the dead of the past and the unborn of the future come to bear upon the present. In attempting to retell a history that foretells the present, these texts—​including The Book of Mormon—​demonstrate how mourning becomes a way to inscribe prophecy into history. The perdurance of the voice of the dead, manifest in the material of the text, imagines the space of the reader for her, and her responsibility to that voice requires her to fulfill that promise laid out for her in advance by the text, the land, her body.

Notes 1. “Conference Minutes,” Times and Seasons, Aug. 15, 1844, 612 in The Joseph Smith Papers (Church Historian’s Press), 2015, http://​ josephsmithpapers.org/​ paperSummary/​ discourse-​7-​april-​1844-​as-​reported-​by-​times-​and-​seasons 2. “April 7, 1844 (2) (Sunday Afternoon)” (Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, https://​ r sc.byu.edu/​ archived/​ words-​ j oseph- ​ smith- ​ contemporary- ​ accounts-​ nauvoo-​ discourses-​prophet-​joseph/​1844/​7-​april-​18-​0), n1: “Traditionally considered the Prophet’s greatest sermon, the King Follett discourse was delivered at a time when both anti-​Mormon and apostate sentiment was intensifying. Accusations were repeatedly being made,” notes B. H. Roberts, “that President Smith was a fallen prophet.” On this occasion he coolly claimed that this single discourse would vindicate his prophetic calling. Although the sermon contains no new doctrine, never before had Joseph Smith so thoroughly, eloquently, and with such power presented what by now had become the very life-​blood of Mormon theology.” 3. George Albert Smith, Documentary History of the Church (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book Co., 1950), vol. 6, 312. 4. Ibid. 5. Samuel Morris Brown. In Heaven as It Is On Earth:  Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Douglas Davies, The Mormon Culture of Salvation (Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000). Brown does an excellent job in considering Smith’s interest in “grave artifacts,” those relics connected to the “problem of death,” but his focus remains the theological rejection of or escape from death.

 

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I think there is more in that fetishism of the artifact (which requires death) evident in Brown’s study that can be better understood by looking at the ways that our relationships to the dead are not solely defined by lack and rupture, but rather by intimacy and continuity. 6. Smith, History of the Church, 313. 7. Ibid., 310 8. Ibid., 313. 9. Ibid., 314. 10. Ibid.,  319. 11. Ibid.,  303. 12. Ibid.,  310. 13. Joseph Smith, Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints (Liverpool, UK: William Budge, 1879), 205. 14. In responding to a question about the location, Professor Bruce Van Orden points out that the Church lacks primary evidence for this assertion, i.e., the “holographic writing” of Smith himself in his journal (the term “holographic writing” is used by Dean Jessee in compiling The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith [Salt Lake City, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2002] to describe Smith’s journal entries written in his own hand and unmediated by posthumous editors). But Van Orden argues that this location of Eden is correct, citing the language in Revelation 57 in the Doctrine and Covenants as well as statements by contemporaneous Church elders Brigham Young and Heber Kimball. Young testified in 1857 that “Joseph the Prophet told me that the garden of Eden was in Jackson [County] Missouri.” Quoted in Van Orden, “I Have a Question,” Ensign 24.1 ( Jan. 1994): 54. 15. Smith, History of the Church, 318. 16. Ibid.,  319. 17. Ibid., 319, emphasis in original. 18. Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991). 19. Ibid.,  35. 20. In the years since Anderson first published Imagined Communities, many scholars of New World nationalism have challenged and refined his thesis, especially regarding this argument about the importance of regional newspapers. In many of the regions covered by Anderson’s study, romances and religious texts were much more broadly consumed and therefore more important in terms of establish the cultural imaginary of the new nations. For more, see Fernand Unzueta, “Scenes of Reading:  Imagining Nation/​Romancing History in Spanish America” in Beyond Imagined Communities, Sara Castro-​Klarén and John Charles Chasteen, eds. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 115–​160. 21. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 35. 22. Ibid.,  6. 23. Ibid.,  7. 24. Ibid.,  24. 25. Ibid.,  24–​25. 26. “Accounts of the “King Follett Sermon,”” The Joseph Smith Papers (The Church Historian’s Press, josephsmithpapers.org, last modified March 18, 2014). 27. The early Mormons were, and the LDS Church remains to this day, consummate record keepers. From documenting Church activities, to community newspapers tracking both local and global verifications of Mormon doctrine, to personal histories submitted to Books of Remembrance, the Mormon community in both its institutional and its personal life produced and preserved great quantities of texts. This profusion of textual production can be seen even in the daily journaling of its members. Many prominent early Mormons documented and published the stories of their daily lives, but this interest carried over into the general populace as well. In his report on Mormon diaries and autobiographies, Davis Bitton writes that “It is hard to believe that any group of comparable size . . . has been so relentless as the Mormons in writing diaries and autobiographies,” particularly in the nineteenth century. See Davis Bitton, “Guide to Mormon Diaries and Autobiographies” (Provo, UT:  Brigham Young University Press, 1977), v. The report then goes on to document only those known, published materials in public collections, excluding personal histories submitted to and kept by the Church; it is

 



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more than a thousand pages long. One of the largest categories of autobiographical writing detailed by the report is the missionary diary (viii). These journals chronicled the experience of the Mormon missionaries and helped in part to understand and track communication between Church branches, as missions were often structured as trips to other Mormon enclaves (ix). The Mormon Church was spread out over a great deal of the country, and these travels, and the diaries that documented them, thus functioned to undermine potentially divisive geographical distinctions by privileging a unified community. Texts such as these function, according to Michel de Certeau, to create a space, a page that “delimits a place of production for the subject.” See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 134. The proselytizing “we” included these distant regions in their distinction from the Gentile or heathen “them,” all while leaving, through the text, a trace upon the land. Publishing and circulating the diaries confirmed this inclusion and sense of community for the reader who was not necessarily herself one of these travelers. The Church supplemented this journaling by itself publishing community newspapers that communicated the work of the Church to its isolated enclaves. In England, Parley Pratt edited the Millennial Star, a Mormon newspaper that connected European adherents to the Saints in America through communicating, as the title page declares, “a great variety of useful information in regard to . . . the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​Day Saints, and of the great work of God in these last days; with a faithful record of the signs and judgments which are beginning to be shown forth in the heavens and in the earth” (BYU Harold B. Lee Library Digital Collections, Latter-​ day Saints’ Millennial Star, http://​contentdm.lib.byu.edu/​cdm/​search/​collection/​ MStar). Its regular features included selections from The Book of Mormon, “News from the Saints in America,” and “Signs of the Times,” all articles that gathered the community under the aegis of shared texts and created for the diaspora the “existential experience” of community (Ed White, “Early American Nations as Imagined Communities,” American Quarterly 56 [2004]: 53). 28. Fawn McKay Brodie, No Man Knows My History : the Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), vii. 29. Joseph Smith, “Doctrine and Covenants,” 216. 30. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 11. In “DissemiNation” Homi Bhabha develops a critique of this historical progressivism around Anderson’s insistence that the ability to imagine the nation through print is opened up by the destabilization of the sign that is due to the erosion of religious faith in sacred languages. See Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990), 291–​322. 31. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 9. 32. Ibid.,  10. 33. Ibid.,  10. 34. Ibid.,  11. 35. Ibid.,  36. 36. Ibid.,  24. 37. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 255. 38. Ibid.,  254. 39. Robert Pogue Harrison. The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), ix. 40. Ibid.,  x. 41. Ibid.,  90. 42. Ibid.,  ix. 43. Ibid.,  94. 44. Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” in Nation and Narration, Martin Thom, trans., Homi K. Bhabha, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1990), 19. 45. John O. McCormick, “Notes on a Comparative American Literary History,” Comparative Literature Studies 5 (1968): 171 (emphasis mine). 46. Ibid.,171. 47. The conflicts leading up to and into the War of 1812 make manifest the manifold ways in which the integrity of the new nation of the United States was challenged by internal and external stresses, including Britain’s refusal to recognize those born in the realm as naturalized

 

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citizens of the United States, contested terrain, conflicted loyalties, indigenous resistance, and the insecurity raised by the Haitian Revolution. In outlining the many overlapping tensions that produced the War of 1812, Alan Taylor describes the conflict ultimately as “a civil war between competing visions of America: one still loyal to the empire and the other defined by its republican revolution against that empire.” See Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812 (New York: Knopf, 2010), 12. 48. There is, in Anderson’s argument, the attendant implication that the New World itself, in its new economic structures and documentary mania, was experienced as the newness of Europe itself (see White, “Early American Nations,” 52), freed from older structures of authority, even before the new national structures were fully developed. New World nationalism, then, arises without the burden of competing historical structures. Instead it is the expression of an ever-​present modernity that contributes to the famous continental theorist’s claim that America has no history (a claim made famous by Jean Baudrillard in America [New York: Verso, 1989], 7). 49. Lewis argued that the past was a burden to the newly formed nation, one that impeded the “creative task at hand,” that of cementing new national bonds and of transforming colonial communities into one independent nation state (13). This gives rise, Lewis argues, to the American Adam, born into a new world cleared of the past. See R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam; Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1955). 50. Quoted in Lewis, American Adam, 159. 51. Joyce Oldham Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution:  The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2000), 3. 52. Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions:  The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 53. Smith, History of the Church, 11. 54. Joseph Smith, Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City, UT: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints, 2007), 58. 55. Smith’s First Vision is recorded as an event, three years previous, in which he sought council from God regarding which sect of Christianity to join and was answered by a vision of heaven and a command from God not to join any of them. See Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 56–​59. 56. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 24 57. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Richmond, VA:  J. W.  Randolph, 1853), 104–​107. 58. William Cullen Bryant, “Thanatopsis,” in Poems of William C.  Bryant (New  York:  Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1893), l.50. 59. Gordon Sayre, “The Mound Builders and the Imagination of American Antiquity in Jefferson, Bartram, and Chateaubriand,” Early American Literature 33 (1998): 225–​249, 244. 60. Curtis Dahl, “Mound-​ Builders, Mormons, and William Cullen Bryant,” New England Quarterly 34 (1961): 178–​190, 178. 61. Sayre, “Mound Builders,” 226. 62. Dahl, “Mound-​Builders,” 181 63. Dahl notes that the archaeological interest in the land was very much driven by the desire to answer not only cultural objections to the “barbaric” American landscape but also scientific ones by Buffon et al. Some of the more “informal” excavations were of course done for the purpose of material gain. The number and availability of the mounds made grave digging and treasure hunting a popular frontier activity. For more see Simon G. Southerton, Losing a Lost Tribe : Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2004), 23–​26; Robert Silverberg, Mound Builders of Ancient America; The Archaeology of a Myth (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1968). Before finding and translating The Book of Mormon, Smith himself participated as a “seer” for such frontier excavations. For more on Smith’s participation in these activities see D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature, 1987). Fawn Brodie also discusses this era of Smith’s life (No Man Knows My History, 16–​37).

 



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64. Dahl, “Mound-​Builders,” 181. While there is not an extensive history of mound excavations among LDS communities, there is a record of just such a discovery as Dahl describes in the study of the remains of the white Lamanite Zelph in an Illinois mound. In Smith’s History of the Church (vol. 2), the event is described in part as follows: During our travels we visited several of the mounds which had been thrown up by the ancient inhabitants of this country—​Nephites, Lamanites, etc., and this morning I went up on a high mound, near the river, accompanied by the brethren. From this mound we could overlook the tops of the trees and view the prairie on each side of the river as far as our vision could extend, and the scenery was truly delightful. On the top of the mound were stones which presented the appearance of three altars having been erected one above the other, according to the ancient order; and the remains of bones were strewn over the surface of the ground. The brethren procured a shovel and a hoe, and removing the earth to the depth of about one foot, discovered the skeleton of a man, almost entire, and between his ribs the stone point of a Lamanitish arrow, which evidently produced his death. Elder Burr Riggs retained the arrow. The contemplation of the scenery around us produced peculiar sensations in our bosoms; and subsequently the visions of the past being opened to my understanding by the Spirit of the Almighty, I discovered that the person whose skeleton was before us was a white Lamanite, a large, thick-​set man, and a man of God. His name was Zelph. (History of the Church, 79) For more on the Zelph account, see Brown, In Heaven,  88–​90. 65. Dahl, “Mound-​Builders,” 180–​181. 66. I would like to draw attention here to a distinction I rely on here, namely that between the Native discourse (pertaining to the Native American or Amerindian) and the native discourse that it becomes (pertaining to an American nativism) that, while it may rely on evoking the Native American, works to incorporates a non-​Indian community. 67. Dahl, “Mound-​Builders,” 181–​182. 68. Ibid.,  179 69. In this way, the mound-​builder theories are deeply entangled with what critics have named the “Vanishing American” thesis of the frontier and historical romance, which lays out a progressive narrative of settlement in which the weakened race of Native Americans fade away before the growth of the European-​American population. These narratives of elision and enervation attempt to overwrite, of course, the violence of removal, both historical and contemporaneous. George Bancroft, who began publishing his successful History of the United States in 1834, contemporaneous with a period of rapid growth in the LDS community, is famous for his Romantic depiction of the vanishing Native American. He wrote in his “Synopsis of the Tribes East of the Mississippi,” “The picture of the unequal contest inspires a compassion which is honorable to humanity. The weak demand sympathy. If a melancholy interest attaches to the fall of a hero, who is overpowered by superior force, shall we not drop a tear at the fate of nations, whose defeat foreboded exile, if it did not shadow forth the decline and ultimate extinction of a race?” George Bancroft, History of the United States From the Discovery of the American Continent,17th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1862), vol. 3, 236. 70. Sayre, “Mound Builders,” 229. 71. Smith, History of the Church, 11. 72. Joseph Smith, The Book of Mormon, 1830 ed. (Salt Lake City, UT: Church Historian’s Press, 2015), http://​josephsmithpapers.org/​paperSummary/​book-​of-​mormon-​1830. This copy of the first edition preserves the use of capitalization for “Record,” a distinction that is not preserved in the text edited by Royal Skousen (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2009). 73. A sample of this criticism includes Harold Bloom, The American Religion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992); Clyde Revere Forsberg, “In Search of the Historical Nephi:  The Book of Mormon, ‘Evangelicalisms’ and Antebellum American Popular Culture c.  1830” (PhD dissertation, Queen’s University, 1994); Klaus J. Hansen, Mormonism and the American Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford and New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2002); Jan Shipps shifts this criticism by reading Mormonism as a new religion on par with

 

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Christianity and Islam, rather than as a sect of the former in Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). 74. Paul Gutjahr, “The Golden Bible in the Bible’s Golden Age:  The Book of Mormon and Antebellum Print Culture,” American Transcendental Quarterly 12.4 (1998): 275–​293, 276. 75. George Dekker’s The American Historical Romance (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987) is a thorough study of Scott’s influence in North America in which he traces the development of a Scott model for national fiction in the United States. For more information about the rise and popularity of the historical romance in the Americas, as well as its contribution to national culture, see Daniel Balderston, ed., The Historical Novel in Latin America: A Symposium (New Orleans, LA: Ediciones Hispamérica, 1986); Michael Davitt Bell, Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971); Roberto González Echevarría, ed., Historia y Ficción En La Narrativa Hispanoamericana: Coloquio de Yale (Caracas, Venezuela: Monte Avila Editores, 1984); Philip Gould, Covenant and Republic: Historical Romance and the Politics of Puritanism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 76. James David Hart, The Popular Book:  A History of America’s Literary Taste (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1976), 73. 77. Quoted in ibid., 74. 78. Quoted in ibid., 73. 79. Ibid.,  80. 80. Bloom, “American Religion,” 101. Emphasis in original. 81. Royal Skousen, ed., The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 1 Nephi 1:9–​15. Further citations of The Book of Mormon come from this edition and will be referenced parenthetically in the text by book, chapter, and verse. 82. Laura Maffley Kipp, Introduction to The Book of Mormon by Joseph Smith (New York: Penguin, 2008), vii. 83. Shipps, “Mormonism,” 26. 84. Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 63. My own scan of the html text of The Book of Mormon on Project Gutenberg returns 1,330 results for the phrase. 85. Robert Flanders, “To Transform History: Early Mormon Culture and the Concept of Time and Space,” Church History 40 (1971): 108–​117, 110 86. There is a third group, the people of Zarahemla (called the Mulekites), who come to America around the same time as the Lehites and are absorbed into that group. 87. The promise implied here is not only the land held in covenant with the Lord, a land promised to a people, but a land of promise, one that will bear fruit. In an early revelation, Smith recorded God’s word to his followers as “I hold forth and deign to give unto you greater riches, even a land of promise, a land flowing with milk and honey, upon which there shall be no curse when the Lord cometh” (Doctrine and Covenants, 161). In Doctrine and Covenants Missouri is listed as “Missouri—​the land of promise” (499). 88. Monte S. Nyman, I, Nephi Wrote This Record (Orem, UT: Granite 2003), 1. 89. Ibid., 637. For more on this revelation see Doctrine and Covenants, 86 and 109.

 

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The Ghost and the Machine Plates and Paratext in The Book of Mormon R . John Williams What one cannot ignore, one is better off knowing

–​Gérard Genette1

What would it mean to “bracket” questions of historicity in a reading of The Book of Mormon? The notion that we can and should do so is the premise of Grant Hardy’s recent study, Understanding The Book of Mormon (2010), in which he “propose[s]‌bracketing, at least temporarily, questions of historicity in favor of a detailed examination of what The Book of Mormon is and how it operates.”2 But of course what Hardy means by “bracketing” is a process that is neither mathematical (wherein brackets indicate the rules for an order of operations, meaning, typically, “do this part first”3) nor syntactical (wherein brackets are inserted in a text [like this] as a way of clarifying or classifying a given phrase). In fact, for whatever reason, the usage Hardy invokes with the verb “to bracket” still isn’t accounted for in the Oxford English Dictionary,4 but it is widespread enough in philosophical and literary–​analytical writings. In these discourses, to place something in brackets is not a syntactical mode of clarification, not an invitation to “do this first,” and certainly not an insistence that what is placed in brackets should take precedence over other pertinent questions. It is, on the contrary, a suggestion that we “set this aside,” “not worry about this for now,” or place something in a temporary “quarantine.”5 Speaking in terms of bracketed historicity then, we might think of Hardy’s invocation (and the brackets do sort of look the part) as something like a pair of book covers ([ ]), binding the entire question, as it were, to an abstract realm of temporarily suspended relevance, placed on a shelf and set aside—​not a complete banishment of the topic, of course, but a polite deferral, or an elegant little box we can dutifully ignore, as Hardy suggests, “at least temporarily.” The potential payoff for bracketed historicity, he argues, is an R. John Williams, The Ghost and the Machine: Plates and Paratext in The Book of Mormon. In: Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon. Edited by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190221928.003.0003

 

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opportunity to read the book simply as it “is,” more directly “on its own terms,” using only the “tools of literary criticism.” Taking more or less this same premise as a starting point, a number of recent discussions of The Book of Mormon have offered the possibility of bracketed historicity as a way of reenergizing and transcending a tired debate, pushing us beyond the trenches of exhausted polemics and devotional banalities, and into an area of fresh insight and ecumenical possibility.6 According to this approach, the old efforts at nailing down Book of Mormon historicity only restrain and delimit our interpretive efforts by requiring in advance either dismissals of the volume’s sacred status (showing, for example, how apparently every element in the text has some correlative cultural referent in Joseph’s Smith’s New England religious and familial environment; hence, fraud7) or else faith-​promoting reconstructions of its supposedly ancient historical origins (showing, by contrast, how many elements in the book can be explained only by transhistorical, angelic delivery; hence, Word of God8). Thus, for a growing number of scholars the most promising way of out of this intractable debate has been to invoke some of literary criticism’s more abstract and formalist modes of analysis, attempting to focus on only-​the-​text, rather than on its historical or cultural (whether ancient Native American or nineteenth-​century Anglo-​American) contexts.9 Earl Wunderli’s An Imperfect Book:  What The Book of Mormon Tells Us About Itself (2013), for instance, like Grant Hardy’s volume, endeavors to shift our focus away from “historical, linguistic, archeological, and other external evidence” (because, he argues, such “external” considerations “leave room for disagreement and uncertainty”), offering instead to focus exclusively on what the book “says about itself.”10 In this essay I  hope to demonstrate that, while I  find these efforts toward bracketed historicity both provocative and interesting, the narrative and structural realities of The Book of Mormon ultimately make all such attempts impossible, perhaps even misguided. More concretely, the problem with these approaches is not simply that none of them ever seem to abide by their own rules of “only-​the-​text,”11 nor is it that these attempts at textual isolation obviously fail to transcend the devotional–​critical divide (certainly readers of Hardy and Wunderli, for instance, will walk away with radically different views of Joseph Smith’s general character); rather, as I hope to illustrate, what is most problematic about these efforts is that they presuppose the possibility of isolating the “text” of The Book of Mormon as a unified, hermeneutically contained object in the first place, which, I want to demonstrate, it can never be. But in so arguing, I am not really making any special claim about The Book of Mormon’s status as a literary or religious text, except, perhaps, to offer it as a vivid case study of something that I would suggest happens in any reading process, no matter the text. Indeed, coming to understand the final impossibility of bracketed historicity,

 



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I want to argue, is exactly what is required of any responsible theory of literary–​ critical interpretation, and The Book of Mormon renders visible these operations in stunning clarity.

Brackets, Paratexts, and the [Book of Mormon] One of the first problems we run into in any effort to define the process of bracketing (whatever the orderly precision implied by the symbols “[ ]‌”) is that the boundaries of where to begin and end the operation are rather difficult to articulate. On the one hand, no text can ever fully set aside its “historicity” as such, since for a text to function meaningfully as text—​as a decipherable message, that is—​one has to accept that it came from some earlier space and time (let’s call it reading at “trace value”). Put another way, whenever we refer to a text’s communicative qualities we are relying on a notion of implicit priority—​the fact that the text was inscribed in a prior-​to-​now historical moment and sent along through space and time for us to decode and, we hope, understand. Arriving with historicity in tow, in other words, is exactly what texts do, and to attempt to bracket it completely would be to disallow the possibility of any meaning at all. On the other hand, insofar as authors seem to speak to us from vast distances of space and time (especially through texts that continue to affect us hundreds or thousands of years after they were composed), we might say that historicity is always bracketed—​continually set aside so that “meaning” can happen here and now. When, for example, the narrator of Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” tells us, “I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence . . . . Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,” we may feel as though he were piercing the veil of the here and now, intimately present, his message vaguely telepathic, such that in every moment of its reading the original historicity of Whitman’s poem is continually, powerfully, set aside.12 Seen from this perspective, then, bracketed historicity is also always exactly what texts do. Or is it? Could not one argue, rather, that this latter example is simply another way of describing the impossibility of bracketed historicity? Am I not more amazed and moved when a text speaks to me powerfully, deeply, from hundreds or thousands of years ago than when a text sent earlier today by means of, say, text message offers the same sentiments? “I’m here now,” says Whitman. “I am here now,” says a text on my phone. The magical telepathy of the former is amplified precisely by its historicity; the quotidian banality of the latter by its historical proximity. But let’s imagine for a moment that we could set aside these linguistic and philosophical dilemmas and ask more concretely about what is implied in the specific recommendation that we look at only-​the-​text of The Book of Mormon.

 

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When Hardy, Wunderli, and others attempt to separate “external” considerations from what the book “says about itself,” what they mean to do, it would seem, is skip past all the miraculous and hagiographical introductory materials we encounter when first opening (or even before opening) the volume and read only what is “internal” to the text. In the field of literary narratology these efforts might be characterized as attempts to separate the text of The Book of Mormon from its “paratext.” Defined by literary theorist Gérard Genette (in a study of what, in French, he calls the seuil, or “thresholds,” of interpretation), a text’s paratext consists of all the material and cultural elements at the “scene” of reading that surround or otherwise package one’s encounter with a given text, including all those “liminal devices and conventions, both within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between book, author, publisher, and reader.”13 According to Genette, these “liminal devices” include all the “on-​text” qualities of a finished book (things like a text’s binding and cover, title page, author’s name, introductions, prefaces, labels of genre, typesetting, dedications, illustrations, chapter and verse divisions, subheadings, blurbs, and so on), as well as all the “off-​text” sites of cultural discourse that might influence a text’s reception (things like commentaries, reviews, correspondences, diaries, prepublication manuscripts, interviews with the author, flyers, advertisements, press releases, translations, the rest of the author’s oeuvre, and so on).14 As catalogued by Genette, then, these “paratextual” elements—​including, not incidentally, information about “the period in which the work was written”—​comprise all the machinery that goes into enabling a text both to become a “book” and to be rendered (dare we say bracketed?) as such for its readers. Simply bracket all the bracketing paratexts, then, and one can effectively set aside the text’s historicity.15 Careful readers of Genette, however, will sometimes notice an occasionally irksome—​perhaps even intentional—​tension between what he offers as the categorical objectivity (the “undisputed territory” as he calls it) of paratextual mediation and what he also acknowledges as the category’s “potential for indefinite diffusion.”16 The paratext is, in one sense, something that “necessarily has a location that can be situated in relation to the location of the text itself,” and yet, in another sense, operates as a “zone without any hard and fast boundary on either the inward side (turned toward the text) or the outward side (turned toward the world’s discourse about the text).”17 Genette’s “theoretical” articulation of the various functions of the paratext should not, he insists, be confused with a “historicist” approach to textual reception, and yet his entire volume is little more than a grand history of paratexts as developed since the classical period, revealing, finally, very little “theory” beyond his penchant for coinage and taxonomic organization.18 At one moment, the paratext is described as a set of framing “devices” and discursive “mechanisms” with specific and definable “functions,” and yet, a moment later, it’s a vague “threshold” marked by “indefiniteness” and

 



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“slipperiness.”19 The structuralist machine of Genette’s paratext, in other words, is just as often ghostly and diffuse as it is concrete and mechanical. Perhaps nothing better illustrates these classificatory dilemmas than an attempt to delineate the various paratexts of The Book of Mormon. To begin with, there is the unavoidable complication that the text itself already seems to be operating as paratext—​to the Bible, at least, but also by nature of the fact that what we find on the printed page is itself, by its own admission, not an “original” text.20 It is a “translation” from “gold plates,” it claims, and even if not really a translation, it is at least the complicated product of various amanuenses who wrote the words as Smith dictated them, adding numerous “errors” into the process.21 Layered around these paratextual elements are a host of auxiliary elements that have appeared in numerous versions since the book first appeared in 1830:  chapter and verse breaks, headings, prefaces, grammatical normalizations, testimonies of witnesses, pictures of archeological discoveries, and so on.22 But, of course, the most radical paratextual elements that continue to shape our encounter with the text are, first, Smith’s narrative about the angel Moroni and the transcendent powers he received in order to “translate” it, and second, the billion-​dollar corporation known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints, which has, more than any other force since the middle of the nineteenth century, infiltrated readings of the text with paratextual (aggressively proselytic) assertions against the notion of Smith as author—​inspiring both faith and polemics to varying degrees. These latter paratextual forces are so powerful and deterministic I  am tempted to argue that any interpretation of The Book of Mormon that does not position itself somewhere in relation to them risks ignoring the highly charged cultural work the text continues to perform. Still, because these elements are so sacred for faithful Mormons and so obviously problematic for non-​Mormons, it may be useful to turn to an instance of how complicated a text–​paratext dichotomy can be by pointing to something less controversial. We could begin, for example, with the fact that at the beginning of the translation process one of Smith’s scribes, Martin Harris, lost the first 116 manuscript pages of their work (pages described by Smith as “an account abridged from the plates of Lehi by the hand of Mormon”).23 How, then, does this ostensibly paratextual bit of history (paratextual, I mean, insofar as our access to it comes only from “outside” the text itself) inform or determine our understanding of The Book of Mormon, or even its inner logic and narrative structure? First, whether one believes Joseph Smith wrote the book, the paratextual dilemma of the lost 116 pages has important consequences for how The Book of Mormon presents itself, including its themes and internal organization. Almost immediately, for example, the book’s first narrator, Nephi, tells us that for some reason (a “purpose I know not”), what we are reading in its first chapters is a

 

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kind of supplement, an expressly paratextual summary or “abridgement” of things that Nephi’s father, Lehi, also wrote about (plot points, in other words, that we as readers know—​through a kind of dramatic irony—​would have also been conveyed in the 116 pages but were destined to be lost).24 Indeed, there are apparently “many more things” he chooses “not [to] write in this book; for I have written as many of them as were expedient for me in mine other book.”25 Nephi does tell us that the “larger,” “other” plates (the ones we’re not reading, that is, at least until we arrive at the time period covered in Mosiah) were of a more “historical” nature, while on the “smaller” plates (the ones we are reading) Nephi provides us with more of “the things of my soul” and his “ministry” (2 Ne 4:15), but nowhere in the book itself do we learn why, specifically, the first six books of The Book of Mormon are composed by way of a totally different narratological point of view (first person, that is, and without Mormon’s editorial interjections). We are told only that it was for “a wise purpose,” known to the Lord but not to Nephi or any of the other narrators. However, what these editorial decisions mean for believers today is that, first, God already knew, long ago and inside the diegetic world of the book, that one of Smith’s scribes would lose the 116 pages containing the editor-​abridged Book of Lehi; and second, that God therefore built into his revelatory scheme a kind of fail-​safe mechanism (what is, essentially, a narrative redundancy that could account for the chronological action described as happening between 570 and 130 BCE).26 Thus, while the story of the lost 116 pages might seem merely paratextual (in terms of existing discursively “outside” the text), it is for believers nonetheless thought to have determined, in a kind of prophetic prolepsis more than 2,000 years in advance, the very structure and narrative complexity of the book itself—​a complexity that is by all accounts genuinely impressive, perhaps even confusing for many readers (so much so that study guides for The Book of Mormon frequently include flowcharts and other diagrammatic visualizations of the plates’ organizational logic; see, for example, Figures 2.1 and 2.2). For believers, in other words, to read the text without this paratextual information is to completely deny the book its most central and internally coherent meaning. However, for readers who are convinced Joseph Smith fabricated The Book of Mormon, the paratextual story of the lost 116 pages is no less significant in attempting to understand the book’s narrative logic. Prior to the loss of the 116 pages in June 1828, the diegetic world of the book seemed to be emerging by way of a relatively uncomplicated organizational scheme in which a single editor–​narrator (Mormon) was portrayed as abridging the accounts of various authors—​all more or less conveyed by way of a single set of plates. However, after losing the 116 pages, Smith spent several months anxiously wondering how to proceed, very much fearing, apparently, that whoever had stolen the manuscript pages might publish them alongside whatever retranslation he attempted

Figure 2.1  Diagram showing the “Compilation of the Book of Mormon,” in Daniel H. Ludlow, A Companion to Your Study of the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 1976), 381. In the bottom-​right corner, in very small print, this diagram explains, “The exact place of the Small Plates of Nephi in the plates received by Joseph is not known,” reflecting the complications that followed, editorially and narratively, following the loss of the 116 manuscript pages.

 

Figure 2.2  “Sources, plates, records, and manuscripts of the Book of Mormon,” in Reexploring the Book of Mormon, John W. Welch, ed. (Provo, UT: FARMS, 1992), p. 17.

 

 



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(exposing, perhaps, the degree to which the notion of “translation” was a mere façade for what was in fact an extremely creative and exploratory compositional process). As a way out of this dilemma, the “additional plates” scenario Smith revealed in 1829 was a stroke of genius, not only because, as we saw previously, it meant the book would become more complicated and interesting; it also meant, ironically, that the book would become more coherent as well. Indeed, one could very well argue from a literary–​critical standpoint that the loss of the 116 pages was a gift, forcing Smith to do what most authors believe is a more sensible compositional strategy anyway: writing the “introduction” last. To be more precise, it is important to understand that Smith did not simply recommence his dictation with Nephi’s small plates and then transition over to the large plates with Mosiah and on to the rest of the book (see Figure 2.3). Rather, when he began dictation again in the spring of 1829, he picked up where he left off, continuing with the large plates, from Mosiah to the end of Moroni, and only then dictating 1 Nephi through Words of Mormon. What this chronological sequence in dictation meant in terms of the book’s thematic, internal organization was that all the important events that transpire in the latter part of the book ( Jesus’s visiting the Americas, the periods of peace and warfare that followed, the eventual destruction of Nephi’s progeny, etc.), had already been written when Smith set out to re-​create the diegetic world that had been lost with the 116 pages. Hence, Nephi’s prophecies on the small plates could be much more specific and anticipatory, directly “foreseeing,” in other words, the events that would transpire later in the book, giving the entire text a much more organized, prophetic structure. There are, of course, a few awkward moments in The Book of Mormon and elsewhere that evidence a less organic, less planned-​in-​advance mode of composition,27 but these should not detract from the truly impressive organizational feat Smith and his scribes accomplished in returning to the text after the loss of the 116 pages. Indeed, I would argue that the complicatedly layered and palimpsest-​like text that finally emerged (in organizational, if not rhetorical, sophistication) might very well be compared to the “two books” thesis offered by a number of scholars regarding that more canonical and “classic” of American novels, Moby-​Dick. As Herman Melville scholar and late-​modernist poet Charles Olson famously put it, “Moby-​Dick was two books written between February, 1850 and August, 1851. The first book did not contain Ahab. It may not, except incidentally, have contained Moby-​Dick.”28 As Olson and several other scholars have argued, the catalyst for Melville’s sudden decision to dramatically revise Moby-​Dick was his rereading of Shakespeare’s King Lear—​a text that intervened so powerfully during his work on the novel that he felt inspired to abandon his earlier attempts at a writing a less ambitious (and no doubt more financially rewarding) swashbuckling romance of the high seas and to revise with an eye toward a more complicated, bizarre, and philosophically rich story of revenge and

Figure 2.3  Diagram (by the author) showing the dictation timeline of The Book of Mormon.

 

 



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human tragedy. As in the case of Joseph Smith’s dictation of The Book of Mormon, however, Melville chose not to completely discard and rewrite the narrative as it had been developing, but to retrofit it according to this new approach—​the resulting text being all the more interesting and complex for having left so many traces of its earlier version behind. In neither case, however, can we refer to these paratextual forces as existing wholly “outside” the text. On the contrary, they seem to be endlessly haunting the text, irreducibly infiltrating its internal, narrative logic and driving its organizational and thematic unity.

The Ghostly Paratext and the Textual Machine If at this point I have been successful in illustrating the degree to which no matter how one reads The Book of Mormon there is no way, finally, to separate text from paratext, I would like to focus, for a moment, even deeper inside the book’s narrative to argue that this indivisible outside–​inside paradigm of textual experience is part of a systemic “scriptural” logic that governs the diegetic world of the characters as well. As I hope to demonstrate, everywhere in The Book of Mormon that a textual machine appears (by which I  mean the human technologies of reading and writing), a paratextual ghost (by which I mean some kind of spiritually enchanted, occult force) seems to infiltrate and haunt it.29 Because we’ve been analyzing the paratextual hauntings of the small plates, I’d like to continue focusing on that area of the book, delving even more closely into Nephi’s story about procuring the “plates of brass” that his family left behind in Jerusalem after leaving for their first journey into the Wilderness. Lehi’s decision to go into the wilderness with his family was informed by a “dream”—​a kind of deeply personal, otherwise “hidden” revelation—​wherein the Lord commanded him to leave Jerusalem because the evil people of the city planned to kill him (1 Ne 2:1). We are told that Lehi had substantial riches, but that he left many of these behind and “did as the Lord commanded him.” Considering that Lehi’s dreams and visions involve details as specific as the immanent destruction of Jerusalem and threats to his person (and given the poetic, scriptural language he immediately engages in after arriving in the wilderness30), one might be forgiven for thinking that with such intimate access to God’s foreknowledge and revelatory power, Lehi might not have really needed some other, previously recorded—​and therefore static and fixed—​account of scriptural revelation in order to carry on in the wilderness. But such is not the logic of prophetic calling in The Book of Mormon. Indeed, in the very next revelation Lehi receives (again by means of the occult experience of having “dreamed a dream”), the Lord tells him to send his sons back into Jerusalem to procure “records which were engraved upon the plates of brass, which contained [his]

 

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genealogy” (1 Ne 3:12). It may seem odd that while the Lord could be particular enough in his instructions to Lehi that he would know to leave behind his possessions and home, take his family into the Wilderness, and send back his sons on a dangerous mission to get plates of brass, the Lord would nonetheless choose not to be specific enough to relate to Lehi the genealogy of his fathers. But, as we shall see, this intermingling of ghostly, occult dreams (visions, prophecies, etc.) with orthographic, textual machines (an elaborate codex, in this case, made of brass) will only become more important as the narrative progresses. As a budding young prophet figure himself, Lehi’s son Nephi will quickly come to understand this delicate dance of ghost and machine, for it is on his way to secure the plates of brass that he has what must have been a frightening occult experience involving, essentially, an instance of human sacrifice. I  am referring, of course, to the night when Nephi sneaks over the walls of Jerusalem and comes across the drunken Laban, the very man who had denied their earlier requests to procure the plates of brass. Some readers may balk at my use of the term “occult” to describe Nephi’s interaction with a “spirit” who commands him to kill Laban, but it is hard, in my mind, to see it any other way. The mystical instructions Nephi receives apparently emerge from an otherwise hidden voice that he alone can hear, and result in the murdering of someone who lies defenseless in a drunken stupor (the definition of “occult,” one is reminded, is precisely “secret, disclosed only to the initiated,” “hidden from view,” and “beyond the range of ordinary knowledge”). The violence in this case is “justified” and “legal” only in an occult, prophetic sense: “It is better,” the spirit tells him, “that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief ” (1 Ne 4:13). But notice that as intimately personal—​as ghostly, that is—​as this revelatory instruction to kill Laban is, the logic Nephi follows through in his mind is entirely mechanical, following a very simple if-​this-​then-​ this reasoning: And now, when I, Nephi, had heard these words, I  remembered the words of the Lord which he spake unto me in the wilderness, saying that: Inasmuch as thy seed shall keep my commandments, they shall prosper in the land of promise. Yea, and I  also thought that they could not keep the commandments of the Lord according to the law of Moses, save they should have the law. And I also knew that the law was engraven upon the plates of brass. And again, I knew that the Lord had delivered Laban into my hands for this cause—​that I might obtain the records according to his commandments. Therefore I did obey the voice of the Spirit, and took Laban by the hair of the head, and I smote off his head with his own sword. (1 Ne 4:14–​18)

 



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To be able to obey the law, Nephi tells us, one has to have the law, and to have the law, one has to have the book. This makes perfect sense, one might suppose, considering how “plain and precious,” Nephi tells us, the words of the book are. In fact, this is precisely the logic Nephi conveys when, in another of his rhapsodic visions, he learns that at some distant time in the future, this same book will “go forth from the Jews in purity unto the Gentiles”—​only it won’t maintain that (textual-​mechanical) purity. Some “great and abominable church” (which Smith’s immediate culture would have identified as the Catholic Church) is going to get its hands on it and “many plain and precious things” will have been “taken out of the book” and “because of these things which are taken away . . . an exceedingly great many do stumble, yea, insomuch that Satan hath great power over them.” Bugs in the machine, in other words. If only the “plain and precious” parts had not been taken out, people would have had no problem knowing the will of the Lord.31 We are not to fear, however, as Nephi goes on to explain, since his vision also tells us that “other books” will arrive, validating, purifying, and “restoring” all the “plain and precious things which have been taken away from them.” Reading, according to this premise, is a simple, uncomplicated process of mechanical decoding. So long as the words are “plain and precious,” the text is enough. But of course the text is never enough. Not only did Nephi need the ghostly “paratextual” instruction to kill Laban in order to obtain the easy-​to-​understand “plain and precious” text; the plates themselves repeatedly generate further enchanted experiences.32 As soon as Nephi and his brothers return with the plates, Lehi “searches” them, discovering his genealogy (as we expected he would), but then immediately launches into another vision:  “when my father saw all these [records], he was filled with the Spirit, and began to prophecy concerning his seed.”33 Nephi not only has many of the same occult visions, his own supposedly “plain” readings of the plates of brass are similarly haunted by his own paratextual infiltrations. For instance, after a curiously anticlimactic arrival in the Americas (Nephi seems rather matter of fact about it: “. . . after we had sailed for the space of many days we did arrive at the promised land; and we went forth . . .” [1 Ne 18:23]), Nephi makes his own plates, and starts copying onto them some of the writings from the brass plates, primarily the words of Isaiah, which he tells us he read to his family: “I did read unto them that which was written by the prophet Isaiah; for I did liken all scriptures unto us, that it might be for our profit and learning” (1 Ne 19:23). As many scholars have shown, what this “likening” entailed was, by even the most generous accounts, a paratextual imposition that transformed much of Isaiah’s original, culturally specific discourse—​radically complicating, at least, any notion that the plates are useful because they are so “plain” to be understood. When, for example, Isaiah 29:5–​12 refers to Sennacherib’s invasion of Judah around 700 BCE, Nephi “expands” the

 

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text so that it appears to reference Nephi’s own people, their eventual destruction, the coming forth of The Book of Mormon, and so on.34 Or whereas Isaiah 48 alludes to Cyrus of Persia, the Babylonian leader who delivers the Jewish people from captivity (clearly referenced in previous chapters in Isaiah), Nephi again “expands” on the text so that Isaiah now seems to be referring to Nephi’s own family and the future return of his progeny into the House of Israel.35 Hardy sees this textual infiltration as merely consistent with Nephi’s tendency to “appeal to the authority of the text while at the same time modifying it,” but I  think a more apt description can be found in the overarching Book of Mormon pattern of intermingling the ghost of paratexts with the ostensibly mechanical qualities of textual purity.36 Indeed, there are so many examples of this tendency, one could point to almost anywhere in the book and find it happening.37 But of course the most famous (at least from a Mormon proselytic perspective) moment of ghostly-​paratext-​in-​the-​textual-​machine comes near the end of The Book of Mormon, wherein Moroni tells his readers, “when ye shall read these things . . . I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true,” and if one asks with “real intent,” he says, God “will manifest the truth of it unto you by the power of the Holy Ghost” (Moroni 10:3–​5). Here, in what can only be described as an organizationally stunning chiasmus, Moroni’s (para)textual exhortation hearkens back—​or forward, actually, given the dictation order—​to the very first chapter of The Book of Mormon. In those first verses, one is reminded, Lehi is “carried away in a vision,” sees the “heavens open,” even God himself “sitting upon his throne,” witnessing “numberless concourses of angels,” while one of these heavenly beings approaches Lehi and gives him—​no surprise here—​a book. It would be difficult to imagine a more impressive paratext (what with God and angels standing by to provide prefatory information and graphic illustrations), but this, finally, is the message of The Book of Mormon: The text is never alone. For every mechanistic, “iron rod” moment of ostensibly easy, textual transmission, some “liahona” of ghostly paratext hovers nearby, haunting the scene of reading.38

Hieroglyphic Inside and Out It should be clear, then, that a historicization of The Book of Mormon is, from a literary–​critical perspective, a mode of interpretation demanded by the book’s own “internal” (if such an adjective is ever logically appropriate) logic. Consider, as a final example, the book’s orthographic origins. At several points in The Book of Mormon we learn that the narrators are writing on their plates in some kind of “reformed Egyptian,” which, for both the narrators and Joseph Smith,

 



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carried with it certain magical and linguistic assumptions.39 Indeed, Egyptian hieroglyphs were, particularly through the mid-​nineteenth century, thought to have an especially evocative religious power because of the way they supposedly packaged together both orthographic text and spiritual paratext, transcending, in other words, any mere alphabetic transcription. Moroni, for example, tells us he and the other narrators have been writing in “reformed Egyptian” characters precisely because the plates are not “sufficiently large” (this, even on the large plates) and that if additional plate space had been available they would have written in the more precise, less-​susceptible-​to-​misinterpretation language of “Hebrew”—​implying, evidently, that Egyptian hieroglyphs (because of their supposedly more efficient, nonphonetic qualities) were somehow capable of concentrating larger-​than-​phoneme units of meaning in single characters.40 We know from several sources that this is precisely what Joseph Smith believed about Egyptian hieroglyphs: that there were, potentially, sentence-​long semantic units hauntingly encoded in the structure of each individual, written character (see, for example, his “translation” work in the 1835 Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language, Figure 2.4).41 Indeed, to see this hieroglyphic magic at work in The Book of Mormon (para)text we have only to combine (1) the various accounts of Smith’s translation process, in which he would place a “seer stone” into a hat and look into it so as to be able to “read off ” the writing on the plates, with 2) what we have learned recently about the number of words Smith would convey to his scribes in a given utterance during the translation. In terms of the latter, Royal Skousen, the Brigham Young University (BYU) editor of the decades-​long “critical text” project on The Book of Mormon, has argued that what remains of the original and printer’s manuscripts of the text provides evidence that Smith would dictate, on average, about twenty words at a time (although sometimes as many as thirty) before pausing to allow his scribe to catch up.42 Regarding the use of the seer stone in translation, David Whitmer (one of the “Three Witnesses” to the gold plates and their translation) explained that in the “spiritual light” of the seer stone, a piece of something resembling parchment would appear, and on that appeared the writing. One character at a time would appear, and under it was the interpretation in English. Brother Joseph would read off the English to Oliver Cowdery, who was his principal scribe, and when it was written down and repeated to Brother Joseph to see if it was correct, then it would disappear, and another character with the interpretation would appear.43 Here, again, what the text “says about itself ” is always more than can be conveyed by any actual grammatical technology (Egyptian hieroglyphics, it

Figure 2.4  Manuscript page and transcription from the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (in the hand of Joseph Smith’s scribe, William W. Phelps), dictated in mid-​to-​late 1835. Notice the single-​character-​to-​entire-​phrase dynamic included in the “translation” for each character. Significantly, the characters are “named” here but have no apparent phonetic logic (the final character’s name, for instance, is apparently six syllables long, Hoeoophahphaheh). Roughly the same character-​to-​meaning ratio can be found on the manuscript of the Book of Abraham (1842), for which this Grammar and Alphabet was a preparatory work, and is implied in the “Reformed Egyptian” of The Book of Mormon (and the various accounts of its translation).

 

 



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could perhaps go without saying, do not function according to these dynamics, and, indeed, no full system of writing ever could).44 It should not surprise us, however, that Smith shared these assumptions about Egyptian hieroglyphics. The idea circulated widely in the early nineteenth century and continued in various forms even after Jean-​François Champollion’s discovery of Egyptian writing’s more directly phonetic–​alphabetic qualities.45 Swedish mystic Immanuel Swedenborg (1688–​1772), for instance, had been championing these hieroglyphic notions for decades by the time Smith received the gold plates. Only the “ancients,” Swedenborg explains in Heaven and Hell (as printed in the first American edition published in Baltimore, 1812), fully understood the Hermetic doctrine of “as above so below” (also known as “Correspondence”), and “it remained longest among the Egyptians, of which their Hieroglyphics or sacred scriptures were a principal part.”46 It was specifically the Egyptians, Swedenborg wrote, who “accounted the knowledge of Correspondences as the most exalted of all Sciences,” coding that sacred science into their hieroglyphic writing, just as the Hebrew prophets had the words of the Bible.47 The editor of the 1812 English-​language edition of Heaven and Hell explains that Swedenborg intended, eventually, to “give us the key to ancient hieroglyphical learning, saying, at the same time, that none but himself could do it,” although he did not live long enough to accomplish it.48 For Swedenborg, in short, no ungodly linguist could ever really understand the hieroglyphs because to decode their meaning one needed the spiritual light of God’s “influx,” and of course Swedenborg had more than his fair share, with frequent visitations from the resurrected Jesus, angels, and other-​worldly beings—​all of which culminated in his own paratextual “expansion” of the first books of the Bible, the Arcana Cœlestia [Heavenly Mysteries] (published in Latin in eight volumes, 1749–​1756). We know that Joseph Smith was familiar with Swedenborg, as were many of Smith’s mystically inclined contemporaries, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose own ideas on Egyptian hieroglyphics were perhaps even more expansive and metaphorical.49 In Nature (1836), for instance, Emerson speaks of “every man’s condition [being] a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put,” and in his essay on Swedenborg in Representative Men, Emerson argues that the great mystic saw the world as “a grammar of hieroglyphs”—​ these modes of writing (in both Egypt and Nature, as it were) embodying rather more than any simple act of linguistic transmission.50 For Emerson, in other words, to say that humankind’s condition was a “solution in hieroglyphic” was not simply to affirm the value of these ancient texts in providing a door to one’s cultural past; rather, for Emerson (as for Swedenborg and Joseph Smith), the dynamics of the Egyptian hieroglyph were valuable precisely because they implied a mode in which the mechanics of text could be—​or

 

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rather, had to be—​radically informed and augmented by an immediate, revelatory paratextuality that confirmed one’s own place in the cosmos. Why “grope among the dry bones of the past,” Emerson asks, when such hieroglyphic experiences are available in the “text” of Nature to any spiritually ambitious soul who would care to see them?51

Haunted Historicities and Representing Technologies Several scholars of Mormonism and other nineteenth-​century faiths have interpreted this fascination with Egyptian hieroglyphs and the revelatory experiences that followed as evidence of a rising “metaphysical” tradition in American religiosity that included Hermetic philosophies, folk magic, and the extra-​biblical legends of Freemasonry—​a “ghostly” and occult discourse that existed alongside and radically altered the “rationalist” dogmas of Enlightenment evangelicalism following the American Revolution.52 For Mormon studies in particular, one of the key points of continuity between this metaphysical tradition and The Book of Mormon has been the legend of Enoch and his gold plate as articulated in the “Royal Arch” degrees of early nineteenth-​century Freemasonry.53 There are varied accounts of the legend in masonic texts dating from the late eighteenth century, but the basic narrative is as follows:  One of Adam’s close descendants, Enoch, was one day taken up by God into a tall mountain, so high it seemed to rise into the heavens. There on the mountain, God revealed to Enoch a triangular “plate of gold” on which “ineffable characters” were engraved and whose pronunciation Enoch was told never to divulge. When he came down from this vision, Enoch was told to commemorate the experience by building an underground temple with nine consecutive arches and to place in the ninth (or “royal”) arch a facsimile gold plate with the same ineffable “hieroglyphics” engraved on it. After building his underground temple, Enoch was allowed once a year to return to the site of the royal arch to consecrate and remember the experience. Thousands of years later, when Solomon’s Temple was under repair, some of his Master Masons (including Solomon’s chief architect Hiram Abiff54) discovered a hidden vault, leading underground and through a “stone with an iron ring,” which turned out to be the “keystone” of an arch—​the same royal arch of Enoch’s gold plate. In that secret vault below the temple, they also discovered a number of other treasures, including the Ark of the Covenant and an ancient book. With Solomon’s help, they then uncovered the key to the ineffable hieroglyphs and were thus able to translate the secret code contained on the gold plate (i.e. the name of God), which was then passed down through the generations of masons until the present day (see Figure 2.5).55

 

Figure 2.5  The “gold plate” of Enoch, on which “inneffable characters” have engraved the name of God; see Jeremy L. Cross, The True Masonic Chart, or Hieroglyphic Monitor (New Haven, CT: John C. Gray, 1820), 44.

 

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Obviously, there are a number of fascinating parallels here between the masonic legend of Enoch and the story of Smith’s gold plates:  the ineffable hieroglyphs, the annual visits to the sacred space, the early revelations Smith received in which he was referred to as “Enoch,” Smith’s description of The Book of Mormon as the “keystone” to Mormonism, and The Book of Mormon’s own narrative of the Nephites’ building temples “after the manner of Solomon.”56 But if the legend of Enoch offered a ghostly paratext for Smith’s reception and translation of the gold plates, it is important to remember that Freemasonry was itself a paratextual supplement to biblical narrative, recasting familiar stories with new characters and sacred rites.57 Indeed, the secretive paratextual additions to the Bible offered by the gold plates of both Freemasonry and The Book of Mormon reveal not only a growing penchant for occult and metaphysical experiences, but also a distinct approach to sacred texts that insisted on the spiritual necessity of paratextual haunting. Such a realization seems especially relevant when we consider that these magical gold plate stories were offered from within the same cultural matrix that had been exuding a burgeoning technological confidence regarding what was known at the time as sola scriptura, a doctrine that held that the word of god alone (so “plain and precious”) was sufficient for salvation.58 The Bible, of course, was always what was meant by scriptura in this context, and a host of evangelical organizations in the early nineteenth century had emerged with the express purpose of publishing and distributing as many Bibles as possible.59 Alternately repulsed and compelled by what historians now refer to as the “market revolution” of the 1820s, organizations like the American Bible Society, the New England Tract Society, and hundreds of others were convinced that what had made possible so many new and dangerous temptations in the public sphere (the rise of more efficient print technologies and modes of circulation) could also initiate the great millennial events that would eventually bring Christ back to earth.60 Their goal was, in short, to create the first mass media in American culture, one with the Bible as its primary vehicle.61 In terms of attempting to understand what The Book of Mormon “says about itself,” these historical circumstances have to be one of our first considerations, if only for the simple fact that what the text presents about itself to the reader—​before anything else—​is that it is a book.62 Indeed, its “bookishness” presents itself to the reader before any possibility of reading the stories of Nephi, Mormon, Moroni, or even Joseph Smith and the gold plates. And once the book is open, it constantly refers to itself as such, even imagining some of its (more skeptical) future readers as complaining, “A Bible! A Bible! We have got a Bible, and there cannot be any more Bible,” but then insisting, just “because ye have a Bible, ye need not suppose that it contains all my words;

 



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neither need ye suppose that I have not caused more to be written.”63 But The Book of Mormon has always aspired, even from within, to be more than just a “written” text—​it has always wanted to be published. It was not enough, obviously, for Smith to have simply dictated the narrative to his scribes and then referred to it variously in sermons with his followers. Whereas it would have been hard, for instance, for Nephi to have imagined the specific “nation” that would necessarily have “dwindle[d]‌and perish[ed] in unbelief ” if he had not been successful in procuring the plates, Joseph Smith had no such difficulty. What he saw was a nation, haunted by an Native American past, suddenly gearing up with the complex networks and communication revolutions of a burgeoning mass media, and The Book of Mormon aspires to biblical status in precisely these terms.

Procuring the Plates Consider, as a final illustration, a rather fascinating allegory that emerges within The Book of Mormon when we examine not only the ghostly plates of masonic legend, but also the mechanical plates of the new print technologies that had been developed and were beginning to circulate in the early 1800s. As I previously explained, the steady faith in the printed word that had been growing among New England Christians during these years was matched by an increased attention to printing technologies, corporate organization, and Bible distribution. It is important to remember that before the nineteenth century, not a great deal had changed in print technology. The process had become more widespread and varied, of course, but the same typesetting and handpress methods that had been in place since Johannes Gutenberg’s innovations were still more or less in operation by the late eighteenth century.64 Beginning in 1803, however, a series of new methods and mechanical apparatuses emerged in England, radically altering the print landscape. I  am referring, specifically, to the advent of “stereotype plates.” The basic design of these plates had been attempted before, but it was Englishman Lord Charles Stanhope’s refinements of the process that made them suddenly available for the rising demands of print culture in both Europe and America. In a traditional printing, typesetters would place pieces of type into a block (or “form”), which was then inked and pressed against sheets of paper. What the stereotype plate offered, however, was implicit already in its name, coined by Firmin Didot (1764–​1836): “Stereotype is a word compounded from two Greek words—​stereos fixed, and typos form, and is thus distinguished from typography, in which impressions are taken from mobile or moveable types.”65 Instead of taking a typeset block directly to the

 

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Figure 2.6  The “Stanhope Press,” named after the Earl Stanhope of England who introduced a new and more efficient means of making metal “plates” for stereotype printing; T. C. Hansard, Typographia: An Historical Sketch of the Origin and Progress of the Art of Printing (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1825), 636.

ink, in other words, stereotype founders would create a gypsum plaster mold of the block of type, and then use it to cast (with a combination of metals) an impression of the typeset page—​creating an entire “plate” for future printings (see Figures 2.6 and 2.7).66 Such plates offered publishers a number of advantages: They avoided the cost of retypesetting an entire book in order to print a new edition, allowed publishers to more easily circulate the necessary materials for an impression between presses, and prevented new errors from entering the printing process (although it also unfortunately set in place errors generated by the initial typesetting, which could still be corrected on the plates, but not without additional cost and effort). It was, however, much more expensive, and only made financial sense, as one publisher explained, for printing “staple works” that could be relied on for “great and constant sale”—​by which he meant, primarily, the Bible.67 Acquiring a set of these plates very quickly became the primary goal of American Bible societies.68 As the Bible Society of Philadelphia explained in an 1810 report that would be reprinted several times throughout New England, “The great advantage which would accrue from the possession of a set of stereotype plates for the Bible, has long engaged the attention of the Managers.”69

 



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Figure 2.7  Tools and casting pot used to found metal “plates” for stereotype printing; T. C. Hansard, Typographia: An Historical Sketch of the Origin and Progress of the Art of Printing (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1825), 636.

Such plates, they continued, would cost more than £700 sterling, an enormous expense at the time for a society whose main objective was to give away Bibles for free, and yet, When they considered that the possession of a set of such plates would enable them to multiply copies of the Bible at the lowest expense, and thus render their funds more extensively useful; and still more when they reflected that it would put it in their power to give greater effect to the operations of other Bible Societies, which are springing up daily in every part of the country, the Managers did not hesitate to order the plates to be procured and forwarded from London as soon as possible. The expense is indeed great, when compared with the fund at their disposal; but they were willing to believe, that the obvious and high importance of the measure could not fail to draw from the public liberality a sum sufficient to counterbalance the heavy draught . . . it is to be hoped, that, by the blessing of God . . . [the use of these plates] will spread the knowledge of the Redeemer and his salvation over the earth, and introduce that happy state of things, when knowledge, righteousness, and peace, shall pervade the world.70

 

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Read in the context of Nephi’s logic about procuring Laban’s brass plates, these deliberations (“considered that the possession of a set of such plates . . .” “and still more when they reflected . . .” “the expense is indeed great . . .” “spread the knowl­ edge of the Redeemer and his salvation”) do indeed have a “familiar spirit.” One is struck, in fact, that there seems to be already something of a mass-​media argument in Nephi’s own deliberations when deciding whether to kill Laban (“better that one man should perish than that a nation dwindle”). Suddenly, alongside this admittedly paratextual discourse, The Book of Mormon’s constant self-​reflexivity as a book made from “plates” begins to seem much less archaic and premodern, something more like the global scripture it would soon become.71 Having examined over a hundred different editions of Bibles printed in the early 1800s, I am struck by the introduction of stereotype plates as the one innovation that began to announce itself on Bible title pages beginning in the early 1810s (see Figures 2.8–​12).72 In fact, there is a curious window in Bible printing history between about 1816 when “stereotype edition” first began appearing on American title pages and the mid-​1840s when the practice had become common enough that many publishers no longer felt it necessary to advertise it on title pages, coinciding rather precisely with the prophetic career of Joseph Smith. Indeed, when the title page of the 1840 printing of The Book of Mormon appeared, finally, in high-​tech biblical fashion, as a “stereotyped” edition, Smith was no doubt very pleased—​and not only because all the embarrassing distancing phrases insisted upon by Egbert Bratt Grandin in 1830 (“Printed by E.  B. Grandin, For the Author”) had been replaced by bold proclamations of “Translated by Joseph Smith, Jr.” (see Figures 2.13 and 2.14). He would have known, also, that the story of the miraculous “plates” had taken on a special resonance. Ebenezer Robinson, the man who coordinated the first stereotyped edition of The Book of Mormon, later testified that in early 1840 he had “received a manifestation from the Lord,” in which “it seemed that a ball of fire came down from above, striking the top of my heart, and told me, in plain, distinct language, what course to pursue . . . in getting The Book of Mormon stereotyped and printed.”73 “I will go,” he told Smith (echoing Nephi’s language to his father Lehi), “and will not come home until The Book of Mormon is stereotyped.” “It was as fire shut up in my bones, both day and night,” he remembered, “that if I could only get to Cincinnati the work could be accomplished”—​the path toward “procuring the plates” once again marked by the ghostly miracles and “divine origin” of The Book of Mormon.74 My point here is neither to argue that Smith must have borrowed the various Bible societies’ language about “procuring plates” in order to write the story of Nephi, nor is it to conclude that he borrowed the legend of Enoch to develop his own narrative of the golden plates. Rather, what these historical points of reference offer is a way of visualizing the degree to which the book demands, inside

Figure 2.8  Title page and detail(s) of the same edition of the bible purchased by Oliver Cowdery at E. B. Grandin’s shop in Palmyra, New York (where The Book of Mormon was first printed), which Joseph Smith later used for his revision of the Bible. Notice the prominent identifiers of the edition as printed from “stereotyped” plates; Holy Bible (Cooperstown, NY: H. & E. Phinney, 1828).

 

 

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Figure 2.9  Detail from the title page of a “STEREOTYPE EDITION” of the Bible (Boston: Samuel T. Armstrong, 1824).

Figure 2.10  Detail(s) from the title page of a “STEREOTYPE EDITION” of the Bible (Hartford, CT: S. G. Goodrich, 1818).

and out, to be read as both ghostly and mechanical, both ancient and modern, both text and paratext. From a literary–​critical perspective, then, The Book of Mormon only confirms what any responsible interpretive practice demands of its practitioners: that we observe not only the text, but the entire scene of textual expression (even as this scene continually disappears into the text itself), including the complex, material conditions of its arrival as well as the varied

 



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Figure 2.11  Detail from the title page of a “STEREOTYPE FOR THE AMERICAN BIBLE SOCIETY” edition of the Bible (New York: A. Paul, 1827).

Figure 2.12  Detail from the title page of a “STEREOTYPE COPY” edition of the Bible (Brattleborough, VT: J. Holbrook, 1818).

cultural expressions made possible by the endlessly unsaturated possibilities of its ongoing circulation. The Book of Mormon’s real gift to literary theory, in other words, is its intransigent refusal to let us stay “inside” the text.

Notes 1. Gérard Genette, Paratexts:  Thresholds of Interpretation (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 1997), 409. 2. Grant Hardy, Understanding The Book of Mormon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), xvi; hereafter abbreviated as UBM. 3. Brackets help to clarify, for example, that 16 ÷ 2[8 –​ 6] + 1 = 5, because in the accepted mathematical order of operations whatever is in (and next to) parentheses ( ) or brackets [ ]‌“outranks” (meaning, has to be done before) the other processes of exponents, multiplication or division, addition, and subtraction. This order of operations (in which parentheses and brackets always take precedence) supersedes any other way of proceeding through an equation.

 

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Figure 2.13  Title page for the 1830 (Palmyra, NY) edition of The Book of Mormon, “Printed by E. B. Grandin For the Author.” 4. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) explains that “bracket” was originally an architectural term and appears to have evolved from the Latin brãcae, meaning “britches,” and was so called for its “resemblance to the ‘codpiece’ of a pair of britches,” the Spanish bragueta indicating both “codpiece” and “bracket.” However, lest we conjure up images of “codpiecing” the historicity of The Book of Mormon, it is perhaps best to go on bracketing the etymological historicity of bracket (allowing “bracket,” that is, to keep on bracketing its own indelicate origins). One should not feel obligated, in other words, to think about codpieces while reading the rest of this essay. And yet, if one were so inclined, it might be interesting (considering the degree to which debates over The Book of Mormon historicity have been almost entirely male-​dominated discussions) to remember Rabelais’s famous treatise on codpieces, in which he satirizes those who, as many did during his time, used overlarge and extravagantly decorated codpieces as pockets, thereby giving a somewhat false intimation as to their supposed contents. As many scholars have noted, Rabelais’s critique of “so many young gentleman’s” codpieces being full of “nothing but wind” is both sexual and textual (implying that the charms of rhetoric, however aesthetic, can sometimes be devoid of meaning). See François Rabelais, Gargantua &

 



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Figure 2.14  Title page for the 1840 (Nauvoo, IL) edition, when the prophet Smith—​ now more clearly identified as “translator”—​had finally procured the (stereotype) plates.

Pantagruel (New York: Penguin, 1955), 55; Elizabeth A. Chesney, The Rabelais Encyclopedia (New York: Greenwood, 2004), 38. 5. “Bracketing” first emerged in this sense by way of the phenomenological “parenthesizing” or “putting into suspension” developed by the philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–​1938). Sometimes referred to as epoché (from the Greek ἐποχή, meaning “suspension”), Husserl’s concept of bracketing was intended to shift one’s focus away from the dilemma of accessing raw objectivity and onto questions of how objects are perceived in consciousness; see David Woodruff Smith and Ronald McIntyre, Husserl and Intentionality (Boston: Reidel, 1984), 96. 6. I would include the initial premise of this edited volume as part of this trend as well. In the original call for papers, our editors encouraged its potential authors to “resist the urge to simply historicize [The Book of Mormon’s] importance away or address its claims to sacred status” (see the original description online at “The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere,” http://​blogs.ssrc.org/​tif/​2013/​08/​09/​cfp-​the-​book-​of-​mormon-​ americanist-​approaches/​). Even Mark Wright, an archaeologist at BYU fully committed to

 

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the Meso-​American historicity of The Book of Mormon, has recently (and in a refreshingly ecumenical tone) suggested, “let’s not discourage anyone from doing research [on The Book of Mormon] even if they think they need to bracket the question of historicity” (see Mark Wright, “The Future of Book of Mormon Studies,” https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=o_​ 9Uq8-​s8ww). 7. Examples of Book of Mormon studies that arrive at this conclusion can be found in Brent Lee Metcalfe, New Approaches to The Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1993); Dan Vogel, Joseph Smith:  The Making of a Prophet (Salt Lake City, UT:  Signature Books, 2004). 8. Publications by the formerly BYU-​based organization Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS), and its alpha-​male intellectual Hugh Nibley, are the most obvious references here, although one senses something of this impulse as well in Terryl L. Givens’s discussion of FARMS in By the Hand of Mormon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 117–​132. 9. Yet another example of this trend can be found in speculative “theological” readings of The Book of Mormon that evidence an ongoing debt to deconstructive and other postmodern theorists; see, for example, Joseph Spencer and Jenny Webb, eds., Reading Nephi Reading Isaiah: Reading 2 Nephi 26–​27 (Salem, OR: Salt Press, 2011); also Spencer’s An Other Testament: On Typology (Salem, OR:  Salt Press, 2012), and Adam Miller, ed., An Experiment on the Word:  Reading Alma 32 (Salem, OR:  Salt Press, 2011) (all of these Salt Press volumes are under contract to be republished as part of BYU’s Maxwell Institute imprints). In a recent article online, Spencer makes clear his approach: “Rather than assuming that certain elements in [The Book of Mormon] are to be attributable to a modern source, others to an ancient source, I assume a kind of integrity of the text. In The Book of Mormon, I assume, I’m presented with a coherent text that needs to be interpreted on its own terms. I assume only one source: The Book of Mormon itself” (emphasis in original); see Joseph Spencer, “On Translation Theories and the Interpretation of The Book of Mormon,” at www.patheos.com. Mark Thomas’s Digging in Cumorah: Reclaiming Book of Mormon Narratives (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2000) similarly attempts to “transcend the history/​fiction debate” by adopting a narratological typology as his mode of analysis. Terryl Givens has argued against Thomas’s and other efforts to “bracket the more remarkable claims of The Book of Mormon,” partly because—​and on this point I completely agree—​he sees the book’s own narrative structures as radically complicating any such effort, but also because he believes (and on this I obviously disagree) “In sum, there is simply little basis for arguing that the worldview of Joseph [Smith]’s era had any influence on the make-​up of The Book of Mormon itself ” (By the Hand, pp. 169, 181, emphasis mine); such a conclusion, I would argue, says more about Givens’s devotion to the notion of ancient historicity in The Book of Mormon than it does contemporary Book of Mormon scholarship. 10. Earl M. Wunderli, An Imperfect Book: What The Book of Mormon Tells Us About Itself (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2013), 9; hereafter abbreviated as IB. As I previously indicated, Grant Hardy’s is undoubtedly one of the most interesting studies on The Book of Mormon to emerge in the last decade, and I am indebted to it in many respects, even if I take issue with the generally one-​sided and wholly nonhistoricist view of what counts as “literary criticism” offered in the book (positing it as a mode of interpretation that can proceed without historical considerations, as though such a view were universal among literary scholars, which it clearly is not). Wunderli’s book, which I also found useful, doesn’t go as far as Hardy in claiming that these methods are those of “literary criticism,” but assumes the same possibility of textual isolation for forensic, lawyerly reasons. 11. Hardy, to point to only one of several examples, on the very same page where he suggests “intriguing possibilities for literary analysis” are available “regardless of whether [Nephi] was fictional or historical,” tells us that “the problem of false Prophets,” so central to Nephi’s story, was also of “critical concern in late pre-​exilic Judah” (Hardy, UBM, 22; emphasis mine)—​clearly augmenting his reading with extra-​textual, historical information. Meanwhile, Wunderli similarly fails to adhere to his own rules of textual isolation, including, for example, a photograph of the lush, thick Meso-​American jungle, and then noting that a region “so densely covered with jungle . . . would inhibit the kind of speedy travel mentioned in The Book of Mormon” (Wunderli, IB, 357).

 



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12. Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” in The Portable Walt Whitman, Michael Warner, ed. (New York: Penguin, 2004), 132–​133. 13. Genette, Paratexts, 1. 14. Genette refers to these “on-​text” elements as the “peritext,” and the “off-​text” elements as the “epitext.” As a formula, then, “paratext = peritext + epitext” (Paratexts, 5). 15. Genette, Paratexts, 7. 16. Genette, Paratexts, 346, 407. To be sure, it is not always clear in Genette where the precise “zones” of a given paratext end and the vague atmospherics of “context” begin, or if it is even possible, finally, to distinguish between the two. He does acknowledge, near the beginning of the volume, that “we must at least remember that, in principle, every context serves as a paratext” (Paratexts, 7; emphasis mine), but then quickly hedges against that open-​endedness, arguing, “by definition, something is not a paratext unless the author or one of his associates accepts responsibility for it” (9). By the end of the volume, however, after tracking a number of paratexts that have, at best, distant relations to any such “responsibility,” Genette more or less throws in the towel, acknowledging, “above all, we must not forget that the very notion of paratext, like many other notions, has more to do with a decision about method than with any truly established fact. ‘The paratext,’ properly speaking, does not exist; rather one chooses to account in these terms for a certain number of practices or effects, for reasons of method and effectiveness” (Paratexts, 343; emphasis in original)—​the word “certain” in that statement, of course, might just as well have been substituted by the word “uncertain” (yet another example, I would argue, of Genette’s ambiguously theoretical approach). To perhaps clarify by way of analogy:  Genette’s analytical distinction between paratext and text is to Jacques Derrida’s more unruly insistence that “there is nothing outside the text” just as Nelson Goodman’s logical taxonomies in analytical philosophy are to Richard Rorty’s nowhere-​else-​to-​go anti-​ foundationalism. For both Genette (in literary theory) and Goodman (in analytical philosophy), in other words, their own methods of analysis constantly threaten to dissolve their taxonomies into the end-​of-​discipline rhetoric of scholars like Derrida and Rorty, but they soldier on nonetheless. My point here is not so much to dwell on the slipperiness or futility of these categories as it is to demonstrate that these are precisely the dilemmas one will unavoidably encounter in any effort to “bracket” historicity. 17. Genette, Paratexts, 2, 4; emphasis in original. 18. For Genette’s disavowal of a directly “historicist” approach, see Paratexts, xx, 13–​14; for Genette’s actually-​very-​historicist taxonomy, see 1–​410. 19. All words are from Genette, Paratexts:  “device,” x–​xii, xviii, xx–​x xi, 56, 78, 80, 286, 317; “mechanism” and “mechanical,” 83, 90, 296, 299; “function,” x–​x xi, 4, 6–​7, 11–​13, 27–​29, 32, 38, 41, 46, 53, 54, 57, 71, 76, 140–​144, 156–​160, 196–​199, 237, 324–​352, 359, 366, 371, 407–​410; “threshold,” i–​x xi, 1–​15, 136, 164, 410; “indefinite,” 138, 174, 343, 346, 398; “slipperiness,” 191, 297, 343. 20. On The Book of Mormon as inherently “incomprehensible apart from a biblical context,” see Philip L. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-​day Saints in American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 26–​42. The determinative relation here might be framed in light of another example by Genette: “To indicate what is at stake, we can ask one simple question as an example, how would we read Joyce’s Ulysses if it were not entitled Ulysses?” (Paratexts, 2). Once again, however, it is useful to point out something odd in Genette’s turn to this example: What he is identifying in this case as a paratextual element (i.e., the figurative and discursive relation of Joyce’s Ulysses to Homer’s Odyssey) is something he had already taxonomized in an earlier work as a “transtextual” relation between what he called “hypotext” (Homer’s Odyssey) and “hypertext” ( Joyce’s Ulysses); see Gérard Genette, Palimpsests:  Literature in the Second Degree (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 1–​7. One might argue, of course, that the paratext is, in this case, merely the thing that signals the relationship and not the relationship itself, but the borders of that “signaling” are similarly difficult to establish (especially given the capaciousness of Genette’s paratextual category of the “epitext”), and we are once again left wondering how to distinguish exactly between the notion of paratext and context. 21. The most impressive account of just how difficult it can be to locate the “earliest” (a word that itself recognizes the paratextual dilemma I  am describing, since the term original

 

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would necessarily invoke either the nonextant gold plates or else, more problematic still, the oral dictation delivered from Smith’s own mouth) text of The Book of Mormon can be found in the work of Royal Skousen, whose The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2009) offers a summary of the findings in his more heavily annotated volumes: The Printers Manuscript of The Book of Mormon: Typographical Facsimile of the Entire Text in Two Parts (Provo, UT:  FARMS, 2001); The Original Manuscript of The Book of Mormon:  Typographical Facsimile of the Extant Text (Provo, UT: FARMS, 2001). 22. There are at least two published volumes detailing the thousands of grammatical and rhetorical variants that are part of The Book of Mormon’s complicated publication history: Curt A. Bench, ed., The Parallel Book of Mormon: The 1830, 1837, and 1840 Editions (Salt Lake City, UT: Smith-​Pettit Foundation, 2008); John S. Dinger, Significant Textual Changes in The Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City, UT: Smith-​Pettit Foundation, 2013). 23. This description indicates that what was lost was consistent with the narrative structure that one finds from Mosiah on through nearly the end of the book. For additional historical details on the loss of the 116 pages, see Givens, By the Hand of Mormon, 33–​37; Richard Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Vintage, 2007), 66–​69; David Persuitte, Joseph Smith and the Origins of The Book of Mormon, 2nd ed. (New York: McFarland, 2000), 78–​80. 24. 1 Ne 1:17, 9:2–​5. Nephi recapitulates his father’s story specifically in ­chapters  1–​8, after which he transitions into details of his own “proceedings” (see 1 Ne 10:1). 25. 1 Ne 9:15. One of the things Nephi tells us he decided not to include is the list of names that he found on the plates of brass that informed them that Lehi’s ancestry could be traced directly to the biblical Joseph in Egypt. He isn’t bothering to, he says, because “it is given in the record which has been kept by my father [i.e., the part of the record that would have been part of the lost 116 pages]; wherefore, I do not write it in this work. For it sufficeth me to say that we are descendants of Joseph” (1 Ne 6:1–​2). We can only speculate on what that list of names (so and so “begat” so and so) might have looked like—​and how hard it might have been for Smith to remember the precise names and their order in any effort to reproduce them without the lost pages. 26. That this is precisely the “faithful” reading that emerges from this paratext–​text synthesis can be seen in a number of Latter-​day Saints (LDS) publications, including the most current Book of Mormon Student Manual (Salt Lake City, UT: LDS Church, 2009) used in LDS institutes and universities (23–​24); as well as more traditional LDS accounts such as E. Cecil McGavin’s How We Got The Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Books, 1960), which suggests that “Mormon seems to have known that such an emergency as the lost manuscript would surely arise and that the choice and sacred annals of the Nephites would be needed to replace that part of Mormon’s abridgement” (64). See also Sidney B. Sperry’s Our Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 1948), which argues, “the Small Plates of Nephi with their six books would not have become an integral part of The Book of Mormon except for a strange turn of events when the prophet Joseph Smith was engaged in the work of translation [i.e., the loss of the 116 pages]” (44). 27. Why, for instance, does King Benjamin have to learn about the coming of Christ through an angelic visitation when he might have simply read Nephi’s account on the small plates (or if he knew of Nephi’s prophecy and the angel were merely confirming its validity, why not say so)? Or, why in God’s revelation to Smith regarding how to proceed with the translation does he tell the young prophet to continue translating “down even till you come to the reign of king Benjamin, or until you come to that which you have translated” (Doctrine & Covenants, 10:41) if that was all that was on the small plates anyway? God would seem to be offering both less and more information than would make sense given what was supposedly already on the plates. For more on this question, see Wunderli, IB,  45–​50. 28. Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1947), 35. Olson is the most famous and avant-​gardist of the proponents of the “two-​books” theory in Moby-​Dick, but there are many others arguing for the same thesis with greater academic precision and comprehensiveness; see, for example, Harrison Hayford, “Unnecessary Duplicates: A Key to the Writing of Moby-​Dick,” in New Perspectives on Melville, Faith Pullin, ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978), 128–​161; George R. Stewart, “The Two

 



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Moby-​Dicks,” American Literature 25 (1954): 417–​448; and Franz Stanzel, Narrative Situations in the Novel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 59–​91. 29. John Lardas Modern’s Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011) brilliantly outlines a later ghost–​machine paradigm in mid-​nineteenth-​century media history and religious experience; what I am outlining here, I would argue, prefigures precisely the metaphysical evolutions Lardas Modern describes as being deeply connected to the development of an American “secularism”; see especially pp. xv–​118. 30. Lehi christens, for example, the river they encounter “Laman,” after his oldest son, saying to him “O that thou mightest be like unto this river, continually running into the fountain of all righteousness,” prefiguring, already, some of the biblical language that Lehi will later find on the brass plates: “O that thou hadst hearkened to my commandments—​/​then had they peace been as a river,/​and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea,” (Isa 48:18). 31. This seems to be Alma’s assumption as well: The word is a “seed” that will, on its own (if one reads generously), “grow up and bring forth fruit” (Alma 32:28–​37). 32. Although there are intriguing readings of Nephi’s story that question the legitimacy of his killing Laban (and therefore position him as an “unreliable narrator”), I find the pattern of paratextual ghostliness infiltrating textual mechanics central to the entire Book of Mormon. Thus, while I agree that Nephi’s decision to kill Laban is highly unethical, it is nonetheless consistent with the larger themes of Book of Mormon scriptural textuality; for readings of Nephi as unreliable narrator, see Hardy, UBM, 16–​23; Eugene England, “Why Nephi Killed Laban: Reflections on the Truth of The Book of Mormon,” Dialogue 22 (Fall 1989): 32–​51. 33. 1 Ne 5:17. They are also “occult” visions in the very diegetic sense that, according to Nephi, one must be initiated into “spiritual things” in order to understand them, which his brothers (bad readers, one supposes) never quite understand. 34. 1 Ne 26; see Hardy, UBM, 64. Hardy’s illustration of how much paratextual information Nephi inserts into Isaiah in 2 Ne 26:15–​16 illustrates this point stunningly. As Hardy says, Nephi deliberately “ignores the original setting in favor of reinterpreting the words so that they apply to his own predictions of the distant future” (UBM, 64–​65); and again, “Nephi’s gloss here . . . is a way to reshape the text of Isaiah so that it makes more sense in light of his current situation” (292). 35. 1 Ne 20; see Hardy, UBM, 73–​74. Perhaps the most obvious (and troubling for faithful readers) paratextual imposition on the text of Isaiah involves the mistaken assumption that the book was itself the work of a single author and composed in its entirety prior to 600 BCE (when Nephi procures the plates of brass). Indeed, the consensus of the “Second Isaiah hypothesis” in biblical studies is, as Hardy notes, “remarkable” (see UBM, 291); see also George D. Smith Jr., “Isaiah Updated,” Dialogue 16.2 (1983): 38–​39; David P. Wright, “Joseph Smith’s Interpretation of Isaiah in The Book of Mormon,” Dialogue 31.4 (1998): 181–​206. In many ways, the quandary of “Second Isaiah” simply illustrates the irreducible text–​paratextual intermingling I  have been arguing for here, with Isaiah itself being a kind of sacred text–​ paratext complex, whose textual unity is assumed (paratextually) by Nephi so that he can himself expand (again paratextually) the textual unity he has ascribed to Isaiah. 36. Hardy, UBM, 74. 37. To point to only some of the most obvious: When, for instance, Alma converts to the word of god, it is not simply by reading the plates of brass, but rather by witnessing the deeply enchanted experience of the prophet Abinadi reading from the plates while glowing with some kind of heavenly power (“his face shone with exceeding luster, even as Moses’ did while in the mount of Sinai”) and expanding on the written prophecies to include the immanent death of those who oppose him (Mosiah 13–​18). When a new set of plates is discovered and brought to King Mosiah (the “Jaredite” plates), he translates them not through any simple, grammatical process of “reading,” but rather by way of “two stones which were fastened into the two rims of a bow”—​magical stones, that is, which had been “prepared from the beginning, and were handed down from generation to generation, for the purpose of interpreting languages” (Mosiah 28:11–​14). When Aaron, the son of Mosiah, reads from (and “expands” on) the plates to King Lamoni’s father, the effect is no mere intellectual experience, but some kind of spiritual possession in which the king “was struck as if he were dead” (Alma 22:12–​ 18). The plates, as Alma tells his son Helaman, “retain their brightness,” not only because

 

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they’re made of gold and not only because they “enlarge the memory of this people” with spiritual history, but also because they are passed along from generation to generation with magical stone “interpreters” that were “prepared that the word of God might be fulfilled” (Alma 37:5–​24). When Samuel the Lamanite preaches among the Nephites from the walls of the city, his performance involves not only an assertion that those who “believe the holy scriptures” will be “made free,” but also a miraculous force-​field-​like power that prevents the recalcitrant Nephites from hitting him with their stones and arrows (Hel 15–​16). When Jesus himself arrives among the people (3 Ne 11–​12), he ends up both quoting himself from what we know as biblical scripture and adding paratextual commentary (Matt 5–​7 and John 15)—​ along with performing numerous miracles. 38. In Lehi’s symbolic dream of his family’s efforts to arrive at the tree of life, the “iron rod” functions as a fixed and stable handrail, offering believers a means of navigating their way through the perilous “mists of darkness” that might otherwise lead them astray (1 Ne 8:19–​ 29). No matter how dark and confusing the landscape, that is, merely “holding to the rod” will keep one grounded on the path (Nephi later explains that the “iron rod” is a symbol for the “word of god”; 1 Ne15:23–​24). The “liahona,” by contrast, is a magical “ball of curious workmanship” made of “fine brass” that Lehi discovers one morning as he and his family journey into the Wilderness (1 Ne 16:9–​10). According to Nephi’s account, this mobile “ball” featured “two spindles” that not only “pointed the way whether we should go into the wilderness” but also, apparently, served as a screen for occasional messages from God—​so long as Nephi and his family were righteous enough to receive them: “And it came to pass that I, Nephi beheld the pointers which were in the ball, that they did work, according to the faith and diligence and heed which we did give unto them. And there was also written upon them a new writing, which was plain to be read, which did give us understanding concerning the ways of the Lord; and it was written and changed from time to time, according to the faith and diligence which we gave it” (1 Ne 16:28–​29). Taken as dual representations of the word of god, these two objects aptly illustrate the text–​paratext dilemma I have been elaborating: The fixed and stable Word of God (as rod of iron) appears only in a dream, while the actual, tangible word of god (as physically written on the liahona’s brass spindles by God himself) comes and goes in fleeting glimpses according to Nephi’s righteousness. Again, the text is never alone. For a classic reading of the “iron rod” and “liahona” as different (not always complementary) approaches to scriptural hermeneutics in Mormon culture, see Richard D. Poll, “What the Church Means to People Like Me,” Dialogue 4.2 (1967): 11–​24. 39. See Morm 9:32–​33, as well as 1 Ne 1:2, Mosiah 1: 3–​4. 40. “And if our plates had been sufficiently large, we should have written in Hebrew . . . and if we could have written in Hebrew, behold, ye would have no imperfection in our record,” (Morm 9:33), again, reflecting the idea that the Hebrew alphabet, unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs, would have been a “perfect” (ostensibly phonetic) transcription of the Nephite language. 41. One could also point to the interesting orthographic efficiency implied in the story of the “twenty and four plates” from which Moroni composed the Book of Ether. In the book’s first chapter, Moroni explains that he is choosing not to include all the writing he found on the twenty-​four plates; specifically, everything dealing with the “creation of the world, and also of Adam, and an account from that time even to the great tower, and whatsoever things transpired among the children of men until that time”—​all of that he leaves out, even though, he says, “they are had upon the [twenty-​four] plates.” Not only that, he is also actively “abridging” the parts of the plates that he is including. And yet, given all of these omissions and abridgements, Moroni’s account of the Jaredites still amounts to thirty-​eight printed pages in the original 1830 Book of Mormon (in very small type). Clearly, whatever Moroni says he found on those twenty-​four plates, their hieroglyphic nature seems to have allowed for a great deal of expansion in English translation. For more on Smith’s Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (online at josephsmithpapers.org), see H. Michael Marquardt and Sandra Tanner, The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papers (Salt Lake City, UT:  Utah Lighthouse Ministry, 2009); Robert K. Ritner, The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri:  A Complete Edition (Salt Lake City, UT: The Smith-​Pettit Foundation, 2011); Christopher C. Smith, “The Dependence of Abraham 1:1–​3 on the Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar,” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 29 (2009): 38–​54.

 



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42. Royal Skousen, “Translating The Book of Mormon: Evidence from the Original Manuscript,” in Book of Mormon Authorship Revisited: The Evidence of Ancient Origins, ed. by Noel Reynolds (Provo, UT: FARMS, 1997), 71–​75. Skousen sees this as evidence that Smith must have seen some kind of magical “screen” in the seer stones that allowed him to literally “read off ” the translation in English; see Skousen, ed., The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text, xv); as well as Royal Skousen’s “History of the Critical Text Project of The Book of Mormon,” in Uncovering the Original Text of The Book of Mormon (Provo, UT: FARMS, 2002), 5. Skousen uses the word “screen” in a recorded lecture reporting on his findings at BYU in February 2013, online at https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=bW65LrdubZ0. 43. David Whitmer, An Address to All Believers in Christ (Richmond, MO: published by the author, 1887), 12, emphasis added; see a discussion of this process in the introduction to Larry E. Morris, ed., The Joseph Smith Papers: Documents, Volume 1, July 1828 –​June 1831 (Salt Lake City, UT: Church Historian’s Press, 2013), xxix–​x xxi. 44. For a basic introduction to hieroglyphics, see Mark Collier and Bill Manley, How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphics (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1998). On the impossibility of any “ideographic” language, see John DeFrancis, Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1989): “In actual fact, there never has been, and never can be, a full system of writing based on the pictographic or ideographic principle” (114). 45. All of the writers reporting on Champollion’s discovery in North American in the late 1820s and early 1830s (those who were reading his early reports in French—​at least all those I have been able to find) were framing these developments in classic Swedenborgian fashion as only further confirming the important, priestly nature of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Even as these new findings revealed the characters to be primarily alphabetic, such revelations did not preclude the possibility—​even the necessity—​for these Anglo-​American Swedenborgians that other, more spiritual, mystical, and theologically powerful messages were encoded in their pictographic etymologies. See Henry Wheaton, “Egyptian Antiquities,” North American Review 29.65 (Oct. 1829):  361–​368; J. G.  H. Greppo, Essay on the Hieroglyphic System of M. Champollion, Jun. and on the Advantages Which It Offers to Sacred Criticism, trans. by Isaac Stuart (Boston: Perkins & Marvin, 1830); Sampson Reed, “Egyptian Hieroglyphics,” New Jerusalem Magazine 38 (Oct. 1830): 69–​76; Edward Everett, “Hieroglyphics,” North American Review 32.70 ( Jan. 1831): 95–​127. For more on Egyptian hieroglyphics and “Egyptomania” more generally in the nineteenth century, see John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1980); Scott Trafton, Egypt Land:  Race and Nineteenth-​ Century American Egyptomania (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2004); Richard V. Francaviglia, Go East, Young Man: Imagining the American West as the Orient (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2011); Erik Hornung, The Secret Lore of Egypt: Its Impact on the West (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). 46. Immanuel Swedenborg, A Treatise Concerning Heaven and Hell (Baltimore: Anthony Miltenberger, 1812), 31. This was the same edition that Joseph Smith would have read. Hermeticism is an ostensibly Egyptian philosophical tradition of mystical experience. For a fine introduction to Hermeticism and its connections to Swedenborg, see Gary Lachman’s two volumes, The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus:  From Ancient Egypt to the Modern World (Edinburgh:  Floris Books, 2011), and Swedenborg: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas (New York: Penguin, 2009); and Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 23–​35. 47. Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, 96. 48. Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, 31. 49. On Joseph Smith and Swedenborg, see D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1998), 217–​219; John Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire:  The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–​1844 (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 1994), 93–​98; Albanese, Republic of Mind and Spirit, 140–​143; Samuel Morris Brown, In Heaven as It Is on Earth:  Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 255. 50. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 7, 687; see also Irwin, American Hieroglyphics, 11.

 

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51. Emerson, Nature, 7. 52. The thrust of much of this scholarship has been to expand and underscore the alternative history of American religiosity offered in Jon Butler’s Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1990), which also cited Mormonism as emerging from within an occult tradition in the United States that was eventually replaced by a more “catholic” and “liturgical” (rather than, as the dominant discourse had it, “evangelical”) mode of religiosity. Quinn and Albanese are very specific in their attempt to keep front-​and-​center the occult traditions that Butler argues were eventually replaced; see Quinn, Early Mormonism, 24, and Albanese, Republic of Mind,  2–​15. 53. Studies that make this connection include Jack Adamson, “The Treasure of the Widow’s Son,” in Joseph Smith and Masonry (Nauvoo, IL: Martin Publishing, 1980), 60–​69; Brooke, Refiner’s Fire, 100; Albanese, Republic of Mind, 135–​150; Richard S. Van Wagoner, Sidney Rigdon:  A Portrait of Religious Excess (Salt Lake City, UT:  Signature Books, 1994), 140; Clyde R. Forsberg Jr., Equal Rites:  The Book of Mormon, Masonry, Gender, and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Michael Homer, Joseph’s Temples: The Dynamic Relationship Between Freemasonry and Mormonism (Salt Lake City:  University of Utah Press, 2014), 2, 69–​72. 54. The phrase “plates of brass,” curiously enough, appears in 1 Kings 7:30, not in the context of writing, but rather of the metalwork wrought by this same “Hiram of Tyre” (whose name was expanded to “Hiram Abiff ” in masonic discourse); see Homer, Joseph’s Temples, 17. 55. The most comprehensive recent summary of these narratives can be found in Homer, Joseph’s Temples, 41–​47; the specific quotations I refer to in this paragraph are found in the following sources:  Thomas Smith Webb, The Freemason’s Monitor; or Illustrations of Masonry (Salem, MA: Cushing and Appleton, 1818 [orig. 1797]); Jeremy L. Cross, The True Masonic Chart or Hieroglyphic Monitor (New Haven, CT: John C. Gray, 1820); Joshua Bradley, Some of the Beauties of Freemasonry (Albany, NY: G. J. Loomis, 1821); George Oliver, The Antiquities of Free-​Masonry (London: G. and W. B. Whittaker, 1823); Avery Allyn, A Ritual of Freemasonry (Philadelphia: John Clark, 1831). 56. For references to Joseph Smith as “Enoch,” see the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants sections 75, 86, 93, 96, and 98 (in the modern LDS edition, those references to Enoch are removed: D&C sections 78, 82, 92, 96, and 104), see Homer, Joseph’s Temples, 69; one is also reminded that in the original manuscript of The Book of Mormon, the (otherwise unknown) prophet Zenock’s name is spelled “Zenoch” (see Skousen, The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text, xli, 61, 535, 592). On The Book of Mormon as “keystone,” see the “Introduction” to the current LDS edition of The Book of Mormon. On Nephite temples after the manner of Solomon, see 2 Ne 5:16. Homer also offers what I think is the most compelling explanation for what has been a long-​ standing misunderstanding of The Book of Mormon as a primarily “anti-​Masonic” text (i.e., that anti-​masonic discourse was often inflected by references to the mysterious “Illuminati” that many thought had infiltrated the otherwise good and ancient tradition of Freemasonry); see Joseph’s Temples,  75–​76. 57. The Bible has traditionally been referred to as the “Great Light in Masonry” in masonic texts; see David Bernard, Light on Masonry (Utica, NY:  William Williams, Printer, 1829), 111. References to biblical stories saturate masonic discourse; see, for example, James Anderson’s The Constitutions of Freemasons (London, 1723), which argues that “Adam taught his Sons Geometry, and the use of it, in the several Arts and Crafts convenient .  .  .  . Noah and his three sons, Japheth, Shem, and Ham, all Masons true, brought with them over the Flood the Traditions and the Arts of the Ante-​deluvians and amply communicated to them their growing Offspring” (2–​3). 58. Timothy Beal offers a longer history of sola scriptura and its varied oppositions in The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 1–​36; see also Nathan O. Hatch, “Sola Scriptura and Novus Ordo Seclorum,” in The Bible in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 62–​71; Barlow, Mormons and the Bible,  6–​7. 59. For a compelling account of these Bible and religious tract societies in the context of American print culture, see David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); see also Peter J. Wosh, Spreading

 



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the Word:  The Bible Business in Nineteenth-​Century America (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1994); William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 354–​359; Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Ronal J. Zboray, A Fictive People:  Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1993); David D. Hall, “The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600–​1850,” in Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 36–​78. 60. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–​1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). See also Nord’s astute analysis of the tentative relationship these religious print organizations had to the rise of the American market; Faith in Reading, 7–​8. On American millennialism as connected to the mission of these societies, see Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–​1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 75–​132. Nord also explains that many of these early societies attempted to either teach Indians English or else develop the necessary orthographies to publish the Bible in various Native American languages—​always under the assumption that “Christians must be readers”; Faith in Reading,  19–​20. 61. Nord, Faith in Reading, 7, 40, 82–​86. 62. As Nord argues, “The millennial dream of supplying everyone with religious reading material was a post-​1800 development, but its roots ran deep into the religious and cultural soil of colonial America, especially New England” (Faith in Reading, 8). This culture had a “special penchant for print”; they believed that “reading the word was the means through which God’s grace came to humankind” (Faith in Reading, 8). 63. 2 Ne 29:3, 10. 64. On this period especially, see Sigfrid H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing (London: Oak Knoll Press, 1996), 136–​140. 65. Quoted in Richard-​Gabriel Rummonds, Nineteenth-​Century Printing Practices and the Iron Handpress (London: Oak Knoll Press, 2004), 715. 66. Because Stanhope’s process (invented in 1803) was initially a trade secret, the first published discussion of the stereotype plate process did not appear until Caleb Stower’s The Printer’s Grammar (London, 1808). For this and other discussions of the process, see Rummonds, Nineteenth-​Century Printing, 714–​759. The most complete account of stereotyping in its 1820s form can be found in John Johnson’s Typographia, vol. II (London: Messrs. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, 1824), 657–​658 (this in a volume that, with its many illustrations of “Egyptian” and other alphabets, I am tempted to suggest served as a source-​ text, somehow, for the seemingly random “Caractors” written on the document that Smith gave to Oliver Cowdery at the end of the translation process—​a document sometimes called the “Anthon Transcript”; see especially Johnson, Typographia, vol. II, 349–​382). 67. Quoted in Thomas Carson Hansard, Typographia:  An Historical Sketch of the Origin and Progress of the Art of Printing (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1825), 826 68. There are literally thousands of references to the need to “procure” or otherwise obtain a “set of stereotype plates” for Bible publication, appearing in nearly every official Bible society conversation between 1810 and 1830. To point to only a small sampling:  Manasseh Cutler, A Discourse, Delivered in Salem, Before the Bible Society (Salem, MA: Joshua Cushing, 1813), 13–​14, 25; Constitution of the American Bible Society (New York: G. F. Hopkins, 1816), 9, 17; Annual Report of the American Bible Society (New  York:  printed for the Society by Daniel Fanshaw, 1820), iii, 12, 13, 17, 30–​31, 48, 49, 49, 88, 99, 193–​194, 198; “Religious Intelligence,” in The Christian Spectator (1825), 433; Charles Stokes Dudley, An Analysis of the System of the Bible Society (London: R. Watts, 1821), 48, 51, 106; Reports of the British and Foreign Bible Society: 1805–​1827 (London: August Applegath, 1825), lx, 21, 26, 28, 30–​31, 58, 63, 82, 118–​120, 158, 192, 221, 246, 255, 265–​268, 270–​272, 285, 331, 358. 69. Bible Society of Philadelphia, The Second Report of the Bible Society Established in Philadelphia (Philadelphia:  Fry and Kammerer, 1810), 10–​11; as reprinted in The Adviser, or Vermont Evangelical Magazine (Middlebury, VT:  William G.  Hooker, 1810), 253; The Christian Magazine (New York: William and Whiting, 1810), 409; The Connecticut Evangelical Magazine (Hartford, CT: Peter B. Gleason, 1810), 354.

 

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70. Bible Society of Philadelphia, Second Report, 11. 71. That religious organizations might also have thought of these new technologies of printing and organization as “enchanted” is yet another fascinating possibility; see Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America,  26–​40. 72. Plates were acquired by the Philadelphia Bible Society in 1812, the New York Society in 1815, and the Bible Society of Baltimore in 1816, after which stereotype plates, as Nord explains, “would become standard in Bible society publishing in America,” although “it would take a few more decades to become commonplace in all book publishing”; Faith in Reading, 52. What this meant in terms of increased circulation is quite staggering. By 1830, the American Bible Society was publishing and distributing more than 300,000 copies a year; Nord, Faith in Reading,  67–​69. 73. Ebenezer Robinson, “Testimony on The Book [of] Mormon,” The Saints’ Herald (Lamoni, Iowa: December 11, 1886), 778–​781. 74. Ebenezer Robinson, “Testimony on The Book [of] Mormon,” 781. It should come as no surprise, I argue, that references in American popular culture to the “golden plates” were on occasion thought to refer to stereotyped plates; see Emma Willard, Abridged History of the United States, Or Republic of America (A.S. Barnes & Burr:  New  York, 1865):  “Under pretense of special revelation, [ Joseph Smith] produced the stereotype plates of the ‘Book of Mormon’ by which he persuaded numbers, that he was the inspired founder of a new religion . . . The plates found were called ‘the golden’ plates” (p. 338 emphasis mine).

 

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Orson Pratt’s Enduring Influence on The Book of Mormon Paul Gutjahr

Introduction From God’s lips to the human heart . . . such runs the mythic ideal of how a divine message moves from Creator to creation. As is so often true with any drama, however, there are frequently a host of uncredited actors who play key roles. Aside from Mormonism’s founding prophet, Joseph Smith Jr., there is perhaps no nineteenth-​century figure of greater importance in the textual development of The Book of Mormon than Orson Pratt. In Mormonism’s first half-​century after the book first appeared in 1830, Pratt played an absolutely critical role in molding the book’s presentation and even its content. Smith may have given The Book of Mormon to the world, but Pratt served an absolutely pivotal role in shaping the actual Book of Mormon editions that believers and nonbelievers have held in their hands for more than a century (see Figure 3.1). By all accounts, Orson Pratt was a strong-​willed and irascible man. He became one of Joseph Smith’s first converts when he accepted Mormon baptism on his nineteenth birthday, September 19, 1830. Punctuated by only a five-​month period of disenchantment with his faith in 1841 when he left the Mormon Church, Pratt remained a devout Latter-​day Saint for over half a century. During his lifetime, he established himself as one of early Mormonism’s most important leaders and intellectuals. John Henry Evans, the well-​respected early twentieth-​century scholar of Mormonism, once stated that “In the first century of ‘Mormonism’ there is no leader of the intellectual stature of Orson Pratt.”1 In 1968, the famed Mormon historian Leonard Arrington asked fifty prominent Mormon scholars to rank the leading intellectuals in the history of the Mormon Church. Orson

Paul Gutjahr, Orson Pratt’s Enduring Influence on The Book of Mormon. In: Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon. Edited by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190221928.003.0004

 

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Figure 3.1  Orson Pratt is pictured here around the time he began work on producing his 1879 edition of The Book of Mormon. Courtesy of the Church Archives, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints.

Pratt came in second only to B.  H. Roberts, receiving more votes than even Smith, the religious tradition’s founding prophet.2 Pratt’s early and lasting conversion made him a Mormon pioneer in every sense of the word. He was one of the first Mormon missionaries to canvas New England with Smith’s new gospel message, and he was appointed to the Church’s first Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.3 Later, he became one of the Church’s first international missionaries, preaching the Mormon message in Canada, the British Isles, and Austria.4 He helped establish one of the earliest Mormon schools, a municipal college called the University of the City of Nauvoo in Illinois.5 He was also in the “Vanguard Company” that first crossed into what is now the state of Utah, and he helped select the site for where Salt Lake City stands today. Pratt was a stunning autodidact with a voracious intellectual appetite.6 He taught himself algebra followed by several other branches of higher mathematics. Over the years, he pursued studies in a wide range of disciplines,

 



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including geology, botany, zoology, astronomy, physics, and theology. He became so committed to the science of astronomy that he built a small observatory just a stone’s throw away from the great Salt Lake City Temple, where he invited others to study the stars with him. By the early 1850s, Pratt was regularly offering public astronomy lectures to the residents of Salt Lake City.7 He used his immense learning to become one of nineteenth-​ century Mormonism’s most industrious editors and prolific authors. Over the course of his lifetime, he wrote and edited dozens of articles, books, and pamphlets, making himself one of the tradition’s most important early theological voices. His many works included two widely circulated apologetic treatises: the first in 1848 on the legitimacy of Joseph Smith Jr.’s prophetic role (Book of Mormon: Divine Authority, or the Question: Was Joseph Smith Sent of God); and a second in 1850 defending The Book of Mormon itself (Divine Authenticity of the Book of Mormon). Both became standard works among Mormons, and their lines of argumentation are still popular today. Pratt provided the Mormon Church with its first substantial forays into extended systematic theological and scientific writing. What is important about his work is the way he attempted to join his theological thinking to his other studies in various scientific branches. As the historian of American science Erich Robert Paul has commented, “More than any Mormon thinker before or since, Orson Pratt . . . exemplified the theologian-​scientist who attempted to combine his theology with the science of the day.”8 Pratt trumpeted his belief in the fused nature of science and religion when he declared in the Salt Lake City newspaper that “The great temple of science must be erected upon the solid foundations of everlasting truth.”9 Pratt was utterly committed to melding the study of God’s word (The Book of Mormon) with the study of God’s work (nature), a religious–​ scientific linkage that he hoped would make the claims of Mormonism convincing to all who encountered them.10 To this end, Pratt paid a great deal of attention during his life to his religious tradition’s eponymous text, helping to produce three different editions of The Book of Mormon. To appreciate Pratt’s influence on the development of The Book of Mormon, one must first understand each of Pratt’s editorial encounters with the book in turn. Taken as a whole, Pratt’s work on The Book of Mormon evinces ever-​more-​sophisticated bibliographic and theological methods and thinking as he worked on each successive edition, and his editorial evolution was always undergirded by his firm commitments to clarity and scientific rigor. Pratt’s editorial interventions in the various textual copies of The Book of Mormon he helped produce have influenced every subsequent major edition of the book.

 

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The British Edition of 1849 To appreciate Pratt’s initial contribution to the production of The Book of Mormon, one must first seek to understand the state of Mormon publishing in the mid-​nineteenth century. Before the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints (LDS) relocated to the Great Salt Lake Basin in 1847, it had experienced constant turmoil and relocation that were due to exterior persecutions and interior disagreements and schisms. Within the space of less than twenty years, the center of Church activity had moved from upstate New  York to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois. Such constant migration meant great instability for many of the Church’s central administrative structures, including its printing enterprises. Just one example of such instability can be seen in how Smith planned to print a much-​needed second edition of The Book of Mormon in Missouri in 1833, only to have his plan thwarted by the destruction of the Church’s Missouri press by a rampaging anti-​Mormon mob.11 A second edition was ultimately printed four years later in the more stable Kirtland, Ohio. As American Latter-​day Saints experienced the Church’s growing pains, Mormonism in Great Britain was thriving. By the 1840s, the Church’s British mission was annually adding thousands of converts to Mormonism. These converts created a great need for printed Church materials, a need that they could not meet by waiting for American printed material to be ordered, produced, and then shipped to England. To meet the British demand, the Mormon leadership in England made Liverpool its publishing hub for the isles. Far more geographically and economically stable than the Church’s publishing enterprises in the United States, the Saints on both sides of the Atlantic ended up using the Church’s publishing center in Liverpool from the 1840s until the 1860s to print the majority of their longer works, including important editions of The Book of Mormon, as well as major compilations of their devotional music such as the Church’s immensely popular Manchester Hymnal. In 1841, the Church’s Liverpool printers produced the first British edition of The Book of Mormon. The 1841 edition was based on the second American (1837) edition of the book, which Mormon missionaries had brought over with them when they had first undertaken the Church’s British mission in 1837. Because of Liverpool’s central role in early Mormon publishing, the 1837 American edition—​and the numerous British and American editions it spawned—​became the standard root text for the most important editions of the Book of Mormon until the Church produced its 1981 landmark edition of the book based on a comparison of all prior Book of Mormon editions. Not until the Great Basin area of Utah became a stable home for the LDS Church did Brigham Young instruct the British Saints in 1870 to send their stereotyped printing plates for The Book of Mormon and other major Mormon works

 



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to Utah in order to consolidate the Church’s publishing activities in a single location. Young made this move to bring greater production efficiency and textual standardization and control to the materials the Church printed and distributed. Orson Pratt played a key role in the Church’s early printing enterprise in Britain. He arrived in Liverpool for his first British mission in the spring of 1840, and within the year, he had helped baptize some 8,000 new converts.12 It was during his initial British mission that Pratt published the first of many pamphlets: “An Interesting Account of Several Remarkable Visions, and of the Late Discovery of Ancient American Records,” a work that contains the first public account of Joseph Smith’s “First Vision” of his encounter with Jesus and God the Father, who directed him to wait for the establishment of a restored Christian Church.13 By 1848 Pratt had been appointed to preside over the LDS Church in Europe.14 The following year, Pratt turned his attention to printing a new edition of The Book of Mormon.15 Of the three editions of The Book of Mormon Pratt helped edit, the second British edition of 1849 stands as the least remarkable. His initial foray into publishing The Book of Mormon was conservative in its nature, but influential in its result.16 Pratt made only a few significant changes in his 1849 edition, but the changes he did make allow one to catch an early glimpse of his editing principles and priorities, practices that he would build upon and refine in the later two editions of the book he would shepherd through the publishing process. The revisions he made for his 1849 edition would survive in subsequent editions of the book published over the next three decades (see Figure 3.2). Pratt’s most notable innovation in his 1849 edition involved moving and relabeling what had been the book’s index to become its “Contents.” He placed this section at the beginning of the book in order to add clarity to the book’s organizational structure. What might seem a minor change in formatting proved revolutionary in how readers encountered the dense and complicated nature of The Book of Mormon. Offering the organizational details found in the Contents section before the actual narrative gave readers a sense of the sacred story’s overall structure, a structure that was by no means easy to grasp by simply attempting to read from start to finish the book’s nearly 600 pages of text. While relatively minor in comparison with the changes Pratt would make nearly three decades later in his 1879 edition, his 1849 edition already showed that he had a keen eye for, and even keener commitment to, better systematizing—​and thus clarifying—​the book’s presentation. He showed no fear in making changes to the text’s format that he believed would make the sacred volume’s contents more intellectually accessible. It was his commitment to system and its resultant clarity that propelled Pratt forward into publishing a much more exotic, yet no less systemically motivated, new edition of The Book of Mormon.

 

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Figure 3.2  Title page, 1849 second European edition of The Book of Mormon. Note how the page states that the work is “Published by Orson Pratt.” Courtesy of the Church Archives, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints.

The Deseret Alphabet Edition of 1869 After completing his work on the 1849 British edition of The Book of Mormon, Pratt once again turned his attention to writing shorter, pamphlet-​length works. He published a series of essays on the central doctrines of the Church throughout the 1850s, focusing on Mormon teachings concerning faith, repentance, baptism, the Holy Spirit, spiritual gifts, miracles, apostasy, and the latter-​ day-​restored Kingdom of God on earth. Through these essays, Pratt brought his scientific and mathematical mind to bear on key points of Mormon theology,

 



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including such key teachings as premortal existence, plural marriage, and eternal progression to godhood.17 By 1858, he had published an impressive body of work that came as close to any nineteenth-​century, single-​author corpus of writings in presenting a systematic theology of Mormonism.18 In so doing, Pratt showed himself part of what one might call the great movement of ordering and systematizing theological thought that so marked the century as a whole. Theological thinking throughout the nineteenth century increasingly fused biblical and scientific methods of investigation to create what quickly became touted as a more scientific and systematic approach to theology. Particularly important to the growing systemic inclinations in theological study was a type of Enlightenment scientific thinking that promised that all aspects of the physical world could be rationally understood. Such understanding first demanded that the attributes of the physical world be categorized. These categories then needed to be analyzed and harmonized through appropriate theories that linked the conceptual to the physical. Perhaps the most famous nineteenth-​century practitioner of this type of scientific investigation and explication was the naturalist and explorer Alexander Von Humboldt (1769–​ 1859). Humboldt spent much of his adult life traveling the world, employing the methods of various branches of science (ranging from botany to zoology to meteorology to geology) to catalogue his discoveries and seek to understand those discoveries within larger theoretical frameworks. Over the course of two decades Humboldt published a hugely ambitious, multivolume work, titled Cosmos:  A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe (1845–​1858). Here, he sought to present the vast diversity of the world in a synthetic way, explaining how the earth’s every facet from its weather patterns to interactions between various animals and their environments all worked in holistically orchestrated ways. In Humboldt’s hands, a world that may appear chaotic to the casual observer became a finely tuned entity ordered by discernible underlying scientific principles. Humboldt considered his Cosmos “the work of my life” as it presented his systematic understanding of the physical world.19 Humboldt’s great claims could be encapsulated as twofold: The physical world was systematically ordered and that such manifest orderliness was the key to its understanding. Humboldt’s belief in nature’s grand harmony was echoed in the work of many of the most prominent theologians of his day. On both sides of the Atlantic, the great Christian thinkers of the age—​men including Friedrich Schleiermacher, Richard Rothe, Charles Hodge, Robert Dabney, and William Shedd—​spent significant portions of their careers attempting to systematize the study of theology and harmonize it with the scientific and philosophic thinking of the period.20

 

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Perhaps no American was more famous in this drive toward systematic theological thought than Princeton Theological Seminary Professor Charles Hodge, who in 1873 released the final installment of his titanic three-​volume Systematic Theology. In it, Hodge showed the close alignment between systematic scientific thought and the study of Bible: The Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. It is his store-​house of facts; and his method of ascertaining what the Bible teaches, is the same as that which the natural philosopher adopts to ascertain what nature teaches . . . . The duty of the Christian theologian is to ascertain, collect, and combine all the facts which God has revealed concerning himself and our relation to him.21 Hodge, and many of the other great theological systematicians of his day, were heavily influenced by the scientific method of Francis Bacon, which declared that God could be known through the orderly and readily understandable nature of His creation. According to such thinking, God had created the universe according to a complex, yet highly ordered and discernible, plan.22 One simply had to parse this plan’s order to understand the mind and character of God. The Baconian empirical approach had great appeal for Pratt, whose mathematically-​bent mind sought to understand his world in terms of larger, unifying schemes of design and function. Pratt, however, pushed upon Bacon’s approach by foregrounding the need to have theories that explained the relationships between various phenomena.23 Pratt was deeply interested in nature’s orderliness, but he always stressed that such orderliness was governed by overarching divinely wrought dynamics. Following this line of reasoning, Pratt argued that God and His natural creation were governed by certain constant, universal laws.24 Although he had only limited success in identifying such universal laws, the impulse that drove him is telling. Pratt wished to explain the universe and its creator by attempting to uncover the systematic, governing principles that ungirded all interactions between God and His creation. It was his bedrock belief in how rigorous systematization and its resultant clarity might lead to religious illumination that drove him to labor on one of the most unique editions of the book ever published, the Deseret alphabet edition of 1869. The Deseret alphabet was a set of forty symbols designed to capture every major sound found in languages around the world. George D. Watt, a British convert and one-​time personal secretary to Brigham Young, was its chief architect. In Britain, Watt had learned a system of shorthand called phonography, which enabled him to record the speeches of Church leaders with great accuracy.25 His

 



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talents led him to become the founding editor of the Journal of Discourses, an unofficial multivolume compilation of many of Mormonism’s most important sermons, talks, and other teachings published from 1854 to 1886.26 Young was impressed by Watt’s shorthand method, particularly its ability to use a single symbol to capture a single sound. Young saw the potential in such a system for sidestepping the myriad spelling problems found in English, thereby making the English language easier to learn for children and nonnative speakers alike.27 At the April General Conference of 1852, Young told his followers, “If there were one set of words to convey one set of ideas, it would put an end to the ambiguity which often mystifies the ideas given in the languages now spoken.”28 Such an alphabet could provide the key to help alleviate the myriad problems found in recorded speech. Young commissioned Watt to work with the regents at the newly established University of Deseret (which had been established in 1850 and would later become the University of Utah). From 1851 to 1854, Watt and his coworkers designed a new alphabet mapping a single symbol to a single sound. Young’s support for developing such an alphabet was rooted in his absolute conviction that Mormonism would make all things new. Mormonism presented the world with a new gospel, and through that new gospel a new way of life both on earth and in heaven. This impulse toward reforming all aspects of human spiritual endeavor led Young to wish for a better, more accessible, and precise system of spelling and writing. Gone would be the ambiguity—​and thus confusion—​that was so endemic to the English language. As one Mormon leader wrote, “The spelling of the English language is very arbitrary. For several generations it has been undergoing improvements and modifications, and it will, no doubt, go on until English orthography will become so perfect that every letter will have but a single sound, instead of having, as now, in some cases, four or five sounds to the same letter.”29 In addition, the Deseret alphabet promised to standardize the characters of all written languages. Pratt’s brother, Parley, worked on the alphabet as it was being created and wrote Orson that the alphabet would enable the Saints to “write Spanish, hebrew, greek, and with the addition of a few more letters, all the languages of the Earth.”30 The alphabet’s power reached beyond orthography; it promised a standard system of symbols for all written language. Here was a system (and its promise of order and clarity) that Orson could wholeheartedly embrace. Aside from the potentially global implications of the success of the Deseret alphabet, Young’s more immediate goal was that it would serve as a system to help teach English both to children and to non-​English-​speaking adults. He particularly felt the need to simplify English spelling in order to

 

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aid the language acquisition of the thousands of immigrants to Utah who were pouring into the Great Basin from across Europe and other parts of the world.31 Whereas the Great Basin held 6,000 Mormons in 1849, by the time of Young’s death in 1877 the region boasted some 150,000 Mormons.32 Many of these immigrants to the region did not speak English, and many more were poorly educated. Once Watt and his compatriots completed their work on the Deseret  alphabet in 1854, Young approved the alphabet and gave instructions to have it taught throughout the Great Basin region. For this purpose, primers for the new alphabet began to appear in the late 1860s. In the mind of Young and its creators, the crowning achievement of the alphabet’s power, however, would be its ability to make the scriptures more accessible. To this end, Young directed that both the Bible and The Book of Mormon be transliterated into this alphabet. The transliterated manuscript of the Bible was completed but never published.33 The Deseret alphabet Book of Mormon fared better. In 1868, the Church turned to Orson Pratt to both transliterate the book and then work with various New York type foundries and printers to get the book produced. Pratt did not disappoint. Attracted to the project for a number of reasons, including how it resonated with his deep desire to provide universal principles and systems that might help explain and prove Mormon beliefs, Pratt set to work on the Deseret alphabet edition of The Book of Mormon with a vengeance. Laboring for incredibly long hours with two of his daughters, Pratt transliterated every word of The Book of Mormon into Deseret alphabetic symbols. He then set off for New York City to find the publishing expertise necessary to print the long and complicated Deseret edition of The Book of Mormon.34 Pratt and his family began their transliteration work in November 1868. In less than a year, Pratt had prepared a manuscript of the book and had seen it published. Pratt’s desire to bring greater order, and thus clarity, to the book—​this time through a new system of orthography—​helped create one of the most unique editions of The Book of Mormon ever produced (see Figure 3.3). Pratt’s hope that the Deseret alphabet would make the book more accessible to the masses was short lived. He commissioned 500 copies of the entire book to be published along with an additional 8,000 copies of portions of the book.35 Such a large number of copies, however, did not ensure the success of the edition or the alphabet used to print it. On the contrary, the Deseret alphabet never replaced the Latin alphabet in the Great Basin, or in any other part of the world. Within just a few years, Young and other key advocates of the Deseret Alphabet were either dead, disillusioned with the potential of the alphabet, or had left the LDS Church. (George Watt, the guiding spirit behind the alphabet, was excommunicated from the Church in 1874 for pursuing the more ecumenical

 



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Figure 3.3  Title page, 1869 Deseret alphabet edition of The Book of Mormon, transliterated and published through the guiding hand of Orson Pratt. Courtesy of the Church Archives, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints.

and less strictly Mormon beliefs inspired by the teachings of Mormon dissident William Godbe.)36 The loss of such key proponents of the alphabet quickly led to the demise of what had once promised to be a revolutionary orthographic system. The new alphabet may have brought an unprecedented systematic, logical phonetic organization to the book, but it did not accomplish Orson Pratt’s dream of making The Book of Mormon more intellectually accessible to readers. In the end, the Deseret edition of The Book of Mormon became little more than an unrealized dream of a better way to communicate Mormonism’s new gospel message.

 

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The Monumental New Edition of 1879 The arrival in 1870 of the British Book of Mormon stereotype plates in Salt Lake City marked a new era in publishing the Church’s signature text. The new gospel born in America would once again find its primary publishing home in the country of its birth. To commemorate this new era, Brigham Young turned once more to Orson Pratt. By the 1870s, many Mormons had come to consider Pratt the Church’s leading scripture scholar and as such the natural choice to undertake the production of a new edition of Mormonism’s signature text. Pratt once proclaimed that he had studied The Book of Mormon “more carefully than any other man that has ever lived.”37 By the 1870s, Pratt knew that he was nearing the end of his unusually long and eventful life. He saw the opportunity to provide the Church with a new edition of The Book of Mormon as a way to cement his legacy as one of the book’s greatest students and apologists (see Figure 3.4). Pratt’s 1879 edition would indeed have lasting effects that continue to reverberate in Book of Mormon editions published even today. With his typical commitment to systematic analysis, Pratt brought a level of bibliographic care to the 1879 edition unprecedented in Book of Mormon publishing. First, he gathered as many previous editions of the book as he could find and compared them for textual accuracy. He was more aggressive, however, than simply employing systematic care in his editorial collation efforts. He moved to provide a new, carefully constructed apparatus for the text. He wrote, and included at the beginning of his edition, an extended Contents section, where he expanded on similar sections found in previous Book of Mormon editions. He also reformatted the entire book with new chapter and verse markings. In addition, for the first time, The Book of Mormon was given footnotes to aid in its interpretation, notes placed at the bottom of each page that offered the reader a new internal cross-​ reference system and many short interpretative glosses explaining the content of specific verses. The importance of Pratt’s paratextual work on his last edition of The Book of Mormon cannot be overstated. While the sacred core “text” of the book itself was what Mormonism’s founding prophet Joseph Smith Jr. once called “the most correct book of any on earth,” Pratt became the book’s first editor to add extensive “paratextual” (or elements outside and complementary to the book’s actual core text) to help the reader interpret that “correct book’s” meaning.38 In his important work on text and paratext, literary critic Gérard Genette argues that all cultural and textual elements that surround the book’s material form and the reading practices to which it is subjected are important to how one ultimately interprets a book. Such paratextual factors are incredibly varied, and they

 



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Figure 3.4  Title page, 1879 edition of The Book of Mormon. Orson Pratt composed this edition by carefully comparing previous editions of the text and introducing a number of formatting changes and study aids. Courtesy of the Church Archives, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints.

include everything from a book’s binding to the particular location where it is read.39 (For a thought-​provoking longer treatment of the importance of text and paratext in considering The Book of Mormon, please refer to R. John Williams’s essay in this volume entitled “The Ghost and the Machine: Plates and Paratext in The Book of Mormon.”) For our purposes, it is helpful to take Genette’s basic point, but to focus it more narrowly, exploring the paratextual elements that comprise the editorial and formatting choices that Pratt employed in producing his last Book of Mormon edition.

 

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Pratt’s extensive use of a new footnote system and his recalibration of the book’s divisions and verse marking systems had two profound effects. First, it made the book’s formatting a more forceful echo of the page presentation commonly found in the Bibles of the day. By including a more robust verse marking system along with an apparatus that served as both a cross-​referencing and an interpretation guide, The Book of Mormon came to resemble more closely—​and thus could be more closely identified in the minds of readers with—​the Bible itself. Pratt’s changes blurred the lines between the signature text of Mormonism and the sacred text of traditional Christianity. Blurring the line between the format of The Book of Mormon and the Bible would only continue in the years to come. In 1920, another new edition of The Book of Mormon under the guidance of James E. Talmage presented the book for the first time in a dual-​column format, the most common biblical printing format in America since the early nineteenth century; in 1982 the LDS Church gave a new biblically related subtitle to the book when it began to produce The Book of Mormon with “Another Testament of Jesus Christ” on its cover and a new half-​title page. Throughout all these later editions, Pratt’s verse and chapter markings have stayed intact. Every subsequent edition of The Book of Mormon published by the LDS Church has employed various Prattian interpretative paratextual elements to help guide the readers through the text (see Figure 3.5). Second, Pratt’s paratextual system of footnotes had profound interpretative consequences for the text itself. Aside from the cross-​reference system Pratt instituted for the first time and the way in which it signaled a grand, systematic coherence to the text as a whole, he also included some seventy-​ five footnotes that linked the book’s narrative directly to specific geographic locations (see Figure 3.6). For example, he tells his readers that the “promised land” that Nephi sought in I Ne 18:23 was “believed to be on the coast of Chili, S. America.,” and the “pastures . . . in all high places” found in I Ne 21:9 were, in fact, “the elevated regions of the Rocky Mountains.” In making such geographic connections, Pratt took his cue in part from Mormonism’s founding prophet, Joseph Smith Jr., who in the early 1840s was introduced to John Lloyd Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (1841). Stephens was one of the first Western explorers to travel into Central America and study the ancient Mayan ruins there. His discussions of sophisticated ancient civilizations convinced Smith that some events in The Book of Mormon had taken place in Central America.40 Pratt followed Smith’s lead in tracing back actual Book of Mormon settings and events to sites located in both Central and North America. The importance of paratextual interpretative elements such as these geographic footnotes—​and their potential influence on a reader’s experience of the

 



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Figure 3.5  Title page, 1920 dual-​format edition of The Book of Mormon. Library of the author.

text—​is seen when one compares Pratt’s 1849 and 1879 editions. In its textual presentation, the 1849 edition hews much more closely to Smith’s original 1830 edition (and all other editions prior to 1849) in its formatting. In both the original 1830 edition and Pratt’s 1849 Liverpool edition, the text is presented as a more standard narrative, unbroken by chapter and verse markings, as well as uninterrupted by footnotes or textual superscripted marks used to signal any interpretative paratextual apparatus. In the 1879 edition, every page of the narrative’s core text is marked by a more “biblical” chapter and verse marking system, and almost every page has at its bottom extensive cross-​referencing and interpretative footnotes (see Figure 3.7).

 

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Figure 3.6  Page 49, section that would become portions of I Ne 18, 19, 1830 first edition of The Book of Mormon. Courtesy of the Church Archives, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints.

By including the seemingly “biblical” paratextual interpretative apparatus of verse markings, cross-​references, and interpretative footnotes on the same pages as the narrative’s text, the book’s paratextual and core textual elements easily blend together in the minds of its readers. Such formatting strategies intermingle Pratt’s non-​sacred editorial additions with Smith’s inspired, sacred text. Such a mingling of sacred and non-​sacred textual elements elevates the importance of Pratt’s interpretative interventions. His notions of which verses relate to which other verses become quasi-​sacred in their interpretative importance, as do his other interpretative notes.

 



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Figure 3.7  Page 47, Orson Pratt’s 1879 Salt Lake City edition of The Book of Mormon. Courtesy of the Church Archives, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints.

Aside from his system of chapter and verse markings, which still persists in the most current editions of The Book of Mormon, nowhere has the lasting influence of Pratt’s interpretative paratextual elements been more important than in the roughly seventy-​five footnotes he included in his 1879 edition referencing geographic locations for events in the narrative. While James Talmage chose not to include Pratt’s geographic footnotes in the next major edition of the book in 1920, the strong connections between settings found in The Book of Mormon’s narrative and actual, physical American settings have carried forward into other twentieth-​century and twenty-​first-​century editions of The Book of Mormon.

 

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The connection between the book’s contents and locations in the Western Hemisphere perhaps enjoys its pinnacle of influence in the 1963 edition of the text. While the 1963 edition also chose not to make use of Pratt’s geographic footnotes, its illustrations continued Pratt’s interpretative connection between the text and ancient Meso-​American settings. In fact, the 1963 edition has perhaps the strongest ties to such Meso-​American settings through its illustrations of various Book of Mormon scenes painted by Arnold Frieberg with early American backdrops along with eleven photographs that precede the text, five of which unabashedly link South and Central America to the book’s content by including images that range from Peruvian golden plates to pictures of great Mayan ruins in Mexico (see Figure 3.8). The substantial influence of Pratt’s 1879 edition is seen in every important subsequent edition of the text. The marks of the scientific bibliographic systemization, as well as his sensitivity to the text’s relationship to various American sites, have lasted into the present. He wished his final edition of The Book of Mormon to be one for the ages. He got his wish. The editorial decisions Pratt

Figure 3.8  Images such as this one of Monte Alban, highlighting the connection between Mormonism and Meso-​America, filled the early pages of the 1963 edition of The Book of Mormon. Courtesy of the Church Archives, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​ day Saints.

 



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made in his 1879 edition still exercise significant influence in how the book is presented to readers up to the present day.

Conclusion In 1981, the LDS Church released a new, landmark edition of The Book of Mormon. It is the basic edition that is still used throughout the Church today. Its importance cannot be overestimated. As one scholar of Mormon print culture has stated, “the only edition the majority of Church members today have had experience with is the 1981 edition.”41 In a methodical fashion that would have immensely pleased Orson Pratt, the Church systematically worked through the entire publication history of the book to present a new, bibliographically sophisticated, yet easily accessible, edition of the text. To produce the 1981 edition, the Church examined every important British and American edition of the book, as well as closely studied what remained of the original manuscripts used for printing several nineteenth-​ and twentieth-​century editions of the text. The editors of the 1981 edition corrected some twenty significant textual errors that had crept into the book over time.42 Such bibliographic collation efforts are but an echo of how Pratt had worked a century earlier with available materials in both his 1849 and 1879 editions to produce what he considered the most error-​free texts possible. Even in his 1869 Deseret edition of the book, he proofread his entire transliterated manuscript no fewer than five times to make sure the edition would be free from error.43 In the tradition of Pratt’s work, the editors of the 1981 edition used the now standard chapter and verse marking Pratt had established in his 1879 edition. They also followed Pratt in their desire to create study aids nestled within the book to help readers more easily locate important events and themes within the book’s narrative. Following Pratt’s lead, the 1981 editors of The Book of Mormon created a new set of internal references and footnotes for the text, as well as new introductory material and new chapter summaries. Finally, although Pratt’s geographic footnotes had dropped out of Book of Mormon editions beginning with Talmage’s 1920 edition, connections between the text and Central America persist in the 1981 edition through the use of illustrations that still clearly link the book’s narrative to Meso-​American settings. Most obviously in this regard, the 1981 edition includes John Scott’s “Jesus Christ Visits the Americas” and Arnold Friberg’s “Samuel the Lamanite Prophesies”; both paintings set their central actions amid Central American architectural backdrops (see Figure 3.9). The spirit of Pratt’s fusion of narrative and archaeology thus lives on in the 1981 edition’s choice of illustrative material.

 

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Figure 3.9  John Scott’s Jesus Christ Visits the Americas follows in the tradition of portraying events found in The Book of Mormon in Central American settings. Scott’s illustration accompanied the 1981 edition and many subsequent editions of the text. Jesus Christ Visits the Americas by John Scott © Intellectual Reserve, Inc.

As is the case with any text that goes through multiple editions over an extended period of time, the text’s publishing history becomes a key component to understanding the text itself. The Book of Mormon is not some static, monolithic entity. Instead, it is a book that has undergone constant change in its numerous English editions, not to mention the more than one hundred foreign language editions of the book. Within this large number of editions, certain common paratextual threads can be detected, and the weaver of many of the most important of these threads is Orson Pratt. To understand the form and influence of the book in the nineteenth century, as well as its continued importance as a cultural text in the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries, it is absolutely essential that one appreciate Pratt’s role in moving the text toward a more systematic, scholarly, and quasi-​biblical presentation. Pratt had a direct hand in the 1849, 1869, and 1879 editions of the text, but he has exercised an important influence on every subsequent edition of the text. His desire to associate his name with The Book of Mormon still reverberates today as even the most current editions of the book bear many of the marks of his groundbreaking editorial and bibliographic work.

 



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Notes 1. John Henry Evans, The Heart of Mormonism (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book Co., for the LDS Department of Education, 1930), 411. 2. Leonard J. Arrington, “The Intellectual Tradition of the Latter-​day Saints,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 4.1 (Spring 1969): 22–​23. 3. Breck England, The Life and Thought of Orson Pratt (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1985), 29. 4. England, The Life and Thought of Orson Pratt, 46, 64. During his lifetime, Pratt made sixteen trips across the Atlantic on Church missions. 5. “University of the City of Nauvoo,” Times and Seasons 2.20 (August 16, 1841): 517. England, The Life and Thought of Orson Pratt, 72. 6. Milando Pratt, “Life and Labors of Orson Pratt,” The Contributor 12 ( Jan. 1891): 85–​87. 7. Orson Pratt, “Astronomical Lectures,” Deseret News 2.4, 2.5, 2.7, 2.8, 2.10–​2.12, 2.15–​18 (1851–​1852), reprinted in Orson Pratt, Wonders of the University, comp. N. B. Lundwall (Salt Lake City, UT: N. B. Lundwall, 1937), 1–​156. 8. Erich Robert Paul, Science, Religion, and Mormon Cosmology (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 127. 9. Orson Pratt, “Lecture,” The Latter-​day Saints’ Millennial Star 46.35 (Nov. 18, 1873): 725. 10. Paul, Science, Religion, and Mormon Cosmology, 128. 11. Hugh G. Stocks, “The Book of Mormon, 1830–​1879: A Publishing History” (MLS Degree thesis, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, UCLA, 1979): 49. 12. David J. Whittaker, “Orson Pratt:  Prolific Pamphleteer,” Dialogue:  A Journal of Mormon Thought 15.2 (Autumn 1982) 28. 13. Orson Pratt, “An Interesting Account of Several Remarkable Visions, and of the Late Discovery Ancient American Records” (Edinburgh: n.p., 1841). 14. England, The Life and Thought of Orson Pratt, 142. 15. Whittaker, “Orson Pratt,” 29. 16. The Book of Mormon bibliographer, Hugh G. Stocks, calls Pratt’s innovations in the 1849 edition “relatively small in scope” but “lasting in effect.” Stocks, “The Book of Mormon,” 77. 17. Whittaker, “Orson Pratt,” 34. 18. Many of Pratt’s early essays were collected and bound into a single volume near the end of his time in England under the title A Series of Pamphlets (Liverpool: R. James, 1851). 19. Gerard Helferich, Humboldt’s Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Latin American Journey That Changed the Way We See the World (New York: Gotham Books, 2004), 320. 20. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (Edinburgh:  T. & T.  Clark, 1928); Richard Rothe, Theologische Ethik, 5 vols. (Wittenberg, Germany: Zimmermannsche Buchhandlung, 1867); Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (New  York:  Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1872–​1873); Robert L. Dabney, Syllabus and Notes of the Course of Systematic and Polemic Theology (St. Louis, MO: Presbyterian Publishing Company of St. Louis, 1878); William G. T. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 3 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894). 21. Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 10–​11. 22. The best overview on Bacon’s influence on American Protestantism in the nineteenth century is Theodore Dwight Bozeman’s Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum Religious Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977). 23. Paul, Science, Religion, and Mormon Cosmology, 138. 24. Orson Pratt, Prophetic Almanac for 1845 (New  York:  The Prophet’s Office, 1845). Orson Pratt, Great First Cause; or the Self-​Moving Forces of the Universe (Liverpool:  R. James, 1851). 25. Ronald G. Watt, “Sailing ‘The Old Ship Zion’: The Life of George D. Watt,” BYU Studies 18.1 (Fall 1977): 52. 26. Watt, “Sailing ‘The Old Ship Zion,’ ” 55. 27. Ronald G. Watt, The Mormon Passage of George D. Watt (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2009), 141–​143.

 

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28. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints, Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (London and Liverpool: Latter-​day Saints Book Depot, 1854–​1886), vol. 1, 71. 29. George A. Smith, Journal of Discourses 12 (Oct. 1867): 140. 30. Parley Pratt to Orson Pratt, October 30, 1854, Orson Pratt Collection, Church History Library, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints. 31. Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 12 (Oct. 1868): 298. 32. Leonard J. Arrington, The Great Basin Kingdom:  Economic History of the Latter-​Day Saints, 1830–​1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1958), 97, 353. 33. Watt, The Mormon Passage of George D. Watt, 159. 34. Papers relating to Orson Pratt’s trip to New York on a commission to print the Deseret edition of The Book of Mormon can be found in the “Deseret alphabet printing papers,” LDS Church Library and Archives, Salt Lake City, Utah, MS 17565, folders 1 and 2. 35. “Deseret alphabet printing papers,” LDS Church Library and Archives, Salt Lake City, Utah, MS 17565, folder 2. 36. Watt, The Mormon Passage of George D. Watt, 243, 255–​262. 37. England, The Life and Thought of Orson Pratt, 162. 38. Joseph Smith Jr., History of the Church 2nd ed. Rev., 7 vols., B.H. Roberts, ed. (Salt Lake City, UT: The Deseret Publishing, Co., 1978), 4:461. 39. Gérard Genette, Paratexts:  Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (New  York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 40. Terryl L. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 101. 41. David J. Whittaker, “That Most Important of All Books:  A Printing History of the Book of Mormon,” in Occasional Papers 5 (Provo, UT:  Neal A.  Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2007): 29. 42. Whittaker, “That Most Important of All Books,” 29. 43. “Deseret alphabet printing papers,” LDS Church Library and Archives, Salt Lake City, Utah, MS 17565, folder 2.

 

4

The Book of Mormon and the Bible Grant Hardy

New scriptures generally come out of times of crisis and anxiety. The narrative of The Book of Mormon begins with a family fleeing Jerusalem about 600 BCE, just before the Babylonian exile, trying to imagine what it might mean to be a branch of Israel cut off from the Temple, the Levitical priesthood, the Davidic monarchy, and the Holy Land itself. The thousand-​year history that follows shows the Nephites fashioning an identity based on the Brass Plates (a very early version of the Hebrew Bible that they had brought with them to the New World) combined with fresh revelations, often delivered by angels, about the nature of God and salvation. So also The Book of Mormon itself, first published in 1830, appeared in an era of social turbulence, when traditional sources of religious authority were being questioned and found wanting. The text—​purportedly inscribed on gold plates that were delivered by an angel and translated “by the gift and power of God”—​was closely connected to Christian scripture, which it affirmed, augmented, and clarified.1 Whatever one might think about the origins or ultimate significance of Joseph Smith’s new scripture, it was obviously modeled on the Bible, and it owed much more to that book than to any of the other potential sources suggested through the years, including Solomon Spaulding’s “Manuscript Found,” Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews, or Gilbert Hunt’s Late War Between the United States and Great Britain. Indeed, it was intended as a companion to the Bible, a sequel of sorts. Readers would have recognized a great many similarities between the two volumes:  Both were divided into internal books, many of which were named after their authors; there was an overwhelming focus on religious issues and perspectives; they taught similar doctrines, at least as seen through the lens of nineteenth-​century American Protestantism; each incorporated multiple genres such as sermons, memoirs, history, prophecy, scriptural interpretations, apocalypse, and poetry; and they both seemed to proclaim the word of God authoritatively, though The Book of Mormon was much more self-​conscious about its Grant Hardy, The Book of Mormon and the Bible. In: Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon. Edited by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190221928.003.0005

 

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status as scripture than the disparate writings that were eventually canonized by the Christian Church. From its first appearance, The Book of Mormon was compared with the Bible by both believers and skeptics, with strikingly different results. Today, with nearly 200 years of hindsight, we can see patterns that may have been difficult to discern in the heat of those early disputations, and there are at least a few points on which all readers might come to consensus, starting with the fact that The Book of Mormon showed up at a fortuitous time. In an era of changing attitudes toward the Bible, The Book of Mormon entered the scene in ways that often bridged differences and integrated opposing perspectives while simultaneously staking out a unique, countercultural position. And this was true whether the topic at hand was politics, literature, or theology.

Americanist Perspectives Robert Alter has echoed the familiar observation that early European-​ Americans identified with the ancient Israelites in their God-​ordained, nation-​ building endeavors, and thus “it was the Old Testament far more than the New that was the biblical text of reference,” in part because “the Hebrew Bible was pervaded by a sense of national destiny deeply engaged in history, whereas the New Testament addressed individuals in urgent need of salvation.”2 So also, Eran Shalev’s American Zion has persuasively documented the preeminence of the Old Testament in American political culture from the Revolution to the Civil War. Americans saw themselves as a new Israel, recapitulating the biblical Exodus and the disunion under Rehoboam. He notes that between 1760 and 1805, the book of Deuteronomy was the most frequently cited source in political discourse, he traces the shift to anti-​monarchical sentiments as revolutionaries looked for models in the book of Judges rather than 1–​2 Kings, and he reviews attempts to fit Native Americans into biblical history, generally as descendants of the Lost Ten Tribes.3 Shalev furthermore provides details about a minor literary genre, which he terms “pseudobiblicism,” which flourished between about 1770 and 1830, in which American authors adopted the diction and style of the King James Bible in writing about recent political events, often in satirical or parodic modes.4 The Book of Mormon fits marvelously into these trends. In its opening chapters we learn that Lehi and his family, like the Puritans, saw themselves as chosen by God and led to a new promised land. As the book recounts the history of their descendants, it adopts a Deuteronomistic perspective with a divine injunction that is repeated some twenty times: “Inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments, ye shall prosper in the land; and inasmuch as ye will not keep my

 



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commandments, ye shall be cut off from my presence” (2 Ne 4:4).5 Its narrators view the shift from monarchy to judges at the beginning of the book of Alma as progress, it takes the Israelite origins of the Indians as a major theme, and its language is thoroughly, if not precisely, biblical. And yet a close look reveals that things are often a little off. In The Book of Mormon, it is not white Americans who represent modern Israel, but Native Americans, whose ancient covenant with God remains in force. European settlers are Gentiles, who must eventually be adopted into the covenant.6 The Nephites are not descended from the Ten Tribes, but from another migration a century later.7 In addition, unlike other examples of pseudobiblicism, The Book of Mormon is more concerned with theology than with politics; it is poignantly serious rather than satirical; and its use of biblical language, as we will see later in this chapter, is rather unusual.8 When Shalev recounts the transition from Puritan to evangelical modes of religiosity that were directed toward individual salvation in Jesus and away from the political precedents of the Old Testament, he leaves The Book of Mormon behind. Yet he could have continued drawing examples from the Latter-​day Saint scripture. Although the form of The Book of Mormon is much more akin to that of the Hebrew Bible (especially the Deuteronomistic History) than it is to the gospels and letters of the New Testament, its focus is thoroughly Christological. Its prophets urge listeners to come to Christ and receive forgiveness of sins in a manner reminiscent of the Second Great Awakening, despite that fact that most of the narrative is set in a time before the Common Era (revelations to the Nephites about the coming Messiah were extraordinarily detailed, so much so that believers were converted to a faith whose founder had yet to be born). Christians had argued for centuries about the relationship between the Old and New Testaments, with typology being one of the most widely accepted solutions. The Book of Mormon, however, integrates the Testaments in an unprecedented fashion, with the result that it is hard to tell where the one ends and the other begins. In a similar manner, it portrays two distinct types of salvation working in harmony. Nephite writers are deeply concerned with salvation history, that is, with God’s intervention in the rise and fall of entire nations and peoples—​ Nephites and Lamanites, Jews and Gentiles—​yet those same writers also repeatedly address individual sinners in need of the “atoning blood of Christ” (e.g., Mosiah 3:18, 4:2; Alma 5:27; Hel 5:9; Moro 10:33). In the context of American literature, The Book of Mormon again almost fits into scholarly narratives. David Reynolds has written about the rise of biblical fiction in the antebellum period, a category that might include The Book of Mormon, at least from an outsider’s perspective. Reynolds notes that “as a result of Christians’ deeply rooted view of the Bible as sacred and inviolable, Biblical fiction appeared later and in lesser quantity than other kinds of religious fictions.”9 These began with renderings of biblical stories in verse (e.g., Timothy Dwight’s

 

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1785 Conquest of Canaan), followed by lightly fictionalized retellings that added literary color and details designed to counter complaints that the Bible was antiquated and dull (e.g. Susanna Rowson’s 1822 Biblical Dialogues Between a Father and His Family), and finally historical fiction set in New Testament times that often focused on extra-​biblical characters or martyrs (e.g., Thomas Gray’s 1830 The Vestal; or, A Tale of Pompeii and the anonymously penned Zerah, the Believing Jew, from 1837).10 The Book of Mormon was published during this period, and though it takes up biblical themes and parallel incidents—​a journey to a promised land, warning prophets, conversion by angelic rebuke, Jesus preaching, and so forth—​it does not retell stories from the Bible. The narrative begins with an offstage biblical character (the prophet Lehi), but the action quickly shifts to an entirely different locale as it chronicles the history of an otherwise unknown remnant of Israel. Perhaps equally significant, it is not characterized by florid, sentimental descriptions and dialogue, as was common in nineteenth-​century religious literature, and it does not evince “admiration for the human, historical Jesus.”11 Rather, the Jesus who descends from heaven to the Nephites is portrayed as God from first to last, as judgmental as he is compassionate.12 Lawrence Buell offers an account similar to Reynolds’s when he traces the rise of “literary scripturism” in America from strict piety to aesthetic appreciation to fiction. He observes how “literary presentation[s]‌of scriptural episodes” gave way to poetry and novels in which “scriptural antecedent continues to be structurally central but is made subservient to some other thematic principle.”13 He then goes beyond Reynolds to consider sweeping reworkings in which the Bible is simply “one among many mythical frames of reference,” with Herman Melville’s Moby-​Dick as a primary example. He provides several illustrations of how Melville reconfigures biblical themes (the subject of a recent book by Ilana Pardes) and then concludes, “Moby-​Dick might thus be seen not only as an analysis and revision of the story of Jonah and other sacred narratives now reconceived as myth but also as a kind of sacred narrative itself.”14 Where might The Book of Mormon be placed within these cultural developments? It seems to be a work of genuine piety, but rather than retelling biblical narratives in more satisfying eloquent forms, it attempts to imitate the Bible in both language and structure as it takes up scriptural themes. And while it certainly lays claim to being “a kind of sacred narrative itself,” this would be in the old-​fashioned sense, as a canonical addition to the biblical record, not the Emersonian dream of a new, universal, mythologizing “scripture-​poem of the universe.”15 The language of The Book of Mormon does not evince an appreciation for the aesthetic qualities of the King James Bible—​the grammar and diction are quite awkward in comparison—​yet the narratology is surprisingly sophisticated, with multiple levels of implied authors, sources, editors, and readers.16 Buell notes the “highly self-​conscious way Melville goes about citing texts and creating his own,” and

 



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notices how in Moby-​Dick, “devices such as the prefatory ‘extracts’ and the classification of whales as types of books keep reminding us . . . that the text at hand is an exercise in reading and writing.”17 A similar observation could be made about The Book of Mormon, which is obsessed with the creation and transmission of written records. For instance, Richard Bushman made this observation: In [Mormon’s] narrative, derived from the available source materials, he quotes other prophets and sometimes quotes them quoting still others. Moroni injects a letter from his father, and Nephi inserts lengthy passages from previous scriptures. Mormon moves in and out of the narrative, pointing up a crucial conclusion or addressing readers with a sermon of his own. Almost always two minds are present, and sometimes three, all kept account of in the flow of words.18 Buell contrasts Melville’s meta-​literary approach to the Jonah story with the way in which a prominent contemporary theologian, Andrews Norton, handled the theologically troublesome tale of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness (Matt 4:1–​11). When Norton, writing a conventional bible commentary, was unable to make literal sense of the episode, he reimagined it as a parable spoken by Jesus. Something similar happens in The Book of Mormon with the injunction from Matt 6:24–​34 to “take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink,” which would seem impractical at best for most believers. When Jesus appears in the New World and delivers a sermon to the Nephites that is almost identical to the Sermon on Mount, he directs these verses to the twelve disciples rather than to the multitude (3 Ne 13:25–​14:1). This is not an isolated example; similar creative reconstructions of biblical language and theology are pervasive throughout the text, where they are presented not as scholarly hypotheses but as miraculously recovered factual accounts. Buell comments, “In contrast to Melville, Norton is always working to closure, approaching the Bible as historical cryptogram.”19 The Book of Mormon could serve as yet another contrast to Melville, since despite its rationalizing, literalistic reinterpretations of Christian scripture, it nevertheless resists closure; narrative does not readily lend itself to the final interpretations of formal analytic commentary, and Smith’s scripture is quite open to the possibility of new revelation and new sacred books (see, for example, 2 Ne 29). If Moby-​Dick is a stunningly creative work of literature with a serious interest in theology, The Book of Mormon might be characterized as a remarkable work of theology with a substantial interest in literature, perhaps even a folk-​art analogue to Melville’s masterpiece.20 From a theological perspective, The Book of Mormon offered itself as an answer to increasingly insistent questions about biblical authorship, transmission, canonicity, sufficiency, and trustworthiness. Protestants had long grounded

 

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their faith in the slogan sola scriptura [by scripture alone], but by the early nineteenth century it was clear that the Bible, on its own, was problematic as the basis for a religion. Contending denominations, each with their own interpretations of the same passages, highlighted the gaps, ambiguities, and contradictions within the text. Deists seized upon these inconsistencies and asked why an all-​ knowing, all-​powerful God would have spoken in such uncertain terms, to just one particular people in one small part of the world. New scholarship revealed that biblical writings had been transformed over time by deliberate editing as well as by copying errors, thus casting doubt on their reliability and inspiration. Historical studies raised the issues of a politically charged canonization process and the relevance in modern, scientific times of an ancient text written in a bygone era by authors with “primitive” perspectives, who saw miracles at every turn.21 Protestants had traditionally believed in the truthfulness of the Bible because the Holy Spirit had witnessed its divine nature in their hearts. Michael J. Lee has recently demonstrated how American theologians in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries responded to Enlightenment critiques by shifting their defenses of the veracity and reliability of the Bible to rational, empirical, even naturalistic grounds (which would cause further difficulties before the century was out). Many felt that the Old and New Testaments, now judged in the light of external, historical data, were in need of additional confirmation and corroboration.22 The Book of Mormon jumped into these debates in an audacious manner as it presented new evidence for traditional Christian beliefs about divine intervention in human affairs, including accounts of angels, revelations, predictive prophecies, and spiritual gifts. Within its pages, doubting Nephites were persuaded by well-​documented miracles that would have met the requirements of commonsense philosophy.23 Because The Book of Mormon offered a plainer version of the Christian gospel than the New Testament itself, with fewer ambiguous or contradictory passages, it was well suited to such an approach. In fact, Martin Harris, when he was acting as a scribe for Smith’s dictation of The Book of Mormon in 1827, optimistically told a neighbor that the completed volume “would be found to contain such disclosures as would settle all religious controversies and speedily bring on the glorious millennium.”24 It remedied gaps in the Bible by restoring lost prophecies from Joseph of Egypt and otherwise unknown Hebrew prophets such as Zenos and Zenock (1 Ne 19; 2 Ne 3; Jacob 5; Alma 33). And where the Bible seemed vulnerable—​on matters of authorship, transmission, and translation—​The Book of Mormon presented impeccable credentials: written and edited by named prophets, with the original documents being miraculously preserved on metal plates, and translated by divine assistance.25 Miracles in ancient Israel were seconded by miracles in ancient America,

 



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which in turn were matched by Joseph Smith’s stories of angels and revelation in the modern world. Indeed, The Book of Mormon proclaimed that part of its mission was to lend support to the Bible in a skeptical age.26 Nephi saw a vision of his book in the last days, and an angel explained, “These last records which thou hast seen among the Gentiles [The Book of Mormon] shall establish the truth of the first, which is of the twelve apostles of the Lamb [the Bible], and shall make known the plain and precious things which have been taken away from them” (1 Ne 13:40). Several chapters later, we read of a promise, lost from the biblical record, the Lord gave to Joseph of Egypt: “That which shall be written by the fruit of thy loins [The Book of Mormon], and also that which shall be written by the fruit of the loins of Judah [the Bible] shall grow together unto the confounding of false doctrines, and laying down of contentions, and establishing peace” (2 Ne 3:12). The Book of Mormon supported a rather literalistic approach to scripture, and even today, as Terryl Givens has noted, “it is fairly resistant to the allegorizing and mythologizing increasingly common among biblical readers and scholars.”27 Smith’s claims of embodied angels, heftable gold plates, and translation by seer stones also made it somewhat impervious to the sorts of faithful naturalistic explanations that were increasingly applied to the Bible in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet The Book of Mormon’s spirited defense of conservative interpretations of the Bible did not endear it to conservative Christians. In part, this was due to discomfort with Smith’s “seeing visions in the age of railways” (in Dickens’s famous phrase),28 and also because the book’s language was so obviously imperfect—​it was difficult to find the miracle in poor grammar and monotonous phrasing.29 But more important, the very existence of The Book of Mormon challenged both the uniqueness and the sufficiency of the biblical record. Not content merely to interpret or comment on scripture, it claimed to be scripture, and hence called for a reopening of the Christian canon that had been firmly closed for 1,400 years. David Holland’s important study of the desire for new revelation in antebellum America places The Book of Mormon within the mainstream of Christian theology, yet in his discussion of Puritans, Deists, evangelicals, African American prophets, Adventists, and Transcendentalists, he focuses on an expansive, generic meaning of “canon” that downplays the radical nature of Mormon scripture. Hardly any other writings of the time claimed, or even aspired to, equal status with the Bible.30 Indeed, The Book of Mormon might be viewed within the context of American letters as a daring attempt to create an innovative, experimental genre of religious literature. Not content to simply quote the Bible and then interpret and apply its teachings, it saw itself as a new, fully canonical installment of sacred history.

 

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The Book of Mormon was clearly addressed to ordinary Americans, at a time when copies of the King James Version were more readily available and widely distributed than ever before. Seth Perry has recently documented “a renewed rhetorical emphasis on the scripturalized terms of religious authority” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with Mormonism being “the preeminent example of the type of religious authority made possible by early national bible culture.”31 In a chapter devoted to Joseph Smith’s various scriptural productions, Perry noted his extraordinary ability to “signify on the Bible,” that is, “to synthesize, compile, rearrange, allude to, and play with the biblical text.”32 His observations about The Book of Mormon tend to focus on diction, lengthy biblical quotations, and paratext, though the narrative itself could have provided additional examples of phenomena that he identified in other chapters, such as performing biblical roles and dictating visionary accounts that were preoccupied with literacy (Lehi and Nephi do both of these in the book of 1 Nephi). Curiously, however, given its scriptural aspirations, The Book of Mormon was never published with biblical references, cross-​references, or even verse numbers during Smith’s lifetime. The Book of Mormon declared that it had been brought forth in the Lord’s “own due time” (Mormon 5:12; cf. title page), and indeed, 1830 seems to have been a propitious moment for the publication of such a book—​a time when Americans were turning their attention from Old Testament notions of national salvation to New Testament harvests of individual souls; when the language of the King James Version was foreign but still imbued with spiritual authority and being put to new uses; when literature based on the Bible was moving beyond literary retellings of familiar stories; when denominationalism and criticisms from scholars and skeptics were threatening to undermine biblical authority; when ordinary men and women were drawing on the Bible to construct identities and process their experiences to an unprecedented extent; and when evidentiary standards were rising but many people were still open to arguments based on supernatural phenomena.33 Outsiders might credit the success of The Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith’s being extraordinarily attuned to the religious concerns and sensibilities of his day, while believers can view the same parallels and conclude that God revealed the Nephite scripture in a form that at least some of Smith’s religiously beleaguered contemporaries found intelligible and motivating, even thrilling. Either way, the fact that The Book of Mormon gained a steady foothold in early nineteenth-​century American culture appears rather miraculous—​whether one chooses to apply that word literally or metaphorically. Comparisons with the Bible reveal The Book of Mormon’s most significant characteristics. Its structure, teachings, and religious aspirations put it in continuity with the Christian scripture, though it is also something of a singularity

 



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in American letters. For the remainder of this chapter, I examine one particular aspect of The Book of Mormon’s biblicism in detail—​its use of King James language. The adoption of Elizabethan grammar, vocabulary, and idioms is one of the most striking features of the book. In addition, phrases from the Old and New Testaments are scattered widely throughout the text, and Smith’s revelation includes whole chapters from Isaiah, Malachi, and Matthew, along with shorter passages from Exodus, Micah, Mark, and 1 Corinthians, all in their 1611 English form (though with occasional alterations). These borrowings were not lost on early critics. For example, Jonathan Turner observed in 1842 that “this book is bespangled from beginning to end not only with thoughts of sacred writers, but with copious verbal extracts from King James’ translation.”34 Early nineteenth-​ century culture was awash in the phrases and rhythms of the Authorized Version, and it would have seemed appropriate to borrow that stately, archaic style for a text that was sacred, revelatory, and scriptural. But just as the Mormon scripture supported traditional understandings of the Bible while simultaneously challenging its uniqueness and sufficiency, so also it drew on the authority of biblical language even as it adapted and recast familiar expressions for its own purposes.

Biblical Diction In the eighteenth century, the Bible dominated America print culture, but by 1830, when The Book of Mormon was first published, some had begun to fear that the Holy Book was losing its place of preeminence, in part because its antiquated English had long since fallen out of everyday speech and also because it was being replaced in the teaching of basic literacy by secular textbooks. Ezra Sampson, in an anthology titled Beauties of the Bible, which went through twelve printings between 1800 and 1812, lamented that “the sacred writings for several years past, have been almost totally excluded from having any share in school instruction:  and by reason of this almost total disuse of the bible in schools, thousands of children have grown, and are growing up in gross ignorance of the contents of that sacred book.”35 In 1826 Alexander Campbell published a modern English version of the New Testament, noting that the “constant mutation in a living language, will probably render new translations, or corrections of old translations, necessary every two or three hundred years.”36 For this volume, he replaced confusing, obsolete terms with their modern equivalents—​such as anticipate instead of prevent, love for charity, and behaviour for conversation—​and he updated both grammar and vocabulary. So, for instance, “Yet hath he not root in himself, but dureth for a while: for when tribulation or persecution ariseth because of the word, by and by he is offended” became “yet, not having it rooted in his

 

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mind, retains it but a while; for when trouble or persecution comes, because of the word, instantly he relapses” (Matt 13:21). As Paul Gutjahr has observed, “While Alexander Campbell was taking the eth endings off words, Smith was putting them on.”37 E. D. Howe, an early critic of The Book of Mormon, echoed Campbell in his disapproval of its biblical diction: “We are not aware that the style of king James is better calculated to reveal the will of Heaven, than is the modern and more refined language; but is a strong evidence against the work now under our consideration. If God chose to reveal himself, it would be reasonable to expect that it would be done definitely, and in such language as could be clearly understood by all.”38 Many more readers, however, were appalled that the language of the Authorized Version had been mimicked so poorly:  “much of the language is borrowed from the Bible and inserted in the book, after murdering the English of it,” or “the whole book of Morman [sic] . . . is a poor attempt at an imitation of the Old Testament Scriptures, and is without connection, object, or aim.”39 It was standard practice for reviewers to provide numerous examples of grammatical errors in the 1830 edition, concluding with summary judgments such as “a very large proportion of his book is made up of such base and bungling attempts to imitate the Scripture style.”40 (For the second edition in 1837, Smith corrected grammatical errors, smoothed out the style, and modernized the language slightly, in a manner reminiscent of Noah Webster’s 1833 revision of the Bible.)41 Nevertheless, some supposed that the similarities would be enough to hoodwink uncritical, devotional readers of scripture: They do not take up the Bible and read it with the expectation of being able to understand it, even in regard to these particulars, as they would understand any other book. All such are prepared, by their very ignorance on these subjects, to become the dupes of the Mormon delusion; or, rather, they are not prepared to detect and withstand this delusion. They open The Book of Mormon. The paragraphs begin with the phrase, “And behold it came to pass.” They read of the cities of Zarahemla, Gid, Mulek, Corianton [sic], and a multitude of others. They read of prophets and preachers, of faith, repentance, and obedience; and having been accustomed, in reading the Scriptures, to take all such things just as they are presented, without careful examination, they can see no reason why all this is not as much entitled to belief, as are the records of the Old and New Testaments.42 Early Latter-​day Saint converts were much less likely than critics to write about the language of The Book of Mormon as compared with that of the Bible, but several reported that they found the two books to be entirely compatible.43 And

 



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Elder John Hyde, in England, defended the book’s style, saying, “If the history of the same Gospel, as to its Saviour and principles, is to be translated into English, language very similar to that in the Bible must of necessity be used.”44 Eran Shalev has pointed out that although writing in the King James idiom was rare at the time, there were at least a few precedents in the political genre of “pseudobiblicism” (as previously noted), and he registers surprise that other American visionary works of the day did not adopt the style of the Bible.45 He passed over the example of Joanna Southcott, an English prophetess to whom Smith was often compared. In her voluminous writings, God speaks in the Elizabethan pronouns and verb forms of the King James Bible.46 In addition, Shaker revelations of the 1840s, most famously the Holy, Sacred and Divine Roll and Book, exhibit a thoroughgoing biblical style, though they were perhaps influenced by the Mormon precedent.47 Nevertheless, these few counterexamples do not negate Shalev’s point—​The Book of Mormon was indeed unusual in trying to replicate the characteristic cadences of the Authorized Version, particularly within a book-​length narrative genre. The Book of Mormon sounds “scriptural” because of its liberal use of King James expressions such as yea, behold, thou, and it came to pass, as well as its verbs ending in –​eth, but also because several thousand of its verses employ expressions that are generally biblical but that appear multiple times in the two Testaments. One way to track these is to provide phrase counts. In the following cases, the first number in parentheses indicates Old Testament occurrences, the second is New Testament instances, and the third tallies usage in The Book of Mormon.48 A comprehensive list would be quite extensive, but a brief sampling includes these: all the ends of the earth (7, 0, 7) as the Lord liveth (27, 0, 17) blood of Christ (0, 4, 6) children of men (23, 0, 131) cry* unto (the Lord/​God) (39, 0, 28) eternal life [or life eternal] (0, 30, 29) for ever and ever (25, 21, 9) from the foundation of the world (0, 6, 22) from time to time (3, 0, 12) God of Abraham . . . Isaac . . . Jacob (5, 5, 8) hard* + heart(s) (32, 11, 102) Holy One of Israel (31, 0, 40) kingdom of God (0, 69, 38) many waters (10, 4, 12) my beloved brethren (0, 4, 60)

 

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presence of the Lord (13, 2, 21) sand(s) of the sea (8, 3, 4) tender mercies/​mercy (11, 2, 3) the Lord (our/​their/​your) God (273, 6, 85) things of the world (0, 4, 14) works of darkness (0, 2, 13) Each phrase appears too many times, either in the Bible or The Book of Mormon, to assume a direct connection or allusion between specific verses, so the overall effect is akin to that of the pervasive Elizabethan pronouns and verb forms:  The language of The Book of Mormon was intended to be reminiscent of the Bible.49 Nevertheless, when there are large disparities in phrase counts (keeping in mind that The Book of Mormon is longer than the New Testament and shorter than the Old), this may be an indication of a particular theme or concern or presupposition, especially if a phrase is seldom or never used in one of the two biblical Testaments.50 Charles Cohen has observed that “rather than enriching the English language as had the King James Bible, The Book of Mormon replicated the former’s cadences (not to mention large chunks of Isaiah), thereby appropriating to itself the reigning cultural standard for sacred diction even if (or perhaps because) the high Jacobean wordings sounded archaic in an age of democratically vernacular homespun.”51 This quick judgment, however, fails to recognize the extent to which biblical phrases were not just appropriated but modified and recontextualized, sometimes in theologically significant ways.

Intertextuality The King James language in The Book of Mormon goes beyond grammar and generic expressions to include specific, recognizable phrases. Such intertextuality can be divided into three categories:  quotations, allusions, and echoes. There may be some disagreement about where a particular example should be placed, but these seem like useful classifications overall. Indeed, they are derived from the way New Testament scholars have generally organized data about phrases borrowed from the Old Testament, though once again The Book of Mormon offers some distinctive patterns. Quotations of biblical passages and verses. According to the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament (4th ed., 2001), there are about 350 quotations of the Old Testament in the New. These quotations are rarely of more than a single verse, and never more than five verses at a time. By contrast, The Book of Mormon incorporates twenty-​four complete chapters from the Bible into

 



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its narrative, along with seventeen additional blocks of two or more consecutive biblical verses. These extended quotations come from Exodus 20, Isaiah 2–​14, 29, 48–​55, Micah 4–​5, Malachi 3–​4, Matthew 5–​7, Mark 16, Acts 3, 1 Corinthians 12–​13, and 1 John 3. Some are specifically introduced as quotations, while others are worked into the text with no note of their origins, aside from Jesus concluding his New World version of the Sermon on the Mount with the words “Behold, ye have heard the things which I taught before I ascended to my Father” (3 Ne 15:1). Most are readily recognizable and did not escape the notice of the book’s earliest readers. (On the other hand, I suspect that few Latter-​day Saints today are aware that eight verses from Micah 5 are embedded in 3 Nephi 21, since they are unmarked in the current official edition.) The extended quotations follow the King James Version (KJV) closely, but sometimes with telling deletions, additions, and alterations. For instance, compare the following three verses from Isaiah in the Bible and The Book of Mormon (each divided into sense-​lines, with original KJV italics retained and differences between the two passages in bold): Isa 48:14–​16

1 Ne 20:14–​16

All ye, assemble yourselves, and hear; which among them hath declared these things?

All ye, assemble yourselves and hear. Which among them hath declared these things unto them?

The Lord hath loved him:

The Lord hath loved him. Yea, and he will fulfill his word which he hath declared by them.

he will do his pleasure on Babylon, and his arm shall be on the Chaldeans.

And he will do his pleasure on Babylon and his arm shall come upon the Chaldeans. Also saith the Lord:

I, even I, have spoken;

I the Lord, yea, I have spoken.

yea, I have called him:

Yea, I have called him to declare;

I have brought him,

I have brought him,

and he shall make his way prosperous.

and he shall make his way prosperous.

Come ye near unto me, hear ye this;

Come ye near unto me.

I have not spoken in secret from the beginning;

I have not spoken in secret from the beginning;

 

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from the time that it was, there am I:

from the time that it was declared have I spoken.

and now the Lord God, and his spirit, hath sent me.

And the Lord God and his Spirit hath sent me.

Some of the changes do not seem to make much of a difference (the added “and” and “yea,” or the shift from “be on” to “come upon”), several are associated with the italicized words of the King James Bible (as is typical, though far from universal, in extended quotations in The Book of Mormon), and it is not obvious why the words “hear ye this” or “now” have been deleted.52 Yet several of the insertions focus on declarative prophecy and the role of God’s spokesperson, which were crucial issues at this point in the story of Nephi’s relationship with his rebellious brothers, who are portrayed as listening to Isaiah 48–​49 as he reads it aloud. Other textual alterations in this two-​chapter passage convey a similar recontextualization of Second Isaiah to fit the circumstances of Lehi’s family in the wilderness (anachronistic as that may be), so this extended quotation is not simply dropped into the story as filler; it has been reshaped as an integral part of the narrative.53 Extended quotations are relatively easy to identify, as are shorter formal citations that are introduced by standard formulas, as when Jacob preaches, “And behold, according to the words of the prophet, the Messiah will set himself again the second time to recover them” (2 Ne 6:14; Isa 11:11), or when Antionah asks Alma, “What does this scripture mean which saith that God placed cherubims and a flaming sword on the east of the garden of Eden” (Alma 12:21; Gen 3:24), or when the narrator explains a law with the citation, “For thus saith the scripture:  Choose ye this day whom ye will serve” (Alma 30:8; Josh 24:15). But unattributed single or partial verse quotations can be difficult to distinguish from allusions. Allusions to specific Bible verses. Where quotations tend to be longer and more nearly verbatim, with the author deliberately importing a block of preexisting text into his writing (or speech) in a way that makes it stand out from his own words, allusions occur when an author is simply pointing readers toward a preexisting text. The common elements may be “fragmentary or periphrastic,” with the phrases more likely to be broken up and woven into the new composition.54 In both cases, authors have intentionally borrowed wording from identifiable sources. There are perhaps a couple hundred instances where The Book of Mormon uses biblical phrases of a verse or less that are distinctive enough to qualify

 



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as either quotations or allusions, but because these expressions are usually smoothly integrated into new narrative contexts, it is prudent to consider them as allusions unless they are explicitly attributed. The situation is further complicated by the book’s multiple levels of narration. We have a good idea of how Paul or the Gospel writers made use of the Greek Septuagint, and we might draw a similar straight line between Joseph Smith and the King James Bible, yet, because The Book of Mormon proclaims itself a work of translation, it suggests that verbal parallels with the Hebrew Bible (which would eventually be manifest in Jacobean English!) could have been deliberately introduced by characters, authors, and narrators, as well as by the translator. Since allusion assumes intentionality, the question arises of who knew what when. Of course, only believers would take this internal frame of reference seriously, but a full assessment of Smith’s scripture making would require an understanding of the various ways that biblical language actually operates within the text and the narrative it presents. Here are a few examples of allusions in which Nephite prophets, Joseph Smith, and modern readers could all have known and recognized the written source behind the words: 2 Ne 4:34

–​cursed is he that putteth his trust in man or maketh flesh his arm

Jer 17:5

–​cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm

Mosiah 11:22

–​they shall know that I am the Lord their God and am a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of my people

Exod 20:5

–​I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation [also Deut 5:9]

Alma 12:35

–​I swear in my wrath that he shall not enter into my rest

Ps 95:11

–​unto whom I sware in my wrath that they should not enter into my rest

Morm 5:24

–​lest a remnant of the seed of Jacob shall go forth among you as a lion and tear you in pieces, and there is none to deliver

Mic 5:8

–​and the remnant of Jacob shall be among the Gentiles . . . as a young lion . . . who, if he go through . . . teareth in pieces, and none can deliver

 

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With regard to the first entry, Nephi had previously indicated that the writings of Jeremiah were on the brass plates in his possession (1 Ne 5:10–​13). Similar to what we have seen in other passages, The Book of Mormon again reconfigures and interprets the Bible, even in its use of relatively straightforward allusions. The wording of Exod 20:5 has been changed in Mosiah 11:22 to make it clear that God will punish people for their own iniquities (plural) rather than for the sin of their fathers, and in Alma 12, the “rest of the Lord” refers to “a remission of sins” and spiritual ease in Christ, rather than the physical entry into the promised land that was originally indicated by the phrase from Psalm 95. The last allusion is a somewhat fragmented, yet there is still a great deal of commonality between the two verses (Mic 5:8 was earlier quoted in fuller form twice by Jesus, at 3 Ne 20:16 and 21:12). There are, however, many other allusions where the author or translator probably had a specific Bible verse in mind when he composed the sentence, which would have been unknown to characters within the story. A few illustrations: 1 Nephi 1:14: Great and marvelous are thy works, O Lord God Almighty Revelation 15:3: Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty Mosiah 3:17: There shall be no other name given nor no other way nor means whereby salvation can come unto the children of men Acts 4:12: Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is no other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved Alma 37:34: Be meek and lowly in heart, for such shall find rest to their souls Matthew 11:29:  I am meek and lowly in heart:  and ye shall find rest unto your souls 3 Nephi 18:29: For whoso eateth and drinketh my flesh and blood unworthily eateth and drinketh damnation to his soul 1 Corinthians 11:29: For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself Mormon 9:14: He that is filthy shall be filthy still; and he that is righteous shall be righteous still (cf. 2 Ne 9:16) Revelation 22:11: He which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still Even from a believer’s perspective, there is no reason why, in the first example, Lehi in 597 BCE should express his pious awe with a phrase that would not be penned until the first century CE, or why Alma would have advised his son in terms taken from the future gospel of Matthew. If The Book of Mormon is to be regarded as a translation, it has to be a rather free rendering, adapted to the biblically formed aesthetic sensibilities of nineteenth-​century Americans.

 



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Yet others of these seemingly anachronistic allusions can be interpreted, within the narrative, as having divine origins. The verses from Mosiah and 3 Nephi are put in the mouths of an angel and the resurrected Jesus, respectively, neither of whom is, at least theologically, bound by the ordinary constraints of time and authorship. (This is yet another way in which supernaturalism is woven into the fabric of The Book of Mormon.) Likewise, in the final example, while it may be that the author or translator is intentionally alluding to Revelation 22 (with significant reinterpretations), from within the narrative frame, Moroni might instead have been quoting Jacob’s words at 2 Ne 9:16, which Moroni would have had on metal plates—​words that Jacob says he received from the Lord Himself. To enter into the world of The Book of Mormon is to repeatedly find oneself within a series of interlocking literary puzzles, which even from a purely naturalistic point of view makes Joseph Smith an interesting author. Echoes of biblical phrases. There are several hundred more Book of Mormon verses that echo specific, identifiable biblical phrases (as opposed to the expressions I earlier identified as generically biblical, meaning that they appear in multiple verses throughout the Bible). These phrases are not as complex as the allusions in the previous section, their original contexts matter much less, and they may or may not have been consciously cited by the author or translator. That is, they could simply be part of his religious vocabulary—​formed by years of reading the scriptures and hearing them preached—​without him knowing exactly where in the Bible they came from, and not necessarily expecting his readers to recognize them by chapter and verse either. These verbal echoes are not evenly distributed through the text since they are much more common in passages of preaching than in the regular narrative. An example of somewhat thick usage occurs at 1 Ne 17: 45–​47: Ye are swift to do iniquity but slow to remember the Lord your God.

Jas 1:19 –​swift to . . . slow to . . .

Ye have seen an angel and he spake unto you. Yea, ye have heard his voice from time to time, and he hath spoken unto you in a still small voice; but ye were past feeling, that ye could not feel his words.

1 Kgs 19:12 –​still small voice Eph 4:19 –​past feeling

Wherefore he hath spoken unto you like unto the voice of thunder, which did cause the earth to shake as if it were to divide asunder.

Pss 77:18; 104:7 –​the voice of thy thunder

 

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And ye also know that by the power of his almighty word he can cause the earth that it shall pass away.

Matt 24:35; Mark 13:31; Luke 21:33 –​earth shall pass away

Yea, and ye know that by his word he can cause that the rough places be made smooth and smooth places shall be broken up.

Isa 40:4 –​rough places plain Luke 3:5 –​rough ways shall be made smooth

O then why is it that ye can be so hard in your hearts? Behold, my soul is rent with anguish because of you, and my heart is pained.

Ps 55:4 –​my heart is sore pained

I fear lest ye shall be cast off forever.55

Ps 77:7; Lam 3:31 –​cast off for ever

Rather than being randomly borrowed phrases, several of these echoes show how The Book of Mormon is in conversation with the Bible. First, the somewhat cryptic reference at Eph 4:19 to being “past feeling” is more explicitly defined in 1 Nephi as an insensitivity to God’s words, whether they come through an angel, an intermittent voice of some sort, or “a still small voice.” Second, a phrase that appears in each of the three synoptic Gospels—​“ heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away”—​is here transformed into an assertion that God’s speech can cause the earth to pass away, which fits Nephi’s concern with the “power of his almighty word.” A similar concern can also been seen in his earlier invocation of Moses, who “truly spake unto the waters of the Red Sea, and they divided hither and thither” (1 Ne 4:2; cf. 1 Ne 17:26). According to Exod 14:21–​29, Moses divided the waters by stretching out his hand, not by speaking, yet The Book of Mormon modifies the biblical account in order to highlight a consistent theme of the potency of divinely authorized, spoken words. And finally, phrases from the Hebrew Bible that are quoted in the New Testament are often picked up in their New Testament form by The Book of Mormon, or conflated, as in “rough places be made smooth.” Still, the expansion of the phrase to include its opposite (“and smooth places shall be broken up”) is a nice literary touch that matches the preceding contrast in both Isaiah and Luke: “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low.” Borrowed biblical phrases were a regular feature of religious writing in the early national period. Printed sermons and articles in denominational magazines were frequently punctuated with familiar expressions from the King James Bible, sometimes with references given and sometimes without. In the case of phrases

 



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lacking parenthetical chapter and verse designations, the authors apparently expected that readers would recognize them, though they were often printed in italics or set off by double quotation marks as an extra hint.56 The Book of Mormon, however, was printed without its biblical phrases in quotes or italics, perhaps because the non-​Mormon typesetter John Gilbert, who was responsible for the paragraphing, punctuation, and general formatting of the 1830 edition, would first have had to identify them all, which would have been a considerable undertaking, especially in the days before searchable computer databases.57 Joseph Smith certainly did not point out clever uses and permutations of biblical language in The Book of Mormon; in fact, he hardly ever quoted from the book in his writings or sermons.58 Recognizable phrases from the King James Version appear throughout The Book of Mormon, where ancient Nephites are portrayed as speaking or writing in terms borrowed from that esteemed seventeenth-​century translation. Latter-​ day Saints have been hesitant to look too closely at the relationship of The Book of Mormon to the Bible because to do so would necessitate directly addressing these many anachronisms, yet in avoiding the issue they miss much of the book’s creative adaptation of biblical language. There is still room for more sophisticated theories of “inspired translation,” which might explain not only how the words of an ancient document could be rendered into English, but also how concepts, cultural assumptions, intertextual allusions, and narratives might have been revised, amended, and modernized to make them intelligible to the Bible-​ reading public of nineteenth-​century America. Non-​Mormons generally regard Joseph Smith as the author of the text, so they have no reason to wrestle with the theological implications of its production, but they might benefit as well from moving beyond long-​standing assumptions about the nature of the book. When read carefully, it turns out that The Book of Mormon does not consist of random episodes or stream-​of-​ consciousness exhortations. Instead, it is a fairly tightly constructed, integrated narrative, dense with repeated phrases that can be read as internal allusions and related by narrators with coherent viewpoints. This by no means proves its historicity, but it does suggest that the work has more literary interest than is often assumed, despite its sometimes awkward grammar and diction.59 So when an 1841 reviewer complained that Nephite prophets “use New Testament phrases; sometimes the precise language of Christ and the apostles, and sometimes only changed a little, with a poor attempt at Old Testament style,” he did not give much thought to those little changes, even though they can sometimes convey a lot of meaning.60 There is a great deal of biblical wordplay in The Book of Mormon, much of which would have been visible to nineteenth-​century readers who knew the King James Version well.

 

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Effects of Intertextuality We can now turn briefly to the kinds of effects that may be achieved when The Book of Mormon repurposes biblical language for its own ends. The mere identification of biblical sources for the language of The Book of Mormon does not tell us much about the book as a work of literature, a religious artifact, or even as scripture; the more significant issue is what The Book of Mormon does with these linguistic building blocks. Reminders of corresponding biblical narratives. Readers of The Book of Mormon have long noticed that not only is its language similar to that of the Bible, but several of its stories sound familiar as well. Lehi leading his family through the wilderness to a new promised land reenacts the Exodus; Alma’s conversion after a sudden, paralyzing encounter with an angel is reminiscent of Paul on the road to Damascus. Critics can point to such parallels as evidence of the derivative nature of The Book of Mormon and Smith’s lack of imagination, while believers might counter that God operates in similar ways in different times and places. Either way, these narrative similarities are fairly obvious. Perhaps more interesting are parallels that might be overlooked were they not signaled by verbal allusions. In both of the following examples, shared phrases may serve to nudge readers away from the unpleasant elements in The Book of Mormon narrative by calling to mind well-​known, beloved incidents in the Bible. Nephi’s deadly encounter with Laban at 1 Nephi 4 has been the subject of much controversy since it seems to give license to killing in the name of God. When Nephi tells the story, however, he includes several thematic allusions to the biblical precedent of David and Goliath, as well as a verbal echo, “the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands” [cf. 1 Sam17:46], and two somewhat stronger allusions:  “I beheld his sword, and I  drew it forth from the sheath thereof,” followed a few verses later by “I smote off his head with his own sword.” (cf. 1 Sam 17:51)61 In Abinadi’s confrontation with King Noah at Mosiah 11–​12, we see several phrases that direct our attention back to Moses at the court of Pharaoh: “go forth and say unto [someone]: Thus saith the Lord,” “they shall know that I am the Lord,” “hardened his heart,” and “stretch forth thy hand.” Readers who remember the biblical precedent will know that nothing good can follow when Noah arrogantly asks the prophet, “Who is the Lord that.” . . . And yet the outcomes of the stories are so different—​Moses is successful in his quest, while Abinadi dies as a martyr—​that we might not consider them comparable were it not for the allusions and echoes.62 Interpretations of biblical ambiguities. Although The Book of Mormon is organized as a continuous narrative rather than as a Bible commentary, there are nevertheless instances where explicit interpretations of specific verses are

 



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woven into the story, which include numerous biblically grounded sermons and prophecies. The most obvious examples are when Nephites quote lengthy passages and then follow up with explanations, sometimes by refashioning key phrases into new, more detailed prophecies. For example, Nephi does this at 1 Nephi 22, after quoting Isaiah 48–​49; Abinadi does the same at Mosiah 12–​16, after quoting Isaiah 52–​53; and Jesus continues the pattern at 3 Nephi 20-​21, working from Isaiah 52 and Micah 5.  Single phrases are also interpreted, as when the expression “to fulfill all righteousness,” which has to do with Jesus’s baptism (Matt 3:15), is explicated at 2 Ne 31:4-​8. At Alma 33:18–​22, Alma adds a crucial detail to the biblical account of the bronze serpent that Moses set up on a pole (Num 21:6–​9), namely that some disbelieving Israelites refused to even look and be healed, thus prefiguring those who would later reject Christ. Jesus himself, at 3 Ne 15:1–​16:3, explains what he meant when he told Jews in Palestine that “other sheep I have, which are not of this fold” ( John 10:16). And the expressions “second death” and “New Jerusalem,” both from Revelation, are clarified at Alma 12, Helaman 14, 3 Nephi 21, and Ether 13. Implicit interpretations occur when biblical phrases are used in new contexts, or with novel meanings or grammatical twists. Here are three examples. (1) At Gen 6:3, the cryptic phrase “my spirit shall not always strive with man” seems to refer to a limit set on human lifespans; in The Book of Mormon it indicates the point at which God gives up on his rebellious children (1 Ne 7:14; 2 Ne 26:11; Morm 5:16; Ether 2:15). (2) Matthew 21:22 portrays Jesus as teaching his disciples that “whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive,” but the verb believing has no obvious object. In The Book of Mormon, the comma after believing is consistently replaced by that, to indicate that Christians should pray in the firm belief that their prayers will be answered: “If ye will not harden your hearts, and ask me in faith, believing that ye shall receive . . . surely these things shall be made know unto you” (1 Ne 15:11). The injunction to “ask . . . believing that ye shall receive” also appears at Enos 1:15, Mosiah 4:21, 3 Ne 18:20, and Moro 7:26. (3) The book of Revelation famously condemns the Devil and his followers to be tormented with fire and brimstone, whose smoke ascends up forever and ever (Revelation 14:10-​11; cf. 19:20; 20:10; 21:8). Despite Dan Vogel’s quite plausible identification of anti-​Universalist tendencies in The Book of Mormon, in three verses the Mormon scripture transforms the fiery phrases of Revelation into a simile (“their torment is as a torment of fire and brimstone”; 2 Ne 9:16, Mosiah 3:27, Alma 12:17),63 and at Mosiah 2:38 the flames are regarded as more psychological or spiritual than literal: “if

 

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that man repenteth not . . . the demands of divine justice do awaken his immortal soul to a lively sense of his own guilt, which doth . . . fill his breast with guilt, and pain, and anguish, which is like an unquenchable fire whose flames ascendeth up forever and ever.”64 New theology in biblical guise. The Book of Mormon often makes its theological points by combining biblical expressions in novel ways. For instance, Blake Ostler has pointed out how a discussion at 2 Ne 9:12–​18 concerning deliverance from spiritual death and temporal death (a nonbiblical distinction common in the nineteenth century) incorporates multiple phrases from Matthew, Hebrews, and Revelation. At the same time, he notes that this is not simply a linguistic overlay: “Jacob’s speech reinterprets the KJV snippets into a new synthesis on death, resurrection, and the judgment . . . . These phrases may represent interpretation of an original text using the KJV New Testament and a nineteenth-​century theological framework. Yet it is clear that the KJV New Testament phrases have become part of the structure itself.”65 There are many such cases where theological innovations in The Book of Mormon can be recognized from their connections with familiar phrases from the Bible. Three examples follow. (1) Both the Old and New Testaments use the expression “blot out [one’s] name” to refer to physical destruction or being deleted from God’s book of life. The verb “blot out” can also be paired with “sin” or “transgression” to denote forgiveness. The Book of Mormon continues these uses, but in one particular passage, it is God’s name that should not be blotted out. King Benjamin tells his people that they will be “called by the name of Christ” and that this name “never should be blotted out, except it be through transgression; therefore take heed that ye do not transgress, that the name be not blotted out of your hearts” (Mosiah 5:9,11). (2) The omission of “thy kingdom come” from the 3 Nephi version of the Lord’s Prayer (cf. 3 Ne 13:10 with Matt 6:10) suggests that Christ actually established his promised kingdom among the Nephites, with significant implications for the problem of the delayed Parousia; i.e., that Jesus actually did return to earth within a generation to establish his kingdom, but that event happened in the Americas rather than in Judea.66 (3) Later in his postresurrection appearance in the New World, Jesus tells the Nephite Twelve that “whoso repenteth and is baptized in my name shall be filled. And if he endureth to the end, behold, him will I hold guiltless before my Father at that day when I shall stand to judge the world” (3 Ne 27:16).

 



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The phrase “hold [someone] guiltless” is almost exclusively associated with the Ten Commandments (“the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain”; Exod 20:7; Deut 5:11; Mosiah 13:15), so there is a strong implication that being baptized in Jesus’s name and then not enduring to the end is one way to take the Lord’s name in vain.67 In conclusion, anyone, regardless of religious background, can see that The Book of Mormon was written as a response to the King James Bible; it expands on the biblical message, resolves contradictions, fills in gaps, and clarifies issues that were left ambiguous. But for believers, this is a divinely appointed role: God brought the book into existence at just the right time as a corrective to a modern Christianity that had gotten offtrack. From that perspective, the relationship between The Book of Mormon and the Bible transcends anachronism since divine intervention is possible, or even expected, at every stage of the Mormon scripture’s production from writing to transmission to translation. Within its pages, the Lord himself declares to Nephi (using several New Testament allusions and echoes, as well as a nod toward evidentiary “proof ”): I speak the same words unto one nation like unto another; and when the two nations shall run together, the testimony of the two nations shall run together also. And I  do this that I  may prove unto many that I  am the same yesterday, today, and forever, and that I  speak forth my words according to mine own pleasure. And because that I have spoken one word, ye need not suppose that I cannot speak another . . . . Wherefore because that ye have a Bible, ye need not suppose that it contains all my words; neither need ye suppose that I have not caused more to be written . . . for out of the books which shall be written I  will judge the world, every man according to their works. (2 Ne 29:8–​11)68 This may appear as a rather self-​serving prophecy that The Book of Mormon makes about itself, but surely the new scripture spoke powerfully to at least some people in the nineteenth century, people such as William W. Phelps, who proclaimed “its style simple, and its language plain.” He continued, “The Book of Mormon is a ‘heavenly treasure,’ and as estimable in its holy precepts and examples for salvation, as the holy bible. A comparison of the two will prove this.”69 Religious plausibility aside, it is worth noting that there is a scripture-​creating exuberance in early Mormonism that invites readers to reconsider the ways in which God might speak to His people—​a God who delights in scriptural wordplay, literary perplexities, intertextuality, and creative anachronism.

 

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Notes 1. The quotation appears on the title page and in the “Testimony of Three Witnesses,” both of which have been included in every edition. 2. Robert Alter, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 2; see, for example, Harry S. Stout, “Word and Order in Colonial New England,” and Mark A. Noll, “The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation, 1776–​ 1865,” both in The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 19–​38, 39–​58. 3. Eran Shalev, American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text From the Revolution to the Civil War (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2013), 6–​7, 11, 44–​48, 120–​135. 4. Shalev, American Zion, 84–​104. 5. All of the quotations of The Book of Mormon in this paper are taken from Royal Skousen, Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2009), though I have sometimes modified his punctuation and omitted his sense-​line divisions, neither of which were part of Smith’s original dictation. Skousen’s critical text, based on a detailed examination of the two extant manuscripts and early printed editions, should be the basis for all scholarly studies of the Mormon scripture. See also the explanations for his editorial choices in his Analysis of Variants in The Book of Mormon, 6 vols. (Provo, UT: FARMS, 2004–​ 2009). FARMS (Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies) has since become part of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. 6. See Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005), 101–​105; Jared Hickman, “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse,” American Literature 86.3 (2014): 429–​461; as well as 2 Ne 10:18; 3 Ne 16:13; 21:6; 30:2. 7. This point is often lost on commentators on The Book of Mormon, but Shalev admirably recognizes and analyzes it in American Zion, 136–​138. 8. An additional example of pseudobiblicism, overlooked by Shalev yet in some ways closer to The Book of Mormon, is Alexander Campbell’s “Third Epistle of Peter,” published in Christian Baptist 12.2 ( July 4, 1825):  280–​285. Clearly a parody, it purports to be a translation of a French rendition of an ancient document that had been found “among the ruins of an ancient city by a miserable wandering monk.” The “translator” declares that he cannot vouch for the authenticity of the original, other than the fact that it seems to have been a true prophecy judging by the accuracy of its characterization of the failings of modern clergy. For instance, “Let your dwelling places be houses of splendour and edifices of cost; and let your doors be decked with plates of brass; and let your names, even your reverend titles be graven thereon; so shall it be as a sign.” The epistle goes on to recommend luxuriant living, recruiting like-​minded colleagues, eloquent preaching that turns a blind eye to the evils of slavery, and fleecing one’s flock. The text does not use Jacobean grammar, but it does adopt idioms and quotations from the King James Bible, as can be seen in this rather typical sentence: “And over and above the price for which ye have sold your service, take ye also Gifts, and be ye mindful to refuse none, saying—​‘Lo! I have enough;’—​but receive gifts from them that go in chariots, and from them that feed flocks, and from them that earn their morsel by the sweat of their brow.” When Campbell writes the first detailed denunciation of The Book of Mormon six years later in his new magazine, the Millennial Harbinger, he does so as someone who has already tried his own hand at a much shorter, lighter example of pseudepigrapha. (Campbell’s critique was published as a separate pamphlet in 1832 titled “Delusions: An Analysis of The Book of Mormon; with an Examination of Its Internal and External Evidences, and a Refutation of Its Pretenses to Divine Authority.”) 9. David S. Reynolds, Faith in Fiction:  The Emergence of Religious Literature in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 123. 10. Reynolds, Faith in Fiction, 124–​139. 11. Reynolds, Faith in Fiction, 129. 12. See Paul C. Gutjahr, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777–​ 1880 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 156–​157. 13. Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture:  From Revolution Through Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 169, 175.

 



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14. Buell, New England Literary Culture, 187, 181. See Ilana Pardes, Melville’s Bibles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 15. Buell, New England Literary Culture, 182. Buell describes the attractiveness of this Romantic ideal of scripture to Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, and Carlyle, and concludes, “But the new Bible did not get written, unless one counts The Book of Mormon” (183). Joseph Smith’s scripture, however, was definitely not the Bible that Emerson was looking for. 16. I  explored the role of major narrators in mediating stories though literary techniques such as embedded documents, parallel narratives, and editorial comment sections in my Understanding The Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). For a writerly appreciation of The Book of Mormon from someone who is impressed by Smith’s scripture, but not enough to become a Mormon, see Jane Barnes, Falling in Love With Joseph Smith: My Search for the Real Prophet (New York: Penguin, 2012), 107–​120. 17. Buell, New England Literary Culture, 179. 18. Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 119. See also Richard Lyman Bushman, “The Book of Mormon in Early Mormon History,” in Believing History:  Latter-​day Saint Essays, Reid L. Neilson and Jed Woodworth, eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 65–​78. 19. Buell, New England Literary Culture, 181. 20. Within the field of American literature, it may seem faintly ridiculous to compare The Book of Mormon to Moby-​Dick, but in terms of world scripture, a notoriously difficult genre to break into, The Book of Mormon is a towering achievement second only to the Sikh Adi Granth in recent centuries—​which may be astonishing given that many outsiders find the book nearly unreadable. Terryl L. Givens observed in 2009 that “Today, more than 130 million copies of The Book of Mormon have been printed in more than one hundred languages, making it by far the most widely distributed book ever produced by an American.” Terryl L. Givens, “Joseph Smith and The Book of Mormon,” in A New Literary History of America, Griel Marcus and Werner Sollors, eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 196. 21. For general overviews, see Nathan O. Hatch, “Sola Scriptura and Novus Ordo Seclorum,” and George M. Marsden, “Every One’s Own Interpreter?: The Bible, Science and Authority in Mid-​Nineteenth-​Century America,” both in Hatch and Noll, eds., The Bible in America, 59–​ 78, 79–​100. Many of these concerns were reiterated in popular, polemical form by Thomas Paine in his Age of Reason (published in three separate parts, 1794, 1795, 1807). 22. Michael J. Lee, Erosion of Biblical Certainty: Battles Over Authority and Interpretation in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 23. It is worth noting, however, that two of its major narrators appear to have different opinions on the plausibility of rational faith; Mormon thinks that he can persuade readers through historical data, while his son Moroni, after seeing in vision the rampant skepticism of the latter days, concludes that the witness of the Holy Spirit provides a more sure ground for belief. See Hardy, Understanding The Book of Mormon, 222–​225. 24. John A. Clark, Gleanings by the Way (Philadelphia: W. J. & J. K. Simon, 1842), 223–​224. See also Alexander Campbell’s famous observation that The Book of Mormon “decides all the great controversies” of the day; Delusions (Boston: Benjamin H. Greene, 1832), 13. 25. Robert N. Hullinger, Joseph Smith’s Answer to Skepticism (Salt Lake City, UT:  Signature, 1992), particularly 128–​129, where Hullinger lists nine criticisms from The Age of Reason for which The Book of Mormon provides a tangible rebuttal. 26. Timothy Smith has identified five ways in which The Book of Mormon “served to strengthen the authority of scripture.” These included its integration of the Old and New Testaments, its insistence that salvation was open to all, an emphasis on ethical uprightness, demonstrations of the Holy Spirit working in the lives of believers, and the literal fulfillment of prophecies concerning the last days. See Timothy L. Smith, “The Book of Mormon in a Biblical Culture,” Journal of Mormon History 7 (1980): 3–​21; the quotation is from 10. 27. Givens, “Joseph Smith and The Book of Mormon,” 194; for a discussion of “selective literalism” in LDS scriptural interpretation, see Philip L. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-​day Saints in American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 32–​38. 28. Charles Dickens, ed., Household Words:  A Weekly Journal (New  York:  Angell, Engel, and Hewitt, 1851), vol. 3, 385.

 

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29. The Book of Mormon requires a reinterpretation of the balance of divine sovereignty and human agency with regard to scriptural inspiration. Although the book portrays God as overseeing its production from first to last, sometimes in very direct ways, its inspired authors and editors nevertheless write from limited human perspectives: they acknowledge the possibility of errors (title page; Morm 9:30–​34), and they worry about their “weakness in writing” (Ether 12:23–​40). Apparently translation by seer stone, whatever it might have entailed, resulted in something less than literary perfection. 30. David F. Holland, Sacred Borders:  Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 141–​157. 31. Seth Perry, Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 7, 13. 32. Perry, Bible Culture, 111–​112. 33. Steven C. Harper has collected evidence from the writings of early Latter-​day Saints suggesting that, influenced by skepticism and Deism, “those who became Mormons were almost always first contemplative Bible believers who were skeptical of false prophets. They considered it reasonable that signs would follow true believers, and they held out for empirical confirmation.” See Steven C. Harper, “Infallible Proofs, Both Human and Divine: The Persuasiveness of Mormonism for Early Converts,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 10.1 (2000): 104. 34. J. B. Turner, Mormonism in All Ages (New York: Platt & Peters, 1842), 203. 35. Ezra Sampson, The Beauties of the Bible: Being a Selection From the Old and New Testaments, With Various Remarks and Brief Dissertations, Designed for the Use of Christians in General, and Particularly for the Use of Schools, and for the Improvement of Youth (Hudson, NY: Ashbel Stoddard, 1800), 3. 36. Alexander Campbell, ed.., The Sacred Writings of the Apostles and Evangelists of Jesus Christ Commonly Styled the New Testament (Buffaloe, VA: Alexander Campbell, 1826), 3. 37. Gutjahr, An American Bible, 153; cf. pp. 101–​105. 38. Eber D. Howe, Mormonism Unvailed [sic] (Painesville, OH: E. D. Howe, 1834), 23–​24. 39. “A Friend in Chagrin, Ohio,” Evangelical Magazine and Gospel Advocate new series 2, no. 6 (Feb. 5, 1831):  47; Josiah Priest, American Antiquities (Albany, NY:  Hoffman and White, 1833), 73. See the digital collection 19th Century Publications About The Book of Mormon, 1829–​1844, hosted by BYU’s Lee Library for this and other early primary sources: http://​ contentdm.lib.byu.edu/​cdm/​search/​collection/​BOMP 40. La Roy Sunderland, “Mormonism,” Zion’s Watchman 3.7 (Feb. 17, 1838). Although this article was written after Smith’s 1837 revisions, Sunderland was using the 1830 edition. 41. For example, Smith changed over 900 instances of “which” to “who” when the antecedent was a person, and deleted 48 occurrences of the ubiquitous “it came to pass.” The shift of “which” to “who” was the first change listed by Noah Webster in the introduction to his Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, in the Common Version, with Amendments of the Language (New Haven, CT: Durrie & Peck, 1833), vii. On the deletions of “it came to pass,” see Royal Skousen, Analysis of Textual Variants in The Book of Mormon, Part One (Provo, UT: FARMS, 2004), 207. 42. Jason Whitman, “Notices of Books:  The Book of Mormon,” The Unitarian (Boston) 1 ( January 1834): 48. Contra Whitman, Corianton is a personal name rather than a city. 43. Examples include Warren Foote, John Young, William Miller, Joel Hills Johnson, and David Pettegrew. See Susan Easton Black, ed., Stories From the Early Saints: Converted by The Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City, UT: Bookcraft, 1992), 11, 20, 24, 51, 59. See also the accounts of Joel Johnson, Anson Call, and Eli Gilbert in Harper, “Infallible Proofs, Both Human and Divine,” 105, 108, as well as Janiece Johnson, “Becoming a People of the Books: Toward an Understanding of Early Mormon Converts and the New Word of the Lord,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 27 (2018): 1–​43. 44. John Hyde Sr., “Christian Preachers and ‘Mormonism,’” The Latter-​day Saints’ Millennial Star 17.26 ( June 30, 1855): 410. 45. Shalev, American Zion, 108, 115. 46. Southcott’s first book, Strange Effects of the Faith (Exeter: T. Brice, 1801), has many, many passages like the following: “The Spirit of the Lord is with them that fear him. On that man

 



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will I look, that is of a meek and contrite spirit; he trembleth at my word; he committeth all his ways to the Lord,” etc. (26). For more on Southcott, see Susan Juster, Doomsayers: Anglo-​ American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 239–​259. 47. United Society of Believers,A Holy, Sacred and Divine Roll and Book From The Lord God of Heaven to the Inhabitants of Earth (Canterbury, NH:  United Society, 1843), 14. A  very similar text is The Divine Book of Holy and Eternal Wisdom, revealed to Shaker prophetess Paulina Bates and published in 1849. Stephen Stein, comparing the Sacred Roll with The Book of Mormon, observed that “both texts appeared overanxious to establish their legitimacy as new bibles, both displayed language similar to the King James Version of the Bible, and both effected a targumizing process through the amplification and extension of scriptural themes and stories.” Stephen J. Stein, The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 182. See also his “Inspiration, Revelation, and Scripture: The Story of a Shaker Bible,” American Antiquarian Society 105.2 (1996): 347–​376. For the notion of “targumizing” in The Book of Mormon, see Krister Stendahl, “The Sermon on the Mount and Third Nephi,” in Reflections on Mormonism: Judaeo-​Christian Parallels, Truman G. Madsen, ed. (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1978), 139–​154. 48. The phrase counts are based on the 1981 edition of The Book of Mormon since Skousen’s Earliest Text is not yet available in searchable form. Asterisks indicate that the count includes grammatical variants. 49. The situation may in some cases be a little more complicated since patterns can sometimes be discernible in larger literary units rather than in single verses or even chapters. For instance, the phrase “Holy One of Israel,” which is closely associated with Isaiah in the Bible, is not scattered randomly throughout The Book of Mormon; thirty-​five of the thirty-​eight uses occur between 1 Nephi 19 and 2 Nephi 31. 50. An aside on nonbiblical phrases: Just as biblical language is noteworthy, so too are striking expressions that are not found in the Bible. Once such phrases are identified, it is useful to try to track which may have been common in Smith’s nineteenth-​century environment, to get a better sense of where the language of The Book of Mormon is original and where it may be derivative. This is more difficult than tracing borrowed language from the Bible, but searchable literature databases make the task much easier than in in the past. For example, the contrast “swift to do iniquity but slow to remember the Lord your God” at 1 Ne 17:45 is a lovely turn of phrase. A search of Literature Online (LION) and Google Books turns up no instances of “swift to do iniquity” or “quick to do iniquity” before 1830. It appears to be an original formulation, which is echoed twice more in The Book of Mormon at Mosiah 13:29 and Hel 12:4, and then reversed at Hel 7:7. On the other hand, nineteenth-​century critics were happy to point out common nonbiblical phrases that struck them as particularly anachronistic. Alexander Campbell, for instance, listed “eternal welfare” (once in The Book of Mormon), “great Creator” (three times), “infinite atonement” (three times), “mother earth” (three times), and “instruments in the hands of God” (twelve times, including variants) (Campbell, Delusions, 13–​14; the phrase counts are mine). M. T. Lamb offered a list of “modern camp-​meeting expressions” that included “encircled about eternally in the arms of his love,” “chains of hell,” “soul expanded,” “experienced a change of heart,” “sing the song of redeeming love,” “the arms of mercy are extended towards them,” and “days of probation,” all of which can be matched to early nineteenth-​century publications. M. T. Lamb, The Golden Bible; Or, The Book of Mormon: Is It From God? (New York: Ward and Drummond, 1887), 227. Some words and phrases were simply part of the English language at the time, while others were deeply enmeshed in current theological debates that The Book of Mormon weighs in on, for example “save his people in their sins,” “infinite atonement,” “the day of grace was passed with them,” and “eye of faith.” Mark Thomas analyzed Book of Mormon uses of the first three phrases in Mark Thomas, “Revival Language in The Book of Mormon,” Sunstone 8 (May–​June 1983): 19–​25. He discusses “eye of faith” in Mark Thomas, Digging in Cumorah: Reclaiming Book of Mormon Narratives (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature, 1999), 57–​58. For more on the role of such phrases in theological debates of Smith’s day, see Dan Vogel, “Anti-​Universalist

 

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Rhetoric in The Book of Mormon,” in New Approaches to The Book of Mormon: Explorations in Critical Methodology, Brent Lee Metcalfe, ed. (Salt Lake City, UT:  Signature, 1993), 21–​52; Clyde D. Ford, “The Book of Mormon, the Early Nineteenth-​Century Debates Over Universalism, and the Development of the Novel Mormon Doctrines of Ultimate Rewards and Punishments,” Dialogue 47.1 (Spring 2014): 1–​23. A phrase-​by-​phrase examination of the language of The Book of Mormon would turn up many more nonbiblical expressions that were familiar in nineteenth-​century religious discourse, as well as phrases that appear to have been original to The Book of Mormon, such as “dwindle(d) in unbelief,” “great and eternal plan,” “holy order of God,” “nourished by the good word of God,” procrastinate(d) the day of your repentance,” “retain(ing) a remission of [someone’s] sins,” “true points of doctrine,” “very Eternal Father,” and “with real intent.” In general, however, these nonbiblical religious phrases are much less frequent than those that are derived from the King James Version. 51. Charles L. Cohen, “Religion, Print Culture, and the Bible Before 1876,” in Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America, Charles L. Cohen and Paul S. Boyer, eds. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 7–​8. 52. On the changes to King James Version italics, see David P. Wright, “Isaiah in The Book of Mormon: or Joseph Smith in Isaiah,” in American Apocrypha: Essays on The Book of Mormon, Dan Vogel and Brent Lee Metcalfe, eds. (Salt Lake City, UT:  Signature, 2002), 159–​169. A thorough discussion of the topic is forthcoming in volume 3 of Royal Skousen’s Book of Mormon Critical Text Project. 53. See Hardy, Understanding The Book of Mormon,  58–​86. 54. See Steve Moyise, The Old Testament in the New: An Introduction (London and New York: Continuum, 2001), 5–​6; Christopher A. Beetham, Echoes of Scripture in the Letter of Paul to the Colossians (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 15–​24. The quotation, which appears in Beetham, is from John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 64. Hollander’s work has been influential in biblical studies, particularly through Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1989). 55. Emphasis added. Nephi is speaking to his rebellious brothers Laman and Lemuel. There may be an internal allusion here with the phrase “cast off,” as he echoes Lehi’s similar concerns from nine chapters earlier:  “He [Lehi] exceedingly feared for Laman and Lemuel. Yea, he feared lest they should be cast off from the presence of the Lord” (1 Ne 8:36). 56. This can be seen, for example, in Ellis Sandoz, ed., Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730–​1805, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1998). 57. The most useful attempt at cataloguing intertextuality to date is the three-​volume FARMS Book of Mormon Critical Text (2nd ed., no editor listed; Provo, UT: FARMS, 1984–​1987). This edition included numerous footnotes highlighting related biblical verses, but some allusions were missed, there was no differentiation between distinctive and generic parallels, and clear instances of phrasal borrowing were often overwhelmed by massed references to passages with similar themes or language that were only roughly comparable. Nevertheless, the FARMS publication provides a baseline for future studies. Helpful introductions to the topic of biblical parallels in The Book of Mormon include Mark D. Thomas, “A Mosaic for a Religious Counterculture:  The Bible in the Book of Mormon,” Dialogue 29.4 (1996):  47–​ 68, and Nicholas J. Frederick, “The Book of Mormon and Its Redaction of the King James New Testament: A Further Evaluation of the Interaction between the New Testament and the Book of Mormon,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 27 (2018): 44–​87. 58. According to Grant Underwood, “in the 173 Nauvoo discourses of the prophet Joseph Smith for which contemporary records exist, only two Book of Mormon passages have been cited, while dozens of biblical passages were.” Grant Underwood, “Book of Mormon Usage in Early LDS Theology,” Dialogue 17.3 (Autumn 1984): 53. 59. See, for example, David P. Wright’s “In Plain Terms that We May Understand: Joseph Smith’s Transformation of Hebrews in Alma 12–​13” in Metcalfe, New Approaches, 165–​229. Wright was trying to persuade Latter-​day Saints that their scripture was a nineteenth-​century fiction authored by Smith, but his analysis transcended denominational concerns when he categorized some of the characteristic ways in which The Book of Mormon revises biblical

 



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passages, including textual conservatism, solving problems, Midrashic transformation, generalization, primordialization, and conflation. Mark D.  Thomas’s underrated Digging in Cumorah also identified key narrative patterns in the text. 60. “Letter on Mormonism 2,” Christian Advocate and Journal 15.52 (Aug. 11, 1841). 61. See Ben McGuire, “Nephi and Goliath:  A Case Study of Literary Allusion in The Book of Mormon,” Journal of The Book of Mormon and Other Restoration Scripture 18.1 (2009): 16–​31. 62. Hardy, Understanding The Book of Mormon, 157–​160. 63. The word as in 2 Ne 9:16 was added by Joseph Smith in the 1837 edition. 64. Vogel, “Anti-​ Universalist Rhetoric.” Compare the assertion of the nineteenth-​ century Universalist Hosea Ballou that the word hell, in the Bible, sometimes refers to “a state of great trouble of mind, in consequence of conscientious guilt.” Hosea Ballou, A Treatise on the Atonement (Randolph, VT: Sereno Wright, 1805), 149; cited in Vogel, “Anti-​Universalist Rhetoric,” 45. 65. Blake T. Ostler, “The Book of Mormon as a Modern Expansion of an Ancient Source,” Dialogue 20.1 (Spring 1987): 76–​77. On the temporal–​spiritual contrast, see Thomas, Digging, 7–​9, 104–​109. 66. While many LDS scholars have noted the omission of “thy kingdom come,” Heather Hardy analyzed the theological implications more fully in Heather Hardy, “‘Saving Christianity’: The Nephite Fulfillment of Jesus’s Eschatological Prophecies,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 23 (2014): 22–​55. 67. The only other instance of “hold [someone] guiltless” in the Bible or The Book of Mormon is 1 Kgs 2:9. 68. Hebrews 13:8, “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever”; Acts 26:25, “speak forth the words”; Eph 1:9, “according to his good pleasure”; Rev 20:12–​13, “the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books . . . and they were judged every man according to their works.” 69. W. W. Phelps, “Letter No. 10,” Latter Day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate 1.12 (Sep. 1835): 178.

 

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An American Book of Chronicles Pseudo-​Biblicism and the Cultural Origins of The Book of Mormon Eran Shalev

The Georgian newspaper The Macon Daily Telegraph and Confederate published a “New Revelation” in the bleak fall of 1864, when the doom of the Confederate States of America seemed to draw closer by the day. The revelation, a pamphlet of 12 pages, was an extraordinary piece that recast the central narratives of the Hebrew Bible as chronicles about America. North America, “the birthplace of mankind,” became the geographical center of the biblical drama: “the river that went out to water the garden of Eden  .  .  .  was the Mississippi-​Pison, the river compassing the land of Havilah, the Arkansas; Gihon, the river lining the boundary of Ethopia, is the Ohio. Hidekel, the Missouri, and Euphrates, the Upper Mississippi.” The “New Revelation” conflated the biblical and American landscapes with “the Hebrew Canaan [identified as] the United States, Mexico and Central America.” “Joshua,” the revelation’s author, could even identify “the site of the present city of New York” as the place where Noah built his ark and made preparation for his voyage. Another crucial moment in the drama that the revelation narrated took place 5,000  years after the deluge, when “a weather-​ beaten vessel is seen, laden with the first Virginia colony.” When it lands, the sons of Abel—​the Europeans, according to Joshua’s account—​face the sons of Cain—​the Indians—​as they “swap beads for whisky.” The original thirteen colonies in North America, the revelation continued, “were none other than a regeneration of the twelve tribes of Israel,” neatly corresponding to their biblical counterparts: North Carolina was Gad, South Carolina was Simeon, Dan was New York, Manasseh was Virginia, and so on, each colony “named after the corresponding territory in Israel.” At that point Joshua extended the liberty he took with interpreting the original narrative and described “the terrible conflict between Monarchy and Republicanism,” which apparently Eran Shalev, An American Book of Chronicles: Pseudo-Biblicism and the Cultural Origins of The Book of Mormon. In: Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon. Edited by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190221928.003.0006

 



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matched the on-​going American sectional conflict between the Union and the Confederacy. The discord ends with “the Jews’ return to Palestine with a free Government, the negroes to Africa, and a republican form of government extends from the western border of British America, half way round the globe,” throughout Europe. Only the progeny of Cain, incapable of any government, “dwell in the lands of his brothers.” These, the newspaper’s editor commented, must have been “the niggers and Yankees.”1 The “New Revelation” seems remarkable to modern readers in its imaginative ingenuity and in rendering American history as an event in biblical chronology. But the piece manifests a fascination with biblical authenticity that was prevalent during the opening decades of the nineteenth century. Indeed, this idiosyncratic rendition was striking only because it appeared some three decades after the peaking of a political theology that portrayed the United States as a New Israel. Had the “New Revelation” been published in 1830 in the western parts of New York, for example, and not in war-​ravished Georgia, it would have been but one of numerous similar manifestations of raw biblical sensibilities and would have easily blended with other biblical accounts of American history. Indeed, by the time that Joseph Smith published The Book of Mormon Americans had been producing and consuming faux biblical texts for close to a century. Imitating a practice that originated as a satirical literary genre in the first half of the eighteenth century in Britain, Americans, who first merely republished English pieces, started publishing original pseudo-​biblical texts in earnest during the Revolution. Thereafter, citizens of the young nation regularly described and were informed of their experiences through texts that made use of the full range of the literary conventions of the King James Bible. Nevertheless, things changed as the nineteenth century advanced, which might explain why the “New Revelation” failed to resonate with the larger society in the closing months of the Civil War: Although the “New Revelation” was in all likelihood written in biblical idiom we cannot be certain because the wartime editor, unlike the common practice of his peers in the past, published the revelation only “in a nut shell” as “a brief synopsis.” By the era of the Civil War Americans were no longer receptive to lengthy and cumbersome texts written in biblical language. Not surprisingly, The Macon Daily Telegraph and Confederate’s editor concluded that the piece was a “grand farce.” It is revealing to read the “New Revelation” while remembering Gordon Wood’s decades-​old speculation that if The Book of Mormon had been published later than its original appearance in 1830 it would have been inconceivable for Mormonism to take hold:  “a generation or so later,” Wood assessed, “it might have been necessary for Smith and his followers to get some university professors to authenticate the characters on the golden plates.”2 Smith’s timing was providential (no pun intended), however, for yet another reason: The Book

 

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of Mormon was published during the final efflorescence of a tradition of pseudo-​ biblical writing in the United States. Published later, The Book of Mormon might have not enjoyed Americans’ fascination with pseudo-​biblicism, the writing of American history in biblical language, which gradually lost its appeal in the years after 1830, as less and less of those distinct texts found their way to print. By the time the effects of the decline of pseudo-​biblicism were felt, however, The Book of Mormon had already gained a momentum of its own, transcending the literary tradition that helped pave the way for that original American scripture.3 Hence, a closer look at The Book of Mormon in light of the popular genre of American texts posing as biblical writings will enable us to better contextualize and understand the Mormon Bible in the intellectual cosmology and print culture of the Early Republic. Viewing The Book of Mormon as part of a well-​ established pseudo-​biblical tradition might thus shed new light on perennial questions regarding the contentious history of the emergence and reception of the Mormon Bible.

Pseudo-​Biblicism in Revolutionary America and the Early Republic By the time that Joseph Smith published The Book of Mormon in 1830 Americans had been producing and consuming faux biblical texts for close to a century. Imitating a practice that originated as a satirical literary genre in the first half of the eighteenth century in Britain, American colonials, who first merely republished English pieces, started publishing significant numbers of original pseudo biblical texts only during the Revolution. Thereafter, Americans regularly described and were informed of their political realities through texts that made use of the full range of the literary conventions of the King James Bible, the translation that had become since the end of the seventeenth century the great Bible of the English language.4 Like the Authorized Version, those texts were divided into “books” and “chapters,” and made use of the universally recognized staccato rhythms confined in short and numbered verses, and repetitively made use of phrases such as “and it came to pass,” “thee,” “thou,” “thy,” and “thine,” whereas modern English would simply use “you,” “your,” and “yours.” Similarly, verbal endings for which modern language would use “–​s,” those texts, imitating the archaic language of the King James Bible, used “–​eth”; whereas eighteenth-​ century Americans used the possessive pronoun “its,” the Authorized Version and pseudo-​biblical texts used “thereof.”5 “The First Book of Chronicles, Chapter the 5th,” (1812) which was characteristically published in a newspaper and covered almost three-​quarters of a

 



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folio page, was representative of numerous similar texts appearing in the printed sphere of the Early Republic. “The First Book’s” first verse opened thus: And David the King of Judea (whom the Lord had delivered from the dreadful sword of his enemies—​and who had led his people through the wilderness from the house of bondage to freedom and independ­ ence) died, and slept with his forefathers;—​and the people mourned for him 162 days.6 The occasional reader could be fooled to think that the text was genuinely biblical, or at least portraying ancient proceedings. It situated readers in a scriptural epistemic mode through its title, character (King David), as well as language that was all biblical. However, the following verse proved otherwise: Now there arose a new king over the land—​an Adamite of the seed of the Amalekites, who affected not to know the precepts of David, and moreover spurned his laws, his statutes, and his commandments. The “David” of the first verse, it becomes evident, was in fact a typological rendition of George Washington, and the “bondage” referred to in the first verse, from which he has saved the American Israelites, was British.7 The political inclination of the text is apparent as well: It was an attack on the “Adamite” king, which stemmed from “Amalekite” seed (Amalekites being perennial enemies of the biblical Israelites). This text, in short, was a political polemic in the service of the Democratic–​Republican Party. The Adamite king, the “First Chapter” went on to tell, “collected round about him the Pickeringites, the factionites, the toryites, and the federalites, whose understandings he had dazzled with the promise of royal favors; and he said unto them: behold the democrites . . . let us set over them task masters to afflict them with heavy burdans. And let us rule over them with a rod of iron, and oppress them with excises, with stamp duties, and loans, with gag-​laws! And with standing armies! And they did so.” “The First Book,” like numerous similar pseudo-​biblical texts, rambled on for scores of verses and thousands of words in an intentionally meticulous biblical idiom, elaborating on modern American happenings. The language, style, and grammar were biblical, the tone subtly ironic, and the text abundant with anachronisms stemming from the imposition of an archaic language on modern experiences: The biblical taskmaster ruled with the modern rods of iron of unconstitutional and un-​Republican “burdans” such as stamp duties, gag laws, and standing armies. The characteristics of this and numerous similar texts—​on both sides of the political divide, many of them Federalist, not Republican, in inclination—​are evident through the few verses of the “First Book” we have just

 

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seen: Their subjects were historical, American, and often partisan (in this particular case tracing the political history of the young American Republic), their language and form were biblical, and their tone was anachronistic and occasionally ironic: When “the days of voting [for President] were over,” the “First Book” told, “the scribes,” or presidential electors in contemporary parlance, “convened themselves together,” and counted “the names according to the custom established in the land of Judea.”8 Nomenclature was too thoroughly biblicized, as names (such as “the Children of the land of George” for Georgians and “Mordecai the Benjaminite” for Benjamin Franklin, among countless others) became too an instrument to enhance the frisson gained from invoking an archaic and quasi-​sacred language from modern events. Numerous polemic and political texts such as “The First Book” consciously participated in the slandering and smearing that characterized the contentious political culture of the early American Republic.9 However, another important group of pseudo-​biblical texts that may be better labeled as patriotic and nonpartisan, or attempting to appear so, tried to stay clear of polemics as well as derision and sarcasm (at least toward American compatriots). The tone of those texts was not satirical but rather solemn to the utmost, in an attempt to imitate the dignitas of the Bible itself. An example of such a text was Gilbert J. Hunt’s grand history, The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain . . . Written in the Ancient Historical Style. As its title promised, this popular history, published serially in newspapers and in several two-​volume editions, retold the story of the War of 1812 in the “ancient historical style” of the King James Bible. Hunt’s history was biblical from its very beginning, opening with the standard “And it came to pass,” immediately going on to contextualize its readers in an American temporal setting, “in the thirty and sixth year after the people of the provinces of Columbia had declared themselves independent of all the kingdoms of the earth.” The opening verses continued to narrate how “Even, James, whose sur-​ name was Madison, delivered a written paper to the Great Sanhedrim of the people,” thus referring to Congress, named after the ancient Jewish assembly of elders, “who were assembled . . . [in the] city where the people were gathered together [which] was called after the name of the chief captain of the land of Columbia, whose fame extended to the uttermost parts of the earth.” So this history rambled for hundreds of pages, painstakingly elaborating a biblico-​ American reality by imposing Hebraic narratives, metaphors, and style on the annals of the United States. Even more than the polemical and acerbic pseudo-​ biblical texts, these solemn writings provided Americans with a rendition of their history and present as a reenactment of a biblical drama, and of their young nation as a second Israel. The two texts we have briefly examined, like numerous other similar pseudo-​ biblical contemporary writings, reflect a distinct historical consciousness, a

 



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unique understanding of the American past and of its present. By imposing the Bible and its intellectual and cultural landscapes on America those texts placed the United States in a biblical timeframe, describing the young nation and its history as occurring in a distant, revered, and mythic time dimension. As such, they consisted of radical historical statements. Those texts produced a constructive estrangement, rendering the present through biblical forms and structures, which while well known and respected, were linguistically and temporally dissonant. Hence, by manipulating time and space, pseudo-​biblicism proved an effective medium for buttressing notions of America’s election and “chosenness,” or of conceiving of the United States as the Second Israel and of North America as the New Canaan. By repeatedly describing, for example, the expanse of America as stretching “from Dan even unto Beersheba,” in the fashion in which the Bible described the land of Israel, Americans were conditioned to understand their history biblically. Such republicanization of the Bible and the biblicization of America demonstrated in countless representations, such as the Congress as “the great Sanhedrim of America” or the American capital as “Jerusalem,” King David’s ancient capital city, pseudo-​biblical writings reorganized Americans’ biblical and political imagination. The numerous representations such as America led by “George [Washington, who] reigned over all Israel,” or James Madison who “assembled together his household and went with them up to Jerusalem, and called a grand council of the nation to deliberate upon all these things,” rendered the Bible as immanently relevant to America and constructed American experiences as reenactments of biblical scripts.10 Americans who saw fit to draw on the Bible to describe their past and present thus perpetuated and intensified the discourse of America as a chosen nation, a second Israel. It is not surprising then that many of the texts written in biblical language referred explicitly to America as “Israel.” By alluding to the past of God’s chosen people through the use of the distinctive language in which that history was originally articulated, Americans attempted not to alter the received facts of that revered history but rather to invoke the authority and meaning that that history, and the language through which that history was delivered and exerted, and apply it to their present. Indeed, in doing so they were merely perpetuating what reformed Christians have been doing for centuries, that is, readings the Scriptures typologically to better understand and enhance their role in history. The use of biblical language was thus not (only) a way to make the Bible relevant to America; it was an effective way to make America relevant to the Bible, to biblicize America. The world of the ancient Hebrews and biblical gentiles, of Moses, Joshua, and the Judges, was of course far removed from that of frontiersmen and Indians, elected assemblies and political parties, canals, and camp meetings.11 By 1830, however, the pseudo-​biblical writings were actively bringing these worlds together for many decades.

 

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In the years leading to the publication of The Book of Mormon Americans were thus conditioned to perceive their recent history in biblical terms, not only in its distinct language but also in its deep meaning. Pseudo-​biblical texts were habituating contemporaries’ historical and biblical sensibilities to understand the Bible and America in similar terms, and hence to perceive the United States as a biblical nation. As we will now come to see, the pseudo-​biblical texts may have also helped to pave the way for the creation and reception of an American scripture in the cadences and metaphors of the King James Bible. Indeed, in light of the popular genre of American pseudo-​biblicism, at least some of The Book of Mormon’s accounts, such as the Jewish ancestors of the American Indians and their remarkable history in the New World, may seem less extraordinary.12 The details of the pseudo-​biblical texts that preceded (and anteceded) The Book of Mormon may have been radically different from the centuries-​long history of a family of Jews and their vast progeny in America, as portrayed in the Mormon Bible. However, as we now see, those texts echoed and enhanced each other remarkably.

The Book of Mormon and Pseudo-​Biblicism The Book of Mormon, “One of the greatest documents in American cultural history” according to one historian, and that, according to another, “occupies a position of major importance in both the religious and intellectual history of the United States,” differed, to be sure, in crucial respects from other contemporary texts written in pseudo-​biblical style.13 Although already its contemporary critics argued that they could identify the fingerprints of nineteenth-​century American culture in the text, as a prophetic text it consciously steered clear of the blunt polemics that characterized many of the political pseudo-​biblical texts. Moreover, providence, unlike in those earlier pieces in which men were the main, if not sole, historical agents, was omnipresent in The Book of Mormon. If ’ like other contemporary visionary tracts (which did not make use of the Bible’s language) The Book of Mormon proclaimed itself a revelatory text intended to tell authentic religious truths, even the most ambitious texts written in pseudo-​ biblical style did not manifest similar pretensions.14 Nevertheless, there are good reasons to see The Book of Mormon as intimately connected to the wider genre of pseudo-​biblicism: The unique combination of the biblical form and style that The Book of Mormon shared with the pseudo-​ biblical texts, as well as their distinctly American content, provide a case for seeing Smith’s book as meaningfully affiliated to that American mode of writing. This affiliation is particularly significant once we realize that while few, if any other, contemporary visionaries claimed the sacred authority of the biblical

 



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language, Smith was bold enough to publish his American Bible in the sacred idiom.15 Understanding The Book of Mormon in light of the pseudo-​biblical tradition may thus shed new light on its origins and conception, as well as on the context within which it emerged, was received, and proliferated. While the practice of imitating the biblical style to convey reality appears extraordinary to modern readers, they came naturally to generations of Americans writing and reading pseudo-​biblical texts, Joseph Smith and his audience included. The numerous texts written in biblical idiom, several of which consisted of major and vastly popular literary productions, attest to the vigor of that distinct American tradition.16 The Book of Mormon, like the bible, comprised of several books narrated by different voices, describing centuries-​spanning events that consisted of intricate, and at times structurally similar, narratives.”17 What first strikes the occasional reader of The Book of Mormon, however, is its biblical language, “laced with biblical expressions . . . steeped in the words and rhythms of the Authorized Version.” Historians of Mormonism have been well aware of this, pointing out that Smith “was telling a sacred story, and this demanded a sacred language, which for him meant the English of the King James Bible.”18 Throughout the book the reader hears the intonations of the diction of King James’s translators in numerous sentences, such as a random verse from the first chapter of the Mormon Bible: “For it came to pass in the commencement of the first year of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah . . . and in that same year there came many prophets, prophesying unto the people that they must repent, or the great city Jerusalem must be destroyed.”19 Hence, if a sympathetic reader may believe that the Book of Mormon “thinks like the Bible,” others pointed out that the book seemed to contemporaries “a clumsy parody of the King James Bible. Every verb ended in –​eth, and every other sentence began, ‘And it came to pass.’ ”20 Indeed, the Gold Bible (thus named after the golden plates upon which it was reportedly originally carved) would have been incomprehensible to contemporaries except in biblical context since for them since the language it utilized was “the only appropriate language in which to enfold the holy words of Scripture.”21 Like the Bible itself and the imitative pseudo-​biblical writings, The Book of Mormon was printed as a collection of books, holding Bible-​sounding titles such as “The Book of Jacob,” or “The Book of Mosiah,” and divided into numbered chapters. Like the Bible itself, The Book of Mormon was not composed in verse, but was versified only later for the sake of convenience and conformity. While many of the pseudo-​biblical texts were divided into numbered verses, they were not necessarily so, but were occasionally written without versification.22 Terryl Givens has noted in an illuminating study that reference to, and interpretation of, specific passages of The Book of Mormon were “surprisingly uncommon” in the early days of the Church. This, according to Givens, is due to the fact that “The Book of Mormon’s place in Mormonism and American religion

 

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generally has always been more connected to its status as signifier than signified, or its role as a sacred sign rather than its function as persuasive theology.”23 The book’s influence thus owed less to what it said but more to what it consisted of; it was first and foremost a historical account of events that took place in America written in biblical language. Accordingly, the way in which the book presents itself, both through its biblical language and its American subject matter, gains further importance: From the opening paragraphs of 1 Nephi (the first book of the Mormon Bible) it is obvious that The Book of Mormon is not only written in the King James Bible’s idiom but also that it is an American book in the most literal sense, recounting a narrative in which the New World is the promised land upon which its original inhabitants, the descendants of the people of Israel, enacted dramatic and sacred acts. Like many other contemporary texts written in the biblical style, The Book of Mormon made use of the archaic language to historicize and sanctify American annals, interweaving the Bible and America, America and the Bible. Without detracting from its innovations and distinctiveness, there is a strong case for viewing The Book of Mormon in light of a larger contemporary textual world and as part of a long American tradition of comparable texts written in biblical language. While the book’s affinities to the original biblical Testaments, as well as to early nineteenth-​century prophetic culture, have been well established, its participation in the genre of writing in biblical prose still needs to be demonstrated.24 Indeed, like other writings in that tradition, The Book of Mormon co-​opted the American landscape and its (pre)history by incorporating it into a scriptural cosmos. While earlier writings in the style of antiquity tended to hallow the terms in which the United States’ history and its present were perceived, The Book of Mormon incorporated America’s remote past into the biblical canon. Hence, while The Book of Mormon may be seen as “an extension of the old and new testaments to the Western Hemisphere,” so should also the numerous pseudo-​biblical texts.25 Seen in this light, The Book of Mormon thus did not necessarily offer American readers a unique, “wholly fresh, wholly novel, and . . . wholly innocent new Scripture.”26 Rather, in light of American pseudo-​biblicism, The Book of Mormon may be seen as extending prevalent literary conventions to their logical conclusion: Like numerous texts in the pseudo-​biblical style, The Book of Mormon incorporated the Bible into American circumstances through the use of an idiom well known to Americans who were accustomed to texts written in a language that consecrated America and its history. It was a language through which Americans regularly revealed truths, either scriptural or political. The familial connection between pseudo-​biblical writings and The Book of Mormon is particularly evident in the ways in which authors rendered the alleged origin and source of their texts. Indeed, The Book of Mormon, like earlier

 



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pseudo-​biblical works, announced itself as a translation of an ancient source. Similarly, “The First Book of Chronicles, Chapter the 5th” which we have already examined, proclaimed, for example, that it was “[t]‌ranslated from the original Hebrew, by Rabbi Shaloma Ben Ezra, for the consolation of posterity.”27 It was not necessarily Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, however, that early nineteenth-​century Americans attributed as the source of their pseudo-​biblical texts. Such writings could refer to themselves, for example, merely as “translated from the original,” without referring to what specific language the “original” was inscribed in.28 Beyond presenting themselves as translated from an ancient language the pseudo-​biblical texts also shared with The Book of Mormon the remarkable ways in which they were preserved for ages and eventually miraculously discovered. Hence such texts could fashion themselves as “A Fragment of the Prophecy of Tobias,” a Hellenized Hebrew name that did not refer to a specific biblical prophet (although the name “Tobias,” or in the Hebrew original “Toviah,” appears several times in the Bible), or merely as a “fragment [which] was found by the subscriber.”29 The Book of Mormon should thus be seen in the context of contemporary texts written in biblical idiom that presented themselves as ancient, often Hebraic, in origin, inexplicably recovered, and translated from an exotic language in order to be presented in front of an American audience.30 Some of the recovery stories pseudo-​biblical writings told were strikingly similar to that of The Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon was memorably buried in rural New York’s Mt. Cumorah, near the Smith family’s farm in Palmyra, where it waited for ages to be found and translated by Joseph Smith, Jr. “The Fifteenth Chapter of the Chronicles” (1812) published in New  York’s Broome County Patriot years before Smith made public his account of the golden plates in the nearby Palmyra, described, like Smith, a supposedly ancient manuscript whose excavator, “Ben Saidi,” appealed to the newspaper’s editor to present his extraordinary finding to the paper’s readers. The choice of Ben Saidi for a pseudonym (or pseudo-​finder’s name) clearly alluded to Nathan Ben Saddi, the nom de plume that English author Robert Dodsley chose for his vastly popular mid-​eighteenth-​ century pseudo-​biblical Chronicle of the Kings of England.31 However, while the English Ben Saddi had stated a century earlier that he was the Chronicle’s author, not mere translator, the American Ben Saidi claimed a different provenance for his biblical text.32 Ben Saidi’s “ancient” manuscript was “found in the hollow of a tree, where it has probably been deposited for ages.” He turned to the New York editor: “If you are able to decipher it,” for ancient prophetic texts, Mormon or other, required decoding and translation, “you will oblige me by giving it a place in your paper.”33 Ben Saidi and Joseph Smith, like other authors of “fragments” and “Ancient Chronicles” that were “translated” from ancient languages, took part in the contemporary frenetic treasure-​hunting and digging culture that

 

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flourished in the burned-​over district. They were fascinated by ancient and puzzling American scriptural texts, written in biblical idiom, hidden for centuries in the western areas of the Empire State, awaiting their Early Republic excavators to find and translate them.34 The line separating political polemics and earnest claims to authenticity, between a pseudo-​biblical language and a language of prophetic religiosity, was never thinner.35 Both The Book of Mormon and American pseudo-​biblical writings presented themselves, as we have seen, as translations of ancient sources, and fashioned themselves (as pseudepigraphic texts have done throughout the ages) as incredibly, if not miraculously, preserved. However, if The Book of Mormon may be situated alongside contemporary pseudo-​biblical texts and preceding pseudepigrapha and apocrypha in its narratives of preservation, it seems less in line with its congeners in other respects, such as claiming to have been inscribed on the gold plates in an unknown language Joseph Smith identified as “Reformed Egyptian.” An Egyptian genealogy for apocryphal texts, Edwin Firmage points out, “has attracted authors of sapiential, magical, and alchemical works since Greco-​Roman times but which seems out of place in a work of Christian apologetics.”36 Nevertheless, hieroglyphic Bibles, a common and overlooked genre that circulated in the early American Republic, further reveal the deep connections among the era’s biblical and pseudo-​biblical imagination, print culture, and The Book of Mormon. Those “curious” hieroglyphic Bibles, published in multiple editions from the late eighteenth century through the publication of Smith’s Bible and after, rendered the Old and New Testaments by replacing key words and phrases in the scriptural text with woodcut pictorial images.37 Self-​proclaimed “hieroglyphic,” those Bibles, impressively executed and each containing hundreds of carefully crafted images, while supposedly intended “for the amusement of youth,” were actually devices, like some key pseudo-​biblical texts, “to familiarize tender age” with scripture.38 Like Reformed Egyptian, the ancient language from which Joseph Smith claimed to have translated The Book of Mormon, the widespread use of pictographic symbols to convey biblical narratives manifests the continuing fascination early Americans held toward the Bible and its relation to ancient forms of presentation. Although Smith never specifically referred to “hieroglyphs” in the context of Reformed Egyptian, the identification of hieroglyphs with the ancient Egyptian script was universal; so was—​and still is—​the common understanding that Reformed Egyptian was a hieroglyphic form of writing ever since The Book of Mormon was published.39 Hence, the connection of scripture and hieroglyphs, the Bible and Egypt, and the sacred and the pictorial, was not unique to Smith, but rather an embedded aspect of contemporary biblical imagination. The Book of Mormon was thus taking its form and impressing upon a world that was attuned to the linguistic and representational sensibilities it evoked. Hence, both the biblical language in which

 



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the Mormon Bible was written and the Egyptian writing system within which the book’s audience imagined it was originally inscribed in echoed strongly in the culture of the early American Republic.

Creation, Reception, and the Contextualization of The Book of Mormon Attempts to understand the creation of The Book of Mormon have had mixed results over recent decades. Richard Bushman has pointed out lately in his magisterial biographical study of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith that The Book of Mormon has been difficult for “historians and literary critics from outside Mormondom to comprehend.”40 Long ago, Smith’s biographer Fawn Brodie suggested that The Book of Mormon “can best be explained, not by Joseph’s ignorance nor by his delusions, but by his responsiveness to the provincial opinions of his time.” Ever since, scholars, roughly divided into “compositionists,” who attribute to Smith the book’s creation, or “transcriptionists,” who propose that Smith experienced a divine call and merely translated the book into English, have tried to contextualize him and his remarkable book in the intellectual and social history of the early American Republic.41 Consequently, historians have produced a rich literature on the various contexts of the creation of The Book of Mormon, from theories of Smith’s acquaintance with contemporary speculation of the Hebraic origins of Indians to structural explanations pertaining to popular culture.42 Summarizing many of those interpretations, historian Nathan Hatch concluded that The Book of Mormon was created as “a synthesis which grew out of the Judeo-​Christian scriptures, magic and the occult arts, and his [Smith’s] experience with dreams and visions.”43 Leaving aside the impressive levels of the sophistication of current understandings of early Mormonism, the “Joseph Smith problem” still seems to generate unease:  How could a young man, “reared in a poor Yankee farm family . . . [with] less than two years of formal schooling and . . . without social standing or institutional backing,” come to produce “a second Bible”?44 Walter McDougal argued that “if the book [of Mormon] did emerge unaided from the head of this young, untutored man, he must have soaked up influences both ancient and modern like a sponge, and must have known intuitively how to refine them into . . . an extraordinary work of popular imagination.”45 Richard Bushman, a believing Mormon, has pointed out that viewing The Book of Mormon as Joseph Smith’s composition (as opposed to revelation) “is at odds with the Joseph Smith of the historical record” not only because Joseph was, according to those who knew him, “an unambitious, uneducated, treasure-​seek[er],” but more important because he “is not known to have read anything but the bible

 

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and perhaps the newspaper.”46 By including American pseudo-​biblicism in the intellectual inventory of the Second Great Awakening, scripture and contemporary newspapers could have possibly sufficed to lay the literary and imaginative framework for an American Bible.47 Palmyra denizens had access to writings in the style of antiquity during the 1820s, the formative decade in the life of the young Joseph Smith. Historians have long denied Smith the image of the ignorant rural boy who could not have acquired all the material that he would have needed to write The Book of Mormon. They have pointed out the reading habits common to the residents of his region, their exposure to newspapers, libraries, and bookstores, the several roads that connected the towns of western New York State with each other and with eastern cities. They have further underscored that the Erie Canal passed a mere block away from Palmyra’s main street, connecting Palmyra with the Hudson River as early as 1823 and with Lake Erie by 1825. Those paths enabled eastern newspapers and books to flood the Palmyra–​Manchester, NY area.48 Predictably, we find pseudo-​biblical writings in Palmyra and its vicinity during those years, including those in a local newspaper office into which, according to one of its employees, Smith “once a week . . . would stroll into the office of the old Palmyra Register, for his father’s paper.”49 We also find an abundance of biblical-​style writings in the eastern areas that were immediately connected to the route of the Erie Canal. In terms of pseudo-​biblicism, Smith indeed could have found what he needed in available contemporary prints.50 Smith, historians point out, was immersed by 1828 in biblical language, “whether by personal study of scripture, by listening to sermons, [or] by natural participation in the biblical idioms of family conversation.”51 Clearly Smith’s “speech and thought patterns had been profoundly influenced by the common version [i.e., the King James Bible].”52 If, as was just shown, it is at least conceivable, if not probable, that Joseph Smith was aware of pseudo-​biblicism, we can only speculate on how writings on America in biblical language would have impressed that young man and influence his creative mind. Surely it was the Bible that exerted the most influence on Smith. However, pseudo-​biblicism demonstrates the ease with which writers could lapse into biblical prose when discussing and describing American events. Hence, even without being able to attribute direct influence of pseudo-​biblicism on Smith, or even to be certain of Smith’s awareness of such texts (but only his access to such writings), incorporating the tradition of biblical writing into his, and the early Republic’s, intellectual ecology adds a crucial dimension and context for understanding the creation of The Book of Mormon. “Let the language of the Book speak for itself,” Joseph Smith asked an impatient American audience in an apologia for his new Bible.53 By taking Smith’s advice and placing The Book of Mormon within the tradition of writing in biblical

 



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style, we not only gain new insights into persistent historiographical questions pertaining to the Mormon Bible and its production; we also better understand the cultural environment that produced it and within which it thrived. Biblical language defined The Book of Mormon and placed it alongside contemporary pseudo-​biblical texts, which transported their narratives to America and constantly referred to the same biblical ur-​text for idioms, style, and structure. Indeed, Smith’s scripture is incomprehensible detached from the context of the numerous other American writings in biblical style. One wonders how this affiliation influenced the Mormon Bible’s effectiveness and success:  The pseudo-​biblical language was, after all, essentially political (and often ironic and polemic), making secular use of a sacred language. An association with this at least potentially religiously problematic language could have hampered The Book of Mormon’s reception. However, the pseudo-​biblical language was not deemed by contemporaries, and hence we should not consider it, a language that necessarily degraded the Bible. Pseudo-​biblicism certainly revolutionized attitudes to the language of the Bible by democratizing the terms of its use. The use of that language did not necessarily lead to erosion of religious sentiments and sensibilities, however. Rather, pseudo-​biblicism incorporated the political into the religious and may have deepened the hold of pious sensibilities through new epistemic modes in the lives of contemporaries. Such use of the Bible’s language was also strongly associated with the quasi-​religious undertaking of sanctifying America, depicting it as a chosen nation in the most staid terms. The distinct use of the biblical language, form, and style no longer informed early Americans merely of an ancient history, but rather spawned vivid texts that referred directly to contemporary lives. Pseudo-​biblicism thus provided an ongoing scriptural venture that complemented and fortified notions of national chosenness. By conditioning contemporaries to applying biblical language to American content, and thus to perceive their history and construct their national expectations in scriptural categories, the pseudo-​biblical language may have helped to ameliorate readers’ reactions to and digestion of the Mormon Bible.54 Since Mormonism drew its followers from other Christian denominations, when Smith published his book in 1830 potential converts were immersed with the language of the King James Bible, its narratives, metaphors, and cultural grammar. Many of them must have been also familiar, however, with the contemporary American narratives and histories presented in that universally revered language. Hence, Terryl Givens’s remark that Joseph Smith’s linguistic and stylistic decisions attest “to a desire to build upon the aura and authority of biblicalism in order to enhance the legitimacy of his work of Christian revisionism,” gains new light.55 Smith’s choices may have—​perhaps unwittingly—​ catered to audiences’ need not only to hear prophecy in the language that was

 

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universally accepted as suitable and even necessary for divine pronouncements, but it was also the textual style and mode through which his contemporaries were used to receiving and perceiving historical renditions of America for some four-​score years.56 Pseudo-​biblicism has then an important role in understanding the reception of The Book of Mormon among its early readers, who were operating in a world that accepted uses of the Bible’s language that would not be permissible only a few decades later (and were acceptable for no more than a century before). At the very least, pseudo-​biblicism points to the extent to which the Bible provided the people of that time with a second language and reflects their intimacy with that idiom, an intimacy The Book of Mormon surely gained from. That The Book of Mormon was by far the most successful revelatory text of its age, and likely the only such text to present itself as the word of God to make use of biblical language, may not have been a coincidence. By the third decade of the nineteenth century Americans were conditioned to perceive and hallow their nation through the medium of Elizabethan English. Hence, they may have not found the Mormon Bible as exceptional as a modern reader might think. Its form, style, and aspiration to sanctify America had already been circulating for over half a century in the Republic’s printed sphere. Nevertheless, assessing the assertion that pseudo-​biblicism had actually participated in and contributed to the reception of The Book of Mormon is a daunting, not to say, a futile task. As reasonable as such a hypothesis be, the evidence is mostly circumstantial:  We have little, if any, direct references to the pseudo-​biblical language by contemporary consumers of those texts, not to mention the lack of direct ties connecting The Book of Mormon to pseudo-​ biblicism. However, it may be “a dog that did not bark” that demonstrates the remarkable extent to which Americans were accustomed by 1830 through years of consuming pseudo-​biblicism to absorbing texts about America in biblical language. Indeed, it is nothing less than astonishing that although The Book of Mormon was among the most criticized, derided, and maligned texts of its age, one is hard to find even a single critical remark about the book’s salient and apparently blasphemous (in the eyes of non-​Mormons) use of the language of the Bible. Further, early opponents of The Book of Mormon who actually referred to and mentioned Smith’s use of biblical language, although critical as they could be, did not criticize such use. One commentator, for example, alluding to The Book of Mormon as “full of strange narratives” remarked indifferently that it was written “in the style of the scriptures” and went on to half-​heartedly applauding the book for “bearing on its face the marks of some ingenuity, and familiar acquaintance with the Bible.”57 A lack of concern toward the use of the King James Bible’s language seemed to have been the norm among its detractors. Noting

 



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that the “book is a literary curiosity,” another observer noticed that “the style is an affectation of the Scriptural,” and went on to criticize not the use of the language in which the Book was written in but rather the mere fact that it was “destitute of the beauties of sublimity.”58 While some critics scoffed the Mormon book as “a ridiculous imitation of the holy scriptures and in many instances, a plagiarism upon their language,” others underscored that “every page [bore] the impress of its human authorship.”59 These detractors, evidently aware of the Mormon Bible’s use of the language Americans were so thoroughly acquainted with through centuries of reading the Authorized Version, were little concerned by the fact that The Book of Mormon used a language that was biblical and traditionally considered sacrosanct. There is little doubt that this silence owes to decades of the incessant production and consumption of American texts written in an idiom that mobilized biblical language to describe American events. The pseudo-​biblical tradition seemed to have numbed American sensibilities toward the mobilization of the sacred language. By 1830 Americans willingly accepted that that language could not only describe happenings in Canaan of old but also deeds occurring, or that have occurred in the past, in the new American Canaan. By acculturating Americans to texts about America written in biblical language the pseudo-​biblical tradition may have thus paved the way for The Book of Mormon.

*** After 1830 the almost century-​old genre of public writing in biblical style began to lose its vigor. While pseudo-​biblical texts were still written for decades after the publication of The Book of Mormon, in the years after 1830 pseudo-​biblicism became increasingly sparse and sporadic; after 1850 there are hardly any such texts to be found.60 The sweeping cultural forces that drove this fascinating style of writing into obsoleteness are the same that powerfully worked to democratize the United States and its political culture during the second quarter of the nineteenth century.61 In tandem with these political and cultural forces of democratization, however, The Book of Mormon itself may have contributed to the fall from grace of the pseudo-​biblical tradition in which it participated. Pseudo-​biblicism would have no doubt eventually waned regardless of the publication of the Mormon Bible. However, the appearance of a text, which was similar in meaningful ways to its pseudo-​biblical siblings but was also strikingly idiosyncratic, may have accelerated the genre’s demise. The Book of Mormon, which became by far the most famous of all nineteenth-​century American texts written in biblical language, was also the only one in which “Israel,” “the

 

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Promised Land,” and other biblical signifiers were unequivocally literal. Hence the Mormon mindset was radically different than the mainstream American theo-​political imagination: America, in the Mormon creed, was the Promised Land and Americans were Israel. Since the era of the Revolution, American citizens were proficient interpreters of their political realities through history, particularly ancient: While America was often seen as the second Israel, it would also be widely understood as a new Rome. There were several paradigms through which American citizens made those wide-​ranging connections between ancient and modern history, among them cyclical metahistorical frameworks such as the translatio imperii, the persistent movement of the seat of power from East to West. The most significant framework was, however, the well-​trusted and time-​proven exegetical typology, the understanding of the present as a fulfillment of past events.62 Biblical typology, like other traditional discursive practices, was not a stable procedure but rather a millennium-​old spectrum encompassing a wide range of interpretations, from loose metaphorical understandings of the present through the past to readings of a people (in this case the American people) as biblical Israel reincarnate. As they typologized, then, pseudo-​biblical authors could thus present their country and compatriots on a spectrum ranging from merely resembling biblical nations and actors (often ironically) to dramatic full-​fledged fulfillments on western shores of a biblical promise. The typological logic thus enabled pseudo-​ biblical texts to become political statements that only dressed in biblical garb; but that exegetical framework could also facilitate deep theological readings of the American political world. The Book of Mormon changed that decades-​old modus operandi, making a quantum leap: For the first time a text that utilized the full gamut of the biblical style argued not metaphorically, or even exegetically, about America and the Bible. The Book of Mormon made a much more radical claim by arguing historically, making it stand out in the pseudo-​biblical crowd. After such a full-​ blown theological claim that America was Israel (or connected historically to the biblical Israel) became widely known, it would have problematized the cultural meaning and ontological stature of pseudo-​biblical tracts that were, at the end, allegorical in nature. Hence, as The Book of Mormon rose quickly into national fame (or infamy) it may have dissuaded potential authors from using that decades-​old style from addressing their political realities, and spoiled readers’ appetites for consuming such texts. The appearance of The Book of Mormon and the decline of pseudo-​biblicism may have not been entirely felicitous then; the success of The Book of Mormon may have hastened the demise of the tradition that facilitated the rise of The Book of Mormon in the first place. ***

 



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The Discovery and preceding settlement of North America was generally seen by the early nineteenth century as the opening act of the history of the United States and were incorporated into the early histories of the revolutionary era. The Book of Mormon contained a sacred account of migrations to America, which presented a bold prehistory of the European colonization of the New World. The migrations to America as described in the Mormon Bible were conveyed through sacred visions or first-​person accounts. 1 Nephi 13:12 provides an example of such a vision: And it came to pass that the angel said unto me: Behold the wrath of God is upon the seed of thy brethren. And I looked and beheld a man among the Gentiles, who was separated from the seed of my brethren by the many waters; and I beheld the Spirit of God, that it came down and wrought upon the man; and he went forth upon the many waters, even unto the seed of my brethren, who were in the promised land. The following passage (1 Ne18:23) chronicled on the other hand a first-​ person account of a Mormon migration: And it came to pass that after we had sailed for the space of many days we did arrive at the promised land; and we went forth upon the land, and did pitch our tents; and we did call it the promised land. These and similar passages in The Book of Mormon describing the discovery and colonization of America are pertinent to our current discussion not for their debatable historicity but rather for the rhetorical mode through which their narrative is conveyed. In similar fashion to numerous pseudo-​biblical texts, The Book of Mormon rendered its sacred and American history in a style that contemporaries would have easily identified. While the majority of pseudo-​biblical accounts did not bother with prerevolutionary happenings, contemporaries would have no doubt recognized the framing of the American continent as taking part in a biblical drama. Yet there are stark differences in the historical rendition in The Book of Mormon and its pseudo-​biblical siblings. Unlike in the pseudo-​biblical tradition, references in The Book of Mormon to North America were vague and open to exegesis (hence as consequence there is a flourishing cottage industry among Mormons to decide where exactly the occurrences chronicled in The Book of Mormon took place); if a pseudo-​biblical text would have been explicit about naming the aforementioned “man among the Gentiles” (1 Ne 13:12) as Columbus, for example, The Book of Mormon refrained from doing so. Further,

 

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while the pseudo-​biblical texts chose to tell their plots through the voice of an omniscient narrator, the common mode of biblical narration, The Book of Mormon told its American plots through visions and a first-​person chronicle (note how the previously quoted passage in 1 Ne18:23 emphasizes the personal aspect of its account through the use of “we” and “our” five times in a span of forty-​three words). Telling the stories that were seen as a preamble to American national history (the New World’s discovery and colonization) through personal modes of narration set The Book of Mormon apart from other pseudo-​biblical texts. While biblically styled omniscience allowed pseudo-​biblical texts to render a definite account of specific American occurrences, the personal tone of the ancient stories of discovery and colonization in The Book of Mormon precluded them from being perceived as a history that related in any clear or specific way to that of the United States; visions were vague by nature while first-​person accounts could not draw continuity that would relate archaic plots to the modern American nation. Indeed, The Book of Mormon mobilized rhetorical modes that were aimed at conveying tales of personal faith and theological truth, not for scoring political points or satisfying national sentiments. Yet while these rhetorical modes precluded The Book of Mormon from participating in any immediate way in the political discourse of the United States, they endowed that sacred account with a panoramic quality and an epic dimension that even the grandest of pseudo-​biblical chronicles had no pretense to. Pseudo-​biblical texts, even when doing their utmost to be disguised as genuinely biblical, had specific, time-​bound goals. Almost always concluding in catharsis, most often with the forces of good prevailing over political evil, they were at the end commentaries on the American present. True, The Book of Mormon could not offer specific analyses of the ailments plaguing the contemporary United States, which the pseudo-​biblical texts were so adept in offering. But if The Book of Mormon was not relevant in any immediate way to the political present, it transcended the pseudo-​biblical tradition in significant ways: The Mormon historical narrative, intertwined with godly visions, dwarfed the scale and pretentions of pseudo-​biblicism. Personal salvation was at stake; The Book of Mormon was replete with passages such as this: “Whether the Lord will that I be translated, or that I suffer the will of the Lord in the flesh, it mattereth not, if it be so that I am saved in the kingdom of God” (Ether 15:34). Even passages that included national salvation, such as “The Lord hath made bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations; and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God” (Mosiah 16:31), did not relate in any concrete way to the present United States. But all pointed the American people toward a personal and magnificent road to salvation and eternity.

 



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Conclusion Pseudo-​biblicism suggests that we may profit from viewing The Book of Mormon as taking part in that larger biblico-​American world that flourished from approximately 1770 to 1830. By doing so we may better understand the literary cosmos in which the Mormon Bible was written, but also gain further insights into what made that American scripture appealing or even intelligible to contemporaries. Americans, who have been reading texts that were similar in important aspects to Joseph Smith’s Bible for many years before its publication, were thus conditioned to comprehend texts written in biblical style about America. Hence, the genre of pseudo-​biblicism demonstrates once more, if such a demonstration is needed, how pervasive, “omnipresent” in the words of Perry Miller, the Bible was in the cultural landscape of the young American Republic.63 Americans’ intimacy with the Bible is underscored through their habit of effortlessly lapsing into biblical language when discussing their past and present in prolonged and articulated texts. Those pseudo-​biblical texts reveal much about the political and historical assumptions pervading the young American Republic. As this article points out, however, this relentless pseudo-​biblical discursive mode also sheds new light about The Book of Mormon, the context in which that American Bible was formed and the intellectual ecology in which it was received. The reformed Protestant heritage, a neoclassical political culture and a mature culture of print facilitated the rise of a unique pseudo-​biblical mode of representing American contemporality. By alluding to the Israelite past, to the history of God’s chosen people through the use of the original language in which that history was articulated, Americans did not challenge the historicity of the scriptures. Rather, they invoked those Scriptures’ authority, subjugated the meaning which was associated with the history they told, and applied them to their present. The use of biblical language was thus an effective way to merge America and the Bible and hence to pave the way for an original American Bible. The tradition of writing in this “truly American spirit” thus offers a vantage point for better understanding a lost political, cultural, and intellectual early American world of biblical imagination, a world in which Joseph Smith and The Book of Mormon took part. As Elizabeth Fenton reminds us, The Book of Mormon’s power stemmed not from its radical difference from other texts produced in the early Republic but rather from its close resemblance to them; it was, in her words, “strange in its familiarity.”64 The unmistakable similarities and affinities between The Book of Mormon and the pseudo-​biblical texts thus provide a significant and overlooked context to understanding the creation and reception of The Book of Mormon, the culture of biblicism in the nineteenth century and thus the intellectual history of the early American Republic.

 

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Notes 1. “A New Revelation,” Macon Daily Telegraph and Confederate, Oct. 20, 1864. 2. Hence, their failed attempts to get scientific verification “did not matter.” Gordon Wood, “Evangelical America and Early Mormonism,” in Religion in American History: A Reader, Jon Butler and Harry S. Stout, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 180–​196, quote on 192. 3. For The Book of Mormon as accommodating Jacksonian sensibilities see Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 116, 120; Phillip Barlow, Mormons and the Bible: The Place of Latter-​Day Saints in American Religion (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2013), 42; Wood, “Evangelical America and Early Mormonism.” Terryl Givens has also emphasized timing as important for understanding The Book of Mormon: “A record claiming to be a literal history of ancient Israelites in America, preserved and translated by supernatural means, appeared on the scene at precisely that moment when the long Christian retreat from biblical literalism was getting under way.” Hence, Givens concludes, “this was not the best climate in which to introduce another religious record even more steeped in the miraculous, and without the benefit of the veil of historical or geographical distance.” Terryl Givens, The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 112. 4. David Lawton, Faith, Text and History:  The Bible in English (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990), 64. 5. Alister McGrath, In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language and a Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 2001), 267, 273. 6. “The First Book of Chronicles, Chapter the 5th,” The Investigator [South Carolina], Oct. 15, 1812. 7. For typology in the context of American politics see Eran Shalev, Rome Reborn on Western Shores:  Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), chap. 3. 8. “The First Book of Chronicles.” 9. In this regard see Joanne Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). 10. “The First Book of the Kings,” Alexandria Expositor, Feb. 21, 1803. 11. Timothy L. Smith, “The Book of Mormon in a Biblical Culture,” The Journal of Mormon History 7.1 (1980): 3–​22, see especially 9. 12. Joseph Smith joined a broad course that claimed Jewish ancestry for the American Indians. For a recent account of the Jewish–​Indian theory see Zvi Ben-​Dor Benite, The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (New York: Oxford: University Press, 2009). 13. Wood, “Evangelical America and Early Mormonism,” 191; Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 32–​33. 14. For an illuminating study that contextualizes Joseph Smith in the early nineteenth-​century culture of prophecy see Susan Juster, Doomsayers:  Anglo-​American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 15. Texts such as “Visionary Thoughts, or Modern Prophecy” (Greenwich, MA:  1806), “A Remarkable Prophecy of Abraham Wood  .  .  .  Word for Word” (Philadelphia:  1811), “The Flaming Sword, or a Sign from Heaven” (Exeter, NH: 1814), and many similar contemporary visions and prophetic texts seem to have shunned the biblical language. When a text presented itself as “A Fragment of the Prophecy of Tobias, translated from the original” and claimed biblical language, it did not pretend to consist of an authentic prophecy. All the prophets and prophecies examined in Juster’s Doomsayers do not show an inclination to use the biblical language. The only possible exception to this pattern may have been “The Vision of Nathan Ben Ashur.” However, not only was this visionary text uncharacteristically restrained in its use of biblical language and refrained from the characteristic flourish, it is unclear whether it was a prophetic text or rather an allegory. “The Vision of Nathan Ben Ashur,” Federalist and New Jersey State Gazette, March 16, 1802. 16. Eran Shalev, “Written in the Style of Antiquity: Pseudo-​Biblicism and the Early American Republic, 1770–​1830,” Church History 79.4 (2010): 800–​826.

 



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17. Elizabeth Fenton, “Nephites and Israelites:  The Book of Mormon and the Hebraic Indian Theory,” 1 [draft]. 18. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible, 14; see also Paul Gutjahr, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777–​1880 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 151–​166. 19. Book of Mormon, 1 Ne 1:4. 20. Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith:  Rough Stone Rolling (New  York:  Knopf, 2005), 99 (note 63), 107; Walter McDougal, Throes of Democracy:  The American Civil War Era (New York: Harper, 2009), 182. 21. Gutjahr, An American Bible, 153. 22. For un-​versified pseudo-​biblical texts see “Chronicles,” State Gazette of South Carolina, June 1, 1786; “A Fragment of the Prophecy of Tobias,” American Mercury, Feb. 10, 1794; “ A Compendium of the 4th Chapter of the 2nd Book of Kings,” New Jersey Journal, Feb. 16, 1793; “A Chronicle,” Commercial Ad [Louisiana], March 2, 1804; “Chronicles, Chap. VII,” Weekly Inspector, Feb. 14, 1807; “Ninth Chapter of the Third Book of Chronicles,” Alexandria Gazette, Apr. 25, 1812; “Chronicles,” Eastern Argus, Feb. 25, 1811. 23. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon, 64. 24. For Joseph Smith as prophet and the larger culture of prophecy in the early Republic see Juster, Doomsayers, 200, 213, et passim. For studies of Mormon Biblicism see Barlow, Mormons and the Bible, Terryl Givens, By the Hand of Mormon, and Smith, “The Book of Mormon in a Biblical Culture.” 25. Bushman, Joseph Smith, 86. 26. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 242. This statement demonstrates how the oversight of the tradition of writing in biblical style caused even a perceptive historian such as Jon Butler to misconceive the context and cultural role of The Book of Mormon. 27. “The First Book of Chronicles.” 28. “A Fragment of the Prophecy of Tobias,” American Mercury, Feb. 10, 1794. 29. Alexandria Herald, Oct. 9, 1822; “A Fragment of the Prophecy of Tobias,” American Mercury, Feb. 10, 1794. Occasionally pseudo-​biblical texts could present themselves as mere “Ancient Chronicles”; Litchfield Monitor, March 28, 1804. 30. Edwin Firmage Jr. points out that generally pseudepigraphic texts presented themselves as providentially recovered texts written in foreign idioms. Edwin Firmage, Jr., “Historical Criticism and The Book of Mormon: A Personal Encounter,” in American Apocrypha: Essays on The Book of Mormon, Dan Vogel and Brent Lee Metcalfe, eds. (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2002), 1–​16, esp. 3. 31. Robert Dodsley, The Chronicles of the Kings of England by Nathan Ben Saddi (London: n.p., 1740). 32. Smith too presented himself as “author” in the first printing of The Book of Mormon. David Persuitte, Joseph Smith and the Origins of The Book of Mormon ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1985), 11. 33. “Chronicles,” Broom Country Patriot, Dec. 15, 1812. 34. For treasure digging and the supernatural in the early Republic see John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire:  The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–​ 1844 (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 1996), 30–​33; Michael D. Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature, 1998); Alan Taylor, “The Early Republic’s Supernatural Economy: Treasure Seeking in the American North-​East, 1780–​1830,” American Quarterly 38:1 (1986): 6–​34. For another text with claims (tongue-​in-​cheek) of antiquity see “From the Charleston Courier,” Philadelphia Evening Post, Apr. 28, 1804. 35. The affinity between these two languages is evident through texts written in biblical language self-​styling as prophecies. See, among others, Francis Hopkinson, “Prophecy,” in Miscellaneous Essays and Occasional Writings (Philadelphia: n.p., 1792), 92–​97. 36. Firmage, “Historical Criticism and The Book of Mormon: A Personal Encounter,” 3. 37. See, for an early edition, A Curious Hieroglyphic Bible (Worcester, MA:  Isaiah Thomas, 1788). 38. See in this context Richard Snowden, The American Revolution, Written in the Style of Antiquity (Philadelphia: n.p., 1793).

 

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39. See, for example, the commentator who described Smith as “decipher[ing] the hieroglyphics on the plates.” “Mormonism,” Richmond Enquirer, Oct. 25, 1831. 40. Bushman, Joseph Smith, 84. 41. Bushman, Joseph Smith, 72; Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1971), 69. 42. For impressive examples of such attempts see Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View; Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire; Persuitte, Joseph Smith and the Origins of The Book of Mormon; Givens, By the Hand of Mormon. 43. Hatch, Democratization, 276 (note 169). 44. Bushman, Joseph Smith, xx. 45. McDougall, Throes of Democracy, 644 (note 15). 46. Bushman, Joseph Smith, 72. Thus, according to Bushman, ascribing composition to Smith calls for attributing to him “precocious genius of extraordinary powers who was voraciously consuming information without anyone knowing it” (72). 47. I hope that believing Mormons can reconcile these findings with their faith by maintaining that the pseudo-​biblical tradition influenced the way Smith translated the Golden Plates. 48. Persuitte, Joseph Smith and the Origins of The Book of Mormon, 16; Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, 178–​193. 49. Quoted in Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, 179. For contemporary publications in biblical style in New York, including in the Palmyra Register to which we have direct evidence of Smith’s accessibility, see “Chronicles,” Palmyra Register, March 8, 1820; “Dr. Franklin’s Parable against Persecution,” American Journal (Ithaca, NY), Feb. 13, 1822; “The Origin of Tythes,” Saratoga Sentinel, Dec. 9, 1823; “Chronicles,” Ballstone Spa Gazette, Oct. 19, 1824, which was reprinted from The Livingston Journal of Geneseo, NY. 50. See in this context Persuitte, Joseph Smith and the Origins of The Book of Mormon, 17. 51. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible, 24. 52. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible, 38. 53. Joseph Smith quoted in Givens, By the Hand of Mormon, 80. 54. For the immediate hearing Mormon elders received for their sacred book in the context of its biblicism see Timothy L. Smith, “The Book of Mormon in a Biblical Culture,” Journal of Mormon History 7 (1980): 3–​22, esp. 6. 55. Givens, The Book of Mormon, 106. 56. According to Jordan Watkins early Mormons indeed understood The Book of Mormon first and foremost as a history; Jordan T. Watkins, “Early Mormonism and the Re-​Enchantment of Antebellum Historical Thought,” Journal of Mormon History 38.3 (2012): 187–​189. 57. “Mormon Religion,” Vermont Gazette, Sep. 13, 1831. 58. “The Book of Mormon,” New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, Sep. 19, 1831. 59. “Mormonism,” New Hampshire Sentinel, Nov. 8, 1832; American Sentinel, Jan. 30, 1833. 60. The latest text I was able to locate is “First Chronicles,” The Pittsfield Sun, Feb. 2, 1854. 61. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–​1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 62. For the use of classical Rome as a paradigmatic model for the early United States see Eran Shalev, Rome Reborn on Western Shores: Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 28–​35, 73–​113. 63. Miller quoted in Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll, eds., “Introduction,” in The Bible in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 5. 64. Fenton, “Nephites and Israelites,” 2.

 

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“To Read the Round of Eternity” Speech, Text, and Scripture in The Book of Mormon Samuel Morris Brown

The Book of Mormon is an exceedingly strange text. Dictated by a deeply religious, iconoclastic seer living in the frontier foment of western New  York, it presents itself as an edited pastiche of several millennia of recorded history that is meant to save the Bible from sectarian controversy and scholarly disbelief.1 This American scripture describes a Jesus who lives and moves well beyond the strictures imposed by the authorized Bible, a time traveler whose gospel is pellucid from at least the Tower of Babel (when the Jaredite narrative begins) to his resurrection (when he arrives in America) and beyond. The book is also the founding artifact of a modern religious movement, and its historicity has proved central to debates over the validity of that movement and its most prominent church. While it’s easy to get pulled into debates about The Book of Mormon as an object or evidence for some specific historical claim or other, the book itself has a good deal to say about the nature of scripture and religion. The text bears reading on its own terms. The Book of Mormon contributes to wide-​ranging conversations, both ancient and modern, about permanence and change. This distinctive scripture meditates extensively on the relationships that language has to human embedding in time and a persistent hunger to break free of that embedment. Complex views on the nature of human language and scripture undergird the entire project of The Book of Mormon. In this essay I follow The Book of Mormon through its grappling with the nature of scripture, language, and time. I argue that two images of Christ and books particularly illuminate the central dynamics of The Book of Mormon. One of these is an encounter with Christ and a book that is a prequel to the climax of The Book of Mormon, while the other is that actual climax: the visit of the resurrected Jesus to the Lehites in America. Samuel Morris Brown, “To Read the Round of Eternity”: Speech, Text, and Scripture in The Book of Mormon. In: Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon. Edited by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190221928.003.0007

 

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The authorial voices2 of The Book of Mormon demonstrate a dramatic and significant commitment to specific positions in the debates over the meanings of language in both its spoken and written forms. These voices worry about the effects of time and distance and the obliteration of memory through the constant succession of human generations. They agonize over the multiplication of meaning and the risks of controversy and obfuscation. And they struggle with the fundamental nature of scripture. According to The Book of Mormon, writing prevents apostasy, enables collective memory, creates a textual immortality, allows nonlocal dissemination of concepts and ideas, and wields a special authority. However, writing is prone to misinterpretation and loss and requires a seer to protect it and give it voice. On the other hand, spoken language is powerful and unmediated, but (with an exception that proves the rule when Christ apparently uses the art of memory to transport the Bible to America) it is also local and consummately mortal.3 While the poles are clearly attested, in practice oral and written interweave constantly throughout The Book of Mormon. The dense interplay between oral and written points to something central to The Book of Mormon—​it is an oral object obsessed with writing, acting out a theory of scripture. In the symbiosis of oral and written, the fleeting but familiar mixed with the persistent but foreign, stands the possibility—​telescoping time and space—​of obliterating the distances that separate humans from God and from each other.4 In this essay I argue that The Book of Mormon, while toying with the differences between oral and written along generally traditional lines, strongly argues against scripture as capable of standing alone: scriptura can never be sola.5 Joseph Smith’s odd book participates in ancient debates about the meaning of language and the nature of the written word. Before exploring The Book of Mormon text, I review, briefly, the outlines of those debates.

Written versus Spoken Language The theology and scholarship around orality and literacy are vast and unruly. Each generation of scholars, clerics, and lay participants brings its own set of sensibilities about language generally and the relation of writing to speech specifically. Philosophy and literary theory contend with theology, linguistics, and anthropology.6 Two broad sets of concerns tend to predominate. First, how did oral and written languages evolve, and what effects did the transition to writing have culturally (the diachronic question)? Second, how do oral and written interact in contemporary culture (the synchronic question)? The first, diachronic, set of questions has tended to generate the most attention while suffering from the greatest deficit of reliable data.7 The second, synchronic, question set depends

 



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on the first in complex and contradictory ways. It’s likely that much of the secondary literature on the diachronic question is in fact primary literature on the synchronic experience. In other words, what many scholars write about the historical transition from predominantly oral to predominantly literate cultures is probably better understood as an expression of the experiences of scholars and their contemporaries with language than as a factual account of antique cultural acquisition of written language. Even as an account of the synchronic experience of the interplay between oral and written language, though, meditations on the genesis, meanings, and implications of the oral and the written are important to understanding the complex human relationships to language over time. Plato is the most famous of the writers of Western Antiquity to ponder the meanings of written language. He opined most memorably in the Phaedrus about the risks associated with writing. (The metatextual oddity of a written dialogue containing the classic meditation on the risks of writing has not been lost on many readers of the Phaedrus.8) Plato, a philosopher honoring and interpreting his mentor Socrates, saw written language as a loss of control of the message. The author is strikingly absent when the reader encounters a written text. And so, according to Plato, are the entities to which writing rigidly refers, lacking the flexibility of a living speaker.9 Walter Ong is perhaps the best-​known modern religious theorizer of the transition from oral to written culture,10 although he draws on the writing of mentors such as Marshal McLuhan and others.11 An American Jesuit literary critic and philosopher, Ong trained a devoutly and intellectually Catholic eye on the cultural transitions from human societies with speech alone to those with both speech and writing.12 Whatever the specific details of actual historical transitions, Ong had a perceptive grasp of how religious Westerners conceived of the interplays between oral and written. His real strength lies in the fact that his conceptual frameworks seem to be phenomenologically true, especially in the long nineteenth century, as mass literacy fulfilled the promise of the printing press. Ong had, I think, a clear sense for the conceptual frameworks employed by religious people pondering the meanings of writing. The capacity of written language to outlive its source grounds one of the oldest beliefs about the differences between oral and written language. Spoken language is ephemeral, while written language may live for millennia after the death of the writer.13 (This is especially true in literate societies, which no longer have multigenerational oral traditions, a reminder that the synchronic accounts may be more relevant than the diachronic accounts.) In such cultures, oral language, constituted through the medium of sound, throbs with life at the moment of utterance and then falls immediately silent. In Ong’s poetic terms, “Sound [the substrate and form of spoken language] exists only when it is going out of existence. It is not simply perishable but essentially evanescent.”14 Written language,

 

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on the other hand, sits as quiet as a dry corpse. Ong similarly traces traditions about the dead letter juxtaposed against the vitality of the spoken word. In his phrase, “one of the most startling paradoxes inherent in writing is its close association with death.”15 Written words are inert and lifeless but permanent, while spoken language bursts with life even as it instantly passes from physical existence. In St. Paul’s anti-​rabbinic phrase, the letter kills, but the spirit gives life (2 Cor 3:6). Like a skeleton, though, written words can last much longer than any fleshly body. In this essay I explore a specific English-​language text as a case study of how participants in a literate society may have understood the relationships between the oral and the written at the explosion of print in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This case study exemplifies the intense intermixing of oral and written and the ultimate inadequacy of theories that sharply distinguish them. I also suggest that The Book of Mormon presented to early Mormons a new theory of scripture. A few minor caveats are in order. I make no attempt here to determine or dispute the divine provenance of The Book of Mormon but to see what it says about itself and the world in which it exists. I am comfortable with the term “translation” to describe what Joseph Smith was doing when he created the English text of The Book of Mormon, even as I recognize that some polemics draw their strength from disputations about the precise semantic content of that multivalent term.16 Whether God guided Smith’s dictations or Smith drew the words from the depths of his own soul, the text was meant to be read in English by American readers and became the founding, authorizing scripture of early Mormonism, a nineteenth-​century American Restorationist movement. I  take the same approach to the authorial voices of The Book of Mormon, treating them as authors in their own right, rather than as simple narrative devices. Whether ancient individuals, figments of Smith’s imagination, or somewhere in between, the narrators are important to understanding The Book of Mormon as it presents itself. I turn now to spoken and written language in The Book of Mormon. Because so much of the material is concentrated in the book’s early presentation of itself, I start there, in some detail. The themes, however, are present throughout the text.

The Book of Mormon’s Self-​Presentation The Front Matter The 1830 edition of The Book of Mormon introduces itself with two brief documents (besides a boilerplate copyright notice), one self-​ consciously

 



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ancient and the other consummately modern. The title page is an ancient explanatory seal, while the preface recounts events of the 1820s that account for the structure of the first third of the book. Because they were intended to introduce the book, these two small texts warrant their own close reading before diving into The Book of Mormon proper. This front matter makes two things clear:  (1) scriptures are built on the sandy foundation of language, which easily washes out from under the text unless (2)  God appoints a translator–​seer to protect the text from inscrutability. Scripture is vulnerable. Scripture requires divine protection to preserve it from disappearance, obsolescence, and misinterpretation. In the right hands, it promises to annihilate spatiotemporal distance, but only in the right hands. The first thing a reader encounters in The Book of Mormon is the title page. According to the official History of the Church, Smith reported that the title page was “not a composition of mine or of any other man’s who has lived or does live in this generation, but . . . a literal translation taken from the last leaf of the plates.” It was, the official history reiterated, a “genuine and literal translation.”17 The author of the History, presumably in consultation with Smith, demonstrates an awareness of the right-​to-​left direction of Hebrew writing, apparently suggesting that the title page was in first place (“on the left hand side of the collection of plates”) as an American would read the book but in last place as a Hebrew would read the book. This confusing clarification, and indeed the language of “literal translation,” may reflect the influence of Smith’s scribes and collaborators on the history or Smith’s concerns with his external legitimacy as a student of languages.18 Did Smith mean that the title page was at the Hebrew back of the plates so that it could be at the English front of the book, in other words, that an epilogue became a prologue?19 It’s not clear from the text itself. Regardless, Smith seems to have understood the title page to be itself a translated portion of ancient scripture intended to stand at the beginning of the English text. The title page describes the accompanying book as “An Account Written by the Hand of Mormon upon Plates Taken from the Plates of Nephi.” Author, medium, and mode of transfer are all specified in the first line of the title page. Two writers and probably two sets of plates, stamped with the writers’ identities. The subtle ambiguity of the term “taken from” is too spare to support much conjecture. In context it seems to mean the text was redacted onto new plates rather than being palimpsest overwritten on old plates (i.e., if “taken from” refers to “plates” rather than “an account”), however intriguing that latter resonance might be. The title page indicates that the plates were “sealed up, and hid up unto the Lord, that they might not be destroyed.” Here sealing has the sense of divine protection from the elements and the ravages of time. It’s not clear initially whether this hiding up is meant to refer to the plates being protected from the time of

 

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Nephi until Moroni or it represents a prophetic forecast of what would happen after Moroni’s death. Several sentences later the phrase is repeated, this time explicitly as a prophecy of the chain of provenance connecting Moroni to Joseph Smith. If this aside is indeed in Moroni’s hand, it is a stark example of the temporal elisions rife in The Book of Mormon. Moroni writes in the past tense from the perspective of the future as a speech that he is giving—​or will have Joseph Smith give, it’s not entirely clear—​to early nineteenth-​century American readers. This sometimes-​disorienting collapse of time extends throughout The Book of Mormon, and it mirrors the temporal legacies of oral and written language. God hid the plates that Mormon engraved (that verb itself, present throughout The Book of Mormon, is a strong, physical image of the transfer of concepts from the mind to the outside world20), keeping them safe from thieves’ grasping hands and the obliterating erosions of passing centuries. But even with such physical protection over the centuries, the plates would require divine intervention before they could become American scripture. This was because of a problem intrinsic to writing: Written language alone cannot make records intelligible over many centuries and generations of readers. The first paragraph twice emphasizes the need for “the gift [and power] of God” for the “interpretation” of the plates. With only two small paragraphs for the entire title page, it’s striking that so much of the material concerns this emphasis on the requirement for a special gift to liberate ancient scripture from its prison of lost language. Written language requires such a gift because writing drifts from its original context to an inscrutable mystery separated from contemporary readers by linguistic change and the original speaker’s absence. The “gift and power of God” recovers written to oral language for a new generation.21 Written language problematically outlives its author, and, too often, its entire linguistic community. That community of speakers dissipates as language drifts over time. Languages can evolve into mutual unintelligibility within a few hundred years of separation. As a consequence, texts outlive their readers unless special preventive care is taken—​not because the text itself has changed, but because it has failed to change while its human audience never stops changing. This is vital for The Book of Mormon, which has prophets who speak it in ancient Hebrew, editors who render it in coded Egyptian hieroglyphics, and an American prophet who recovers it into a peculiar Jacobean-​inflected American English. The obliteration of temporal, spatial, and linguistic distance is translation, a gift of God. The Book of Mormon is obsessed with this problem, perhaps as a type for the same crisis that the authorized Bible faced, whether its defenders were willing to acknowledge it or not. This problem loomed large for American readers, who were far enough from their sacred ur-​texts that many prior translations of the Bible were now obsolete. The consensus for the fixity of biblical canon seemed oblivious to the fact

 



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that such fixity mandated acts of recovery across the intervening generations.22 On its own, the Bible can’t be timeless: Language is the clock that never stops ticking. In order to reach a modern audience intelligibly, the Bible required (1) a scholarly translator, (2) the regenerating spirit of Christ, or (3) a translator–​seer. The problem of biblical fixity was approached very differently by Joseph Smith and his chief theological competitor, Alexander Campbell, a Reformed Baptist separatist who pioneered the Disciples movement. Smith and Campbell are the most famous of the American Restorationists. While both saw antebellum Protestantism as separated from traditional Christianity, they disagreed on many fronts, the nature of Scripture probably foremost. Campbell believed that the original sacred book, the ancient Bible, was sufficient. In his view, translation was a matter of attending closely to the ancient languages and clearing the linguistic detritus that had accumulated over the centuries. Acknowledging that English had evolved out from under prior Bible translations, Campbell justified his own revisions (a pastiche of recent scholarly translations with some brief but significant emendations and adjustments that Campbell’s followers called the “Living Oracles”) by arguing that “a living language is continually changing.” Even sacred texts are susceptible to “the cankering hand of time,” which “moulders” them “away.” Suggesting that God had made Hebrew and Greek “dead” languages in order to halt linguistic evolution, Campbell stated that “we have, in writing, all the Hebrew and Greek that is necessary to perpetuate to the end of time.”23 In the battle over the meaning and mutability of language, Campbell rejected the King James Bible because it bore the marks of extrabiblical theology.24 Joseph Smith’s book opposed Campbell’s view that a Bible was safely pure in its ancient, ossified language. According to The Book of Mormon, assembling scholarship to directly translate ancient languages could never be enough. The key to Smith’s view is present in the very front matter of The Book of Mormon, which tells its story using two sets of plates, a small set (the Jaredite record) contained within a larger set (the Lehite record). The smaller and more ancient plates serve as the key to understanding the larger and later ones. The Book of Mormon confronted the problem of linguistic drift both for itself overall and for the embedded sacred text originally rendered in Eden’s pure language, the lost gold plates of the Jaredite people, refugees of the Tower of Babel and type of the later Lehites. The title page highlights the Jaredite narrative, twice, despite it representing only one small book (Ether) near the end. It does so with good reason: The Jaredite narrative is key to understanding the entire Book of Mormon. While I rehearse the textual evidence for this point elsewhere,25 suffice it to say here that The Book of Mormon repeatedly presents the Book of Ether as a type for the whole. At the simplest level, both Jaredites and Lehites flee the wickedness of the Ancient Near East for a promised land in the

 

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New World, are destroyed by God after betraying their covenant to that promised land, leave gold plates as the record that outlives their cursed civilizations, and require a seer with special stones to unlock the secrets encoded in an ancient language on those gold plates. Despite auspicious origins and aspirations, the central narrative of declension or apostasy overwhelms the Jaredites and their story. A people so blessed of God that they survived the Curse of Babel with their language intact descended subsequently into moral squalor and annihilating civil war. After the civilization-​ destroying war, the Jaredite history becomes an inscrutable book handed from person to person, awaiting contact with a seer (in this case the Lehite king named Mosiah) before its secrets could be unlocked. This ancient American seer “translated and caused to be written [a phrase Smith used to describe his own later activity] the records which were on the plates of gold,” a reference to the Jaredite rather than the Lehite plates.26 This point merits additional emphasis: Even the people who had escaped the confounding of human languages were utterly lost without a prophet and a book. They needed both. The written script that made possible the record’s physical persistence through time simultaneously locked it in the impenetrable vault of an extinct language. In the views of Joseph Smith and The Book of Mormon, and contrary to Alexander Campbell, mere book learning about biblical languages couldn’t solve the problem. Neither—​and here Smith differed from the rest of Protestant America—​could the regenerating power of Christ’s spirit within the individual believer overcome the obliterating expanse of the generations intervening between the “sacred penmen” and their ultimate audience. The fact that The Book of Mormon wraps Hebrew in Egyptian code (its “Reformed Egyptian” script) makes the point absolutely clear. Scholars and spirited preachers can’t solve the problems of linguistic distance. Finite humans can’t rise above finite language. What is needed is live guidance from a contemporaneous prophet in concert with a written text. After mentioning the exemplary history of the Jaredites, the title page makes clear that every single nation will have its own scripture because Jesus is “God, manifesting himself unto all nations.” But the explicit requirement for each nation implies that there must be both book and prophet–​interpreter for each people to overcome the curse of Babel. Scripture has to live in each target language. This appears to be the divine pattern advocated by The Book of Mormon. An itinerant preacher named Alma prays for special power to convert his listeners and then acknowledges that he doesn’t need to become a supernatural evangelist—​an “angel”—​because “the Lord doth grant unto all nations, of their own nation and tongue.”27 An ancient book and a modern prophet for every people. The written and the spoken word. It’s how God makes himself known. The past, present, and future merged into one.

 



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Immediately after its mention of the Jaredites’ dilatory fall from grace, the title page specifically acknowledges the limitations of written language. Scripture is vulnerable. In a Book of Mormon leitmotif, the writers display an aggressive defensiveness about the failings of the word, even after the presence of the prophet–​interpreter to render from one language to the next has been ensured. “now if there be fault, it be the mistake of men; wherefore condemn not the things of God.” The reader can’t quite tell whether the imperfections are in the original coded Hebrew or in the hybrid of antebellum American and Jacobean English in Smith’s published text.28 But that ambiguity here may be part of the point. No matter what language encodes divine truth, it will always be at most a partial encoding. This “fault” does not appear to be primarily an admission of sinfulness on the part of the prophetic authors, but an acknowledgment of the failings of written language. A living prophet beside the text is required to make up for those problems—​The Book of Mormon says as much, repeatedly. One remembers here Ong’s observation that what is spoken can be vital in a way that written language is not.29 The Book of Mormon comments frequently on the limits of written scripture.30 A book, a physical object that carries words across temporal and spatial chasms, can hold only so many words. Lehi’s son Nephi explicitly indicates (1 Ne 1:16–​ 17) that he will not be able to relate or record everything that his father saw, a frequent refrain in the book. The book openly (e.g., Jacob 1:4) confesses its editorial policy to “engraven the heads of ” events only.31 What we get in any scripture is just one small part of God’s infinite corpus. Writing can never be exhaustive; scripture can never be complete. Not just because God will never stop talking, but because written language can never be adequate to the mysteries of the cosmos. Scripture is always partial: It cannot fully encompass the subjects it hopes to treat. Protestantism, with its central doctrine of sola scriptura, is a lost cause from the very beginning on this Mormon view.

The Failures of Language Independent of the question of abridgement or abbreviation, written language is notoriously unreliable in The Book of Mormon. A recurrent theme is that many things can’t be written and some can’t even be spoken. Some of this represents typical concern about the limitations of the written word, some is apophatic mysticism, and some is related to the exigencies of abridgement and the physical constraints of space. But the theme of linguistic limitation is inescapable. One could drown in the sheer volume of unwritable things: Christ’s physical ministry (3 Ne 17:15, 26:18), Samuel the Lamanite’s prophecies (Hel 14:1), or those of his contemporary Nephi the Nephite (Hel 8:3). Some concepts or experiences are utterly beyond language, whether spoken or written, especially

 

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Christ’s teachings (3 Ne 19:32–​34). Sometimes the failing lies with the audience’s understanding (3 Ne 17:2); sometimes the volume of experience is just too large to be contained in a finite physical record (3 Ne 7:17, 26:6–​7). The first author, Nephi son of Lehi, laments his “weakness” in language, his failure to be “mighty in writing.” Moroni, the final writer, worries in an apostrophe to God that outsiders would “mock” the American scripture because “thou hast not made us mighty in writing.” Similar examples multiply freely (e.g., 1 Ne 19:6; 2 Ne 33:1, 11; Jacob 4:1; Ether 12:23–​24). The fault doesn’t necessarily reside in the author. At times The Book of Mormon attributes the flaws to language itself: “there are many things which according to our language we are not able to write” (3 Ne 5:18). While this is generally the spatiotemporally disconnected written form, sometimes it is simply human language as a whole. There is a strange hopefulness in Moroni’s curious aside (Morm 9:32–​33), explaining that the Reformed Egyptian he was forced to use by the constraints of the plates caused the record to be flawed in some way. Mormon confessed the limits of Nephite language in 3 Ne 5:18. If Moroni had been allowed to use Hebrew (“if our plates had been sufficiently large we should have written in Hebrew”), the holy language of the Bible, there would have been “no imperfection in our record.” This reference to Reformed Egyptian suggests that The Book of Mormon was written in a code that derived from both Egyptian and Hebrew—​ the two languages believed anciently to be closest to the pure language of Eden.32 The use of the code allowed ancient America to record its scripture compactly enough that it could be held in a single book, an American Bible. But such a code could not be cracked without a divine interpreter. Implicitly, not even Lehi’s contemporaries could have read the book. A seer would be required to recover its contents from the very beginning. The use of this Egyptian code emphasizes the complex limitations and ineluctable mediacy of written language. In addition, The Book of Mormon presents the glimmering possibility of a special written language that could mirror the power of spoken language. The Jaredite prophet Moriancumer has such a supernatural ability, apparently related to God’s protection from Babel’s curse. In Moroni’s apostrophe to the Creator lamenting his personal weakness in writing, he said of his Jaredite antecedent, “thou madest him that the things which he wrote were mighty even as thou art, unto the overpowering of man to read them.”33 For Moriancumer, freedom from Babel’s curse imparted to his words a supernatural force, one he could use to maintain his ethnic community and overpower his readers. The Nephite prophets could only envy the power of Moriancumer’s words, written in the pure language before Babel. (The Book of Mormon subsequently maintains that even spoken language may be in code requiring divine inspiration, in 1 Ne 15:1-​3, when Nephi attempts to report his own esoteric vision, including a parallel to John’s Apocalypse.)

 



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The failings of language are also apparent in the preface to The Book of Mormon, which follows immediately after the title page. The preface is carefully concerned with explaining why the subsequent text is not what Smith initially intended, while also defending the integrity of the translation overall.34 Beyond its self-​justification, the preface returns to the central concerns of The Book of Mormon regarding language and time. The events that occasioned the preface are clearly described therein, although more is happening in the preface than its self-​justification. The crisis arose because the financier’s wife demanded some physical evidence that the thousands of dollars her family would spend to support Smith and the ultimate publication of the text were not being stolen by a confidence man. Smith elected therefore, with considerable ambivalence, to share Emma Smith’s transcripts of his initial dictations. The manuscript section Smith loaned to his financier—​what would take 116 pages to replace in the printer’s manuscript35—​soon escaped utterly from the translator’s control. Separated from their author, the written words became capable of betraying and subverting both the translator and God’s plans for the scripture. The preface indicates par excellence the loss of authorial control intrinsic to written language. Smith feared that if he attempted a retranslation, his enemies would take those initial words, bring back a revised text, and pretend that they had thereby exposed a hoax. Attend to this fact: Language is mutable and treacherous, and a written text lives long enough to betray its author. The loss of Emma Smith’s transcripts created a crisis that could be solved only by turning to a set of backup plates made available to the translator through God’s providence.36 The flexibility of connections between written and spoken language thereby gets moved from the translation process itself to an ancient parallel account. Strategically this move permitted Smith to keep alive language’s multivocality while not running too far afoul of the evidential Protestantism within which he operated.37 The books of 1 Nephi through Omni are thus recovered from a parallel account. Smith’s solution to the theft of his first draft echoes the problem of language: One set of events can be understood and presented in multiple ways. The sensibility of the preface regarding the risks of written language, mutatis mutandis, could come straight from Plato’s Phaedrus. The preface freely acknowledges the hybrid nature of The Book of Mormon, with its complex movement from written to oral and back again.38 Smith explains that “I translated, by the gift and power of God, and caused to be written, one hundred and sixteen pages, the which I  took from the Book of Lehi.” In this phrase, Smith distinguishes his act of supernatural “translat[ion]”—​reiterating the miraculous nature of the divine gift it represents—​from the act of “caus[ing] to be written.” While one could wonder whether the Jacobean biblical cadences of Smith’s language directed the use of Hebraic duplication to make his point,39 as

 

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I read the phrases, they refer to separate elements of Smith’s process. Translation drew ancient writings into oral form in the soul of a prophet, after which Smith “caused to be written” the words that resulted from that revelatory experience. Smith’s language here is an odd circumlocution for dictation to an amanuensis, admittedly, but the phrase points to the separation of the prophetic recovery of ancient language and the act of reducing translated speech into written English words. Ten lines later, the couplet recurs: The English was “translated and caused to be written.”40 Two distinct, sequential acts, resulting in an English scripture. A revelatory dictation, subsequently transcribed.41 The deliberate separation of the two acts is also apparent in early colophons to Smith’s later revelations, as, for example, “Given by Joseph the translator & written by Oliver August 7, 1831 in the land of Zion.”42 The Book of Mormon uses the same concept to describe an episode in which a prophet has his sermon transcribed in order to reach a broader audience (Mosiah 2:8). Consistently, then, there is a division between translation and transcription, a distinction emphasized within the front matter for The Book of Mormon. Such was the content of the front matter. With these introductions, the reader enters The Book of Mormon proper by joining the hejira of Lehi, a Jerusalemite prophet coeval with Jeremiah, from wicked Jerusalem to a New Zion in the Americas.

Bearing the Bible Across Time and Space After the front matter, the text itself begins43 in earnest, the story of Lehi and his vast progeny told from the perspective of his confident and eminently righteous son Nephi. They flee Old Jerusalem with a Hebrew Bible and a prescient Christianity to await Christ’s coming to their New Jerusalem. The two most striking juxtapositions of Jesus and the Bible support the crucial importance of this connection to the story of The Book of Mormon. “The Book of Nephi” (now called 1 Nephi) begins with intricate concerns about provenance (vv. 1–​3), then describes a Mosaic-​sounding call to prophecy (vv. 4–​6) for the narrator’s father Lehi, who “saw and heard much” from a pillar of divine fire after hearing prophecies of the imminent Babylonian destruction. Almost immediately after the prophetic call, a vision follows, stunning in its scope if initially disorienting. This odd vision (vv. 7–​15), described as a “throne theophany” by authors seeking to establish the ancient Near Eastern origin of the text,44 exemplifies many of the important themes and elements at play in Mormon scripture. In Lehi’s vision, thirteen visitors—​contextually Jesus and his twelve disciples (see also 1 Ne 11:27–​29)—​come to this otherwise unknown Jerusalemite prophet and “gave unto him [Lehi] a book and bade him that he should read.” Supernatural beings come to speak with a prophet and their advice

 



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to him is to read a sacred text. The encounter with angelic messengers isn’t enough; there has to be a book. Contextually this book is an idealized or perfected version of the Bible, with at least portions of both Old and New Testaments. (When Lehi and Nephi revisit the vision in 1 Nephi 10–​11, Lehi mentions Second Temple Judaism, and both of them recount in detail the New Testament stories of Jesus and John the Baptist. It is as if they have read from this future Bible.) The nearest equivalent to such a book within the Bible is in the vision of John, in which a book seems to represent the prophet’s mystical call and perhaps the metaphysical terror of prophecy (Revelation 10). In Lehi’s vision the book is clearly a text that he reads to discover the future contents of the Bible, including the New Testament (1 Ne 1:19–​20, cf. 1 Ne10:7ff). (That Lehi soon sets out to obtain the physical proto-​ Bible from a kinsman further suggests the connection between the book of his vision and the future Bible.) The Book of Mormon itself does not require that we move farther afield to discover antecedents for the book within Lehi’s vision.45 Nephi’s parallel vision of Lehi’s initial supernatural encounter (1 Ne 13:24–​25, 29) implicitly contrasts the authorized English Bible that reached Joseph Smith with the old Bible Lehi inspected, drawing attention once more to the thirteen visitors, who are clearly the “descending” Jesus and his twelve apostles. In the initial vision of 1 Nephi 1, Lehi opens the book, is “filled with the Spirit of the Lord,” and finds there an account of the Babylonian exile and destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem. He already had seen a vision of that destruction himself: A personal prophetic warning was the reason he was evacuating his family from Jerusalem. But the Bible that Jesus brings him in vision appears to confirm, finally and absolutely, the preaching of the other prophets in Jerusalem.46 Lehi’s vision is deliciously strange and points out key structures in The Book of Mormon. The interdependence of oral and written is clear here, as is the collapse of time. The sacred text crystallizes the future for Lehi: It’s hard to argue with a supernatural Bible straight from Christ’s hands. The future Bible, playing on the power of the written word to move across time, presents a vivid image of the ways The Book of Mormon works with temporality. In this supernatural encounter, the future is visiting Lehi, and it is bringing the scripture that he or his peers will have written in an intermediate future. Reading that scripture from the future, Lehi knows without a doubt what awaits Jerusalem in the near term. Lehi is living around 600 BCE, Jesus is visiting from about 30 to 100 CE (or perhaps later; the text is silent on the question of whether Jesus is visiting from a later point in his postmortal career) and the text that the thirteen supernatural beings carry in their hands is presumably a production of 300 BCE–​30 CE or thereabouts, assuming it is some form of a Hebrew Bible. It’s a little dizzying how much is happening with time in Lehi’s vision. Future seeps into both present and past. The temporal divisions are obliterated by a book and the prophets who carry it

 

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from one time to another. As this Bible moves backward and forward through time, transported from Roman to Babylonian Jerusalem, it testifies to the victory of scripture conjoined with prophet over the annihilating expanses of time. The audience is invited to read over Lehi’s shoulder, to imagine a perfect Bible that evades their grasp but nevertheless ties them to past and future. This trope of the future visiting the present with a witness from an intermediate future has become a stock-​in-​trade in speculative fiction and is familiar in general contours from such classics as Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, in which a ghost from the future brings Ebenezer Scrooge knowledge of a time period that falls between the present and the future. The reason for the popularity of this trope may be its relevance to a dream many humans surely have of liberation from their mortal entanglement in time. The fact of temporal entanglement episodically mystifies many, perhaps most, of us. Time has flown. Where has it gone? Where is the past? Could it possibly still exist? What does the future look like? Is that even the right verb tense to use? What are the connections among past, present, and future? These and similar questions, phrased variously, are ubiquitous in human culture (and, Ong would note, embedded in the interplay between spoken and written language). Liberation from temporal constraint appears to be an important element of what is occurring in The Book of Mormon and related Mormon scripture.47 That Smith revisits the millenarian image of Christ and his twelve descending from heaven in a September 1830 revelation points again to the importance of temporal elision. There (D&C 29:12) “mine apostles the Twelve . . . shall stand at my right hand at the day of my coming in a pillar of fire.” Lehi thus experienced the same kind of visit the world would receive in its end times.48 A few pages after his encounter with the future Bible, Lehi abruptly reports (1 Ne 3:2–​6) a follow-​up dream vision in which God commands him to secure the pre-​exilic Bible owned by his kinsman Laban. In one of the more famous sequences from The Book of Mormon, Lehi’s sons set out to obtain the proto-​ Bible. After an initial failure, the older brothers want to abandon the quest for these “brass plates” that contain Lehi’s genealogy and “the words which have been spoken by the mouth of all the holy prophets, which have been delivered unto them by the Spirit and power of God, since the world began, even down unto this present time.” It is Nephi’s strenuously oral presence (his “manner of language”) that “persuade[s]‌” his brothers to risk their lives to obtain the engraved remnants of the spoken words of the ancient prophets (1 Ne 3: 9–​22). After a second, even riskier but still unsuccessful, attempt to obtain the pre-​ exilic Bible, Nephi tries again to persuade his brothers that recovery of the brass plates is worth their lives. To that end, he retells the story of Moses and the Red Sea (1 Ne 4:2, 17:26, with antecedents in 1 Ne 16:38–​39). On Nephi’s retelling, instead of gesturing with his staff—​the method portrayed in the Hebrew Bible

 



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version (Exodus 14) of the story—​Moses speaks to the Red Sea in order to part it. Repurposing an old narrative that is contained within the brass plates they seek, Nephi emphasizes the importance of spoken language to effect God’s will in the physical world in order to convince his brothers to try one more time to recover the sacred writings.49 The initial narratives of The Book of Mormon contain a complex knot of local, powerful oral speech and distant, durable written scripture. The theme of atemporality occurs again much later in The Book of Mormon, after civilizations have risen and fallen over the span of many pages and half a thousand years. Sometime around 33 CE (the text equivocates on the precise timing), after a cataclysm that parallels the rending of the Temple veil at Christ’s death in the Old World, Christ comes to redeem a fallen America. This central event of The Book of Mormon returns again to the distinctive mashup of spoken and written language. The moment Jesus arrives, he begins quoting Old World scriptures at length, including Isaiah, Micah, Malachi, and Matthew. The pre-​ Easter, New Testament Jesus quoted extensively from Isaiah. Despite a different social context, this post-​Easter American Jesus continued to recite passages from the Bible. When Jesus redelivers the Sermon on the Mount, by his own account an act performed in order to shuttle New Testament texts to the New World (carrying the written word across vast distances by memorizing it), he makes several fraught comments. In the presentation of Matt 5:21 (3 Ne 12:21), The Book of Mormon text adds to the “it was said by them of old time” that killing is forbidden, “and it is also written before you.”50 Oral and written preside together, interdependently, in the sermon Christ is preaching. Shortly thereafter (3 Ne 20:11) Jesus quotes from Isaiah at length and refers his audience to the written copy they possess (presumably although not necessarily in the brass plates): “the words of Isaiah . . . are written, ye have them before you, therefore search them.” This practice differs from Christ’s tendency in the New Testament, especially the Sermon on the Mount, to call out traditional texts as defective, using a stereotyped phrase, “it has been written . . . but I say unto you.” In The Book of Mormon these acts of exposing the limits of pre-​Christian Judaism have been happening since the very beginning. Christ has no need in this American setting to strip away misconceptions about the Mosaic law because his audience already knows that the law of Moses was provisional. In Jesus’s return to The Book of Mormon narrative, the same act of Lehi’s vision—​ Jesus delivering biblical texts to American Jewish refugees—​ has recurred. That Jesus still chooses to quote from scripture is telling. Even the resurrected Jesus, the Alpha and Omega, returns to the written word to buttress his teachings. As if his presence were somehow not enough, he offers scripture. Hybridity thus seems to exist at the very highest level of scripture and divine presence.

 

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One hears complex echoes of the Logos theology of early Christianity in The Book of Mormon’s work with speech and text.51 The Logos was the bodily presence of God in Christ, but it was also the sacred text about that very divinity: Christ as Word and Christ’s word. Early in The Book of Mormon, God had previsioned such an event, establishing one specific model of the relationship between oral and written language. God would speak, and prophets would write. “I shall speak unto the Jews, and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto the Nephites, and they shall write it.” These would be two parallel written sources to recall the Divine Word. Similarly, Jesus performs in incredible concision his Old World ministry (the miracles seem to be wrapped into a single day in 3 Nephi 17). As he enacts years of ministry in the span of time it takes to write it, Jesus points to yet another view on the intersections of text and time. In this specific instance, the real world becomes as brief as the written word. Consistent with The Book of Mormon’s approach, this Old-​Testament-​made-​ New merges spoken and written, as Jesus says aloud the words and instructs the American audience to inscribe his Old World words for future generations. “Give heed to my words. Write the things which I have told you. And according to the time and the will of the Father, they shall go forth unto the Gentiles” (3 Ne 23:4). He also curates the entirely New World record: In 3 Ne 23:6–​13, Jesus corrects scripture to require inclusion of the fulfillment of a prophecy of Samuel the Lamanite (Hel 14:25). As he intertwines the different stories and scriptures, Jesus gives the lie to the sense of physical distance between the Old and New Worlds. When the American disciples write down Jesus’s sayings, they allow the words to persist into his absence. Christ engages this process specifically—​he instructs them to spend time with these transported texts. “I say unto you that ye had ought to search these things. Yea, a commandment I give unto you that ye search these things diligently, for great is the words of Isaiah” (3 Ne 23:1). Christ’s instruction as he sits in their midst is that they search a newly written instance of the book of Isaiah. Something about the written text matters even when Jesus is in their midst.

The Commingling of Oral and Written While The Book of Mormon devotes considerable energy to playing with and perhaps acting out the distinctive aspects of oral and written language, it ultimately fails, persistently, to honor the distinctions between the two. In its self-​ presentation as conversations frozen in amber, in its frequent merger of words for writing and words for speaking, and in the common lack of clarity regarding whether a given section is in fact primarily oral or written, The Book of Mormon constantly erodes the boundaries between spoken and written. In its very form

 



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as a published transcript of a miraculous dictation, The Book of Mormon violates the distinction between oral and written. It is self-​consciously an oral performance that is obsessed with the written word.52 The divisions between oral and written are always flimsy, and The Book of Mormon acknowledges this often, sometimes almost unconsciously. Nephi and others flit back and forth between speaking and writing to refer to the scripture they are producing. They speak and write and write and speak, often simultaneously. As one among many examples, when told not to “speak,” Nephi indicates that he will be “short in writing” (1 Ne 8:29-​30). In Alma 32:4, the narrator, presumably Mormon, refers to his writing as “speaking.” Omni (1:30) ends his “speaking” to signal the conclusion of his writing. In 3 Ne10:19 (and 3 Ne 26:12), “my sayings” (echoes perhaps of the logia of the New Testament) refers to a written record (see also 3 Ne 29:4). Mormon uses both “speak” and “write” to refer to a section of scripture in 3 Ne 30:1.53 A reference to Isaiah channeled through Nephi (2 Ne 25:1) uses a similar kind of equation: “the words which I have written, which have been spoken by the mouth of Isaiah.” On multiple occasions, God’s “voice” refers to the written word (e.g., 1 Ne 19:7; Mosiah 26:33). Frequently scriptural authors use “say” or “speak” to describe something they’ve written (e.g., Alma 43:2, Alma 48:21). Whether the conflation of oral and written comes from Smith or the ancient prophets isn’t entirely clear. Unless Mormon is transcribing his own speeches—​something he doesn’t indicate he has been doing—​he was sitting alone with the plates, transcribing them onto new plates. Still the verbs used to describe the creation of scripture hover between oral and written. This indeterminacy seems more at home in dictation than in the silent redaction of one written text into another written text. The Book of Mormon routinely breaks the distinction between oral and written:  Much of early Nephi is apparently a transcript of Lehite or angelic speech. Some long sections (e.g., much of the preaching in Mosiah and Alma) feel like theatrical soliloquies or audio recordings of oral language. The sermons of Alma to his sons around the middle of the Book of Alma never reveal whether they are letters or transcripts of oral encounters, instead presenting themselves as a pastiche of recorded–​transcribed speech (e.g., Alma 37:16). The complex of stories surrounding the Liahona compass also point toward the interdependence of the divine voice and written scripture. God upbraids Lehi (1 Ne 16:25–​ 27) for losing faith but instead of speaking the message directly, he tells Lehi to “behold the things which are written” (rather like Jesus’s implicit advice in 1 Ne 1 and explicit instruction in 3 Nephi). But as if to emphasize that even those special graffiti were inadequate on their own, the voice of God directed the Lehites’ attention to the director. Two verses later, we discover that “new writing” on the Liahona compass will guide the Lehites from day to day, a scripture that thus

 

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wipes and rewrites itself on a regular basis, appearing more oral than written in its ephemerality. Occasional turns of phrase indicate the interconnections between written and spoken language. The spoken and the written at times come together in a single package. Thus when Helaman (Hel 5:6) recalls the ancient namesakes of his sons, Lehi and Nephi, he urges them to live similarly righteous lives: “know how that it is said, and also written, that they were good.” The same merger of oral and written immediately recurs (Hel 5:13) as the redactor editorializes that Helaman “did teach them [his sons] many things which are not written, and also many things which are written; and they did remember his words.” The panoramic visions of history so characteristic of The Book of Mormon also cross the lines between spoken and written language.54 The prophet sees the grand arc of history, an experience beyond language, but this gift often includes direct visualization of people consuming the written word, a kind of extra-​linguistic short-​circuit of the problem of written language that allows the writer to see the reader directly. The writer also thereby cuts through the masses of intervening time, the kind of temporal elision that is the striking characteristic of The Book of Mormon. Moroni’s apostrophes to his future audience, often misunderstood, are precisely this kind of collapse of spoken and written language, uniting the human generations. The commingling of oral and written within The Book of Mormon points toward Smith’s hybrid understanding of scripture and its applications to nineteenth-​century America.

A Hybrid Model of Scripture The Book of Mormon proposes that written scripture is partial or deficient. Scripture is whole only when it combines a written record and a living prophet. The Book of Mormon posits a solution to the problems of oral and written languages through a divinely curated hybrid of the two. Written scripture preserves truth for future generations but requires the presence of a prophet–​seer. Most memorably, a visit of Christ to Lehi requires a Bible from the future, and that same prophet then requires a physical proto-​Bible before disappearing into the Arabian Peninsula. And his progeny some six centuries later receive a visit in which Christ recites scriptures for the Lehites to write down. A book without a speaker fails because language is cursed with fallibility and endless ambiguity, and a speaker without a book fails because a speaker can address only a limited few before her mortal sojourn comes to a close, stilling her voice forever. A speaker with a book has at least a shot at solving the problems of language, both written and oral.

 



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At several points the text exemplifies its preferred strategy. In one of many insertions of biblical text into The Book of Mormon (1 Nephi 21, rereading Isaiah 49), Nephi apparently reads Isaiah to his brothers. In the next verse, his brothers ask “what meaneth these things which ye have read? . . . are they to be understood according to things which are spiritual, which shall come to pass according to the spirit and not the flesh?” Contextually, one hears a nod toward the notorious method of reading scriptures “spiritually,” a strategy that many Mormons found suspect. Nephi, functioning as a prophet to make sense of the written text, explains that both “spiritual” and “temporal” readings are required. The Book of Mormon thereby exemplifies precisely this hybrid nature of scripture: prophet and text, inseparably. While the claim strained the credulity of many in the nineteenth century, The Book of Mormon solved the problem of scriptural interpretation by requiring the simultaneous presence of a prophet. The Bible is the corpse of scripture, awaiting the spirit of prophecy to animate it. When Nephi preached to his people after his father’s death, the audience “believed in the warnings and the revelations of God [brass plates]; wherefore they did hearken unto my words [the words of a prophet]” (2 Ne 5:6). Similarly, when Nephi’s brother Jacob addresses the Nephite people, he lists his prophetic credentials, the authority by which he claimed the right to preach (2 Ne 6:3). This authority came because “I have spoken unto you concerning all things which are written from the creation of the world.” The prophet derives his authority from the scripture, and the scripture requires a prophet to be real. The ministry of the sons of Alma and Mosiah (the major evangelical narratives in The Book of Mormon) repeatedly exemplify the interdependence of prophet and scripture. Noting that the apostate Nephites had been misreading scripture (a type for the nineteenth-​century misreadings that The Book of Mormon would put right), Alma reports that a prophet is needed, simultaneously invoking two lost prophets who testify of Christ, Zenos and Zenoch (Alma 33:2). The narrator, apparently Mormon, comments on the success of Mosiah’s evangelist–​son Ammon. The narrative up to this point has repeatedly emphasized the staggering power of this specific evangelist. Ammon has performed Herculean tasks, repeatedly, both in battle and in sacred reasoning. There is every reason to think of Ammon as a perfect and sufficient vessel for the converting power of God. But even Ammon was incomplete without scripture. According to the editor, “were it not for these things that these records do contain, which are on these plates, Ammon and his brethren could not have convinced so many thousands of the Lamanites” (Alma 37:9). Mosiah 1 (the portion of the current Book of Mormon that Smith dictated after losing his initial Book of Lehi) is a consummate summary of the need for both oral and written. The prophet Benjamin wants to preach a deathbed sermon to

 

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his people, but he knows that not everyone will be able to hear him speak. So he has an assistant write the text of his sermon for distribution among his people. Implicitly it was this act of writing that allowed his sermon to be included in the final Book of Mormon.55 (The book never indicates whether the many other apparent transcripts came to life in a similar way.) Mormonism’s response to Protestant canon came as an elaboration of its hybrid model of scripture: a written text and a speaking prophet. Written and oral language—​always only tentatively separated—​fill in each other’s defects. This understanding of scripture gives the lie to the old saw that early Mormons didn’t use The Book of Mormon.56 Merely counting the number of sermons using Bible versus Book of Mormon proof texts will fail to illuminate the use of The Book of Mormon among early Mormons. They used their American Bible to read the authorized Bible, side by side with their seer, Joseph Smith. Prophet and scripture, scripture and prophet. Notably, the hybrid model attended the translation process of The Book of Mormon. Smith and his followers saw Campbell’s “Living Oracles” and similar projects as doomed from the outset. Even the King James translators, preferred by Mormons, could not stand without a current prophet. In William Phelps’s introduction for the church newspaper of a Book of Mormon passage criticizing the English Bible, “This is a sufficient reason for the Lord to give command to have [the Bible] translated anew: Notwithstanding King James’ translators did very well, all knowing that they had only the common faculties of men and literature, without the spirit of Revelation.”57 Phelps’s phrase was perfectly consistent with the claims of The Book of Mormon itself—​no nonprophetic English translation could ever be anything but inaccurate and provisional. Another view competed with Campbell’s, and it predominated in much of the American evangelical consensus. In that view, a kind of mystical correspondence was at play by which both Christ and the Bible were the Word.58 On one reading of that consensus, what mattered about the Bible was not so much its literal content but its capacity to bring the believer into contact with Christ. Nothing could be stranger on this view of scripture than The Book of Mormon’s doubled image of Christ delivering Bibles. On this traditional Christian reading, he’d already delivered the Bible via the apostles and their church. The hybridity of the Protestant consensus wasn’t oral and written on equal footing but a kind of relay by which preaching brought the Bible to life, thereby bringing Christ’s regenerating and illuminating Spirit directly to the believer. While I  consider questions of translation mechanics at length elsewhere,59 here I only nod toward the implications of a hybrid model of scripture to the translation process. The text itself, Smith’s relationship to the text, and the deep concerns with prophet and scripture as mutually dependent all argue, strongly in my view, against a visual transcription model (i.e., Smith saw English words,

 



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which he read aloud) of translation. It seems more likely that Smith was having a seeric encounter with God, mediated in some way by the gold plates and interpreter stones. His dictation was his attempt to reduce that encounter to spoken American English, in the presence of a scribe. In a similar vein the theme of hybridity opens another view of the English text’s temporal and cultural situation. Whatever else The Book of Mormon is, it’s an English-​language scripture written for the early nineteenth century. The book reads as if it were aware of the role it would play in antebellum America and the millennial preparations of that country for the restoration of Israel.60 The model of scripture that I  advance here is relevant to understanding the interdigitations of The Book of Mormon, Hebrew and American antiquity, and early national America. While two poles (exclusively ancient book, exclusively modern book) have anchored sectarian strife over the validity of early Mormonism, this model of scripture as a hybrid between text and prophet explains not only that there may be nineteenth-​century elements in The Book of Mormon,61 but that there must be nineteenth-​century elements in the book, because translation is a process of bringing disparate human generations into active communion. By the same token the New Testament belongs beside the Old Testament in the American scripture because their histories are intertwined, and the apparent centuries that separate them are shown to be an illusion. Smith’s seeric prophets translate scripture, and translation means more than the simple act of rendering a document from one language into another. Translation is the process of collapsing the distance in space and time that estranges one group from another, that separates the present from the past. Through The Book of Mormon we experience an exquisitely clear vision of the collapse of distance in space and time. Ancient is modern, the Eastern Mediterranean is the American Zion, Old Testament and New Testament collide in an astounding eradication of distance. One can be forgiven for seeing this as requiring a new metaphysics of translation. By the logic of Mormon translation, The Book of Mormon has to be a nineteenth-​century reflex of an ancient text because the scripture was addressed to nineteenth-​century readers by a nineteenth-​century prophet. (Note that the model I  propose is consistent with actual Nephites and actual gold plates, if need be.) Speaking to that antebellum world, Smith’s scripture had an important message, particularly attuned to the struggles of interpretation and legitimacy in a world of sola scriptura. It’s hard to imagine a more straightforward announcement of Christ’s ownership of the Hebrew Bible than Lehi’s vision. Jesus hands a copy of the Bible to a Hebrew prophet before the Babylonian exile. Scripture melds into prophet, melding back into scripture. Sacred time collapses back into itself.

 

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Notes 1. John Durham Peters, Jana Riess, Andrew Brown, and Adam Miller read and improved this essay as best they could under the circumstances. Given my utter incorrigibility, none of the residual failings in the essay should dishonor them. 2. I am not gesturing toward the pseudoscience of stylometric (“wordprint”) analyses, merely acknowledging that whatever its genesis, The Book of Mormon feels to many readers like it contains multiple narratorial voices. On this point, see especially Grant Hardy, Understanding The Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 3. While oral language or culture can occasionally reach beyond locality—​e.g., exercises of the art of memory—​The Book of Mormon does not favor nonlocal speech per se. 4. I acknowledge here resonances with Harold Innis’s conception of time-​binding and space-​ binding modes of communication as well as the possibility that in certain objects they may be intertwined. See Harold Innis, Empire and Communications, Voyageur edition (Toronto: Dundur Press, 2007), 30–​31 et passim. 5. I  hope I  can be forgiven for ignoring—​on purely rhetorical grounds—​the fact that sola scriptura is in the ablative. 6. See the thoughtful discussion in John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds:  Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015), chap. 6. 7. Eric A. Havelock controversially focused on the transition to written culture in Greece. See, e.g., his summative The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy From Antiquity to the Present (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1988). Jan Assmann, extending Halbwachs on collective memory, took issue with the Hellenic focus of Havelock. See, e.g., Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization:  Writing, Remembrance and Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). On the problems with traditional ideas about the deficiencies of oral culture, Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole argue in Psychology of Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981) that literacy per se, based on their studies among the Vai who use Vai literacy for only trivial tasks, yielded no substantial change in cognitive capacities or outlook. The argument is that in order for literacy to have a psychological effect, it must be applied within a rich literate subculture. See Barry Powell, Writing:  Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization (Malden, MA:  Wiley-​ Blackwell, 2009) for a thoughtful, revisionary take on questions of the timing, methods, and meaning of the evolution of alphabetic writing in human history. 8. On Socrates and the Phaedrus, see Dorrit Cohn, “Does Socrates Speak for Plato? Reflections on an Open Question,” New Literary History 32.3 (Summer 2001): 485–​500. 9. Peters, Marvelous Clouds, 278–​279. 10. There are other theorists in this space (see, e.g., Ruth Finnegan, Literacy and Orality [Oxford:  Blackwell, 1988] and M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record:  England 1066–​1307, 2nd ed. [Oxford: Blackwell, 1993]), but none was quite as fun as Ong. The most interesting current theorist is John Durham Peters:  see especially his Speaking into the Air (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001) and The Marvelous Clouds. 11. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962). 12. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982) and Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967). 13. Recording technology now allows the voice to persist long after the death of the speaker; such was not the case when Smith was alive. 14. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 32. See also Peters, Marvelous Clouds, 263–​264. 15. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 80. 16. I summarize my preliminary thoughts about Smith’s translation projects in Samuel Brown, “The Language of Heaven: Prolegomenon to the Study of Smithian Translation,” Journal of Mormon History 38.1 (Summer 2012): 51–​71. 17. Karen Lynn Davidson et al., eds., Histories, vol. 1: Joseph Smith Histories, 1832–​1844. Vol. 1 of the Histories Series of The Joseph Smith Papers. (Salt Lake City, UT: Church Historian’s Press, 2012), 352–​355, primary quotation comes from Draft 1. The draft, written in the hand of

 



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James Mulholland in the second half of 1839, entered the published History with only minor revisions. 18. On Smith’s concerns about his credibility as a student of languages, see Samuel Brown, “The Translator and the Ghostwriter: Joseph Smith and William Phelps,” Journal of Mormon History 33.4 (Winter 2007): 26–​62. 19. John Durham Peters observes that D&C 133 (an 1831 revelation included as an appendix in the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants) suggests the possibility of a similar kind of prologue as epilogue, one possible trait of someone as extra-​temporal as Smith tended to be. 20. Of perhaps not merely incidental note, a Hebrew verb for writing [katav] also refers to engraving. 21. Smith expands this notion of gift in D&C 10, a contemporary revelation grappling with the problem of the lost manuscript of the Book of Lehi. 22. David F. Holland, Sacred Borders:  Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2010) considers canon at length. See also Paul Gutjahr, An American Bible:  A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777–​ 1880 (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), which explores the many ways that American Protestants sought to update the Bible, if only in its apparatus, to connect it to their own experience. 23. One is tempted to hear resonances with 2 Ne 29:2–​4, in which early Americans are anticipated to say that they have all the Bible they need in the King James version. 24. This paragraph updates the treatment in Brown, “Joseph (Smith) in Egypt,” 36–​37. Alexander Campbell, ed., The Sacred Writing of the Apostles and Evangelists of Jesus Christ, Commonly Styled The New Testament. Translated From the Original Greek, by George Campbell, James MacKnight, and Philip Doddridge, Doctors of the Church of Scotland. With Prefaces to the Historical and Epistolary Books; and an Appendix, Containing Critical Notes and Various Translations of Difficult Passages (Bethany, VA: Alexander Campbell, 1826), with three further editions by 1835. This work became known popularly as “the Living Oracles,” though Campbell himself reserved that title for the original language texts: Cecil K. Thomas, Alexander Campbell and His New Version (St. Louis, MO: Bethany, 1958), esp. 31, 59, 62, 67, 69, 120, 129. Campbell’s revisions were much more significant than those of Noah Webster, whose 1833 Common Version was a minor Victorian updating of the King James version. Campbell’s discussion of “living languages” is from his “General Preface: An Apology for a New Translation,” on pp. 3–​ 10 of the 1835 fourth edition. 25. See Samuel Morris Brown, “Seeing the Voice of God:  The Book of Mormon on Its Own Translation,” chap. 6 in Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects and the Making of Mormon Christianity, Michael Hubbard MacKay, Mark Ashurst-​McGee, and Brian M. Hauglid, eds. (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2020). 26. See Samuel M. Brown, In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2012), chap.  5. The quote is from Mosiah 28:14–​16. 27. Alma 37:4; Alma 29:8; D&C 90 (March 11, 1833). 28. I’m aware of but find fruitless recent suggestions that The Book of Mormon may contain pre-​ Jacobean English. See, e.g., Stanford Carmack, “A Look at Some ‘Nonstandard’ Book of Mormon Grammar,” Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 11 (2014): 209–​262. 29. Ong, Presence of the Word, 111–​115. 30. Richard Bushman lists the following as examples of these meditations: Jacob 3:13; 2 Ne 31:1, 33:1; WofM 1:5; Alma 8:1, 13:31; Mosiah 8:1; 1 Ne 6:3, 17:6; Jacob 4:1; 3 Ne 5:8, 7:17, 19:34, 26:6; 3 Ne 5:8, 17:15; Hel 8:3, 14:1; Moro 9:19; Ether 12:25, 15:33. See also 1 Ne 19:2–​3; 2 Ne 11:1. 31. See also 2 Ne 11:1 and 1 Ne 19:2. 32. There’s an unstated tension here. Normally pictograms were considered closer to oral language and thus more perspicuous, mystically so. Here the claim seems to be that the Bible’s Hebrew is purer than Egyptian pictograms. While many, including probably Smith, saw Hebrew as sacredly pictographic, Egyptian normally held pride of place in the hierarchy of sacred pictograms. This inversion of the usual priority of pictographic language seems striking. Powell, Writing, discusses the scholarly inadequacy of the notion of pictography, a discussion

 

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that, while useful for modern scholars, misses the intense reality of the pictographic ideal for religious people over the course of millennia. 33. Ether 12:23–​24. 34. Smith used parallel revelations to argue the same point: see, e.g., D&C 10. 35. Michael MacKay, Gerrit J. Dirkmaat, Grant Underwood, Robert J. Woodford, and William G. Hartley, eds. Documents, vol. 1: July 1828–​June 1831. Vol. 1 of the Documents Series of The Joseph Smith Papers (Salt Lake City, UT: Church Historian’s Press, 2013), 92, makes the almost certainly correct observation that “116 pages” is a later inference from the pages in the printer’s manuscript rather than a measure of the actual number of pages released by Smith to Harris. 36. Smith doesn’t say it here, but based on his later practice and hints in D&C 10, it seems likely to me that he knew that his translation would never be verbatim, so retranslation would have been a perceptual problem even without his critics forging a version of his initial translation. He famously revised many of his prophetic dictations, including in places the English text of The Book of Mormon itself. 37. On evidential Christianity, see E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought From the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). 38. I concur with Robin Jensen’s assessment (“ ‘Rely Upon the Things Which Are Written’: Text, Context, and the Creation of Mormon Revelatory Records,” [MLS thesis, University of Wisconsin, 2009], 78) that the “Book of Mormon must be read as both an oral text and a written one.” 39. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 111–​142, provides a standard overview of duplication or repetition in Hebrew sacred writing. 40. Such phrasing also occurs internal to the book, when a prophet–​king gives a speech and has it written in order to disseminate it beyond the sound of his voice; Mosiah 2. 41. Royal Skousen, The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (New Yale, 2009), xlii, is close with his argument that The Book of Mormon is “a dictated rather than a written text.” It is, of course, both. 42. Jensen, “Things Which Are Written,” 142–​143. Note, however, that in D&C 10:10–​11 “caused to be written” may be equated with “translated.” 43. While something like a scholarly consensus supports the idea that Smith translated Mosiah–​ Moroni before 1 Nephi–​Words of Mormon, it is also apparently true that Smith understood Nephi to belong at the beginning of the book. 44. The best-​known treatments of this are Blake T. Ostler, “The Throne-​Theophany and Prophetic Commission in 1 Nephi: A Form-​Critical Analysis,” BYU Studies 26.4 (1986): 67–​95; John Welch, “The Calling of Lehi as a Prophet in the World of Jerusalem,” in Glimpses of Lehi’s Jerusalem, John Welch, David Seely, and Jo Ann Seely, eds., (Provo, UT:  FARMS, 2004), 421–​448. 45. I’m aware that I differ from Ostler and Welch in my identification of the book. I confess that I do not find noncanonical pseudepigrapha relevant to the identity of the book, which is clearly established within The Book of Mormon as a future Bible. For a similar example, see Susan Juster, Doomsayers:  Anglo-​American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 163–​164. Note, though, that within the context of the theory of translation suggested in this paper that the vision of Jesus bringing Lehi the Bible could in fact be the nineteenth-​century translation of an ancient vision more like those recounted in the pseudepigraphic works adduced by Ostler and Welch. 46. One sees complex echoes in the visit of Moroni to Joseph Smith, in which the angel quotes the Bible to the young prophet. See discussion of Moroni’s Bible quotations in Jensen, “Things Which Are Written,” 65. 47. On entanglement in Mormonism, see Samuel Brown and Kate Holbrook, “Embodiment and Sexuality,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, Philip Barlow and Terryl Givens, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 292–​305. 48. I agree with John Durham Peters that apocalyptic takes on new significance in this framing as both a marker of end times and of the lifted veil. 49. Curiously, when the narrative returns to Moses (Hel 8:11), he’s no longer speaking; instead, he had power “to smite upon the waters of the Red Sea.”

 



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50. The Book of Mormon text then addends and clarifies another part of that same verse, clarifying that “the judgment” refers to the judgment of God. 51. Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-​Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), provides a reasonable overview of the logos theology. 52. Brown, “Book of Mormon on Its Own Translation.” One hears in this an echo of the practice of rabbinic Talmudic preaching, another oral performance obsessed with the written word, as also is the Talmudic emphasis on oral creations arising from an ancient written text. 53. See also, e.g., 1 Ne 19:5–​6, 18–​19; 2 Ne 4:14; 3 Ne 10:19, 23:2–​3 (there describing Isaiah), 28:24; Moro 8:4, 10:2, 10:24. 54. See Brown, “Book of Mormon on Its Own Translation” for details on panoramic visions. 55. Following the analysis of Peters, Marvelous Clouds, chap.  6, an expedient to overcome the limits of space served also to overcome the limits of time. 56. The standard presentation of this view is Grant Underwood, “Book of Mormon Usage in Early LDS Theology,” Dialogue 17.3 (Autumn 1984): 35–​74. 57. [William Phelps], “Selected,” Evening and Morning Star 1:1 ( June 1832): 3. 58. Matthew Bowman, The Urban Pulpit:  New  York City and the Fate of Liberal Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 59. Brown, “Book of Mormon on Its Own Translation.” 60. Jared Hickman, “Amerindian Apocalypse,” American Literature 86.3 (2014): 429–​461. 61. Blake T. Ostler, “The Book of Mormon as a Modern Expansion of an Ancient Source,” Dialogue 20.1 (Spring 1987): 66–​123, has been the standard treatment of the “expansion” hypothesis.

 

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“The Writing of the Fruit of Thy Loins” Reading, Writing, and Prophecy in The Book of Mormon L aura Thiemann Scales

The Book of Mormon opens in an age of prophecy. In the sixth century BCE, the prophet–​narrator Nephi tells us, “there came many prophets prophesying unto the people that they must repent or the great city Jerusalem must be destroyed.”1 Nephi begins with the story of how his father, Lehi, received the gift of prophecy; like the ancient Hebrew prophets, Lehi foresees the “destruction of Jerusalem” and finds himself “mock[ed]” and rejected by the Jews (1 Ne 1:18–​19). But Lehi is marked as a different kind of prophet: a reading prophet, one who accesses God not just through visions but through text. While “carried away in a vision” of heaven, Lehi sees an angel, who “came and stood before [him], and gave unto him a book and bade him that he should read. And it came to pass that as he read, he was filled with the Spirit of the Lord” (1 Ne 1:8, 11–​12). The act of revelatory reading then begets the act of revelatory writing. Lehi writes an account of his vision; Nephi records his father’s experiences on the small plates of The Book of Mormon; Nephi’s brother Jacob reads Nephi’s plates and continues the record. From the very start, then, The Book of Mormon embeds its prophecies in layers of text, and foregrounds the ways in which each of its personae—​narrators and characters, ancient prophets and modern ones—​is also a reader. Rather than setting up a stable hierarchy in which the divine word passes directly from God to prophet to reader of scripture, The Book of Mormon establishes a genealogy of prophetic narrative in which prophets create readers who then become prophets themselves, in an unending chain. The Book of Mormon is the story of how ancient Israelites established a civilization in the Americas, but it is also the story of the book itself: how the records were acquired, composed, labored over, protected, lost, abridged, preserved for Laura Thiemann Scales, “The Writing of the Fruit of Thy Loins”: Reading, Writing, and Prophecy in The Book of Mormon. In: Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon. Edited by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190221928.003.0008

 



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a thousand years, and finally buried so that the plates could, as prophesied, be discovered by Joseph Smith centuries later. The prominence of the reader and writer is not just an incidental feature of this scripture, but is essential to the Mormon understanding of the relationship between human and divine. This essay identifies three key narrative features of The Book of Mormon: the centrality of readers and witnesses to the creation of scripture, the primacy of the act of writing in revelation and prophecy, and the mediation that allows a single person to inhabit multiple narrative categories. Biblical prophets, especially “writing prophets” like Jeremiah and Ezekiel, share some features with the prophets of The Book of Mormon, such as first-​person narration and dialogue with God. Yet there is little biblical precedent for The Book of Mormon’s intense focus on its own textuality and its own narrative practices or for the ways in which prophets transcend their passive, anointed roles and become authors of scripture in their own right. Its insistent textuality does, however, link The Book of Mormon to other scriptural and prophetic forms that arose in the antebellum United States. While the Mormon prophets vary in their literary style, narrative techniques, and personal presence, the centrality of reading, writing, and the system of scripture-​ craft is persistent. In The Book of Mormon, God’s word is nearly inseparable from human word, and it is frequently not the divine speech act itself, but its translation, interpretation, and writing by human mediators that we are asked to notice. Unlike biblical prophets, who tend to present themselves as vessels for God’s word, Latter-​day Saint (LDS) prophets are distinctive in their often-​simultaneous embodiment of multiple narrative identities: They are authors, narrators, characters, and even readers of one another’s work. With the merging of these narrative categories, readers’ understanding of both human and divine authority changes. The Book of Mormon reveals human readers and writers to be makers of, not mere conduits for, the divine word. Scripture is always mediated, historicized, and written for a particular purpose and audience, and each act of reading and writing is a potential act of prophecy. Although it has frequently been acknowledged that first-​person narration is a crucial component of The Book of Mormon’s structure, and although many have noted its structural complexities, there is still much about the nature of narrative voice in The Book of Mormon to be explored, especially when examined in its nineteenth-​century historical context.2 Taking at face value Grant Hardy’s premise that the scripture’s “mediat[ion] by narrators . . . is the underlying logic of the text from which all interpretation has to proceed,” this essay shows how the centrality of first-​person prophet–​narrators in The Book of Mormon fundamentally changed the standard narrative practice of scripture.3 In reading The Book of Mormon as both marking a radical departure from previous scriptural forms and typifying an emerging nineteenth-​century practice of prophecy and

 

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scriptural narrative, I build on the work of Kathleen Flake, who identifies Joseph Smith as an “interpreting reader” in the act of prophesying, and Terryl Givens, who designates “revelation as a personalized, dialogic exchange.”4 But even beyond the personal encounters—​the “face-​to-​face” communion with the divine by means of “human language and human paradigms”—​that critics like Givens properly describe as central to the Mormon model of prophecy, I wish to call attention to the textual encounters that are central to the translation of prophecy into scripture.5 Like other scriptural and quasi-​scriptural texts of its day, The Book of Mormon makes central not just the revelation itself, but the process of reading, writing, sharing, and editing the work of revelation. The Book of Mormon broke onto the American scene in the early nineteenth-​ century religious world of evangelical preachers, self-​proclaimed prophets, and historicist biblical scholars, many of whom produced texts that collapsed narrative categories and transformed the relationship between human and divine. In situating the narrative voice of The Book of Mormon historically, I wish to move beyond the commonplace that personal revelation is the primary distinction of LDS and of Second Great Awakening–​era scriptural and spiritual practice; instead, I argue, its key characteristic is the always-​mediated and often-​ textual nature of that revelation.6 In these new scriptures it is the mediation of revelation—​its intermingling of divine and human in multiple voices and layers of text, not just the individualized nature of it—​that allows the narrative hierarchies to merge and reverse, giving human prophets a new authority. Unlike biblical prophets, Mormon prophets and their nineteenth-​century counterparts exhibit an unusual positional mobility, existing on multiple narrative planes and drawing authority from their flexible and overlapping positions as narrators, readers, and characters. The prophets’ spiritual authority derives not just from God, but from the ancestral structure—​the chain of readers and writers—​that produces the book. Such a narrative structure is a necessary precondition to the LDS theology that humanizes God and divinizes humans. While God becomes a character who “[speaks] unto me as a man speaketh with another,” the prophet becomes narrator and author of revelation (1 Ne11:11).

“A System of Craft”: Scripture and Prophecy in the Age of Joseph Smith The Book of Mormon was published in an age of prophecy not unlike the age in which it begins. In 1830, when Joseph Smith first brought the manuscript to a printer in Palmyra, NY, the United States was rife with would-​be prophets predicting the apocalypse, the millennium, the Second Coming, and the spiritual transformation of the human realm. William Miller reinterpreted the Book

 



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of Revelation to predict the “second advent” of Christ in 1843. John Humphrey Noyes reinterpreted the Bible to proclaim that the Second Coming had already occurred, and that “the state of the saints in heaven” was “attainable on earth.”7 Emanuel Swedenborg (who had died fifty years earlier, but found his greatest influence in the antebellum United States) claimed that the Second Coming had already occurred, that he spoke with angels regularly, and that he himself “enjoy[ed] perfect inspiration.”8 Shakers claimed in 1808 that founder Mother Ann Lee (though by then dead) had been the Second Coming of Christ. Robert Matthews (the Prophet Matthias) claimed to be God, and Elijah Pierson (Elijah the Tishbite) his prophet.9 Like the prophets in The Book of Mormon, these religious leaders and self-​proclaimed prophets were textual interpreters who brought the age of prophecy into the present day and who blurred the line between divine and human in far more radical ways than biblical prophets did. As I have argued elsewhere, this generation of religious leaders and would-​be prophets helped usher in an idea of divine voice as necessarily mediated by humans and placed as much focus on the mediator as on God’s word.10 This mediation reconfigured the power relationship between human and divine, upending the standard prophetic hierarchy in which the prophet serves only as passive vessel for the Holy Spirit. Instead, the prophet takes on magnified significance, at times rivaling divine power or claiming divinity for himself or herself. At the same time, this flattened hierarchy creates a complex new narrative mode, since the prophet, no longer merely an effaced narrator, can now become author or protagonist of scripture. The Second Great Awakening era in which these prophetic figures arose was typified by structural changes in organized religion that coincided with shifts in the individual relationship to the divine.11 Formal religious hierarchies gave way to modes of worship that emphasized the personal experiences of ordinary people. David L. Rowe notes that “Congregationalists and Presbyterians, formalists who required an educated clergy, resident pastors, and structures of authority that stewarded the belief and practice of congregations” lost ground to denominations like “the Methodists and Baptists, who encouraged lay participation by the uneducated and whose less stringent congregational arrangements ensured individual expression and creativity.”12 Evangelical and enthusiastic forms of worship, predicated upon the individual experience of the Holy Spirit’s presence, gained popularity. Shakers and Quakers who shook and danced with holy fervor, camp meetings whose attendees were bodily overcome with the spirit, evangelical itinerant and lay preachers who held worship outside of ordinary congregations—​all were increasingly common in this era. Authority structures deemphasized hierarchical pastoral and priestly relationships and admitted greater individual manifestation of religious experience. The personal and the particular relationship with the divine thus found new and vibrant expression in the antebellum era.

 

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At the same time, many in the 1820s and 1830s envisioned a new age of prophecy in the present time. Those engaged in scholarly pursuits found deep knowledge of the ancient prophets and their cultural context newly necessary; in what David Holland calls a “contextualizing craze,” knowledge of ancient Jewish customs, archaeology, the geography of Palestine, even the botanical features of the Holy Land were deemed required elements of biblical study for scholars and laypeople alike.13 For others, the ancient prophets came alive in the nineteenth century in more literal ways. Grant Underwood describes how, for Mormons, “[t]‌he prophetic books of the Old Testament brimmed with meaning for their understanding of the new dispensation. In their eyes, they were the fulfillment of much of what they read about in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel.”14 There were many others who saw themselves as either fulfilling or following in the line of Old Testament prophecy, as well. Nat Turner, leader of a slave revolt, claimed to have interpreted signs from God and positioned himself as both an Old Testament prophet and a new messiah. He claimed that he spoke with “the Spirit that spoke to the prophets in former days,” and interpreted cryptic visions and hieroglyphics sent from God.15 Yet Turner also reframed his impending execution as a crucifixion, implying that the visions and the deadly revolt that his interlocutor, Thomas Gray, thought were delusional were actually a deeply transformative turning point in human history.16 Other prophets are harder to take seriously from a modern perspective, but nevertheless represent important strains of prophetic identity. Mordecai Manuel Noah, or Noah, called himself the “Messiah of the Jews” and attempted to establish a “Jewish homeland,” Ararat, on an island in the Niagara River.17 Robert Matthews (who later became notorious as a cult leader and accused murderer) renamed himself the Prophet Matthias, claimed ancient Jewish ancestry, and, in a meeting with Joseph Smith himself, “proclaimed himself a direct descendant of the Hebrew prophets and patriarchs, of Jesus Christ, and of Matthias the Apostle. He possessed the souls of all these fathers, for that was the way of everlasting life: the transmigration of spirits from Father to son. He was, in short, the incarnate Spirit of Truth.”18 Each of these men attempted to claim the double identity of prophet and messiah, blurring the line between human vessel and divine incarnation. Unlike ancient prophets, who never questioned their subservience to God, these modern prophets claimed an unusual authority over both divine and earthly realms, mastering scriptural interpretations, re-​creating biblical scenarios, and assuming the mantle of divinity. If the new prophets and new messiahs reconfigured the authority structure between God and prophet, new methods of biblical interpretation ignited intense debate and reconfigured the relationship between God and reader. Whereas precritical methods of biblical interpretation saw God as author of the Bible, the higher criticism taught that readers should apply to “the biblical texts

 



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the same principles of critical analysis that had been employed in the study of classical authors.”19 Historicist hermeneutics placed new focus on the role of the writer, reader, and text—​rather than the divine author—​in the antebellum era. Theodore Parker, in an 1841 sermon that summed up the recent controversies in biblical criticism, described how modern Criticism is fast breaking to pieces this idol which men have made out of the Scriptures. It has shown that here are the most different works thrown together. That their authors, wise as they sometimes were; pious as we feel often their spirit to have been, had only that inspiration which is common to other men equally pious and wise; that they were by no means infallible; but were mistaken in facts or in reasoning; uttered predictions which time has not fulfilled; men who in some measure partook of the darkness and limited notions of their age, and were not always above its mistakes or its corruptions.20 When regarded as a document written by fallible human writers, and for particular readerships in a specific times and cultures, the Bible became not a unified text but a series of stitched-​together documents that “conveyed ideas and concepts that originated in historical contexts, and were peculiar to the writers and their audiences.”21 The meaning of scripture and of scriptural reading thus changes: In the interpretive act, the reader must consider not just the divine, but also the mediators—​the “inspired men” who wrote the Bible.22 That mediation becomes essential to scripture’s nature—​becomes, in fact, the very substance of scripture itself. The reader or interpreter becomes the key figure in divining meaning, rather than God. It is no surprise that such biblical scholarship influenced liberal theologians and ministers, but it bears significance in the transformation of evangelical, millennialist, and prophetic practices as well. Historians have typically described the practices of the Second Great Awakening as emphasizing direct contact with the divine and bodily possession by the Holy Spirit. Divine revelation comes in forms oral, aural, and visionary; external and internal—​“thunderous claps and trumpet blasts, calls to preach the gospel, whispers of prayer, reverberations of scripture”; “dreams and visions.”23 But I wish to show how that inspiration can also look surprisingly textual. William Miller, for instance, who predicted that the Second Coming would occur in 1843, describes in his Memoir the doubts created by a Deist cosmology that views scripture as the work of humans: While I was a Deist, I believed in a God, but I could not, as I thought, believe the Bible was the word of God. The many contradictions, and inconsistencies, which I thought could be shown, made me suppose it

 

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to be a work of designing men, whose object was to enslave the mind of man; operate on their hopes and fears, with a view to aggrandize themselves . . . . I viewed it as a system of craft, rather than of truth.24 Miller committed to years of biblical study before arriving at his revelation about the coming millennium. He ultimately came to reject the higher critical view of scripture, instead understanding the Bible as divinely inspired. Yet he, like many in the era, including Joseph Smith himself (as well as Lehi in The Book of Mormon), engaged directly in biblical interpretation in order to access the Holy Spirit: I laid by all commentaries, former views and prepossessions, and determined to read and try to understand for myself. I  then began the reading of the Bible in a methodical manner; and by comparing scripture with scripture, and taking notice of the manner of prophesying, and how it was fulfilled, (so much as had received its accomplishment,) I found that prophecy had been literally fulfilled, after understanding the figures and metaphors.25 It is through the higher critical method of close reading that the scriptures reveal their truth to Miller. Miller never claimed to be a prophet (in fact he explicitly rejected the label)26 but was instead an ideal reader of the Bible. While Miller abandons the writer—​the idea of the Bible as crafted by humans—​in favor of the reader, Joseph Smith’s revelation enables the merger of the “system of craft” that the higher criticism reveals, and the system of “truth” upon which more literalist hermeneutics relies. Mormon prophecy depends upon a view of revelation as textual; indeed, the “crafting” of scripture by holy men plays a vitally important role in bringing God’s voice to humanity. In part this emphasis derives from the Mormon belief in continuous revelation; Grant Underwood notes that Smith “believed that the Spirit would continue to speak anew in each age, even at times to the superseding of previous prophets and apostles.”27 Likewise, David F. Holland observes that when a revelation casts all inspired speech as scripture, it “suggests not only that what was scriptural was divinely true, but that whatever was divinely true was scriptural, be it uttered by whomever. The very definition of scripture seemed to evolve under the weight of Mormonism’s widely distributed revelatory power.”28 Just as the higher criticism expanded the definition of biblical authorship, Mormon revelation expanded the definition of scripture. But many critics, describing revelation as a feeling, a vision, or a voice—​an experience of the divine or an utterance of God’s word—​discount the centrality of the written manuscript in the revelatory experience.29 This essay argues that we should see Mormonism’s expansion of revelation as explicitly textual. Antebellum

 



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readers of scripture—​both liberal and conservative biblical scholars as well as laypeople with their ubiquitous study Bibles—​engaged constantly with biblical commentary and interpretation in order to understand the cultural and historical context of the Bible.30 The Book of Mormon prophets, reading plates and narrating events years distant—​in some cases, a full thousand years distant—​from the events they record, perform a form of scriptural interpretation similar to that required of nineteenth-​century American believers. The constant presence of the physical plates in The Book of Mormon generates three distinct aspects of revelation. First, prophecy becomes a material object passed down from generation to generation, producing a chain of readers who inherit the textual record and thus produce a kind of text-​based prophetic immortality. Reading, an act both internal and inherited, allows The Book of Mormon to occupy a middle ground between prophecy and history, between the visionary experiences of personal revelation and the public record of scripture. Second, by insisting on new writers who can carry on the record-​keeping, the text invents a process for creating new prophets: He who inherits and reads the plates inherits, as well, the obligation to narrate and the mantle of prophecy. Upon accepting the prophetic project, each new prophet occupies multiple narrative categories—​often serving simultaneously as character, narrator, author, and reader—​that elevate the prophet above the ordinary human plane in both spiritual and narratological terms. Third, the written text produces a system for sharing prophecies: While personal revelation is limited by individual subjectivity, the process of writing and editing allows for collective prophetic experiences, producing a more complex interchange between human and divine, and making the interaction between human prophets as central as the interaction between prophet and God. These three elements combine to create the distinctive narrative form of The Book of Mormon.

“As He Read, He Was Filled With the Spirit of the Lord”: Reading and Witnessing Mormon missionaries usually end their first discussion with prospective converts by reading “the promise of Moroni,” the assurance that all who sincerely read scripture and reflect upon it will receive an affirmative witness from God: Behold, I would exhort you that when ye shall read these things, if it be wisdom in God that ye should read them, that ye would remember how merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men . . . . And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God the Eternal Father . . . and he will manifest the truth of it unto you. (Moro 10:3–​5)31

 

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Reading occupies a privileged place in LDS practice and in The Book of Mormon: God’s truth is made manifest not just through prayer or vision but also through reading and witnessing. Moroni, in fact, invites readers to mirror his own prophetic practices. To be a reader in (and of) The Book of Mormon is to be a potential prophet. The book contains many different types of readers:  characters, narrators, soon-​to-​be-​narrators, and, through prophetic allusion, Joseph Smith and the nineteenth-​century readers who will inherit the record. The writers of The Book of Mormon are inevitably readers first, since they all either edit and summarize previous prophets’ writings or situate themselves within a genealogy of prophets whose work they have already read. Lehi’s vision, which initiates the great chain of readers, has at its center an angelic book; even though he is already in the midst of his vision, Lehi is not “filled with the spirit” until he reads. Revelatory vision and text are inseparable. Reading is also the mechanism that allows one to move from character status to narrator status; only after reading the previous record does each first-​person narrator assume his position as the producer of scripture. Reading is the only necessary first step to becoming a prophet. As Nephi prophesies, God chooses not the “learned” or the powerful, but “him that shall read the words” as the recipient of revelation (2 Ne 27:20, 23). The stakes are therefore high for the readers of The Book of Mormon itself. Because the prophet–​narrators of The Book of Mormon foreground the act of writing, they are also acutely aware of, and rather anxious about, their potential readers. Many of the narrators imagine their readers finding fault with the text. Nephi, for instance, imagines that the reader might wish for more detail about the history of the Nephites, but he (rather peevishly) defends his choices: “And I engravened that which is pleasing unto God. And if my people be pleased with the things of God, they be pleased with mine engravings which are upon these plates. And if my people desire to know the more particular part of the history of my people, they must search other plates” (2 Nephi 5–​6). Likewise, Moroni thinks the reader will be wondering why there are so many mistakes, and why the record is incomplete: “And whoso receiveth this record and shall not condemn it because of the imperfections which are in it, the same shall know of greater things than these. Behold, I am Moroni. And were it possible, I would make all things known unto you” (Morm 8:12–​15). He excuses the abridged nature of the record by explaining that the plates are too small: “I would write it also if I had room upon the plates, but I have not,” and excuses the errors by explaining that he writes in a language not his own: “And if we could have written in the Hebrew, behold, ye would have none imperfection in our record” (Morm 8:5, 9:33).

 



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It is an unusual scripture that anticipates such trouble with its readership:  Rejection of faith becomes wrapped up in potential complaints about style, technique, and editing choices. The reader becomes materially present as we are called to imagine not abstract potential converts, but specific readers with specific desires and grievances. Just as the prophets themselves insist upon their first-​personness, readers gain particularity. And those readers have great power in creating and shaping scripture; much depends upon their reading and responding properly, for a reader who can overlook imperfection in the details will complete the chain of readers and allow prophecy to be fulfilled. Even though Joseph Smith’s translation promises to arrive in a new era of faith, it will not, Moroni knows, obviate the problem of a critical and skeptical readership. Conversely, the hermeneutical debates around the higher criticism in this era explicitly invited readers to interrogate the sources of scriptural texts, the cultural biases and human errors, the seams that might show between human narrators. The Book of Mormon embraces, enhances, and draws attention to those seams. As Jared Hickman has argued, The Book of Mormon rejects the dualism suggested by the debate between liberal hermeneutics (scripture was crafted by humans) and literal hermeneutics (scripture is God’s voice) by insisting that “[a]‌ny theological authority accorded to the content is intimately bound up with the identity of the author-​narrator.”32 Human and divine are not set in opposition to one another, but are irretrievably merged. In the book of Ether, Moroni makes it clear that The Book of Mormon is being prepared not just for the descendants of Lehi and the ancient prophets, but also for one specific reader, Joseph Smith, in one specific moment, 1823. He tells contemporaneous readers that the plates are not for them: “I have told you the things which I have sealed up. Therefore touch them not, in order that ye may translate; for that thing is forbidden you except by and by it shall be wisdom in God.” God “hath commanded” him to “seal up” the plates along with “the interpreters,” the seer stones that will help Smith translate the unfamiliar language (Ether 5:1, 4:5). It is Smith’s reading, along with the testimony of the three witnesses, that will truly transform the plates into scripture. When they become translated, then they will be accessible by the whole world of “the Gentiles” and the whole world will be able to read “all [God’s] revelations” (Ether 4:7). Thus The Book of Mormon traces a transformation of readership, and of prophecy, from individual to community. In Moroni’s time, he says, the people have “dwindled in unbelief and there is none save it be the Lamanites—​and they have rejected the gospel of Christ—​therefore I am commanded that I should hide them up again in the earth” (Ether 4:3). In Joseph Smith’s time, however, when “the Gentiles . . . shall repent of their iniquity,” the plates shall be distributed to all the faithful so that all might read (Ether 4:6). The last in the line of narrators, Moroni knows that

 

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his own civilization is nearing an end and that the plates must be preserved for a future people. He looks beyond the book’s boundaries and his own historical moment, and speaks directly to its future readers: And now I Moroni have written the words which was commanded me, according to my memory. And I have told you the things which I have sealed up . . . . And unto three shall [the plates] be shewn by the power of God; wherefore they shall know of a surety that these things are true. And in the mouth of three witnesses shall these things be established; and the testimony of three and this work—​in the which shall be shewn forth the power of God and also his word, of which the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost beareth record—​and all this shall stand as a testimony against the world at the last day. (Ether 5:1–​4) The line of succession, which had previously been primarily father to son or brother to brother (with a few trusted prophets outside of the lineage), now leaps ahead to Joseph Smith, and to the “three witnesses” who will view the plates. Moreover, God himself seems to enter the line of readers and writers: Even the holy trinity “beareth record” to the word. Moroni’s prophecy points to yet another type of readerly engagement with text: witnessing. Witnesses, who testify to the truth of the record, are prominent throughout The Book of Mormon. The 1830 publication ends with the testimony of the three witnesses and the eight witnesses, all of whom avow that they have seen the elusive golden plates that Joseph Smith recovered. This testimony mirrors the structure of reading and witnessing that we find within the narrative itself. The three witnesses speak directly to future readers, “all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people, unto whom this work shall come,” and testify that they “have seen the plates,” that God’s “voice” declared their translation to be divine in origin, that God “commanded us that we should bear record of it.” The eight witnesses concur that they have “seen and hefted” the plates, that they “witness unto the world that which we have seen,” and that they “lie not, God bearing witness of it.” Witnessing encompasses the range of sensory and visionary experiences:  encountering the physical nature of scripture, its appearance, feeling, and weight; hearing God’s voice revealing its divine nature. The witnesses create a record of their experience and “[bear] witness unto the world,” which is then, just as in Moroni’s prophecy, witnessed by God, who verifies and legitimizes the claims.33 These testimonies both anticipate and result from the key acts of readers and witnesses to The Book of Mormon. They establish a cycle of witnessing: Humans encounter scripture and testify to its divine nature; their testimony then becomes scripture, verified by the divinity. Humans and God must co-​witness, verify one another, in a process that both relies on

 



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structures of empiricism and undermines empiricism by making God (himself the object of verification) one of the witnesses. Divine truth emerges not just from the text itself, but from the chain of readers and witnesses who convert the text into scripture. Anticipating a readership of skeptics, then, The Book of Mormon privileges those who can testify to the veracity of its claims, and it carefully and repeatedly lays out the process by which word becomes scripture: an encounter with text, personal revelation, testimony to others who can bear witness, and the creation of a new text with new readers. Nephi foresees this same pattern: Having read, edited, and inscribed the words of Jacob, he tells the reader that “Jacob [and Isaiah] also hath seen [Christ], as I have seen him. Wherefore I will send [ Jacob’s and Isaiah’s] words forth unto my children to prove unto them that my words are true. Wherefore by the words of three, God hath said, I  will establish my word. Nevertheless God sendeth more witnesses, and he proveth all his words” (2 Ne 11:3).34 It is not enough for Nephi to have seen Christ himself, nor is it sufficient for him to pass on Isaiah’s and Jacob’s own accounts. Nephi must read the others’ accounts, incorporate them into his own record, and combine them into “the words of three.” As Joseph Smith did in gathering the witnesses to the plates, Nephi must confront the unreliability and subjectivity of personal revelation and individual experience. Acts of reading and witnessing in The Book of Mormon drive toward making personal revelation into scripture: public, communal, and verifiable. It engages both empiricist tendencies—​the need for proof—​and evangelical ones, since that proof takes the form of personal vision. Significantly, although the 1830 Book of Mormon placed the witnesses’ testimony at the end, all subsequent publications relocated the witnesses to the beginning of the book. Thus while the historical thrust of the story [fabula] drives toward the revelation of Joseph Smith, the witnesses, and the publication of the book in 1830 as its final triumph, the temporal sequence of the narrative discourse [sjuzhet] reinforces the circularity of the narrative. While the Nephites’ story ends with the burial of the plates to be recovered by Joseph Smith, our readership begins with the revelation of Joseph Smith, the witnesses, and the publication of the book in 1830. The Book of Mormon cannot become scripture without witnesses, nor can it become a modern text, moving from ancient civilization to the nineteenth-​century United States, without readers.

“The Help of These Plates”: Writing and Editing Because The Book of Mormon always requires its manuscript to be handed down to subsequent generations, reading inevitably leads to writing—​and to a responsibility for the authorship of scripture that is shared with one’s fellow prophets

 

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and with God. The prophet–​narrators in The Book of Mormon seldom allow us to forget their presence as embodied writers; they continually remind us of their names, the circumstances of their narration, and the process by which divine revelation became translated into written form. In an age of intense debate over the human authorship of the Bible, this new scripture must have been particularly compelling. While contact with the Holy Spirit through visions and voices is still a component of Mormon prophecy, the written word is the central fact.35 A succession of sons, brothers, and other trusted men record God’s word and the history of the Nephites on engraved plates, thus establishing and keeping the faith: “For it were not possible that our father Lehi could have remember all these things, to have taught them to his children, except it were for the help of these plates . . . that thereby they could teach them to their children, and so fulfilling the commandments of God, even down to this present time” (Mosiah 1:4). Over and over, the prophets tell us that the continuity of the clan, the rise the Nephite civilization, and the eventual rise of a new faithful people when the ancient civilizations are destroyed depend upon the engraved plates. Indeed, The Book of Mormon would have little plot without them.36 Since the plates hold both divine counsel and human history, the prophets are more than mere recorders of God’s word; they are also narrators and authors who make clear choices about the story’s discourse. They emphasize repeatedly that the record is abridged: In some cases they present edited versions of longer plates, and in others, they merely summarize complex experiences. Nearly every prophet explains, as Moroni does, that “I give not the full account, but a part of the account I give,” or that “I was about to write more, but I am forbidden” (Ether 1:5, 13:13). Elizabeth Fenton has argued that “the book presents the compiling of American history as a process fraught with erasure, failure, and loss.”37 Yet as much as The Book of Mormon documents the failures of its narrators as historians, the necessary incompleteness of the record gives both epistemological and creative power to the prophets as authors. The prophet knows more than his readers and chooses which knowledge to take from the past, and which knowledge to extend into the future. Nephi, for instance, describes having to edit his father’s writings: I Nephi do not make a full account of the things which my father hath written, for he hath written many things which he saw in visions and in dreams. And he also hath written many things which he prophesied and spake unto his children, of which I shall not make a full account. But I shall make an account of my proceedings in my days. Behold, I make an abridgment of the record of my father upon plates which I  have made with mine own hands. (1 Ne 1:16–​17)

 



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Nephi is the researcher, the historian, the engraver, and even one who has forged the metal to fashion the plates—​he has created the entire realm of these records. He is also, of course, a character in his own story, traveling across the sea with his family to establish a new civilization, receiving the Spirit’s direction, and becoming the new prophet and leader of his people when Lehi dies. At the same time he is a mere reader: At this point in the narrative, he shares no experience of his father’s visions or dreams, nor does Lehi speak to him directly, but he must read of them in Lehi’s writings. Similarly, we as readers have no access to the full experiences of Nephi and his family, but must understand them only through Nephi’s abridged version. Prophecy is always mediated through layers of speech and text here. This gives the prophet great power to create and shape the textual world, and it also makes each prophet into a reader of someone else’s work. Each prophet exists on at least two narrative planes—​as an extradiegetic narrator and a reader—​and many exist as characters in their own stories as well. Jacob, similarly, describes himself as both empowered and limited by the engraving process: Now behold, it came to pass that I Jacob having ministered much unto my people in word—​and I cannot write but a little of my words because of the difficulty of engraving our words upon plates—​and we know that the things which we write upon plates must remain, but whatsoever things we write upon any thing save it be upon plates must perish and vanish away, but we can write a few words upon plates, which will give our children and also our beloved brethren a small degree of knowl­ edge concerning us or concerning their fathers. Now in this thing we do rejoice, and we labor diligently to engraven these words upon plates, hoping that our beloved brethren and our children will receive them with thankful hearts and look upon them that they may learn with joy and not with sorrow, neither with contempt, concerning their first parents. ( Jacob 4:1–​3) Jacob controls and limits our access to the original scene, choosing which few words of his original ministry to pass on to us as readers. This gives him authorial power, though he negates that power in several ways:  by emphasizing his physical inability to write more, by making himself out to be a humble worker for the greater good, and by worrying that his children might look upon him with contempt. Jacob tends to be a more anxious and cautious prophet, yet still he knows he has the power to “unfold the mystery” of the Lord to his followers ( Jacob 4:18). Like Nephi, Jacob emphasizes the importance of the human role in shaping scripture by insisting upon the written nature of his prophecy and detailing the “labor” by which the plates came to be—​the “difficulty” of producing

 

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the plates and the hard editorial choices that had to be made. When Moroni explains that an Egyptian language needed to be used, though “if our plates had been sufficiently large, we should have written in Hebrew,” or when Nephi rejoices that the promised land contains “all manner of ore, both of gold and of silver and of copper” so that he might make new plates, or when Moroni explains that the account written on his plates abridges the story written by Ether on the “twenty and four plates which were found by the people of Limhi,” the reader is called to revere the work and the laborious process of the prophets’ writing (Morm 9:33; 1 Ne 18:25; Ether 1:2). We might normally think of a prophet’s role as passing along God’s word as directly as possible; the prophet is distinctive because of his or her chosen status as one to whom to the Holy Spirit can speak, and because he or she serves as a conduit between divine and human. And certainly these prophets do submit to God’s word and, at times, convey it directly. But prophets are not usually considered editors, abridgers, or authors, the very roles that The Book of Mormon prophets repeatedly and insistently foreground. By making its readers imagine the difficulty with which the manuscript came to be and the choices that its prophets had to make at every turn—​the forging of the plates, the painstaking engraving process, the choice of language, the abridgment of God’s word, and the representation of human history—​The Book of Mormon establishes the prophet’s labor as equally important to its scriptural identity as God’s word.

“Write the Writing of the Fruit of Thy Loins unto the Fruit of Thy Loins”: Mediation and Multiplicity The divine imperative that “these plates should be handed down from one generation to another or from one prophet to another until further commandments of the Lord” necessarily creates a complex narrative structure, and compels prophets to inhabit complex narrative categories (1 Ne 19:4). In order to create and maintain an unbroken prophetic lineage, revelation must be mediated and retold, the words of one prophet rewritten by other prophets. This means that prophets inhabit—​whether simultaneously or sequentially—​the gamut of narrative categories. The prophets of the small plates (1 Nephi through Words of Mormon) each become, in time, reader, narrator, character, and author. Each of these prophets, even those who narrate the briefest of chapters, is a first-​ person homodiegetic narrator with a stake in the story and its creation, as well as a removed and abstracted historian, shifting between the narrative modes that Émile Bénveniste outlines:  histoire, or a “purely narrative and objective

 



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mode” with “the exclusion of all references to personal speakers or listeners” and discours, a primarily first-​person mode in which “every utterance assum[es] a speaker and a hearer.”38 The large plates of Nephi, which continue the history of the Nephites, were ostensibly edited and abridged by Mormon and Moroni a thousand years later, along with the plates of Ether. They thus take a different narrative strategy; while Mormon and Moroni are not homodiegetic narrators who appear as characters in the history they tell, they interject first-​person commentary and summary, give autobiographical detail, and incorporate first-​person documents (letters and sermons) from others throughout their narration. Thus over the sweep of The Book of Mormon, narrative perspective, voice, and distance change frequently. Grant Hardy notes that “[o]‌ne result is that the sheer number of disparate voices can tend to disintegrate or fragment the unity of the text.”39 At times the negotiation of these narrative roles can create awkward transitions. For instance, as Moroni (the last prophet chronologically) completes his narration of the history of the Jaredites in the Book of Ether—​and nears the end of his own life—​he narrates primarily in the mode of histoire, with no first-​ person interjection and no particular listener, viz., “And it came to pass that there arose up Shared, and he also gave battle unto Coriantumr; and he did beat him” (Ether 13:23). But as the record of Ether draws to a close, Moroni finds himself in an unusual circumstance, with some extra time on his hands: “Now I Moroni after having made an end of abridging the account of the people of Jared, I had supposed to not have written more, but I have not as yet perished. And I make not myself known to the Lamanites lest they should destroy me . . . . Wherefore I write a few more things, contrary to that which I had supposed” (Moro 1:1). In his first-​person narrative stance, he uses the discours mode, always specifying himself as speaker and another as listener. He is a character again; although he does not describe the setting, the reader is asked to imagine him in hiding from the Lamanites, who wish to kill him—​and so he writes “a few more things” to pass the time while sheltering himself from the wars outside. He takes this time to write commentary on church organization, including the priesthood, the eucharist, baptism, and church membership. Next he quotes at length from his father Mormon’s epistles on the error of infant baptism and updates on the war with the Lamanites; thus Moroni’s first-​person narration embeds Mormon’s first-​person narration to his son. Finally Moroni writes directly to new readers, “my brethren the Lamanites,” to “exhort” them to “deny not the power of God” (Moro 10:7). Again we find a rather bewildering range of narrative voices and modes:  the abstract historian materializing into specific character; the elder prophet speaking with wise first-​person authority about church practices; and the first-​person letter from father to son contained within another first-​person narration.

 

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Thus while the structure as sketched out in the sections on reading and writing suggests continuity (an unbroken lineage of recording prophets) and cyclicality (readers becoming writers becoming prophets who beget new readers), a chart of narrative modes would appear considerably more chaotic. While each narrator has a different style (Nephi the personal narrator; Mormon the historian; Moroni the “reticent” and “stumbling”40), all inhabit multiple positions and slippery roles. Because of this multiplicity of narrative personae, no given narrator can hold a single, stable position of power. As narrators they are at times fully abstract, at times personal; at times wholly authoritative, at times apologetic. As readers of others’ work they serve sometimes as powerful interpreters and sometimes as passive conveyers of scriptural or human language. Sometimes they are protagonists and heroes in their own stories, sometimes minor characters, and sometimes hundreds of years absent from the stories they superintend. These seemingly chaotic variations do not diminish the authority of the narrator–​ prophets, however. Instead, the intense focus on the mechanism of the shifts—​ a transition from one state to another rarely goes unnoticed or unremarked upon—​results in a magnification of the significance of the narrator–​prophets. When they are least significant as personal presences, they tend to hold the most authority as omniscient narrators, either historians or prophets. When they are most present as individuals—​even fallible ones—​they tend to dominate our attention as characters with the ad infinitum proliferation of first-​person “I Nephi” and “I Moroni” and “I Lehi” and “I Jacob” statements. The result is a narrative mode in which human narrative agency takes precedence over divine narrative agency. Because each narrator takes on so many personae and because there are so many narrators needed to create scripture, The Book of Mormon tends to underscore the passage of language between generations more than the exchange between God and humans. Until Moroni’s narration in the last chapter of Mormon, there is no major narrator whose voice is not subject to interruption by another first-​person document; nor is there any character who is allowed heroically to dominate the stage without contending with an interpolating narrator. The prophets are continually speaking and writing not just on behalf of God but on behalf of other people (e.g., Mormon quotes Alma, who speaks “to establish the words of Amulek and to explain things beyond”; Moroni writes “a few of the words of my father Mormon which he spake concerning faith, hope, and charity”), and it is not uncommon for the layers of narrators to reach three deep (Alma 12:1; Morm 7:1–​2). Yet despite his ubiquity, the amanuensis, editor, or spokesman is never merely secretarial. Instead the “spokesman” takes an anointed, exalted—​indeed, almost messianic—​position. At the start of 2 Nephi, for instance, we have a double first-​person narration as Nephi records his father Lehi’s words to his sons on his deathbed. Lehi (whose words are already being imparted by his son) prophesies

 



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the arrival of “a spokesman” who “shall write the writing of the fruit of thy loins unto the fruit of thy loins” (2 Ne 3:18). Commonly understood to be Moroni, this prophesied spokesman plays a Christ-​like role in the Nephite lineage, resurrecting the voices of the dead: “And it shall be as if the fruit of thy loins had cried unto them from the dust . . . . Because of their faith their words shall proceed forth out of my mouth unto their brethren which are the fruit of thy loins” (2 Ne 3:19–​20). The spokesperson ensures the eventual rise of “one mighty among them which shall do much good, both in word and in deed”: Joseph Smith himself (2 Ne3:24). Thus Nephi serves as spokesman for Lehi, who prophesies a future spokesman, Moroni, who prophesies another future spokesman, Joseph Smith. Able to raise the voices of the dead, to “pass much restoration unto the house of Israel” more than a millennium beyond the fall of the Nephite civilization, and to ensure the rise of the prophet for the new generation, the spokesman resists effacement and takes on nearly divine powers (2 Ne 3:24). Grant Hardy argues that one of the most significant narrative transitions in The Book of Mormon is the moment when Mormon transforms from historian into prophet after receiving divine revelation. This conversion takes Mormon from self-​directed narrator who holds his own authority to one who “is now speaking in the name of the Lord, with prophetic authority, oriented to the future rather than the past, and directed by God as to exactly what he should say.”41 For Hardy, Mormon must give up his historian’s authorial power in order to become a prophet and subordinate himself to God’s authorship.42 Yet, as Hardy acknowledges, Mormon underscores his struggle with God: Again and again, he tells us what he was about to do when God intervened; for example, “Behold, I were about to write them all which were engraven upon the plates of Nephi, but the Lord forbid it . . . . Therefore I Mormon do write the things which have been commanded me of the Lord” (3 Ne 26:11–​12). While Hardy reads this moment as the essential acceptance of passivity and subordination on the part of the prophet, it is important to notice that Mormon pointedly refuses to relinquish his personal presence or his first-​person voice—​and returns to his historian’s status soon after this moment. Moreover, God’s enforcing of narrative limits mimics the function that prophets have been performing themselves throughout The Book of Mormon. In the small plates, it is each prophet, not God, who commands the next and provides instructions on keeping the genealogy. Each book typically begins with an account of this commandment:  “Nephi gave me, Jacob, a commandment concerning the small plates . . . that I should not touch, save it were lightly, concerning the history of this people which are called the people of Nephi. For he said that the history of his people should be engraven upon his other plates, and that I should preserve these plates and hand them down unto my seed, from generation to generation” ( Jacob 1:1, 2–​ 3). “Now behold, I Jarom write a few words according to the commandment of

 

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my father Enos, that our genealogy may be kept” ( Jarom 1:1). “I Omni being commanded by my father Jarom that I should write somewhat upon these plates to preserve our genealogy” (Omni 1:1). We should see God’s commandment in a larger pattern of negotiation over the shape, scope, and purpose of The Book of Mormon, one in which humans participate as well. Returning to Mormon’s purported conversion from historian to prophet, we can now see this transformation as taking place within a more complex system of authorial negotiation. When Mormon obeys God’s commandments in the large plates, he writes a thousand years after the small plates were engraved, and the generational links have weakened; although Mormon receives instruction from Ammoron, he must dig up the plates on his own fourteen years later. Thus, in the absence of an ancestor, God takes the role that fathers play with other prophet–​narrators. (When Mormon’s son Moroni takes over the narration, we return to the previous structure, telling us that “I have but few things to write, which things I have been commanded by my father” [Morm 8:1].) God’s instructions tend to be about the strategies for conveying knowledge—​about the sjuzhet, not the fabula—​and he often wishes to withhold information until the readership is ready to receive it. Mormon tells us that he has gained access to divine knowledge—​knowing the identity, for instance, of three Nephites who have been granted immortality by Christ—​and though God tells him not to reveal all of this knowledge, he nevertheless possesses it, and it verifies his place in the great chain of prophets. As with other prophets in The Book of Mormon, his personal authority is amplified and his prophetic stance defined by the mediation of other voices, and like the other prophets, Mormon constantly reminds us of his mediated state. When he says that “great and marvelous works shall by wrought by” the three immortal Nephites in the future, it is easy to see a parallel to the scripture being wrought by Mormon and his fellow prophets. Like the three Nephites, their participation in the chain of prophecy converts them into a hybrid state—​not divine but neither fully human:  instead “sanctified in the flesh, that they were holy and that the powers of the earth could not hold them” (3 Ne 28:32). The prophet-​as-​spokesman, entrusted with the voices and the writings of the dead as well as the voice of Christ and the knowledge of the Holy Spirit, thus concentrates narrative power, becoming increasingly godlike. Another prophecy again makes it clear that Joseph Smith is the focal point for all of the mediated prophecies in The Book of Mormon: Ammon prophesies the arrival of “a man that can translate all records that are of ancient date,” a “seer” who “is a revelator and a prophet also”: And a gift which is greater can no man have except he should possess the power of God, which no man can; yet a man may have great power

 



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given him from God. But a seer can know of things which has passed, and also of things which is to come; and by them shall all things be revealed—​or rather shall secret things be made manifest—​and hidden things shall come to light, and things which is not known shall be made known by them, and also things shall be made known by them which otherwise could not be known. Thus God hath provided a means that man through faith might work mighty miracles. (Mosiah 8:16–​18) Although the great translator does not “possess the power of God,” he does approach godlike power, possessing foreknowledge, knowledge of the past, knowl­ edge of the “secrets” of the present, and the ability to “work mighty miracles.” The system of mediation and shared prophecy opens the messianic role to multiple people. The advent of Joseph Smith represents the end of a familial line of succession, and the beginning of a prophetic readership: Now any person who reads the scripture might become a new prophet. Although briefly concentrated in Joseph Smith while making the 1,400-​year leap from Moroni to Smith, the subsequent Mormon model of prophecy produces “widely distributed revelatory power” that allows nearly any layperson to read, prophesy, and contribute to the ever-​evolving, cyclical process of producing scripture.43

“The Sense of Our Author Is as Broad as the World” Seven years after the publication of The Book of Mormon, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of “creative reading” in “The American Scholar”: There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always true, that, as the seer’s hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his volume.44 The Book of Mormon participates in a culture of reading, writing, and mediated narration that characterizes many strains of early American literary and religious expression. Emerson’s idea that the reader, “braced by labor,” might also be a creator, and that the author, far from being singular or unitary, might be “broad as the world,” bears similarity to the openness and fertility of Mormon prophetic practice, in which every reading of scripture produces potential new prophets.

 

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Studies of Mormonism, unlike studies of Transcendentalism, often become stuck on the problem of scriptural “truth” or “fictionality” and the question of whether authorship was human or divinely inspired.45 As it was in the 1830s, reading as a faithful act is often considered to be irreconcilable with reading as a scholarly act. Yet, like Emerson’s essay, The Book of Mormon resists those dualisms at every turn by telling us that divine inspiration must be authored by humans; that personal revelation must be recorded in writing and verified by witnesses; that God must be understood as “created,” in some respects, by the human mind and the human pen. So too, as literary theory pushed toward secularism and antiauthoritarianism in the second half of the twentieth century, it became difficult to allow any elision of Author and God, since “[w]‌e know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-​God) but a multi-​dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.”46 The drive to “desacralize the image of the Author” extends into narrative theory, where Jonathan Culler has argued that “the frequently articulated analogy between God and the author” does not work “if, for instance, we do not believe in an omniscient and omnipotent God” or if we believe that “God is by definition perfect, and . . . must be all-​knowing.”47 Such refusals to link divinity and authorship lack imagination as to the range of “Gods” historically available, even within the relatively narrow confines of an “omniscient,” “perfect,” and “all-​knowing” Christian God of the post-​ Enlightenment era. The God of Millerites, Baptists and Quakers; the God of slave rebels and female second comings; the God of higher critics and evangelicals—​ each of these human interpretations and incarnations of God informs a specific power relationship with humans. The prophets and preachers who embodied the divine in writing, visions, or speech claimed particular spiritual powers for themselves. The God of The Book of Mormon becomes nearly human: He gets involved in the apparatus of prophecy and plate-​making; he occasionally appears bodily “like unto flesh and blood”; and he speaks “in plain humility, even as a man telleth another in mine own language” (Ether 3:4–​5, 6, 12:39). And the readers of The Book of Mormon, in turn, become nearly divine by means of shared revelation, inherited prophecy, creative reading, and reciprocal witnessing.

Notes 1. 1 Nephi 1:4. All Book of Mormon citations are from Royal Skousen, ed., The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2009), and will hereafter be cited parenthetically by chapter and verse. 2. Grant Hardy’s Understanding The Book of Mormon:  A Reader’s Guide (New  York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) has laid the essential groundwork for future studies of narrative technique in The Book of Mormon.

 



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3. Hardy, Understanding The Book of Mormon, xix. 4. Kathleen Flake, “Translating Time:  The Nature and Function of Joseph Smith’s Narrative Canon,” The Journal of Religion 87.4 (Oct, 2007):  507; Terryl Givens, By the Hand of Mormon:  The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion (New  York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 217. 5. Terryl Givens, Book of Mormon:  A Very Short Introduction, Guide (New  York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 21. 6. Givens, in The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction, calls “Personal revelation” one of the primary themes of The Book of Mormon: “Prophecy and revelation contract into the sphere of the quotidian, the personal, and the immediate, where they proliferate and flourish” (21). David Holland has argued that personal revelation, open to nearly all laypeople, is a key distinction of Mormonism. David F. Holland, Sacred Borders: Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 155. 7. John H. Noyes, Confession of Religious Experience: Including a History of Modern Perfectionism (Leonard & Company, Printers, 1849), 15. 8. Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1972), 484. 9. For more on the Prophet Matthias, see Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-​Century America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). For more on the religious culture of the 1830s, see Grant Underwood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Louis P. Masur, 1831: Year of Eclipse (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001). 10. Laura Thiemann Scales, “Narrative Revolutions in Nat Turner and Joseph Smith,” American Literary 24.2 (Spring 2012): 205–​233. 11. For more on these structural changes, see Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). 12. Rowe cites the following statistics:  “Between 1776 and 1850 the percentage of Congregationalists among total Christian adherents dropped from 20.4 to 4, of Presbyterians from 19 to 11.6, and of Episcopalians from 15.7 to 3.5. Methodists, on the other hand . . . rose [from 2.5 to 34.2] . . . and Baptists increased their share from 16.9 to 20.5 percent. The War of 1812 accelerated the shift.” David L. Rowe, God’s Strange Work: William Miller and the End of the World (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2008), 71. 13. Holland, Sacred Borders, 112–​113. 14. Underwood, Millenarian World, 58. 15. Thomas R. Gray, “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” reprint, in The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material, Henry Irving Tragle, comp. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971), 309. 16. Gray, “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” 310. For more on narrative voice in Nat Turner’s “Confessions,” see especially M. Cooper Harris, “Where Is the Voice Coming From? Rhetoric, Religion, and Violence in The Confessions of Nat Turner,” Soundings:  An Interdisciplinary Journal (2006): 135–​179; Scales, “Narrative Revolutions in Nat Turner and Joseph Smith”; and Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations:  Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1993). 17. Johnson and Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias, 64. 18. Johnson and Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias, 5. 19. Barbara Packer, “Origin and Authority: Emerson and the Higher Criticism,” in Reconstructing American Literary History, Sacvan Bercovitch, ed. (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1986), 71. 20. Theodore Parker, “A Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity, Preached at the Ordination of Mr. Charles C.  Shackford, in the Hawes Place Church in Boston,” May 19, 1841 (Boston: the author, 1841). Reprinted in Lawrence Buell, ed., The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings (New York: Modern Library, 2006), 169. 21. Jerry Wayne Brown, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 1800–​1870: The New England Scholars (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), 19–​20. 22. Paul Gutjahr argues that The Book of Mormon, because Smith claimed to have translated it directly from the original plates, functions as an antidote to the historicist hermeneutics of the

 

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day: “The Book of Mormon stood as an answer to a mutilated Gospel record . . . . Smith offered American Protestants no mere revision, but an uncorrupted biblical text.” (Paul Gutjahr, An American Bible:  A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777–​1880 [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999], 153). But I wish to emphasize not the “purity” or unity of the manuscript, but its multiplicity and self-​conscious mediation (153). 23. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things:  Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 8; Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 114. 24. William Miller, “Memoir of William Miller,” in Views of the Prophecies and Prophetic Chronology, Selected from Manuscripts of William Miller With a Memoir of his Life, Joshua V. Himes, ed. (Boston: n.p., 1842), 9. 25. Miller, “Memoir of William Miller,” 11–​12. 26. Holland, Sacred Borders, 159. 27. Underwood, Millenarian World, 117. 28. Holland, Sacred Borders, 155. 29. See, for example, Terryl Givens on “dialogic revelation” (Givens, By the Hand of Mormon, 209–​239) or Holland, Sacred Borders, 141–​157. 30. Holland, Sacred Borders, 106. 31. Thanks to Jared Hickman for noting the relevance of this passage. 32. Jared Hickman, “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse,” American Literature 86.3 (2014):  447. See also David Holland on “revelatory particularity” (Holland, Sacred Borders, 147). 33. Skousen, Book of Mormon, 737–​738. 34. In saying “by the words of three, God hath said, I will establish my word,” Nephi echoes both Paul’s letter to the skeptical Corinthians (2 Cor13:1) and Deut 17:6, on the necessity of having multiple witnesses before executing idolaters. Nephi turns legal practices into doctrine. 35. For more on the centrality of writing, see Hickman, “Amerindian Apocalypse,” 446. 36. We learn early on that the plates containing the “record of the Jews and a genealogy of [Nephi’s] forefathers” are so irreplaceable as to be worth killing for. Nephi returns to Jerusalem from exile to fetch the plates from Laban. After some struggle and failed negotiation, Nephi, guided by the Holy Spirit, decapitates a drunken, sleeping Laban and takes the plates (1 Ne 3:3). 37. Elizabeth Fenton, “Open Canons:  Sacred History and American History in The Book of Mormon,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth Century Americanists 1.2 (Fall 2013): 340. 38. Émile Bénveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. M. E. Meek (Coral Gables, FL, University of Miami Press, 1971), 74, quoted in Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1978), 188. 39. Hardy, Understanding The Book of Mormon, 146. 40. Ibid.,  218. 41. Ibid.,  211. 42. Ibid.,  210. 43. Holland, Sacred Borders, 155. 44. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings, Lawrence Buell, ed. (New York: The Modern Library, 2006), 89. 45. Even Grant Hardy’s masterful reading of The Book of Mormon’s narrative form cannot escape this trap; though he attempts to evade the problem by reading “within the confines of the text itself,” he tips his hand occasionally, as when pointing out that “the chronology is handled virtually without glitches . . . though Joseph Smith’s wife . . . explicitly denied that he had he had written something out beforehand” (Hardy, Understanding The Book of Mormon, 7). 46. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 146. 47. Barthes, “The Death of the Author”; Jonathan Culler, “Omniscience,” Narrative 12.1 ( Jan. 2004): 23.

 

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Nephite Secularization; or, Picking and Choosing in The Book of Mormon Grant Shreve Every man has a natural, and, in our country, a constitutional right to be a false prophet, as well as a true prophet. –​Joseph Smith, “The King Follett Sermon” And they are free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and death, according to the captivity and power of the devil. –​2 Nephi 2:27

Sometime in 1820—​or so the story goes—​a fourteen-​year-​old Joseph Smith, “wrought up in [his] mind, respecting the subject of religion” and vexed by “the different systems taught by the children of men,” ventured into the woods to ask for divine guidance about which one among the competing sects that had by then flooded the “burned-​over” district of western New York was “right” and which “wrong.”1 God, he reasoned, “could not be the author of such confusion,” and so he pleaded for clarity, armed with the words of the epistle of James: “But if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all generously and without reproach, and it will be given to him” ( Jas 1:5). Alone in the forest, he then witnessed God and Christ descend from heaven in a pillar of light to dispense the promised wisdom. The two divine figures, however, did not instruct him about which existing system to choose; instead, they told him that all were false. But this blanket negation was not the end of the story, of course, for subsequent revelations would reportedly lead Smith to a set of plates buried in a hill near Palmyra, New York, that once translated would become known as The Book of Mormon. There is an admirable matter-​of-​factness to Smith’s first vision. Confronted with disparate, even contradictory, creeds, he reasonably turned to an ultimate source to resolve, as he put it, this “war of words, and tumult of opinions.”2 And as the verse Grant Shreve, Nephite Secularization; or, Picking and Choosing in The Book of Mormon. In: Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon. Edited by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190221928.003.0009

 

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from James had promised, he received his answer. No doubt scores of thoughtful fourteen year olds then and now, upon facing a sprawl of religious possibilities, have asked to know which is the right one to follow. But Smith’s experience, shaped by the conditions of religious life in his historical moment and animated by his furtive and penetrating imagination, uncovered tectonic movements in the background of American religious and social life of the early nineteenth century, revealing not only the deep anxieties of having to choose a religion but also a method (divine revelation) by which such a choice could be made. Because it hews so closely to the patterns of the classic American evangelical conversion narrative, Smith’s first vision has struck many as a mere duplication of a well-​worn form of Protestant religious experience. Indeed, practically all the evangelical luminaries of Smith’s own moment and before ventured alone into the woods to empty their hearts in prayer. The narratives of men like Charles Grandison Finney, Jonathan Edwards, and John Marrant, to name a few, are full of rich, sensory details and vivid descriptions of profound transformations of the heart. Finney, for instance, recalls in his Memoirs the “waves and waves of liquid love” that rolled over him during his conversion, and Edwards writes of the comparatively mild but no less nourishing “inward, sweet delight in God and divine things.”3 Yet nowhere in Smith’s first vision is there a description of the agonies and ecstasies of conversion. He presents himself not as one whose heart needs changing but one whose mind needs persuading. “Information,” he told the prophet Matthias in 1835 during their infamous meeting, was what he “most desired” at the time.4 Smith’s need to know which among the multitude of clashing creeds he should cling to transforms the deeply affective and frequently irrational experience of evangelical conversion into a fundamentally rational one. As the English polymath Sir Thomas Browne wrote in defense of a religious faith that did not depend on visible miracles, “to credit ordinary and visible objects is not faith, but persuasion.”5 In Smith’s first vision, the conventional scene of religious conversion collapses into something akin to rhetorical persuasion, and divine intervention settles a state of cognitive dissonance rather than ravishing a sinful heart with infinite love.6 By turning the evangelical conversion narrative into a story about the resolution of the sociological and theological crisis posed by religious voluntarism, Smith signals just how far the imperative to choose had permeated the region of his upbringing. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century the “burned-​over district” became, in the words of one historian, a “center of gravity for spiritual stimuli,” a hotbed of theological innovation fueled by a profusion of religious zeal.7 Between upstart prophets, nomadic sects, masonic chapters, and a medley of Protestant denominations vying tirelessly for new congregants (Universalists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists among them) the social world that was

 



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growing up along the banks of the Erie Canal was well primed to foster a deep sense of uncertainty within those who had come to care for the fate of their immortal souls. Furthermore, the imperative to choose a religion in a territory bereft of an established church and swarming with religious sects is indicative of wider changes then occurring within Western modernity that here took on distinctively American forms.8 Smith was among the first generation in the United States to experience what the sociologist Peter Berger calls the “universalization of heresy,” in which heresy—​here thought of in both its etymological sense of haeresis, or “choice,” as well as its more familiar theological sense—​shifts from being a “possibility” to a “necessity” as a result of the pluralization of disparate worldviews. Under these conditions, Berger argues, “picking and choosing becomes an imperative.”9 In his monumental work, A Secular Age, philosopher Charles Taylor shows how Berger’s pluralization thesis remains bound (at least within Latin Christendom) to a story of secularization. Historically understood as a sociological process describing the retreat or decline of religious belief under the peculiar pressures of modernity, secularization reigned for much of the twentieth century as a master narrative for modern sociology. In its most familiar formulations, scholars have pointed to the excision of theological language from the public sphere and the perceived decline in religious belief among individuals as evidence of this movement. But the secularization thesis, once posited as an inevitable consequence of modernization, has come under intense scrutiny during the last three decades as religiosity has exploded across the globe. Taylor’s version of secularization, however, focuses not on the mostly debunked (or at least unevenly distributed) theses of privatization and decline but rather on the changing conditions that govern how individuals experience religious belief. In his view, secularization describes the shift “from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.”10 Among the many threads of Taylor’s sweeping argument is his claim that modern secularity rests upon a changing conception of the self. Selves that were once “open and porous and vulnerable to a world of spirits and powers” are steadily supplanted by selves that are “buffered,” inured from the forces of the beyond through a virtually impermeable barrier that separates self from world and in which “the possibility exists of taking a distance from, disengaging from everything outside the mind.”11 This capacity for detachment makes the experience of belief as choice a live possibility and, by means of a process of “mutual fragilization” generated by the contact between competing religious and nonreligious worldviews, multiplies indefinitely the kinds of belief that can be chosen.

 

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The young Smith undoubtedly encountered the existential trial of religious choice that Taylor and Berger identify, but Taylor’s framework nevertheless fails to explain adequately how Smith and so many of his contemporaries experienced secularity, which we may here define as the set of background conditions that “constitut[es] the real in a social imaginary and establish[es] religion as a category.”12 This is so first because Smith’s dilemma was occasioned not by the predominating presence of unbelief (as in Taylor’s account) but by an array of contradictory orthodoxies. There was, in short, too much belief percolating Smith’s religious milieu rather than too little. And second, the self-​experiencing this particular dilemma was neither exclusively porous nor exclusively buffered. As many historians have noted, the burned-​over district was a region still teeming with magical forces, and Smith himself had a reputation among his neighbors as an able scryer and treasure seeker, an individual capable of corresponding with subterranean powers to locate valuable hidden artifacts.13 The self that Smith presents in his accounts of the first vision is at once open to the interventions of magical forces yet nevertheless destabilized by the din of irreconcilable religious truth claims; it is a self that is kept porous by the collective faith in magical forces yet buffered by the cognitive dissonance produced by sectarianism. In a case like Smith’s, concepts like disenchantment or buffering do little therefore to explain the experience of religious choice.14 Taylor begins his study of secularity with the question, “What does it feel like to live within a secular age?” Any answer to this question, the historian John Lardas Modern has asserted, must “explain those processes . . . in which religion becomes naturalized as an option rather than as an obligation.”15 Smith’s solitary prayer in the wilderness gives us a glimpse into the experience of religious optionality, but it is The Book of Mormon that aspires to explain, in its own distinctive terms, how this reality came to be. Smith’s supposed discovery and translation of an ancient set of golden plates were the marvelous and baroque culmination of events that began with his adolescent arboreal plaint. Discovered in a hill near Palmyra, New York, their solidity and weight provided a concrete resolution to an ephemeral if powerfully felt anxiety. The book strives to quell the problem of religious choice through an astonishing—​if deeply problematic—​gathering of Hebraic scripture, counterfactual Amerindian history, and Protestant pluralism. But its narrative is no mere reflection of the conditions of Smith’s religious milieu, for its epic narrative of the decline and fall of the Nephite people is also an alternative history of how religion came to be seen as a choice rather than an obligation and an exploration of how religious truth might continue to be asserted under such conditions. A story of the transatlantic exodus of a pre-​Christian group of Israelites from Jerusalem to the Americas, The Book of Mormon has the distinction of thinking through American history without recourse to the history

 



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of Europe. The secularization story it tells therefore bypasses Eurocentric narratives of secularization like Taylor’s in order to carve out a fresh historical channel to explain the emergence of religious choice in a world unambiguously penetrated by the divine and unencumbered by the institutional weight of the Catholic Church. In crafting such a story from scratch—​one in which the gravitational force of the old orthodoxies is notably absent—​The Book of Mormon explores the furthest implications of the naturalization of choice and at the same time speculates how this historical process might be reversed through the mechanism of revelation. In what follows, I reconstruct the submerged tale of Nephite secularization in The Book of Mormon through a consideration first of the peculiar trajectories of Nephite political and spiritual institutions and then of the ways that heterodoxy expresses itself in the public sphere. This story is confined to what are known as the large plates, the series of historical books (Mosiah–​Mormon) that Smith translated first during the period April–​June 1829 but that appear after the small plates (1 Nephi–​Jacob) in the published manuscript. In the conclusion, I turn to those sections of the book that Smith translated last (the small plates) in order to examine how the book itself, in all its materiality, attempts to resolve the problems posed by Smith’s particular experience of secularity in the early nineteenth-​century United States.16 *** Nephite secularization is not European secularization. This is, it is not a process born out of ecclesiastic infighting, institutional fragmentation, and the rise of political powers independent of a universal spiritual institution (the Catholic Church). Instead, it begins with the disarticulation of theological authority from political authority and the creation of a public sphere in which dissenting voices compete for congregants. This pluralization of religious possibilities, I aim to show, eventually spawns a form of unbelief that radicalizes the principle of choice into a peculiarly Nephite brand of secularism, a “self-​sufficient humanism” (Taylor’s term) whose legitimacy is grounded in the denial of a prophetic tradition rather than the rejection of a spiritual institution. This immanent humanism, in turn, creeps into the social imaginary and produces a public that is—​approximately—​ phenomenologically secular.17 But this particular social process also occurs within a world that is never actually disenchanted. Nephite selves eventually become buffered, but the world they are buffered from has not changed: signs, wonders, heavenly emissaries, and revelations continue to abound. The cataclysmic theophany of the resurrected Christ in 3 Nephi, I will argue, erupts into the narrative as a collective and undoubtable manifestation of divine presence whose function is to reverse the secularizing trajectory of Nephitic life.

 

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The book of Mosiah, which is the first book inscribed on the large plates of Mormon, begins almost in the manner of a fairy tale. It opens at the tail end of a long period of stability and social unity brought about through the benevolent reign of King Benjamin. A monarch and a prophet, a sovereign and a high priest, Benjamin is first seen as he is preparing to transfer his crown to his son Mosiah. Before he abdicates the throne, however, he delivers one final address to his subjects. His long dispensation, which he proclaims to all his people, is public in the fullest sense of the word. The buzzing hive of human life that swarms around the temple to hear the king is so numerous that Benjamin is forced to “erect” a tower in order that “his people might hear the words which he should speak unto them” (Mosiah 2:7). In the address, Benjamin relates a recent visit paid him by an angel of the Lord who had delivered a prophecy of the coming Christ. (At this point in the large plates, it is ambiguous whether any such prophecies had been made prior.) The redemptive force of this prophetic vision prompts him to rename his subjects the “people of Christ,” a designation that in one fell swoop links theological expectation with ethnic identity and territorial domain. It is a signal moment of perfect religious and political unity. But when Benjamin’s reign concludes and his son Mosiah assumes the crown, this harmonious unanimity is fractured; the geography of the book begins to expand, and internal divisions and political reconfigurations begin to tear and fragment the tightly knit social fabric that Benjamin had woven. Mosiah turns out to be the last of the Nephite monarchs, and his final sovereign act is to abolish the institution of the monarchy itself. This sets in motion a process that progressively distinguishes religion from politics within Nephite culture. Mosiah’s decision to disassemble the office of the king stems both from the fact that none of his own sons wish to assume the crown—​which would precipitate an interruption in the monarchical line and leave a power vacuum after his death—​as well as the example of the wicked King Noah, whose life and reign prove to Mosiah that not all monarchs are by nature benevolent. In place of the monarchy he institutes a diffuse system of judges, the structure of which reads like a hybrid of a republican government and the system of judges described in the Hebrew bible. Although this legislative–​judicial system retains a theological grounding (the judges are responsible for “establish[ing] the laws of God” in Zarahemla and “judg[ing] the people according to his commandments” [Mosiah 29:13]), because they are chosen “by the voice of the people” (Mosiah 29:29) each judge occupies a secular office independent from the Nephite church. The division effected between priests and judges is a subtle one but with important consequences, for between the end of the book of Mosiah and the beginning of the book of Alma church–​state relations within Nephite culture undergo another dramatic transformation—​one the book does not explicitly chronicle—​ by legalizing a nascent form of religious liberty. The institution of judges and the

 



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steady dislodgement of theological from political authority creates conditions whereby belief in the Messiah, which in The Book of Mormon is a necessary component of social stability and a cornerstone of orthodoxy, ceases to be a given. The liberty these new political conditions afford enables dissent to enter the public sphere, a transformative process that both naturalizes religious choice and generates competitive orthodoxies. The slow drift of religion and politics into semi-​autonomous spheres thus marks the institutional prelude to Nephite secularization. And, just as Smith went into the wilderness to ask which of the competing sects he had encountered in Palmyra was right and which wrong, The Book of Mormon grapples with the problem of how the principle of religious liberty, which produces multiple dissenting groups, can coexist with a particular form of orthodox belief. Nephite approaches to the problems raised by religious liberty are mentioned twice in the large plates. Both are in the book of Alma and both occur in relation to a specific instance of heretical intrusion into the public sphere. Each, however, resolves the problem quite differently. The fact that explicit reflections on the shifting meanings of religious liberty are paired with representations of the consequences of such a policy helps to chart the book’s increasingly sophisticated narratological solutions to the problems posed by religious difference. The first of these moments appears in Alma 1 in response to the sudden rise of the roving preacher Nehor. Nehor, we learn, has been disseminating a doctrine of theological universalism (all people are saved regardless of conduct) and a defense of a tax-​supported clergy. On one of his itinerant journeys he encounters the Christian hero Gideon, and the two argue with one another over Nehor’s beliefs until Nehor, enraged, suddenly murders his interlocutor, a crime we are led to believe is a direct consequence of his belief in universal salvation. Since Nehor believes himself saved regardless of his actions, the logic goes, what’s the harm in murder? When he is eventually apprehended, Nehor is tried only for Gideon’s murder and not for his erroneous beliefs. Yet, with his head on the chopping block, he nevertheless confesses his error. What it is that prompts this eleventh-​hour change of heart, however, remains decidedly vague: “And it came to pass that . . . they carried [Nehor] upon the top of the hill Manti, and there he was caused, or rather did acknowledge . . . that what he had taught to the people was contrary to the word of God” (Alma 1:15, emphasis added). The semantic gulf between “was caused” and “did acknowledge” is not a trivial one and leaves the actual cause of Nehor’s repentance frustratingly indeterminate. Underlying this episode is the claim that bad conduct is a direct consequence of bad belief, which in this case implies that a belief in universal salvation lifts the prohibition on murder. We might call this the cynical argument in defense of religious liberty, one that the novelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick—​a contemporary of Smith’s—​dramatizes to great effect in her anti-​Calvinist novel A New-​England

 

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Tale (1822). The explanation of this principle that the narrator (Mormon) offers comports with the events described in the text. Noting the fact that Nehor’s eventual execution has not prevented the spread of his doctrine, Mormon observes that numerous individuals continued “preaching false doctrines; and this they did for the sake of riches and honor. Nevertheless, they durst not lie, if it were known, for fear of the law, for liars were punished; therefore they pretended to preach according to their belief; and now the law could have no power on any man for his belief ” (Alma 1:17, emphasis added). Mormon’s displeasure with the law’s inability to punish false beliefs is palpable. False prophets, he claims, use the freedom of belief as a loophole to get away with deliberate lying. In this view, religious freedom is nothing more than a tool for deceit. Nevertheless, as Nehor’s case exemplifies, freedom of belief continues to be permitted because it is assumed that erroneous beliefs will result, at the end of the day, in criminal behavior punishable by law. The supposed linkage of good practice to right belief and bad practice to heterodox belief thus allows the law to legislate belief indirectly, a work-​around solution that goes some way toward explaining how disparate religious systems can be allowed to coexist without threatening the orthodoxy they challenge. By asserting an unambiguous correlation between belief and practice, however, the treatment of religious liberty and the public containment of dissent in Alma 1 is overly reductive. For what is to be done when radical dissent fails to issue in criminal acts and when the content of dissenting beliefs challenges a prevailing orthodoxy on the grounds of reason rather than of self-​interest? In Alma 30 is an episode that parallels this earlier one, but it substantially reformulates the terms of the previous scene even as it retains its structure. The resemblances between the two are immediately apparent: Both contain narratorial discussions of religious liberty and both represent the rise and eventual downfall of a popular heretical preacher. The critical revision that separates these two scenes, however, lies in the degree to which choice has become a central theological problem and the richness with which it is figured. The chapter begins with a restatement of Nephite religious freedom, but this time Mormon treats it as a centerpiece of religious orthodoxy rather than a regrettable necessity of social life: Now there was no law against a man’s belief; for it was strictly contrary to the commands of God that there should be a law which should bring men on to unequal grounds. For thus saith the scripture, ‘Choose ye this day, whom ye will serve.’ Now if a man desired to serve God, it was his privilege; or rather, if he believed in God it was a privilege to serve him; but if he did not believe in him there was no law to punish him. (Alma 30:9)

 



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In this positive, if guarded, defense of the principle of religious choice the absence of a law that would punish individuals for their beliefs is no longer treated as an oversight to be exploited by the deceitful and lamented by the faithful, but is in fact a legal realization of the “commands of God.” For a society to require uniform belief would, Mormon concludes, “bring men on unequal grounds” and deny them the “privilege” of choice. The prooftext he offers for this claim is Josh 24:8 wherein the biblical judge Joshua, addressing all the tribes of Israel in Canaan, asks his audience to decide what god or gods they will serve: “And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” ( Josh 24:15). Joshua’s audience unanimously answers this command by saying, “God forbid that we should forsake the Lord, to serve other gods” ( Josh 24:16–​17). Where Joshua’s imperative leaves no ambiguity as to the right choice, Mormon’s citation of the verse uses the speech not to underscore what the right choice is but to legitimize choice as a precondition of orthodox belief. This shift reveals the degree to which the naturalization of choice has become a keystone of piety within Nephite culture. This defense of choice is a prelude to the introduction of Korihor, another false prophet who roams the countryside preaching a doctrine that would not have seemed out of place among freethinkers in the early nineteenth-​century United States. Korihor is a more richly rendered dissenter than the heterodox strawman Nehor, and, unlike those of his predecessor, Korihor’s beliefs don’t result in any conduct punishable by law. As far as we can tell, his behavior is unimpeachable. Moreover, he’s afforded far more space than any other dissenter in The Book of Mormon to articulate and defend his views, which, to eyes grown accustomed to panegyrics of human autonomy and to critiques of the excesses of religious authority, have the ring not only of familiarity but also of sensibility. Finally, and most important, where Nehor had differed on only very specific points of ecclesiology (a tax-​supported priestly class) and theology (universal salvation), Korihor rejects Nephite orthodoxy wholesale. The threat he poses is more far-​reaching because he issues direct challenges to the messianic prophecies that are the keystone of Nephite theology. Korihor doesn’t just peddle new theological baubles; he embodies choice as an existential condition. Motivating Korihor’s proselytizing is his denunciation of the prophecies of the coming of Christ, which he descries as nothing more than the “foolish tradition of your fathers” (Alma 30:14). He condemns these traditions first on the grounds that they are improbable (“How do ye know of their surety? Behold, ye cannot know of things which ye do not see; therefore ye cannot know that there shall be a Christ”) and second on their misuse by Nephite religious leaders who invoke these “visions and pretended mysteries” to oppress and manipulate

 

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a credulous people (Alma 30:15). Korihor goes on to pathologize the Nephite prophets themselves by reducing visionary experience to the “effect of a frenzied mind” (Alma 30:16). In place of the old prophecies, Korihor proposes a philosophy of immanent self-​reliance and human perfectibility, declaring that “every man fared in this life according to the management of the creature; therefore, every man prospered according to his genius, and that every man conquered according to his strength; and whatsoever a man did was no crime” (Alma 30:17). Korihor’s idealization of the “management of the creature” extends choice beyond either believing or not believing in God—​although this is where it begins—​into a philosophy of untroubled and unrestrained human autonomy, a valorization of the will and a celebration of atomistic human flourishing. His is a worldview that radicalizes the principle of choice by extending it beyond religion to every facet of human life; it is the heretical counterpart to Mormon’s orthodox defense of religious liberty. We should pause here to note that Korihor’s articulation of his self-​sufficient humanism marks a critical point in the larger story of Nephite secularization, for it is at this moment that Nephite secularization and Nephite secularism (or Korihorism) intersect with Taylor’s narrative of secularization in the West. For Taylor, the availability of exclusive (i.e., immanent) humanism as a live option for individuals is the crucial harbinger of the “coming of modern secularity.”18 Exclusive humanism, argues Taylor, is defined by its having “no final goals beyond human flourishing,” as apt a characterization as any for Korihor’s philosophy.19 Considered in this light, we might think of Korihor as the first Nephite secularist and perhaps even the first representative of exclusive humanism in the Americas. But as we subsequently see, Taylorian secularism and Nephite secularism, although they share many common assumptions, are not simply equivalents of one another. The secularization story Taylor tells in A Secular Age tracks how exclusive humanism became a legitimate option in European history through a series of complex intellectual, institutional, and theological reforms within Latin Christendom. It’s not a linear narrative by any means (Taylor calls it a “zig-​ zagging story”), but its hairpin turns and unintended consequences notwithstanding, it is fundamentally a story about the Catholic Church, the institutional bastion of orthodox Christianity. But the politico-​theological dilemma posed by the changing roles of the Catholic Church in Europe, which the political theorist Pierre Manent has called the “key to European development,” is a dynamic conspicuously absent from Nephite history.20 There is no equivalent in Nephite church history to Taylor’s Master Reform Narrative (MRN), in which reform-​ minded friars gave way to the early Protestants who, in turn, created space for the rise of latitudinarians and Deists (the forerunners of modern humanists), a steady movement of reformation within the church that had the unintended

 



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effect of Christianizing the Christianity right out of Europe. In Taylor’s account these historical and ecclesiastical changes opened the floodgates for an explosion of worldviews, each of which attempted to mediate in its own way the poles of orthodox Christianity and unbelief. Nephite civilization, by contrast, because it effects political disestablishment and the naturalization of religious choice through quasi-​biblical forms of governance, ends up producing an exclusive humanism differently situated. First, Nephite humanism is not the cause of pluralization but the effect of a public sphere already pluralized, and second, the orthodoxy against which Korihor rages is not a monolithic institution (the Catholic Church) but a diffuse tradition of messianic prophecy. Korihor’s humanism is therefore distinctive insofar as it legitimizes itself through its declared opposition to a particular prophetic tradition within a pre-​advent New World culture, the validity of which would be decided once and for all when the Christ either is or is not born, crucified, and resurrected. The explicit claim at the heart of Nephite orthodoxy makes it so that any heretical opposition is potentially falsifiable. Whereas in Taylor’s narrative the variety of belief positions generated by exclusive humanism multiplies indefinitely, Korihor’s humanism, because it opposes a very specific set of prophetic utterances, is invested with a distinctly temporal dimension. Either the prophecies of a messiah will be gloriously fulfilled or they will be refuted once and for all. The Book of Mormon flags this temporal aspect of Korihor’s apostasy by referring to him as an “anti-​christ” (Alma 30:6). Although other figures in The Book of Mormon also warrant this title, Korihor is the only one to whom it’s actually applied. As it’s used here, “anti-​christ” should be understood in a sense nearer to its original meaning—​drawn from the first and second epistles of John—​ which denoted merely an individual who denied Jesus’s divinity rather than (as we now tend to hear it used) a singular antagonist to Christ whose appearance in the world heralds the end of days.21 The word is thus a convenient term to characterize a class of people who deny Jesus’s messianic status. But where the epistolist uses “anti-​christ” to refer to post-​advent deniers of the Christ, The Book of Mormon uses it in a pre-​advent context, which is to say that these dissenters deny things to come and not things that have already occurred. The virtue of this proleptic orientation is that it attaches the equivalent of a countdown timer to all religious dissent. If the old prophecies are fulfilled then denial (and thus dissent from Nephite orthodoxy) will be impossible. Before we can consider the endgame of Nephite secularism in the fulfillment of messianic prophecy it is instructive to ask how—​in the moment of Korihor’s appearance on the Nephite scene—​orthodoxy can be defended without sacrificing the imperative to choose, which as Mormon’s orthodox defense of the principle of religious liberty quoted above demonstrates, had become a precondition for

 

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Nephite religious life. How, to put it another way, can individuals be brought to accept religious truth without being compelled by law to conform to it? The problem, as in Smith’s first vision, is one of persuasion and not conversion. In the Korihor episode, persuasion initially takes the form of argumentation when High Priest Alma confronts Korihor about his beliefs. The encounter between the two religious leaders is one of few in The Book of Mormon where the narrative mode borders on the novelistic. The antebellum novel, it should be said, by virtue of its investments in character and plot, was a genre much more deeply committed to the ideals of deliberation and dialogue than The Book of Mormon. (One might think here of the verbal exchanges over religious belief and practice in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, or Harriet Beecher Stowe.) As scholars like Sandra Gustafson and Amanda Anderson have demonstrated, deliberation and argumentation are two of the novel’s principal means of guiding characters toward truth.22 Curiously, however, the dispute between Alma and Korihor ultimately amounts to nothing. Even after Alma methodically refutes his accusations, Korihor holds fast to his heresy. When their exchange reaches a standstill Korihor insists that the only way he will be “convinced that there is a God” is if Alma shows him a “sign” (Alma 30:43). Alma at first resists his antagonist’s demand. But Korihor continues to press him on this point until Alma finally relents, telling his interlocutor that he shall have his sign; Korihor, he says, “shall be struck dumb” and “shall no more have utterance” (Alma 30:49). And, in an instant, he is. The miraculous intervention persuades Korihor of God’s existence and power, who—​now incapable of speech—​writes his confession on a piece of bark. The scene, which begins as a nuanced theological dialogue that seems as if it might model a liberal faith in the power of reasoned argument, quickly devolves into a demonstration of argument’s incapacity to persuade. In a theologically inflected retort to the aspirations of the liberal novel, The Book of Mormon suggests that only the unambiguous intervention of supernatural forces can finally do the work of persuasion. This underlying claim of the episode is further insisted upon in the content of Korihor’s confession. Having been cowed by the power Alma commands, Korihor admits he did not arrive at his views through a process of careful reasoning, but that the devil had “appeared unto [him] in the form of an angel, and said unto [him], ‘Go and reclaim this people, for all they have all gone astray after an unknown God’ ” (Alma 30:52). In a world of semi-​porous selves, even one’s most deeply held beliefs, it would seem, are the product of either true or false revelation. No wonder, then, that argumentation proves to be an inadequate means of persuasion, acting as little more than ornamentation laid atop primary experiences of intuition or revelation. Religious choice, then, is a choice between revealed claims and divine intervention. Whether via signs, wonders, or revelation, it is the only effective means

 



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of persuasion. But this is not to say that choice is in any way obviated by the primacy of revelation. Although their outcomes have the air of inevitability, the encounter between Korihor and Alma and similar episodes throughout The Book of Mormon are not “metaphysically rigged” in the way Gustafson argues many episodes from the Hebrew Bible are. Demonstrations of divine power enter only to provide evidence of truth, but they nevertheless remain at some fundamental level resistible.23 Individual agency therefore, insofar as it is expressed through the power of religious choice, is not negated, but the difficulty of maintaining heterodox views becomes exponentially more difficult. Korihor dies ignominiously beneath the rampant hooves of another heretic’s horse, and his name disappears with him. But the story of Nephite secularization does not end with his demise. This large-​scale social transformation continues apace as Korihor’s ideas—​through acts of transmission the book neglects to detail—​seep into the water table of the Nephite social imaginary and come to achieve a kind of taken-​for-​granted status among the people. Korihor, in short, heralds the virtually universal acceptance of Nephite secularism. The effects of this process are most clearly on display in c­ hapter  16 of the book of Helaman in a scene that occurs several decades after Korihor’s death. As the birth of the Messiah gets ever nearer, Mormon informs his readers that during this time “there were great signs given unto the people, and wonders; and the words of the prophets began to be fulfilled. And angels did appear unto men, wise men, and did declare unto them glad tidings of great joy; thus in this year the scriptures began to be fulfilled” (Hel 16:13–​14). The people, however, willfully ignore this overflow of heavenly signs by maintaining a fragile immanent frame about themselves, even going so far as to call into question the veracity of the prophecies. Speaking singularly as the vox populi they declare, It is not reasonable that such a being as a Christ shall come; if so, and he be the Son of God, the Father of heaven and of earth, as it has been spoken, why will he not show himself unto us as well as unto them who shall be at Jerusalem? . . . But behold, we know that this is a wicked tradition, which has been handed down unto us by our fathers, to cause us that we should believe in some great and marvelous thing which should come to pass, but not among us, but in a land which is far distance, a land which we know not; therefore they can keep us in ignorance, for we cannot witness with our own eyes that they are true. And they will, by the cunning and the mysterious arts of the evil one, work some great mystery which we cannot understand, which will keep us down to be servants to their words . . . and thus will they keep us in ignorance if we will yield ourselves unto them, all the days of our lives. (Hel 16:18–​21; emphasis mine)

 

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The resonances with Korihor’s speech are everywhere evident in this passage. The characterization of prophetic tradition as a tool for oppression parallels Korihor’s accusations against Nephite clergy, and the collective demand they make for prophecies to be “reasonable” mirrors Korihor’s demands for “surety.” What solidifies the link between Korihor and this collective expression of the Nephite people is the fact that the only two places in the entirety of The Book of Mormon where the phrase “keep [us/​them] in ignorance” appears are in this passage and Korihor’s speech to the high priest Giddonah in Alma 30:23. The Nephite people in this collective utterance rehearse not only the substance of Korihor’s critiques of Nephite orthodoxy but also his distinctive language, a clear indicator of the degree to which Korihor’s worldview has consolidated into a normative way of seeing the world in Nephite culture. Korihor, we can now see, stands at the beginning of the end of Nephite secularization. His life and posthumous influence demonstrate how a kind of political secularism (a nominal distinction between political and theological spheres of authority) over time naturalizes religion as choice rather than obligation and opens the door, in turn, for the universalization of a phenomenological secularism in which heterodoxy consolidates into Christ denial. When this unique brand of secularism, Korihorism, reaches peak saturation in Nephite culture the problem of persuasion escalates from an individual encounter to a collective event. As we have already seen, because this is a world in which insights are arrived at solely through either true or false revelations, forms of argument and deliberation are inadequate to such a task. Only divine intervention remains as a feasible persuasive mechanism, but because the culture itself has undergone a secularization process that defines itself in opposition to messianic prophecies, and because these new background conditions entail a buffered public, mere signs and wonders fall short. Collective theophany, which in this case takes the form of Christ’s postresurrection advent among the Nephites, becomes the sole antidote.24 In their collective speech in the book of Helaman, the Nephite people raise for the first time the question of why Christ, who they have been told will live, die, and be reborn in a region of the globe far removed from their own experience, won’t also appear to them. Prior to this moment, the possibility of Christ’s visitation to the Nephites is raised only twice, leading Grant Hardy to the conclusion that the large plates are “not structured around a straightforward expectation of Jesus’ postresurrection appearance among the Nephites that is satisfied and brought to an unambiguous conclusion” (Hardy, Understanding The Book of Mormon, 182). If we see The Book of Mormon as a text that is evolving in almost real time, however, it becomes clear that the evidentiary demands of a secularized Nephite public transform the possibility of Christ’s appearance among the Nephites from a possibility into a necessity.25 The event becomes not

 



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only a theological solution but the last remaining narratological solution to the problem of Nephite secularism. Although preceded by all the supernatural fanfare one could hope for—​a booming, disembodied voice and terrifying climate events—​Christ’s appearance to the Nephites in 3 Nephi is a little deflating. Since nearly all of Jesus’s speech is drawn verbatim from the gospels and thus offers little novelty to the credulous reader of a new scripture, Hardy acknowledges that this profound moment of theophanic drama might strike a reader hoping for a radically new revelation from the resurrected Christ as “disappointing or frustrating.”26 But the import and interest of Jesus’s appearance are not in what he says but in how he manifests himself. In the gospel accounts of his resurrection, Jesus only ever appears to his small coterie of apostles, but in The Book of Mormon he makes himself known to an entire populous simultaneously. This collective experience of theophany is intended to override culturally pervasive and axiomatic doubts and to demonstrate the unambiguous fulfillment of the prophetic tradition at the heart of Nephite orthodoxy. And it works, if only for a time. The effect of Christ’s appearance is a social and theological unity that lasts for more than two centuries, a testament to the persuasive capacities of collective revelation if there ever was one. And yet, its effectiveness at resolving difference slowly fades as time marches on. After 210  years we learn that the problem of sectarian division began to rear its ugly head once again. Mormon, now in a tone of lamentation, observes that during this period “priests and false prophets . . . buil[t]‌up many churches” (4 Ne 1:34); religious options multiply exponentially with the rise of both false Christian churches that “did deny the more parts of his gospel” (4 Ne 1:27) and Christ-​denying churches that “did persecute the true church of Christ” (4 Ne 1:28). This new eruption of unmediated dissent—​pluralization on steroids—​sends Nephite culture along a course toward irreversible contention and bloody religious warfare. From the cynical, orthodox, and heretical approaches to religious liberty with which we began, we can now add the apocalyptic, a vision of religious choice as unfettered and uncontainable sectarian division. The history of the Nephites and Lamanites, because it began as an explanation of Amerindian decline, was always going to be a tragedy. But the mechanisms by which this inevitable outcome occurred are particularly interesting. To borrow an old cliché: The journey, in this case, is more interesting than the destination. Christ’s appearance to the Nephites, as we have seen, creates a theological consensus that reverses the secularizing trends within Nephite culture—​but only for a time. Revelation, it seems, even as grand a one as Jesus’s descent among the Nephites, has a half-​life; its effects decay with time, creedal profusion recurs with even more force, and the trajectories that had been in place earlier proceed with renewed vigor.

 

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The movement I’ve been tracking up to this point can be restated as follows: In the large plates of The Book of Mormon Smith constructs a counterfactual history to explain the conditions of Smith’s own trial of religious choice, a story of the emergence of religious liberty within a “New World” context that sidesteps European history entirely. In this narrative, the dilemma of choice in a religiously plural landscape sets in motion social processes that give rise to a kind of secularism (heretical choice) in which the human will is so valorized as to expand the power of choice beyond the confines of religion into all facets of life. The best available method of curbing this tendency and for reasserting orthodoxy is through divine intervention, here understood as a form of persuasion peculiarly adapted to a world comprised of semi-​porous selves. Yet because the persuasive impact of revelation weakens over time, the capacity to choose—​at least in the Nephite case—​eventually spirals outward into an apocalyptic din. The question thus remains, then, of how the orthodox view of choice can be maintained without either devolving into an immanent view of unfettered human autonomy or into pluralistic chaos. For choice to continue to be meaningful, therefore, revelation needs to be renewable. *** Thus far I have confined my analysis to the large plates of The Book of Mormon, which comprise the books of Mosiah–​Ether. When Smith began translating the plates in earnest in April 1829, this was the material he dictated first. A  year earlier he had translated Mormon’s “abridgment” (D&C 10:44) of a series of earlier records, but the 116 pages that had been produced were destroyed by the wife of Martin Harris, Smith’s ever-​credulous scribe and patron, after Harris had lent her the manuscript to prove to her the veracity of the great work that had been undertaken. A chastising revelation from the angel Moroni prohibited Smith from translating any more for several months, and when he again took up his seer stones, he began at the point in the narrative where the earlier material had concluded. Only after he had completed the entirety of the large plates did he return to the material that had been lost. But this time he was tasked not with translating a later abridgment of the early records of the first Nephite prophet, but the actual records themselves, which had been engraved—​or so he claimed—​on a series of smaller plates. Comprising these writings were the first-​person records of Nephi and other early Nephite leaders and prophets, and they differed dramatically in character from the sweeping histories and folksy vignettes of the large plates. The small plates, as they appear in The Book of Mormon, are a generic mélange that moves fluidly between prophesy, narrative, visions, and interpretation, and what narratives they do contain more closely resemble the Hebraic tales they strive to emulate than the broad historical accounts of the large plates:  intimate family dramas, the trials of having been

 



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chosen by God, and concentrated instants of moral uncertainty. Although they now appear first in The Book of Mormon, the small plates, because they were composed late in the process of translation, are actually continuations of the deep problems we have so far tracked in the large plates. Most important, they bring the entangled issues of choice, revelation, persuasion, and time to bear on the very form of Smith’s new scripture as well as on its anticipated reception in the early nineteenth-​century United States. The impulse to persuade rather than to convert becomes an explicit feature of these texts, as when the prophet Nephi records—​in one of several similar moments—​that the “fulness of mine intent is that I may persuade men to come unto the God of Abraham” (1 Ne 6:4). Though their aim is persuasion, the small plates do not shy away from thematizing the diminishing capacities of revelation as a persuasive mechanism, which, as we have already seen, becomes a cause for concern late in the large plates. This is an issue that Peter Berger glibly labels the “problem of the morning after,” when the flood of details, habits, and obligations that structure quotidian experience diminish or even negate the revelatory experiences of the past evening, the past week, or the past year. (The failure of Christ’s postresurrection appearance to effect a permanent social change within Nephite civilization is this phenomenon made manifest at the level of an entire civilization. The morning after, in that case, takes two centuries to arrive.) Early in 1 Nephi, the book that begins The Book of Mormon, the Hebrew patriarch Lehi, having recently had a vision commanding him to leave Jerusalem, tasks his four sons (Nephi, Laman, Lemuel, and Sam) with recovering a set of brass plates kept by Laban, a wealthy Hebrew living in the city. After two botched attempts to retrieve the plates, Laman and Lemuel decide to abandon the mission. When their brother Nephi insists they try again the two begin to beat and chastise him and Sam. In the midst of this attack, an angel appears to them to remind them of their task and to promise its imminent fulfillment. Laman and Lemuel remain skeptical, but Nephi reminds them of God’s mightiness and of his aid to Moses against the armies of Pharaoh: “Now behold, ye know that this is true; and ye also know that an angel hath spoken unto you; wherefore can ye doubt?” Wherefore indeed. Later, while the entire family struggles to survive in the desert away from the comforts of Jerusalem, Laman and Lemuel bind Nephi with rope and beat him, demanding again that the family return to their home. Shocked and enraged, Nephi cries out: “How is it that ye have forgotten that ye have seen an angel of the Lord?” (1 Ne 7:10). Again, several chapters later, while sailing aboard the ship that carries the family of Lehi to the Americas, Nephi reminds his brothers in a sermon, “Ye are swift to do iniquity but slow to remember the Lord your God. Ye have seen an angel, and he spake unto you; yea, ye have heard his voice from time to time; and he hath spoken unto you in a still small voice, but ye were past feeling” (1 Ne 17:45). Nephi’s repeated invocations of the angel’s visitation

 

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give voice to the bafflement and frustration of revelation’s failure to persuade once and for all, thematizing its apparent inadequacy to maintain its hold over minds across time. It was while dictating The Book of Mormon that Smith began to conceive of revelation as a process that was at once occasional and continuous. His many revelations were recorded and published first in the Book of Commandments (1830) and subsequently in Doctrine and Covenants (1835). Not all of these would come to fruition, and many were revised or overwritten by subsequent revelations, but the continuing stream of dicta and theological insight being delivered to Smith from on high enabled him to preserve the experience of private and continuous revelation as a feasible tool for cultivating power and enacting political, social, and ecclesiastical change. As a way of further consolidating revelatory authority and ensuring its continuity across time, Smith also established hierarchies within the church that guaranteed that continuous revelation would be enshrined as a fundamental principle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​ Day Saints.27 This is what he devised to renew revelation across time within the church, but The Book of Mormon, because it is a text and not an institution, solves this problem slightly differently in the small plates. By virtue of its being a material artifact, the book doesn’t have the same capacity to evolve and change with time.28 As a revelation, it is—​Smith’s subtle revisions to the book throughout his life notwithstanding—​fixed. But The Book of Mormon nevertheless sidesteps the problem of scripture’s seeming fixity through formal strategies that invest every reading of it with the experience of renewed revelation, re-​creating by means of the intimate relationship between reader and text both the sociological dilemma of religious choice traced in the large plates and its resolution. It does this by generating what we might call prophetic loops, narrative cycles of prediction and fulfillment that occur entirely within the confines of the text. These loops tend to be either highly localized, as in the promise made by the angel who visits the sons of Lehi, or more sweeping, as in the case of the numerous prophecies of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus. But even the most dramatic and far-​reaching of these prophecies remain locked within the bounds of the text. They are ultimately movements of prediction, anticipation, and fulfillment that function as theological equivalents to more conventional forms of narrative suspense, which Roland Barthes memorably compared to the “pleasure of the corporeal striptease.”29 But there is another class of prophecies in The Book of Mormon that looks beyond events chronicled in the book itself to the circumstances of its composition, production, and reception, prophecies that seem to be fulfilled by the book’s sheer existence rather than by its mere content. This class of prophecies, all of which are issued in the small plates, concerns the particular historical circumstances that birthed The Book of Mormon. One

 



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resonant example of these occurs in the patriarch Lehi’s last address to his sons. Speaking directly to his son Joseph, Lehi quotes from the brass plates that Nephi had obtained from the Hebrew leader Laban. The passages he quotes were supposed to have been written by the biblical Joseph (of Genesis) and anticipate the eventual arrive of a “choice seer” who “shall write” (2 Ne 3:7, 3:12). This seer’s name, writes Joseph, “shall be called after me; and it shall be after the name of his father. And he shall be like unto me; for the thing which the Lord shall bring forth by his hand, by the power of the Lord, shall bring my people unto salvation” (2 Ne 3:15). Joseph Smith, Jr., the son and namesake of Joseph Smith, Sr., seems to fit the bill of the original Joseph’s prophecy. Nephi will later echo these words in a series of prophetic statements that anticipate the discovery and reception of The Book of Mormon in the nineteenth-​century United States. To future readers of his records, he declares that his writing “shall be kept and preserved, and handed down unto my seed, from generation to generation, that the promise may be fulfilled unto Joseph” (2 Ne 25:22).30 Elsewhere, in an appropriation of Isaiah’s prophecy, he speaks of a sealed book that “shall be delivered unto the man of whom I have spoken” and that “the eyes of none shall behold it, save it be that three witnesses shall behold it by the power of God, besides him to whom the book shall be delivered” (2 Ne 27:12). (The first edition of The Book of Mormon included the testimony of three witnesses in its concluding pages.) God, speaking through Nephi, also looks forward to how nineteenth-​century Americans will likely view the emergence of a new scripture: “And because my words shall hiss forth—​many of the Gentiles shall say, ‘A Bible! A  Bible! We have got a Bible, and there cannot be any more Bible’ ” (2 Ne 29:3). To these hypothetical Gentiles God responds with a defense of continuous revelation, “because that I have spoken one word, ye need not suppose that I cannot speak another; for my work is not yet finished” (2 Ne 29:9). From one angle, these moments, all of which answer the kinds of objections that would eventually meet The Book of Mormon upon its publication (Why was this book revealed to a farm boy in 1830? How can there be a new Bible?), may be read as instances of what Mark Currie calls “rhetorical prolepsis,” attempts to inoculate the book against critique by answering objections before they’re raised.31 From another angle, they may be seen as part of the “symbiotic relationship of mutual credentialing” then developing between the book and the Prophet.32 But considered in the light of a reader’s experience of the material book, the more important effect of this pattern is how it sacralizes the book in the moment of its reading. In his monumental study of the idea of scripture, What is Scripture?, Wilfred Cantwell Smith answers his book’s titular question in the negative by asserting that there is, finally, no “ontology of scripture.”33 Instead, he defines scripture tautologically: “for a work to be scripture means that it participates in the movement of the spiritual life of those for whom it is so.”34 Scripture is thus the construct

 

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of a community of readers over time, and The Book of Mormon issues prophecies and fulfills them as a means of constructing this community through reading. Those prophecies within 2 Nephi that anticipate both the translation of The Book of Mormon by a nineteenth-​century American named Joseph and also the book’s subsequent reception in the nineteenth-​century United States transform what would otherwise be mere history into scripture and what would otherwise be mere reading into the inhabitation of revelation. They create a closed loop whereby the very nature of the text one reads is changed by means of the text’s own predictions of its coming into being, a feature of the work that shuttles the reader between the text and its context, between the story and the scene of its composition. The reader of The Book of Mormon is thus placed into a position—​ albeit a private one—​akin to that occupied by a figure like Korihor, where an individual’s religious doubt is met with the self-​evident fullness of divine revelation. The book’s many acts of self-​scripturalization aim to persuade a doubtful reader by requiring her to experience the unique thrill of witnessing prophetic fulfillment. Given this aspect of the book, it should come as no surprise that one of the LDS Church’s primary methods of winning converts is to urge them to read The Book of Mormon and, ideally, to experience the sensation of revelation. This ingenious device is at the heart of the book’s aesthetic. Choice, it seems, to go back to where we began, may indeed be, as Mormon says, a privilege, but it may also be a pleasure. The Book of Mormon does not utterly resolve the intertwined problems of secularization and pluralization that sprout and blossom from the principle of religious choice. But revelation, thought of here as the primary force capable of negotiating difference and guiding choice under the conditions of American secularity, is nevertheless preserved and renewed within the text itself. The Book of Mormon yet remains and will remain, according to the early Mormon apostle Parley Pratt, “a strange book, a VERY STRANGE book.”35 This is as it should be, for secularity is also shot through with a deep strangeness that is obscured by its ubiqury, and few works of the nineteenth century can claim to grapple with its intricacies as imaginatively or as richly as The Book of Mormon does.

Notes 1. Joseph Smith, Jr., “Sketch Book for the use of Joseph Smith, jr.,” Journal, Sept. 1835–​Apr. 1836, Nov. 9, 1835, http://​www.josephsmithpapers.org/​paperSummary/​journal-​1835-​1836. Although all the versions of the First Vision are slightly different, Richard Bushman is right to claim that such discrepancies do not imply intentional deceit, but are more likely than not simply the messy and dynamic process of continued reflection as it reshapes experiences over time, shading features that once were light and illuminating others that once were dark. The multiple versions of the First Vision are collected in Dean C. Jesse, “The Earliest Documented Accounts of Joseph Smith’s First Vision,” in Exploring the First Vision, Samuel Alonzo Dodge and Steven C. Harper, eds. (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, 2012), 1–​40.

 



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2. Joseph Smith, “Joseph Smith Recounts His First Vision,” in A Documentary History of Religion in America, Edwin S. Gaustad and Mark A. Noll, eds. (Grand Rapid, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003), 339. 3. Charles Grandison Finney, The Original Memoirs of Charles G. Finney, Richard A. G. Dupuis and Garth M. Rosell, eds. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002), 16; Jonathan Edwards, A Jonathan Edwards Reader, John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth P. Minkema, eds. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 283. 4. Dan Vogel, Early Mormon Documents (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1994), 43. For more on Smith’s remarkable encounter with the prophet Matthias see Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3–​12; and Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith:  Rough Stone Rolling (New  York:  Vintage Books, 2007), 274–​278. 5. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici and Urne-​Buriall (New  York:  New  York Review Books Classics, 2012), 14. 6. This cognitive version of religious experience has been retained in the Church of Latter-​Day Saints to this day, where the process of conversion is “not generally seen as the recognition of one’s sinful nature and transformation to a state of grace, but the moment of one’s spiritual confirmation of a particular set of propositions about God and his work of modern restoration.” (Terryl Givens, Wrestling the Angel, vol. 1 of The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 82). 7. Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-​Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–​1850 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1950), 13. 8. The significance of choice as a means of explaining the vibrant religiosity of the nineteenth-​ century United States is well documented in Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, The Churching of America, 1776–​2005:  Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005). See also R. Stephen Warner, “Work in Progress Toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 98.5 (1993): 1044–​1093. 9. Peter L. Berger, The Heretical Imperative:  Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (New York: Anchor Books, 1979), 25. 10. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3. 11. Taylor, A Secular Age, 27, 38. 12. Michael Warner, “Was Antebellum America Secular?” The Immanent Frame, Oct. 2, 2012, http://​blogs.ssrc.org/​tif/​2012/​10/​02/​was-​antebellum-​america-​secular. 13. See D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1998); Brant A. Gardner, The Gift and Power: Translating The Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2011), 23–​52. 14. For discussions of how secularity, secularism, and secularization should be conceptualized within the context of the United States see Wilfred M. McClay, “Secularism, American-​ Style,” Society 44.6 (2007):  160–​163; Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 92–​117; Warner, “Was Antebellum America Secular?”; and John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 15. Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America, 3. 16. Throughout this essay I read The Book of Mormon as an evolving text engaged in a continual process of self-​revision, by which I mean that key episodes are revisited and revised at different points in the text that mark novel approaches to problems raised earlier in the work. This I take to be a consequence of Smith’s dynamic and nearly spontaneous composition of the text. Although this approach takes for granted that Smith’s is the sole mind responsible for The Book of Mormon, I nevertheless think it is one in keeping with Smith’s view of the imprecise nature of revelation itself. Smith, writes Terryl Givens, thought of prophets as “flawed and fallible vessels” (Wrestling the Angel, 38) and revelation, consequently, as a continuous and often revisionary process of acquiring knowledge. It might therefore be profitable to think of spontaneous narration and literary composition as being analogous in character. Such an approach does not obviate Grant Hardy’s “narrator-​based reading,” but it does see narratorial identity (especially in the large plates) as uneven and emergent, rather than everywhere

 

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consistent and coherent. As Ann Taves has suggested in her brilliant analysis of The Book of Mormon’s origins, a leap of compositional faith may have been necessary to begin the writing process, which once accomplished allowed the words (and there are so very many of them) to pour forth from the mouth of the prophet. See Ann Taves, “History and the Claims of Revelation: Joseph Smith and the Materialization of the Golden Plates,” Numen: International Review for the History of Religions 61.2–​3 (2014): 182–​207. For more on how revelation was being reconceived as a continuing process within American culture more broadly see David F. Holland, Sacred Borders:  Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 17. See José Casanova, “The Secular and Secularisms,” Social Research 76.4 (2009): 1049–​1066. 18. Taylor, A Secular Age, 18. 19. Taylor, A Secular Age, 18. 20. Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 4. 21. Admittedly, the epistolist’s uses of “anti-​christ” carry a whiff of the endtimes, but the label itself is always a common, not a proper, noun. It’s more descriptive than it is evaluative: “For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist” (2 John 1:7). 22. See Sandra Gustafson, Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Amanda Anderson, “The Liberal Aesthetic,” in Theory After “Theory,” Jane Elliot and Derek Attridge, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2011), 249–​261. 23. Gustafson, Imagining Deliberative Democracy, 18. 24. Because dissent in the Nephi world occurs before the birth of Christ, it thus assumes a temporal character it lacked in the nineteenth-​century United States. Smith’s own historical moment was suffused with the expectation of the Second Coming of Christ and the beginning of the millennium, but no one could be quite certain how, when, or even if such an event would occur. The antebellum era is littered with attempts to pinpoint the exact date of Christ’s Second coming, with William Miller’s botched calculation that it would occur on October 22, 1844, being but the most infamous example. (Even Smith himself, who toyed with millennial thought, was pressed at times by followers to give a date for Christ’s return, a question he wisely learned to sidestep.) One of the great narratological triumphs of The Book of Mormon is that it narrates the history of a society whose experience of religious difference in crucial ways mirrors that of the nineteenth-​century United States but relocates familiar tropes of millennial expectation and Christian prophecy to an era before Jesus’s birth. Because Christ’s birth and first resurrection would have been virtually indisputable events for Smith’s contemporaries, every reader of The Book of Mormon knows in advance that the Nephite prophecies will prove to be true. This readerly foreknowledge generates the experience of what we might call cosmo-​dramatic irony. The large plates of The Book of Mormon therefore have all the qualities of a millennial narrative without any of the doubt. 25. One might conclude that the trajectory the narrative had taken made the representation of this event imperative. Perhaps Smith, like other great serialists of the nineteenth century, was improvising a plot and biding time until he chanced upon a narrative solution that would pave the way for a suitable catalyst. The clock that ticks away in the background of the narrative would have laid the groundwork for this moment, but evidence in the book itself suggests that what exactly occur at this momentous time remained nebulous. 26. Grant Hardy, Understanding The Book of Mormon:  A Reader’s Guide (New  York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 183. 27. For Smith’s “politics of revelation” see Steven C. Harper, “‘Dictated by Christ’: Joseph Smith and the Politics of Revelation,” Journal of the Early Republic 26.2 (2006): 275–​304. 28. Smith made hundreds of minor revisions—​some of them substantive—​to The Book of Mormon between its publication and his death. Although many of these emendations are theologically significant, they did not alter the narrative itself in any meaningful way. 29. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New  York:  Hill & Wang, 1975), 11. 30. See Hardy, Understanding The Book of Mormon, 80, for a handy chart of these echoes.

 



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31. Mark Currie, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 29. See Elizabeth Fenton, “Secularization and Nineteenth Century American Literature,” in A Companion to American Literary Studies, Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine, eds. (New York: Blackwell, 2011), 65–​69, for a thoughtful discussion on how the small plates of The Book of Mormon use prolepsis as a strategy for evading critique. 32. Paul Gutjahr, The Book of Mormon: A Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 61. 33. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, What is Scripture?:  A Comparative Approach (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 237. 34. W. C. Smith, What is Scripture?, 36. 35. Parley Pratt, The Autobiography of Parley Parker Pratt (New York: Russell Brothers, 1874), 37.

 

 

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Kinship, The Book of Mormon, and Modern Revelation Nancy Bentley

After the final battle recounted in The Book of Mormon, Moroni collects the records his father Mormon had compiled and makes his own additions, preparing to bury the inscribed plates for safe keeping. At this pivotal moment, the future concerns him as much as the past: He concludes Mormon’s vast history of pre-​Columbian Americans by envisioning the day when God would allow the plates to be “brought out of the earth.” At that far-​distant time, Moroni writes, the rec­ord “shall come even as one should speak from the dead” (Morm 8:16, 26). His words thus open a path of communication between ancient and modern Americans. Aware of its own reappearance in what will be the modern settler society of western New York, The Book of Mormon addresses a mixed audience of Christian “gentiles,” “unbelievers,” and indigenous Americans who will have before them a record recovered from the deep past. Joseph Smith was the anticipated “servant” of God who made it possible for ancient voices “crying from the dust” to speak to modern peoples (2 Ne 33:13). In doing so, he offered his contemporaries an answer to a question that preoccupied many in Smith’s era and region:  What relations do modern Americans have to the ancient inhabitants of the land? The question carried both urgency and special difficulty in a settler society in which white and red Americans were bound together by vexed ties of violence and habitation of the same continent. The record Smith published revealed how and why the dead speaking from the dust were the spiritual ancestors of living American populations. Returning as an angelic visitor, Moroni informed Smith that The Book of Mormon would forge bonds of kinship between Amerindian “fathers” and latter-​day “children,” using language that recast Malachi’s prophecy to the Hebrews for the people of the New World: “And he shall plant in the hearts of Nancy Bentley, Kinship, The Book of Mormon, and Modern Revelation. In: Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon. Edited by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190221928.003.0010

 

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the children the promises made to the fathers, and the hearts of the children shall turn to their fathers” (History 1:39). What did it mean to conceive of ancient Amerindians as generational “fathers”? When Smith published this latter-​day Bible, his claim that the “former inhabitants of this continent” (History 2:34) should be understood as Americans’ divinely revealed ancestors created a sensation. But for all its startling novelty, The Book of Mormon joined ongoing conversations among Smith’s contemporaries about the deep history of human kinship in general and of Americans’ ancestors in particular. Two other men who lived in western New York, ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan and Iroquois prophet Handsome Lake, also turned to questions of kinship as each grappled with the implications of white people’s occupation of indigenous homelands. Like Smith and other descendants of the region’s first settlers, Morgan’s boyhood interest in Indian relics buried in the soil grew into a quest to understand how the living and the dead were bound in an ever-​widening “circle of kindred.” His study of the neighboring Iroquois, or Haudenosaunee, set him on the path to establishing kinship studies as a scientific discipline. Morgan’s “Science of the Families of Mankind” was pointedly secular; Smith and Handsome Lake, in contrast, relied on divine revelation to make their own claims about how to understand kinship and race in America. But all three founded enduring institutions that rested on beliefs about how modern-​day persons should understand their relation to dead ancestors.1 To read The Book of Mormon in this context is to foreground key questions about how kinship matters to freedom. According to social theorists of the era, the way a given society ordered its families made the difference between a free people and a people in collective bonds of servitude. For these thinkers, one of the most important traits for identifying a free and modern society was the successful shedding of ancestor worship and other forms of irrational attachment to unknown kin. Self-​government demanded it. Only unenlightened peoples—​ Old World aristocrats and New World Indians, for instance—​tolerated governance based on kin and caste. Modern people, in contrast, were presumed to have transcended the clannish kinship orders of backward “tribes.” For moderns, family was no longer a conjoint identity for collective rule but the site for producing private individuals, an incubator for the habits of self-​regulation and the robust individual agency required of a free people. Nineteenth-​century legal historian Henry Maine provided the motto for this article of modern faith: Progressive societies advance “from status to contract.” At the tipping point where inherited status is “dethroned” by the power of individual agency or “contract,” families become private and a society emerges from darkness into modern freedom.2 As I argue, The Book of Mormon offered divine affirmation for this view of contract. Yet this did little to win over learned detractors. After The Book of Mormon was published in 1830, its sharpest critics denounced it as a compendium of

 

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error and superstition that Smith had repackaged for the credulous. Under the spell of this fraudulent scripture, they charged, the Mormon faithful had surrendered the freedom vouchsafed to modern Americans (or at least to white Americans). Lewis Morgan, for instance, viewed Mormons as atavistic, a throwback to premodern habits of thought and behavior. When the LDS Church disclosed its practice of plural marriage, it seemed to confirm hostile accusations like Morgan’s: Mormons had regressed to kinship practices that were little different than those of “savage” peoples like American Indians. In reality, though, The Book of Mormon propounded claims about kinship and freedom that shared a good deal with the tenets of secular theorists like Morgan. This American Bible gave deep roots to the doctrine that individual agency and private families could transform backward tribes into free people. Amerindian prophets had warned against blind adherence to the customs of tribal fathers and taught the transformative capacity of what Morgan called the “motive power” of individual choice. Its stories uncovered ancient origins for ideas about modern personhood and told of the prosperity such individual agency and freedom can secure—​as well as the unhappy, potentially genocidal fate awaiting those societies that fail to embrace them. The Book of Mormon, in short, offered an expressly religious foundation for axioms propounded by elite social thinkers. In what follows, I seek to demonstrate how The Book of Mormon reconnects secular doctrines of free agency with Christian theology, thereby disclosing the theological origins of secular thought about kinship and contract. The centuries of pre-​Columbian history recounted in this scripture affirmed much of what the conjectural histories penned by Morgan and others claimed about human development. Ironically, its history of the “white” Nephites even gave narrative form to the atavism Morgan saw in the Mormons: The fate of the Nephites taught that a free “white” people could lapse from civilization into the backward tribalism of populations like the Lamanites, the “dark” people who were the lineal progenitors of Native Americans. But if The Book of Mormon affirmed the tenets of secular kinship theory, that commonality could not surmount the troubling problem of genre: These precepts came packaged in a book claiming to be modern revelation. I underscore tenets shared by Mormon scripture and secular science because doing so allows us to isolate modern revelation as an epistemology. For skeptics of Joseph Smith, the obstacle was less the moral truths expounded in his golden Bible than how he claimed to know those truths. For that reason, The Book of Mormon can help illuminate key aspects of secularity explored in recent debates. As scholars like Talal Asad and Bruno Latour argue, secularization does not entail a necessary erosion of spiritual belief or a weaker adherence to religion; in fact, in the nineteenth-​century United States, the disestablishment of state churches and other secularizing trends actually helped religiosity

 

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to flourish. Rather, the impact of secularization lies in the way its operative prescriptions—​procedures for identifying superstition and the imperative to reject it, for instance, or the assumption that what is most rationally calculable is most reliably real—​become the ground for a consensus understanding of what should count as rational, modern, and free. This secular consensus operates as a diffuse cultural umpire, calling balls and strikes as various phenomena come into view. As a product of modern revelation, The Book of Mormon fell afoul of secular prescriptions, even as other scripture and religious beliefs were deemed altogether compatible with modernity. The costs of that judgment could be high. For followers of Joseph Smith, belief in modern revelation meant vulnerability to expulsion and exile. For followers of the New Religion founded by Handsome Lake, the costs were even higher. Few doubt that secular epistemologies have produced momentous benefits, but scholars in secularity studies have asked us to heed as well the uneven ways that secularization distributes rewards and liabilities across different populations, sometimes for reasons that go unnoticed or undeclared. Hindsight aids this scholarly effort; it is easier to discern in retrospect how the prescriptions of secularity frequently fail to deliver the universal blessings they promise. Latour defines the secular creed of self-​described “moderns” as a commitment to “freeing themselves from attachments to the past in order to advance toward freedom” and thereby lift humanity as a whole.3 His formulation neatly captures the ethos behind the secular imperative to stigmatize the kinship practices of tribal peoples as counter to human freedom and enlightenment. But this creed obscures the fact that freedom for modern settler societies was predicated on the violent removal of peoples they had declared insufficiently modern—​a human freedom inseparable from vast human destruction. In its distinctive conjunction of modern precepts and an epistemology at odds with modern prescriptions, The Book of Mormon illuminates the stakes of secularization as few texts can. In this essay I examine The Book of Mormon as a latter-​day Book of the Dead, a purportedly ancient text that reveals truths for a modern world. Unlike the Egyptian Book of the Dead, in The Book of Mormon the keys to securing a place in the afterlife are not spells or incantations but—​as befits a modern people—​a true knowledge of American history and a Christian reformation of family and kin life that is necessary for salvation. The distinctive way it connects ancient and modern worlds can be illuminated through comparison with other contemporary efforts to join the living and the dead. I compare The Book of Mormon with Morgan’s secular ethnology and (more briefly) with the New Religion founded by Handsome Lake, two other transformations of kinship thinking that were rooted in western New York and that rested on textualizing voices of the dead. In all three cases, spiritual truths encrypted in the deep past are cross-​fertilized

 

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with the modern doctrine of self-​making through contract. The disparities among them, however, can teach us as much about secularity as it does about American religion.

Spiritualizing Contract Faith in prosperity can move mountains. No sooner had US sovereignty been secured then ambitious men began to envision remaking the very topography of the earth. When it was completed in 1825, the Erie Canal system, joining New York City with the Midwestern Great Lakes, put western New York at the center of the booming new economy of inland trade and manufacturing. To its planners and engineers, the Canal was a self-​consciously modern achievement. As writer C. F. Briggs boasted, unlike the “great works of antiquity,” the Canal was not a monument to kingly vanity but an enterprise for shared human flourishing, undertaken to “promote the happiness and welfare of the people who constructed it.” It harnessed godlike power—​the capacity “to level mountains, excavate rivers, bridge impossible chasms”—​to the goal of producing unparalleled rewards for human communities.4 The economic boom that followed from the Canal’s completion gave bragging rights to proponents of free-​labor capitalism. In an era when the world was still debating the feasibility of republics and the United States was grappling with the turmoil of an emergent market revolution, it was by no means self-​evident that a social order organized around contractual labor and private property rights had history on its side. But the success of the Canal seemed to foretell that the future of the nation was wedded to industrial capitalism. The region became ground zero for the idea that free choice—​the proprietor’s choice to hire and fire at will, the worker’s choice to leave unsatisfactory employment—​made contractual wage labor superior to the more interdependent relations of master and apprentice or owner and slave.5 This evidence that contract labor was in the vanguard of history might have seemed sufficient proof that the Canal was a great modern achievement. Yet leaders in the region staked their claim to modernity in a surprising way:  by calling up the spirits of the dead. When the Rev. F. H. Cuming delivered an address at the Canal’s dedication, he invoked not God but the dead heroes of the American Revolution, calling on them to “throw off their load of earth” so as to rise from the grave and witness the “magnificent work” achieved by a “multitude of freemen.” One dead soul was summoned by name: If he could resurrect George Washington, Rev. Cuming proclaimed, he would have the great man cast his eyes on the wonder of the Canal and then ask him “whether his children had not well improved the rich legacy” of their ancestors. In this imagined resurrection,

 

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Washington’s gaze on the worldly achievement of the Canal sanctifies the agency of “freemen” conceived as his children.6 The same rhetoric of visionary communication across generations structures the inscription engraved on a plaque at the Canal’s final connecting lock. The inscription makes living readers into ancestors addressing their future “posterity,” descendants who will later pay homage to the “spirit” of the deceased Canal builders by their own strenuous efforts at achieving prosperity: Let Posterity be excited to perpetuate our Free Institutions and to make still greater efforts than their ancestors to promote Public Prosperity by the recollection that these works of Internal Improvements were achieved by the Spirit and Perseverance of REPUBLICAN FREE MEN.7 In these moments of imagined communion with spirits, a secular order of ontology—​what exists in natural time and space—​still has an adjunct spiritual dimension populated by the dead. The Canal was the Mount Pisgah of the secular order: To observe the American landscape from its heights was to bear witness to the truth of a prosperous commercial future, one that was shaped by human actors for the benefit of human societies. Even when the eye-​witnesses were dead souls, evidence of the senses confirmed “REPUBLICAN FREE MEN” as the agents of history—​and as deserving of capital-​letter prominence, an honor the King James Bible gave to the LORD when translating the Hebrew word Yahweh.8 By claiming a rhyming similarity between these secular visions invoking the dead and the religious visions of prophets, my point is not that the secular frame for such visions is really a species of religion in disguise. The significance is rather that, even as this rhetorical structure excludes religion—​not even the clergyman gives credit for the Canal to God—​it still transcends the boundary between mortal and immortal persons. These counterfactual moments of spiritual sight perform a task commonly authorized by religion: They allow communication between the living and the dead. There is no supernatural agent involved as in religious transport, but the dead and the as-​yet unborn are summoned into the present moment as approving spirits and witnesses. When performed by Native Americans, invoking the spirits of dead ancestors was typically classified as superstition. But historian Gillian Feeley-​Harnick has shown that in antebellum America, relations between the living and the dead were just as important to the way white settlers defined their own status as free people. She identifies new practices that were designed to distinguish the status of modern persons by way of kinship, practices that retrospectively made one’s ancestors “ever more ‘American’ and ‘modern.’ ” The shift from churchyard burials to segregated suburban cemeteries, the production of ancestral

 

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“tablets” and expensive family Bibles, the introduction of census categories for tracking the “progress and prosperity” of “free” populations as distinct from other groups—​slaves and itinerant laborers, for instance—​who had no such records of progress: These and other techniques allowed living Americans to enlist dead ancestors as the silent witnesses of their status as free persons. These practices were innovated in New England, among white populations invested in promulgating the ideology of contract. For self-​described moderns, esteem and wealth were to be conferred through work—​not through one’s forebears or an inherited station—​but defining and claiming that modern personhood, Feeley-​Harnick argues, still involved “placing the dead in what they considered ‘modern’ time and places.”9 When the dead awaken and throw off their “load of earth,” they do the work of spiritualizing contract.

“Our Ancient Nation” When surveying for the Canal began in 1810, it charted a path through the heart of Iroquoia, the homelands of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. The surveyors and builders met no armed resistance; removal of the Haudenosaunee had been achieved by the previous generation, most starkly when the Nations had been forced to choose sides in the colonists’ war against the Crown, and four of the six had sided with their longtime military ally, the British army. General James Clinton led the campaigns that not only killed active warriors but also decimated Iroquois villages, massacring women and children and laying waste to dwellings and crops. With the victory of the colonists, the surviving Haudenosaunee were moved to a handful of reservations while parcels of their lands were awarded to officers in the Continental Army as a form of compensation. The general’s son, DeWitt Clinton, was appointed to the planning committee of the Canal; later, as New  York governor, DeWitt Clinton oversaw its financing and construction. To inaugurate the new era of commercial transport and progress, he traveled the length of the Canal in a passenger boat called Seneca Chief.10 It is worth asking precisely what that boat’s honorific signified to Clinton and the other principals behind the creation of the Canal. The name Seneca Chief was not a mockery of a defeated enemy but a species of tribute. The same linguistic recognition of the region’s aboriginal inhabitants covered the map of the Empire State; settlers bestowed Indian-​derived names on towns, lakes, and highways. That spirit of tribute might seem hard to square with the history of settlement. When Briggs, in his encomium to the Canal, enumerated the powers of the freeman, he was forthright about declaring the right of free settlers “to exterminate the useless tribes that encumber the earth without improving

 

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it.”11 But people deemed “useless” when they inhabited land desired by settlers could be eminently useful in another respect—​though only insofar as they were no longer on the scene. They could be imagined as noble forebears, the “first Americans” who had bequeathed the forests and streams to their heirs. Indian names functioned for settlers as a kind of linguistic headstone for claiming Native Americans as dead historical ancestors. When relegated to the past, then, Native peoples could serve the same purpose of spiritualizing contract, blessing the work of the moderns from the grave. One of the most popular and far-​reaching technologies for creating this retrospective ancestry was the historical novel. The era of the construction of the Canal was also the moment when fiction about colonial-​era Indians became a publishing sensation. James Fenimore Cooper, whose father had founded Cooperstown in Mohawk territory, published the first in his series of Leatherstocking novels in 1823. Each subsequent novel was set in an earlier time period in colonial history, making the voices of the living Iroquois in his fiction voices of persons long since deceased. In giving Indians fictional life, historical novels placed them among the dead. Why excavate this history in fiction and stage the past as a scene of vivid life? Narrated through the historical novel, the reality of Briggs’s “right” of “extermination” becomes succession, a generational relation between red and white Americans.12 Cooper even made Indians the unacknowledged originators of the Erie Canal. In Notions of the Americans Cooper writes that, while DeWitt Clinton was the most prominent “parent of the project,” the real “birth” of the Canal must have been the “plaint of some Indian that nature had denied a passage to his canoe from the Mohawk [River] to a stream of the lesser lakes.”13 Cooper’s fanciful scenario transforms the violence of colonial settlement, reimagining the relations to aboriginal Americans for an age of contract as the Canal completes a “project” first dreamed of by Iroquois ancestors. Lewis Morgan would take this imaginary consent one step further:  In his earliest writings, Indians directly ask white settlers to be their successors and spiritual heirs. As a young man just out of college, Morgan reorganized the Gordian Knot Club, a secret fraternal society for the sons of elite families of western New York, calling it the “New Order of the Iroquois.” In the initiation ceremony, Morgan would speak as a Cayuga “Sachem” to lead other young white men through rites of “Indianization” that make them worthy of claiming the “parentage and descent from our ancient Nation” (italics added). The Great Spirit himself then importunes the white “Indian band” to record and preserve the world of dead Iroquois as their latter-​day representatives: “Save from oblivion their names, their customs, and their deeds; that they may be known forever in your books.”14

 

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Morgan’s interest in the Iroquois had begun as a boy when he began collecting Indian objects uncovered in the soil of area farms and large estates. He later learned these objects were not the ancient relics of a long-​extinct civilization, as he had imagined; they were actually tools and household remnants abandoned quite recently by the Cayuga inhabitants whose removal allowed Morgan’s grandfather to acquire their land as compensation for his war service.15 Research for his fraternal society set him on the path toward producing serious ethnographic studies of the Haudenosaunee; his earliest work is a telling combination of racial fantasia and empirical documentation. A paper submitted to his “brothers” in the New Order, for instance, describes in detail the geography and trails connecting the Six Nations of the original Iroquoia, all presented as the tribal wisdom spoken by “Skenandoah,” Morgan’s Indian alter ego. A piece he published in the literary magazine Knickerbocker was framed as a vision by a dead Cayuga warrior speaking as a spirit from beyond the grave. Aided by an older prophet, the warrior describes his vision of the future displacement of the “great family of the Iroquois” by white settlers, and his lyrical expressions of grief are matched with Morgan’s more prosaic disquisition on the sociopolitical structure of the Iroquois Confederacy.16 It may seem curious that Morgan would combine fact and fiction in this fashion. If his aim were to write authoritative ethnography, why would he invent fanciful speeches for imaginary Indian warriors, prophets, and spirits? Historical novelists like Cooper had similar aspirations to make fiction give life to the reality of the past, but how could avowed fabrications serve the ends of historical validity? The answer lies in the way secular epistemology distinguished and yet coordinated different orders of truth. Both Morgan and Cooper subscribed to the Romantic doctrine that modern literature was capable of expressing the spiritual essence of a supposedly premodern people like the Iroquois. Morgan’s texts in particular capture the recent epistemological split that had formally divided and thereby consolidated both scientific truth and Romantic spiritualism, giving each its own kind of authenticity.17 Highly educated men of the region like Cooper, Morgan, and DeWitt Clinton (who also collected Iroquois objects and lore) built on the work of their prominent fathers and grandfathers—​the work of warfare, Indian removal, settlement of towns—​by undertaking complex epistemological work, combining fiction and historiography in ways that allowed them to claim guardianship of the memory of the Iroquois dead. As a method of claiming and redeeming the dead, both ethnographic history and Romantic fiction relegate Native Americans to the past by the very act of saving them from “oblivion” in books. Ennobling the place of modern settlers depended on placing dead Indian forebears in the archives of the past.

 

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The Book of Mormon shares many features with this body of literature:  ancient Indian prophets, the voices of dead warriors, visions of tragic removals and defeats, an imperative to save for posterity a record of the culture and spirituality of America’s original inhabitants. Just as the “Indians” of Morgan’s fraternal society heed the words of the “Great Spirit” to “save from oblivion” the names and histories of the dead, the prophets of The Book of Mormon follow God’s command to preserve a written record of “the words of those who have slumbered in the dust” (2 Ne 27:9). Joseph Smith also felt called to give a voice to the dead, publishing a book intended to establish the true relationship between red and white Americans. But unlike those of Cooper and Morgan, the book Smith published provided no room for reading with the kind of epistemology made possible in Romantic poetics. Unearthed by the power of God, The Book of Mormon was a work of literal transcription, not expressive fiction. It was revealed scripture, not inspired art. Or, as its critics claimed, it was a fraud, a story invented by a young man’s fecund imagination for the purpose of deliberately passing it off as a New World Testament of one of the “lost” Hebrew tribes in America. But as either holy writ or fraud, by offering itself as scripture The Book of Mormon performs the work of linking the living and the dead in crucially different ways than did the writings of Cooper and Morgan. Rather than distinguishing secular history and spiritual meaning through different epistemologies, it encloses human history within the revealed truth of God’s word.18 At the same time, The Book of Mormon was not a return to traditional Christian epistemology. While it claimed the status of ancient scripture, by its very existence The Book of Mormon also entailed a power of modern-​day prophecy, and Smith’s role as a “choice seer” capable of direct communication with centuries-​old Americans like Moroni meant that ancient and modern history had a radically new and porous relation (2 Ne 3:6). As we will see, from this new scripture Mormon converts learned that institutions social theorists defined as distinctly modern achievements—​ societies of freemen, tender family love, prosperous cities—​were also part of American aboriginal history. The Book of Mormon would further reveal that the fate of these ancient societies rested on the freedom of individual choice, the power to “act and not be acted upon” (2 Ne 3:26). In narrating the ancient roots of contract, Smith’s scripture offers an unexpected parallel to Morgan’s secular science. In his chosen genre of “conjectural history,” a reason-​driven reconstruction of the deep past developed in the Scottish Enlightenment, Morgan also saw history as powered by what he called the “motive power” of individual choice.19 The Book of Mormon and Morgan’s conjectural history of the evolution of kinship shared twin imperatives: to spiritualize contract and to turn the hearts of the settler children to the Native fathers.

 

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Tribes and Families For Joseph Smith the issue of personal agency was, as one scholar puts it, an “obsessive” preoccupation, the foundation of modern-​day covenants with God and the key to uncovering eternal truth.20 For Morgan, “personal liberty” was the motor of human history and the test of whether a given society was “righteously organized.”21 In the thinking of both men, the voluntarism prized in their Protestant milieu was intensified and redirected, becoming the interpretive key to understanding the world from its earliest beginnings. In making contract the prime mover of human history, Smith and Morgan shared much with the social contract theory of thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. But it was their shared conviction that contract made its mark by transforming kinship that set them apart from those earlier thinkers. Morgan’s ethnology asserted that the force of personal agency, emerging slowly over the course of millennia, had gradually transformed kinship, and “successive stages of growth in the Family” had eventually allowed for unfettered personal freedom to act and trade, producing regimes of prosperity and peace.22 In Smith’s case, God would reveal that the force of contractual consent in kinship had not only changed human society but would also shape an eternal future, exceeding the bounds of mortality itself. By the time Smith received his 1843 revelation on “the new and everlasting covenant” of celestial marriage, the principle of contract was nothing less than the binding power of the cosmos itself. Worldly contracts were powerful but still limited: “All covenants, contracts, bonds, obligations, oaths, vows, performances, connections, associations, or expectations, that are not made and entered into and sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise, . . . are of no efficacy, virtue or force in and after the resurrections from the dead; for all contracts that are not made unto this end have an end when men are dead.” These agreements expired at death, but because the Holy Ghost embodied the divine potential of “promise” itself, mortality need not be an end to human agreements. When properly “sealed,” contracts are transcendent: they “shall be of full force when they are out of the world” (D&C 132:7). In both Smith’s religious cosmology and Morgan’s scheme of commercial secularity, particular arrangements of kinship are the basis of contract and the index of its far-​reaching  power. The Book of Mormon discloses that personal agency had been a decisive power in the fate of pre-​Columbian peoples, as manifest in the way those ancient Americans organized their families. Terryl Givens highlights the importance of kinship in The Book of Mormon when he observes that it “could be said to return its readers from New Testament organizational structures [of churches] to the primacy of family and clan.”23 Yet this important insight can be taken further: In

 

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its portrait of kinship, The Book of Mormon also introduces a difference between family and clan, or, to use other nomenclature, between what historians call the contractual family bound by ties of voluntary protection and care and the clan or tribal kinship of potentially coercive, tradition-​bound power. The distinction is crucial. According to anthropologist Susan McKinnon, the operative difference between family and tribe is the “primary trope” of modern social theory.24 In The Book of Mormon that distinction runs like a seam through centuries of pre-​ Columbian history. When in the opening episode of The Book of Mormon history, Nephi’s father Lehi is instructed by God to “take his family and depart into the wilderness,” the departure is more than just geographical. Leaving Jerusalem in the reign of Zedekiah meant leaving behind a world of ancient Hebrews who refused to heed prophets like Lehi, prophets who called them to repent of “their wickedness and their abominations” and who brought the message of the “coming of a Messiah” (1 Ne 2:3, 1:19). Crucially, the solitary migration of Lehi’s family (joined later by the family of Ishmael, with daughters who marry Lehi’s sons) is thus both a religious reform and a reform of kinship. It allows for a break with a society of calcified religious tradition and the rebuilding of a godly people on the basis of individual families. New World history thus begins with a family history, as an autonomous household becomes a breakaway unit that changes the fate of the globe. Although Lehi’s family still observes the law of Moses and brings with them to America a “record of the Jews” (1 Ne 3:3) to preserve their memory of Hebrew history, personal revelation becomes a more immediate source of spiritual knowledge for this family circle. Lehi’s visions reveal the future fall of the house of Israel and the coming of Christ, while his spiritually precocious son Nephi asks for and receives his own revelations about the family’s future in the New World. A proleptic faith in what will be Christ’s incarnation relocates authority from received Hebrew tradition to individual vision, and shifts biblical history from the collective life of Jewish tribes (about to succumb to Babylonian “captivity”) to a new terrain of personal conscience and revelation operative within families. Nephi is the first-​person narrator of the first two books of this New World scripture, and his narrative voice helps to make the difference between family and tribe something readers encounter at a formal level. “I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents,” will now “make a record of my proceedings in my days” (1 Ne 1:1). Holy writ has merged with autobiography, the genre of personal subjectivity, and Nephi’s first-​person voice and viewpoint makes a self-​narrated life story the lens for sacred history. As in most autobiographies, Nephi’s story begins as a story of an immediate birth family and its web of relations. His role as a prophet is inseparable from his life as an obedient son and a younger brother to Laman and Lemuel, Lehi’s rebellious sons. Because the two brothers believe

 

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their father’s prophetic visions are merely the “foolish imaginations of his heart,” they cannot grasp that, at God’s behest, their father has broken with Hebrew tradition in order to restart human history in the New World (1 Ne 2:11). In contrast to the Old Testament record of individual prophets speaking to the collective tribes of Israel, The Book of Mormon embeds revelation within the dynamics of an individual family. Filial obedience in conflict with jealousy and rebellion, the relief of a mother at her sons’ safe return from journeying, the grief of loving parents at internal family strife: Through these and other interpersonal kin relations, religious history is grounded in the actions and feelings of an intimate family ensemble. By opening formal narrative space for depicting a righteous father and his fractious family, The Book of Mormon enacts the transformation of tribal kinship. Genealogical descent is still significant (Lehi notes that he is “a descendant of Joseph who was carried captive into Egypt” [2 Ne 3:4]). But now the bonds of family are less a means for transmitting a name and identity than the basis for a field of individual spiritual choice. To be a son of Lehi is to face the fateful decision to either seek personal confirmation of his teachings regarding the Messiah and the fall of Jerusalem or else to reject those teachings. When Laman and Lemuel take the latter course, they prove themselves inclined toward tribalism, “like unto the Jews who were at Jerusalem” (1 Ne 2:13). Each family member has the freedom to choose; obedience is never coerced. Addressing his sons, Lehi connects individual moral agency to the Messiah who “cometh in the fullness of time” (2 Ne 2:3). Lehi’s prophetic knowledge, then, gives him the key to the all-​important principle of contract: Christ is the mediator who secures the freedom for all people “to act for themselves and not be acted upon, save it be by the punishment of the law at the great and last day” (2 Ne 3:26). Through this proto-​Christian family, the kinship of Hebrew patriarchs has become the contractual family.25 Grounded in mutual affection rather than patriarchal power, the contractual family understands its purpose to be the nurturing of individuals, moral agents able to “act for themselves.” In a sequence of blessings given to individual sons, Lehi speaks the “words of a trembling parent” to urge each man to choose a righteous path, and gathers his grandchildren to bless them and share “the feelings of his heart” (2 Ne 4:12). After a number of years, however, the family form Lehi has managed to establish, with its emphasis on agency and feeling, comes into crisis. The cause of the crisis is the fateful question of polygamy. What if one exercises one’s agency by electing to forego Lehi’s example of a “tender” monogamous family and instead embraces the option of polygamy? When family becomes an institution founded on contract, the ancient family form of polygamy becomes less an inherited tradition than a lifestyle one might choose. After Nephi’s death, his brother Jacob takes over the narrative. Jacob’s

 

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record reveals that backsliding has set in among Lehi’s descendants, and men have used the example of David’s and Solomon’s “many wives and concubines” as an excuse for sexual laxity. In a fiery rebuke, Jacob sets them straight. The Lord has revealed that such behavior is “abominable”: “Wherefore, I the Lord God will not suffer that his people shall do like unto them of old.” While polygamy would not be formally banned in Judaism until around 1000 CE, then, The Book of Mormon teaches that in ancient America it was forbidden: “For there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife; and concubines he shall have none” ( Jacob 2:23–​27). Jacob expounds upon God’s reasons for insisting on monogamy. In the land of Jerusalem the behavior of men brought “sorrow” to Hebrew women, but in America God will not listen impassively to the “cries of the fair daughters against the men of my people.” The New World family is designed to prevent animosity between men and women and to protect the hearts of wives: “Ye have broken the hearts of your tender wives, and lost the confidence of your children . . . and the sobbings of their hearts ascend up to God against you” ( Jacob 2:30–​35). In contrast with the tribal kinship “of old,” the New World family is to be bound by sacred family feeling. The question that intrigued and confounded social thinkers—​how and why monogamy grew out of polygamy—​is revealed in this ancient record: God himself intervened to command his people to forego this tribal practice. Secular thinkers would have agreed with the contention that monogamy was a family form superior to the patriarchal polygamy “of old.” But if The Book of Mormon confirmed this spiritual truth, it also contained a corollary that would be startling—​and troubling—​to modern social theorists. Because God himself directs changes in human kinship, the law of monogamy can also be changed at God’s discretion: “For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed unto me,” I will “command my people” to do so through a different family form ( Jacob 2:30). By this view, kinship did not develop through universal laws of social evolution. The power of human reason to grasp human development and predict its future through the regularities of natural law suffers a serious blow if divine edict can recover and re-​sacralize a tribal family form like polygamy. As subsequent Mormon history would confirm, the belief that one could consciously choose to practice polygamy—​as a sanctified Christian duty, no less—​seemed to most modern Americans a case of free agency gone terribly awry. It violated not just the moral norms of “civilized” societies but also the presumed regularities of social evolution. The Book of Jacob reveals that free agency is also behind what appeared to moderns as the wholly inherited human property of race. Jacob explains that Lehi’s descendants have divided into two contrasting populations, the Nephites and the Lamanites. The names are reminiscent of tribal peoples of the Levant,

 

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reminding readers that they are reading a biblical history. But rather than being two comparable tribal peoples, the Nephites and Lamanites represent the family versus tribe distinction writ large. While the reforms introduced by Lehi remain alive among the Nephites for centuries, the Lamanites quickly lapse from God’s teachings. They eventually lose their knowledge of religious law and even of God (they are vaguely aware of only a “Great Spirit”). Cursed by God, they become a nomadic dark-​skinned people, “wild, and ferocious, and blood-​thirsty” (Enos 1:20). Present-​day readers have pointed to the stark racism in the depiction of these “white-​skinned” and dark-​skinned populations. But less noticed is the fact that the two populations also follow an ethnological schema structured not by race but by religio-​cultural institutions. The difference in skin color between the Nephites and Lamanites does not mark a difference between separate biological races; all are equally the “seed” of Lehi. Rather, the Lamanites, in failing to elect the path of Christian worship and private families, also fail to practice the arts of a supposedly higher civilization—​the knowledge, technologies, industriousness, and personal liberties belonging to what The Book of Mormon calls “freemen” (Alma 51:6–​7, 60:25). When the Lamanites refuse the enlightened, family-​based spirituality introduced by Lehi and Nephi, they make themselves tribal. Even race is a matter of choice, or rather its most visible effect.26 The distinction between family and tribe is also the key differential in Lewis Morgan’s “Science of the Families of Mankind.” In his major publications on kinship, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity and Ancient Society, he defined the “civilized family” in opposition to the earlier evolutionary stages of kinship in tribal societies, where clans or kin-​based units [gentes]—​rather than civil institutions—​organize governance and everyday life. Gathering data from missionaries and imperial administrators about kinship patterns around the globe, Morgan developed a vast conjectural history of the universal evolution of kinship. “Modern civilized society,” according to Morgan, “reposes” on the private family. But that family form did not spring into being all at once: “It was of slow growth, planting its roots far back in the ages of barbarism.”27 Because human development is uneven, however, eventually the growth of kinship divides humanity into two broad kinds: societas and civitas, uncivilized and civilized, ancient and modern.28 What made the difference in whether a people got on the escalator to modernity or remained stuck in the backwater of evolutionary time? Somewhat surprisingly, a key factor for Morgan was polygamy. Although Morgan condemned the plural marriage of Mormons, he saw in that family form the germ of human moral development–​–​albeit in the deep past only. Polygamy provided a crucial turning point because it allowed the patriarch to acquire a sense of father-​right over a large-​enough group to establish a base of power apart from the rest of the tribe. And when the head of the family rather than the collective clan “became the natural center of accumulation,” it

 

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launched what Morgan calls “the property career of mankind.”29 Born in the matrix of evolving kinship, the idea of private property grasped first in polygamy releases the “individualizing” power of contract and becomes the driving force toward creating the “monogamian” family and all that comes with it—​not just private property and wealth but romantic and domestic love, the commodification of land, civil governance in monarchy and then in the Republican nation-​state. Like the history recounted in The Book of Mormon, Morgan’s evolutionary history of family forms made individual agency both a moral index of human development and a “motive force” driving human history. But whereas The Book of Mormon reveals that agency is a power rooted in Christ, Morgan’s ethnology rewrites the origins of human history without a role for divinity. Through the “slow accumulation of experimental knowledge,” the human mind—​not divine edict—​had designed the contractual family. The absence of a personal god in Morgan’s model caused distress for some family and friends. Yet it is notable that Morgan’s ethnological vision was emphatically keyed to moral, spiritual, and even theological meaning—​not in spite of the fact it framed human life as the unfolding of a “property career” but because of it. The developmental progress he theorized from kin-​based societies to commercial modernity was for Morgan a moral transformation of the species, the “history of civilization in the interior of the human soul.”30 He saw moving through history the power of a “Supreme Intelligence” immanent in human life.31 Morgan’s secular ethnology endowed his meta-​narrative of progress with a value approaching the sacred, something that carried profound implications for any persons or peoples deemed to be at odds with the work of this “Supreme” human force. That Morgan eliminated a role for God in his account of history might make his science seem worlds away from Smith’s religious history. But the markedly moral meaning Morgan ascribes to contract—​and to the worldly prosperity it brings—​points to a coincidence of opposites between Mormon scripture and Morgan’s secular science. Morgan dispensed with the sectarian beliefs of most of his neighbors in the “Burned-​Over District” of western New York. But famously, so had Joseph Smith. The region’s religious revivals of the 1820s and 1830s had spread the idea that “personal liberty” was divine in origin; in the words of preacher Charles Finney, “God has made man a moral free agent.”32 But in their different ways, both Smith and Morgan were emboldened to write off sectarian religion as hollow and obsolete. They both turned instead to what Morgan called “unwritten history,” the deep past in which spiritual truths had unfolded among generations long deceased. Morgan is a kind of secular counterpart to Joseph Smith, the prophet who cast off all existing religions as faulty human institutions and turned to the dead for saving knowledge.

 

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Secularity, Sacred Kinship, and Biopolitics Placing Smith and Morgan in this context also brings to the fore what is often overlooked in histories of the region: The elevation of contract had consequences that were not only religious and economic but also ethnological and biopolitical, affecting the health and survival of whole populations. The hyper-​valorization of personal agency shaped what anthropologists call “person-​making” in far-​ reaching ways. By “redefining the status of a person as a certain kind of agent,” the elevation of contract meant that personhood was not fully shared by all.33 Those who failed to count as a free people found themselves with little legal or social power. For Native Americans, there were both spiritual and material consequences in the rise of a model of free personhood that assigned them to the premodern past on the basis of forms of kinship deemed unfree. Even as Morgan forged one of the most influential ways of defining free persons in contrast to “our savage ancestors,” he acknowledged a record of violence and injustice in his epic story of progress that at times appalled him. The “ancient proprietors” of the land “stand to us in a special relation,” he noted, but it is “a relation in some respects awful to contemplate.”34 From the beginning, Morgan’s science of kinship was both inspired and troubled by a felt need to redeem the crimes of white America. After reorganizing his fraternity on the model of the Iroquois Confederacy, he headed up that group’s efforts to help the Seneca with court battles against land companies trying to expel them from their small remaining reservations. His awareness of the difficulties imposed by state and federal Indian policy sharpened after he met Hasaneanda, a Seneca teenager, in an Albany bookstore. The young man, who also went by the name Ely Parker, became an invaluable collaborator in Morgan’s ongoing research into Iroquois life and material culture, and educated Morgan about the mistreatment suffered by his people. Morgan became convinced that, as he wrote to fellow ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft, the whole “fate” and “National character” of the United States depended on somehow answering the “just reproaches” of Native peoples. If we can “vindicate” the Indian’s rights and “watch over his political prosperity,” then “the Indian lament over the injustices of the White Man may not here-​after ring never ending and just reproaches against the American name.”35 Redeeming the white settler nation depended on “reclaiming” the Indian. For Joseph Smith, reclaiming the present-​ day Indians or Lamanites—​ descendants of Lehi through the lines of Laman and Lemuel—​meant their religious conversion. Or, more precisely, it meant restoring them to the covenants God had promised their ancestors many centuries before. Bringing “civilization” to American Indians in effect meant urging them to look backward to their

 

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own ancient past. In a missionary effort in 1830, church leader Oliver Cowdery supplied copies of The Book of Mormon to a Council of Delawares. The book, he announced, was a history of “the red men’s forefathers” when they had “possessed the whole land.” Accepting its truths meant learning not only their ancient history but also “the things which should befall their children in the latter days.” If reclaimed in the modern era, the lost covenants could restore rights of inheritance to lands they were promised by God.36 Like Morgan, then, Smith and his followers believed that the redemption of white America was closely tied to the fate of red America. The plan to convert Native peoples was paternalistic and rooted in disregard for their own spiritual institutions. But for Mormons—​and here is a critical difference from figures like Morgan—​the health and survival of white Americans, not just Native Americans, also depended on learning about Amerindian history and embracing its lessons. White “gentiles” needed conversion just as much as Indians, and for much the same reason. The four centuries covered in The Book of Mormon demonstrated that the “white” civilization of the Nephites could fall into darkness and bring on genocidal disaster. And according to ancient prophecy, modern Americans risked the same course of population destruction. The Book of Mormon charts a religious biopolitics in close detail. When the Nephites are faithful, their social order is organized as a unity of individual families. During the reign of King Benjamin, for instance, a revival-​like event brings all of the people of the city-​state Zarahemla to hear a last address from the aging leader, and Mormon (now the editor of the record) emphasizes the makeup of the Nephite family unit: “And it came to pass that when they came up to the temple, they pitched their tents round about, every man according to his family, consisting of his wife, and his sons, and his daughters, and their sons, and their daughters, from the eldest down to the youngest, every family being separate one from another” (Mosiah 2:5, emphasis added). So powerful is Benjamin’s preaching that every person in attendance takes an “oath” to have faith in Christ (through his name you “are made free”), after which “they returned, every one, according to their families, to their own houses” (Mosiah 5:7–​8, 6:3). Under this political arrangement, populations flourish. But during eras when the people fall into political conflict and sin, the Nephite social order lapses from a solidarity of equal and independent families into contending clan-​like factions, always with violent results. As the long record finally draws to a close, the warring Nephites and the Lamanites are both practicing mass carnage. Nephite cities fall to their enemies, and Lamanites demonstrate a fiendishly pointed hatred of Nephite kin relations, feeding the flesh of dead husbands to their own wives and children (Morm 4:14–​ 15). The Nephites more than match their savagery. They rape and torture captive Lamanite women and then “devour their flesh,” becoming what Mormon calls

 

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“a people without civilization” (Moro 9:9–​11). For the Nephites, the ancient record ends—​history itself ends—​with wholesale extinction. The concluding pages of The Book of Mormon offer a striking portrait of genocidal destruction. It joins spiritual exhortation with material devastation—​the bodily matter of rotting corpses, starving widows, and decimated populations. Mormon speaks directly to the Lamanites (that is, the indigenous peoples) of the latter days, urging them to learn from The Book of Mormon (“written for the intent that ye may believe” [Morm 7:9]) that repentance and conversion will bring a restoration of their people and their rights to the land. His parallel message to the Gentiles is stark: The Lord allowed you to receive the “blessings” forfeited by the Lamanites and you now possess the land, but if you thwart the will of God it will mean an end to your dominance—​possibly your very existence. As a cautionary history of war and extinction, The Book of Mormon is thus as relevant to settlers as it is to the descendants of Lamanites: “Oh ye Gentiles, . . . repent of your sins” lest you face “your overthrow and destruction” (Ether 8:23). Extinction and survival, destruction and redemption, the living and the dead: Through the power of revelation The Book of Mormon connects two eras of American biopolitics. Modern revelation implicated white settlers no less than Native peoples in the threat of future destruction and undercut any complacent narrative of inevitable white progress.37 It provides keys for discerning the future fate of states and populations in the New World and makes demographic history inseparable from theological drama. Mormon converts saw their world-​historical role tied to pre-​Columbian peoples, with a calling to build a “New Jerusalem on the border of the Lamanites.”38 For Morgan, in contrast, it was the immanent laws of history that would decide the future, and that future belonged to white moderns. Even though he took the side of Native nations in many conflicts with the state, he was convinced that indigenous peoples would survive only by giving up communal landholding and kin-​based governance. Perhaps the best path was to “engraft” the Indian onto the white population through reproduction. So deep was Morgan’s belief in laws of progress that this eugenic “solution” seemed to him a matter of natural law rather than racial—​and profoundly racist—​engineering.39 I have been arguing that, despite their contrasting epistemologies, Smith’s sacred history and Morgan’s secular one both look to the dead for saving knowl­ edge. Both define the contractual family of freemen in opposition to tribal kinship, schemas that stigmatize tribal peoples even as they seek to provide a path of redemptive reconciliation between settler and Native populations. As the founder of what would become secular kinship studies, Morgan is a prime example of “the close relation between evangelical forms of Protestant religiosity and secular social imaginary.”40 At the same time, the very absorption of Protestant habits of thought into the fabric of modern theory and sociality

 

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meant that secular discourses like law and anthropology acquired a new power to exclude from social legitimacy any species of religiosity they deemed suspect. Anyone, white or otherwise, who embraced a faith that seemed insufficiently modern risked forfeiting both their status as free persons and the rights of protection for their religious observance. The power of the secular to stigmatize and exclude can be seen in relief when a suspect epistemology, modern revelation, became the basis for any innovations in sacred kinship.41 When a new revelation prompted Joseph Smith to introduce plural or “celestial” marriage, it boldly extended the power of religious contract to introduce a new dispensation of the family ordained by God. But ironically, it also exposed revelation as a power no longer capable of being recognized as legitimately and substantively religious, at least by state authorities and theorists like Morgan. For Morgan, it made no sense to link Mormon plural marriage to revelation, or even to religious conscience or choice. After centuries of monogamy, how could descendants of Europeans choose to go backward on the evolutionary ladder? For Morgan, such a choice simply wasn’t possible: In Ancient Society he writes that the phenomenon of Mormon polygamy represents not religious choice but an atavistic “relic of the old savagism not yet eradicated from the human brain”—​a malfunction of physiology.42 Morgan’s system obviated any possibility of a religious motive for choosing polygamy. His axiomatic elimination of revelation and religious choice anticipates the church’s fraught legal battles in which plural marriage was eventually ruled outside of any Constitutional protections for religion and the church corporation was dismantled.43 Morgan showed the same blindness to the power and social effects of revelation among the Haudenosaunee. Thanks to Ely Parker (Hasaneanda) and other members of the Parker family, Morgan was able to witness firsthand many of the rites and institutions of Iroquois life. His 1851 monograph The League of the Iroquois provided the first widely circulated account of the “New Religion” founded by the Seneca prophet Ganiodaio, or Handsome Lake. Taking root in the devastating aftermath of the Revolution, by the 1820s and 1830s the Code of Handsome Lake had spurred a revitalization of Iroquois communities through a set of new beliefs and practices that refashioned traditional kinship and worship. But tellingly, even as Morgan recognized the New Religion as a modern movement, he was unable to apprehend the prophet’s intervention as reform that was genuinely religious. In his chapter on the New Religion, Morgan recounts Handsome Lake’s description of a visitation by “three spiritual beings, in the forms of men, sent by the Great Spirit.” Although a member of a prominent Seneca family—​he was a half-​brother of famed leader Cornplanter—​Handsome Lake had fallen into a life of alcoholism and illness, a fate of many in the dark days after the Revolution. On his sickbed and nearing death, Handsome Lake had spent the night praying,

 

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after which he fell into a state of “apparent death.” While in this state, he looked through the door of his lodge and saw “three holy men who looked alike, and were dressed alike” who assured him that the Great Spirit had heard his prayers. Informing Handsome Lake that his health would be restored, the messengers instructed him to convey to his people the new teachings he would receive in a series of coming revelations.44 The dramatic spiritual visitations Handsome Lake reported in 1799–​1800 coincided with the beginning of the region’s surge of Protestant revivals and have been analyzed as “an indigenous expression of the Second Great Awakening.”45 As with the heightened culture of conversion among evangelicals, the New Religion spread among the Haudenosaunee by emphasizing individual spiritual agency. Teaching that the Great Spirit “hears our words” and “knows our thoughts,” Handsome Lake called upon each member of the nations of the Long House to heed a set of divine injunctions: to abstain from drink and violence, to shun conflict and divorce, to cease selling land, and to remember and regularly address the dead.46 Whereas moral behavior had traditionally been deemed a social obligation with social sanctions, Handsome Lake taught that the morality of the revealed Code had a supernatural source. What is more, the choices of individual members determined whether, after death, that person would suffer in a “House of Torment” or else rejoin their families in heaven. Handsome Lake’s Code brought forth an indigenous version of spiritualized contract. For the people who chose to follow this modern prophet, they acquired a new supernatural assurance that they were entitled to their own Iroquois religion. At the same time, Handsome Lake’s teachings asked followers to alter their traditional matrifocal family order. Despite resistance from many wives and clan mothers, the New Religion reshaped gender relations and partially succeeded in organizing families into smaller, more patriarchal units.47 Voluntary acceptance of divine revelation thus introduced a marked change in Haudenosaunee kinship. Yet, while the New Religion opened a new space for the principle of personal agency, Morgan was unable or unwilling to see its reforms as truly religious, in either origin or nature. He casts Handsome Lake as a canny, “self-​ appointed apostle” who only pretended to have received revelatory visions, and who strategically decided to dress up his admonitions for reform in religious garb. “Knowing that argument and persuasion were feeble weapons in a contest with this mighty foe” of drink and discord, Morgan writes, “Handsome Lake had the sagacity to address himself to the religious sentiments and the superstitious fears of the people.”48 Because Handsome Lake figures for Morgan as a hero of rational reform, he cannot be deemed a sincere religious visionary, and prophecy is cast as a form of worldly rather than spiritual communication. In reality, the guided vision Handsome Lake received from his spirit messengers unveils a very different sort of relation between settlers and Native

 

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Americans than the story of redemptive progress preferred by Morgan. When the spirit guides show the Seneca prophet the “dazzling” and fruitful land that is heaven, he learns that “no white man ever entered” its precincts. This privileged glimpse of the dead reveals a restoration of Indian bodies (“they possessed a bodily form [and] senses”) and a return to family wholeness (“families were reunited, and dwelt together in harmony”). But this sphere is not untouched by the history of contact with white Americans. As with the Erie Canal vision conjured by the Rev. Cuming’s dedication address, the spirit world disclosed to Handsome Lake includes a resurrected George Washington. Although not permitted to enter heaven itself, Washington has been granted a place of honor in the afterlife: a “fort” with an enclosure “just without the entrance of heaven”: They said to Handsome Lake:  the man you see is the only pale-​face who ever left the earth. He was kind to you, when on the settlement of the great difficulty between the Americans and the Great Crown [Go-​wek-​go-​wa], you were abandoned to the mercy of your enemies. The Crown told the great American, that as for [the Crown’s] allies, the Indians, that he might kill them if he liked. The great American judged that this would be cruel and unjust. He believed they were made by the Great Spirit, and were entitled to the enjoyment of life. He was kind to you and extended to you his protection. For this reason, he has been allowed to leave the earth. But he is never permitted to go into the presence of the Great Spirit. Although alone, he is perfectly happy. All faithful Indians pass by him as they go to heaven.49 Like the prophetic visions of The Book of Mormon, Handsome Lake’s revelation links the history of indigenous Americans to conditions of threatened extinction and modern state power. Spiritual justice, not rational reforms or improvement, shapes the possibilities for redemption. Because Washington recognized the Haudenosaunee as children of the Great Spirit, he is the sole white person who escapes death and becomes the witness—​alone but satisfied and at peace—​of the postmortal restoration of faithful Indians. Whereas Morgan’s secular history in effect retreats from the facts of historical destruction into laws of preordained historical progress, the revelations of The Book of Mormon and of Handsome Lake are a vehicle through which American history is brought before the bar of divine judgment. Modern revelation was thus the basis for bold condemnation, but claiming the power of prophetic critique could also mean forfeiting the status of a legitimate modern religion. The sacred kinship systems claimed respectively by Mormons and the Haudenosaunee were not ancient or premodern; both were created through faith in the principle of free agency, the power to “act for oneself

 

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and not be acted upon” that had acquired a new importance and even a quasi-​ sacred status in nineteenth-​century American thought. Yet because their ways of connecting themselves to dead ancestors and present-​day kin were based on revelation, their choices counted not as expressions of religious conscience but as superstition or priestcraft. Indeed, their religious practice often failed to count as choice at all but instead was taken as proof that chains enslaved their minds. For critics, the “imposture” of Mormon revelation and their departure from norms of white kinship meant that they were a benighted population very much like Natives Americans, and Mormons and Indians were often directly linked as groups destined to be “overwhelmed by the restless wave of civilization.”50 The power of revelation that offered hope to the faithful made those same followers more vulnerable to exile, attrition, and death.

Notes 1. According to Morgan, humans exist at the center of a “widening circle of kindred,” binding together “millions of the living and the dead.” Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1871), 11. Morgan referred to his work as “the Science of the Families of Mankind” in an unpublished preface to Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. He wanted the preface to honor his dead daughters as an inspiration for his “science,” but the Smithsonian Institute, which published it, deemed the preface too sentimental. See Gillian Feeley-​Harnick, “‘The Mystery of Life in All Its Forms’: Religious Dimensions of Culture in Early American Anthropology,” in Susan Mizruchi, Religion and Cultural Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 140–​191. 2. For a survey of the dominant paradigm of kinship to contract in modern social theory, see Susan McKinnon, “Kinship Within and Beyond the ‘Movement of Progressive Societies,’” in Vital Relations, Susan McKinnon and Fenella Cannell, eds. (Santa Fe, NM:  School for Advanced Research Press, 2013), 39–​62. 3. Bruno Latour, An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence:  An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 8. 4. C. F. Briggs, “Lockport,” in The United States Illustrated, Charles A. Dana, ed. (New York: H. J. Meyer, 1853), 162–​164. 5. Paul E.  Johnson’s classic study of the role of evangelical revivals in the transformation of ideas about labor remains relevant to these questions. Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–​1837 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978). Although the system of contractual wage labor forged in this era eventually became normalized, Johnson points how it also changed ideas of personhood for the way it “denied human interdependence” in social and economic relations (138). 6. Rev. F. H. Cuming, quoted in Patrick McGreevy, Stairway to Empire: Lockport, the Erie Canal, and the Shaping of America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 101–​102. 7. Ibid.,  101. 8. For a related discussion, see Grant Hardy’s analysis of the visionary “tour of the future” Nephi receives from an angel and recounts in 1 Ne. 11–​14. Hardy links this prophetic dreamscape to the biblical genre of an “apocalypse,” best known from the book of Revelation, but notes that Nephi’s vision combines allegorical elements with an unveiling of specific “yet-​to-​be-​fulfilled historical events.” Understanding the Book of Mormon:  A Reader’s Guide (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2010), 76–​78, 76. 9. Gillian Feeley-​Harnick, “Placing the Dead: Kinship, Slavery, and Free Labor in Pre-​and Post-​ Civil War America,” in McKinnon and Cannell, Vital Relations, 181, 182.

 

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10. See Laurence Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001). 11. Briggs, “Lockport,” 101. 12. In The Last of the Mohicans, for instance, Cooper casts the individualism of settlers as in part an aboriginal inheritance: Colonists acquired New World discipline by “emulating the patience and self-​denial of the practiced warriors” they accompanied into war against the French. James Fenimore Cooper:  The Leatherstocking Tales vol. 1, Blake Nevins, ed. (New  York:  Library of America, 1985), 479. 13. James Fenimore Cooper, Notions of the Americans (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1852), vols. 1–​2, 127. 14. Morgan quoted in Thomas R. Trautmann, Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 2008 [1987]), 47–​48. On the New Order of the Iroquois (sometimes the Grand Order of the Iroquois), see Trautmann, Lewis Henry Morgan, 39–​50; Daniel Noah Moses, The Promise of Progress: The Life and Work of Lewis Henry Morgan (Columbia:  University of Missouri Press, 2009), 36–​79; Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 71–​94. 15. Carl Resek, Lewis Henry Morgan: American Scholar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960),  5–​6. 16. Aquarius [Morgan], “Vision of Kar-​is-​ta-​gi-​a, a Sachem of the Cayugas,” The Knickerbocker 24 (September 1844): 238–​245. 17. There is a large body of scholarship on Romantic poetics and secularization. For a useful overview, see Colin Jager, “This Detail, This History: Charles Taylor’s Romanticism,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, Michael Warner, Jonathan Vanantwerpen, and Craig Calhoun, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 166–​192. See also Talal Asad’s discussion of the way the modern concept of “myth” in the West serves to “ground secular experience.” Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1–​66, 56. 18. Although The Book of Mormon claimed the status of sacred writ and is premised on modern revelation, a number of scholars have remarked on the ways the text emphasizes its own human construction, through its multiple narrators and editors, its admitted gaps, and its obsession with (and examples of failures of) human record-​keeping. See for example Jared Hickman, “The Book of Mormon as American Apocalypse,” American Literature 86 (2014): 429–​61. 19. Henry Lewis Morgan, Diffusion Against Centralization, quoted in John Lardis Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 226. 20. Sterling McMurrin, The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1965). 21. Henry Lewis Morgan, The Two Antagonistic Principles of Civil Government, paper presented to the Rochester Athenaeum, quoted in Moses, Promise of Progress, 126, 133. 22. Morgan’s summary description, in a private letter, of his Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity in the Human Family, quoted in Trautman, Henry Lewis Morgan, 2. 23. Terryl Givens, “The Book of Mormon and the Reshaping of Covenant,” in this volume. 24. McKinnon, Vital Relations, 40. 25. See, for instance, Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and Family in Nineteenth-​ Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 26. The question of whether the difference between Nephites and Lamanites is religiocultural or ethnoracial is complex. See, for instance, Hickman’s close analysis of the text’s racial conundrums (“The Book of Mormon,” 437–​441). But free agency not only inaugurates the original population difference of the Lamanites; that power of agency remains a live factor in Lamanite identity, as when the voluntary conversion of a group of Lamanites to Nephite teachings makes their skin become “white” (2 Ne 2:12–​16). 27. Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity, 493. 28. “The experience of mankind . . . has developed but two plans of government.” “The first and most ancient was a social organization, founded upon gentes, phatries and tribes. The second and latest was a political organization, founded upon territory and property . . . . One belongs to ancient society, and the other to modern.” Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society (1877; Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 62.

 

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29. Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity, 491; Ancient Society, 238. 30. Quoted in Moses, Promise of Progress, 127. 31. Morgan’s reference to a “Supreme Intelligence” comes in the final sentence of his very long masterwork Ancient Society, 554. Scholars have recently explored how spiritual and theological concepts inform Morgan’s secular science. In Secularism in Antebellum America, Modern analyzes Morgan’s ethnographic studies as “a curious blend of evangelical and spiritualist sensibilities,” which theorize the mechanism of social progress as an unseen, animating energy that spreads from mind to mind (225–​227). Feeley-​Harnick has examined Morgan’s life and writing as an instance of the way religious worldviews shaped the construction of nineteenth-​century political and scientific culture. In addition to her “Placing the Dead,” and “ ‘The Mystery of Life in All Its Forms,’ ” see “Communities of Blood: The Natural History of Kinship in Nineteenth-​Century America,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 14 (1999):  215–​262, and “The Ethnography of Creation:  Henry Lewis Morgan and the American Beaver,” in Relative Values:  Refiguring Kinship (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2001), 54–​84. 32. Morgan quoted in Moses, 128. Charles Finney quoted in Johnson, Shopkeeper’s Millennium, 3. 33. Feeley-​Harnick, “Placing the Dead,” 182. 34. Morgan, in a letter to President Rutherford B. Hayes, quoted in Moses, Promise of Progress, 255. 35. Ibid.,  53. 36. Oliver Cowdery, “Address to the Indian Council,” in Stories From the Early Saints: Converted by the Book of Mormon, Susan Easton Black, ed. (Salt Lake City, UT: Bookcraft, 1992), 54. As Smith affirmed in a letter to a journalist, through The Book of Mormon “we learn that our western Tribes of Indians are descendants from that Joseph that was sold into Egypt, and that the land of America is a promised land unto them, and unto it all the tribes of Israel will come.” Dean C. Jessee, ed., The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret, 1984), 273. 37. Hickman goes so far as to argue that as a “tragic Nephite eschatology” told from the point of view of fallible Nephite narrators, The Book of Mormon contains a “metacritique of the theological racism” of the Nephites and the muted basis for a Lamanite or Native liberation theology. “The Book of Mormon,” 442, 436. 38. In 1830 Smith sent missionaries west from New York state to bring The Book of Mormon to Indians. They eventually reached Jackson County, Missouri, which bordered Indian Country (“the border of the Lamanites”), where they met with Shawnees and Delawares. Joseph Smith joined them and in July 1831 recorded a revelation that Jackson was to be a New Jerusalem, the “city of Zion” (D&C 57). See Leland H. Gentry, “Light on the ‘Mission to the Lamanites,” BYU Studies 36.2 (1996–​1997): 226–​232. 39. In his 1845 letter to Henry Schoolcraft, Morgan declares that Indians “cannot hold out against the onward tide of [white settler] population” and therefore must wholly assimilate or “even be engrafted on our race.” Quoted in Resek, Lewis Henry Morgan, 31. In an 1859 trip west, an entry in Morgan’s notebook states that because it is “utterly impossible” for Indians to survive in their present state they must “make money and throw off the Indian in part.” Leslie White, ed., Lewis Henry Morgan, The Indian Journals, 1859–​1862 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), 36. Taken as a whole, Morgan’s body of work constructs what Modern calls a “metaphysical scheme” of progress that seemed to promise a redemptive “sense of cohesion and wholeness” amidst the disruptions of settler colonialism (Secularism, 187, 188). But Feeley-​Harnick points to the ways that his later work in particular introduces a more contingent and fragile picture of what the human “property career” portends for the future, especially with regard to ecological systems and animal species. As Morgan put it, the “property career” of civilization “contains the elements of self-​destruction.” “Mystery of Life in All its Forms,” 176. 40. Michael Warner, “Was Antebellum America Secular?” The Immanent Frame:  Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere, October 2, 2012, http://​blogs.ssrc.org/​tif/​2012/​10/​02/​ was-​antebellum-​america-​secular/​ 41. On the ideas of “visionary reproductive biology” that informed the new forms of sacred kinship in utopian communities of this period, see Feeley-​Harnick, “Placing the Dead,” 182. As I argue in this essay, the kinship reforms introduced by Handsome Lake’s New Religion

 

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can be considered another version of the “visionary reproductive biology” discussed by Feeley-​Harnick. 42. Ancient Society, 61. 43. See Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-​Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 44. Lewis Henry Morgan, League of the Hodénosaunee, Iroquois (New York: Citadel Press, 1962), 229, 234–​235. 45. Matthew Dennis, Seneca Possessed:  Indians, Witchcraft, and Power in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 75–​76. 46. Morgan, League of the Iroquois, 241. 47. Dennis, Seneca Possessed, 84. 48. Morgan, League of the Iroquois, 228. Morgan calls Handsome Lake’s prophetic career a “philanthropic enterprise for the social and moral improvement of the Iroquois.” But he admits that “it may be difficult to ascertain” why Handsome Lake so suddenly rejected his “vagrancy and sloth” for a life of “ambition and industry” (230). Although Morgan describes Handsome Lake’s revelations as deliberate “pretensions,” he claims that the spiritual leaders who continued to teach the Code were sincere believers. 49. Morgan, League of the Iroquois, 256–​257. 50. Emma Willard, Abridged History of the United States or Republic of America, quoted in Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption:  Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 243.

 

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How the Mormons Became White Scripture, Sex, Sovereignty Peter Coviello

If you know much at all about Mormonism, you probably know something of the story about race and indigeneity that gets told in The Book of Mormon, and you know too how ugly it is. In very brief: The wicked Lamanites, removed from the Holy Land to North America where they will do battle with the righteous Nephites, are marked in their ungodliness with, of course, dark skin. Famously, the Lamanites are at a stroke transformed into the indigenous people of North America, into “Indians.” (“It has been said by many of the learned, and wise men, or historians,” Smith had written in 1835, in what was by then a not-​ unfamiliar formulation, “that the Indians, or aborigines of this continent, are of the scattered tribes of Israel.”1) In this way The Book of Mormon adapts itself to a series of drearily familiar racist tropes of the American nineteenth century:  about Indians as remnants of the lost tribes of Israel, or, more saliently, about nonwhiteness as a God-​ordained and indelible accursedness. The Book of Mormon, we might say, swallows these conventional racist premises whole, and metabolizes them into an intractably racist cosmology, haphazardly wrought round with a settler-​colonial white supremacism that will be unfamiliar to few students of antebellum America. In this context, what Jared Hickman rightly describes as American Mormonism’s “deplorable record of theological racism” oughtn’t to surprise us much at all. On the contrary, such racism would appear to be stranded through the very DNA of early Mormonism, written indelibly into its foundational theological text.2 In what follows I want to pursue two basic points. First, with the aid of readers and critics who have preceded me, I want to suggest that the reading of The Book of Mormon as plainly and conventionally racist is, while not exactly untenable, nevertheless a serious misapprehension of the text, and especially of the ways Peter Coviello, How the Mormons Became White: Scripture, Sex, Sovereignty. In: Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon. Edited by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190221928.003.0011

 

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the singularity of its narrative structure inflects, entangles, and in fact overwrites its seemingly stark racist polarities. The Book of Mormon is something other, and something stranger, than the reflexive reproduction of nineteenth-​century racism for which it is very, very easy to take it. As Mormons readers were themselves quick to recognize, The Book of Mormon tells a story, too, about imperial hubris and the steep decline of a once-​righteous people overthrown by their own pride. For early Mormons, who had endured a multitude of persecutions and enjoyed very little of the protections of the state for which they might have hoped, the analogies were not hard to read. White Americans—​the “Gentiles” in Mormon terminology—​were the imperialists speeding themselves toward violent decline. “I am prophet enough,” Brigham Young declaimed in 1849, in a quote to which we will return, “to prophesy the downfall of the Government that has driven us out.”3 But my second major point runs hard aslant of the first. As I hope to show, one of the things that might make it difficult for us to encounter The Book of Mormon as something other than yet-​one-​more artifact in the vast archive of white supremacism is, in fact, Mormonism. More precisely, it is the shape Mormonism was to take over the course of the later nineteenth century, as the Mormons ventured into the American West and began to live alongside the peoples they referred to as “Brother Laman.” This, Brother Laman, was the curiously fraternal term Mormons used for Native peoples, in deference to their status as The Book of Mormon’s surviving remnant. But that fraternal fellowship was from the first roiled, and roiled not least by a powerful and anxious Mormon need to distinguish themselves, sharply and unmistakably, from the very Natives they also understood to be their sometimes brethren. I want to suggest above all that the Mormon hunger for sovereignty—​some sheltered space for self-​rule, apart from the incursions of federal authority—​precipitated, in the West, not a new but a newly urgent Mormon identification with whiteness: whiteness, here, as the form of civic status that alone might secure their claims to a sort of intranational sovereignty. But as the Mormon story helps us to see with real vividness, settler-​ colonial whiteness was a matter larger than phenotype and a willingness to indulge in racist disidentification and violence. (These, the Mormons had in full supply.) Complicatingly, whiteness entailed, too, specific ways of living in relation to gender, to sex, and to secularity, not all of which were easily accessible to devoted Mormons. These crossed imperatives pressurized Mormon relations to native peoples in ways that help us explain the painful adjacency, in nineteenth-​ century Mormonism, of anti-​imperial critique and colonizing brutality. But in the contours of the Mormon story we can begin to see, too, how whiteness itself had become what, today, it continues to be: the emblem of a modernity successfully attained, a signature of the secular.4

 



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The Lamanite’s Lament If The Book of Mormon could be said to have villains, they would have to be the Lamanites, the descendants of Lehi’s unrighteous son Laman—​Laman who, as we are first introduced to him, is marked chiefly by his deceitfulness, his treachery, and the constancy of his “murmuring” against his father and brother. The cursing of the descendants of Laman with dark skin early on makes plain enough their Cain-​like racialization, whereby nonwhiteness and spiritual malignancy are made into the simplest of figures for one another. The passage comes in 2 Ne 5:21: And he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them.5 One does not struggle to find accounts of the Lamanites keyed to the note of a characterological malady of soul, expressed in the shorthand of phenotype. It’s true that there is much in The Book of Mormon to mitigate the clarity of this division: passages of earnest Lamanite conversion, periods in which Lamanites and their “good” counterparts the Nephites are described as virtually indistinguishable in their distance from righteousness, and others when Lamanites are more righteous. Nevertheless, whatever the blurring force of these doublings and migrations of virtue, the positioning of the Lamanites as the fearsome enemies of the Nephites, distinguished by their “cunning, and lying craftiness” (Mosiah 10:18), is relatively unfaltering. The Lamanites, cursed with their “skin of blackness,” play more or less exactly the role nineteenth-​century American readers might expect of racial Others. They are the treacherous enemy, untrustworthy and accursed. All of which might simply solidify our understanding of The Book of Mormon as, at base, an especially outblown variety of Midrash: a respinning of conflicts and tropes and figures from the Bible, adapted to the shifting needs of a particular historical moment. (I will forever be grateful to the undergraduate who in class referred to The Book of Mormon as “Old Testament fan-​fiction,” an observation I found at the time both funny and faultless.) Embedded here is a kind of racial contextualism, an interpretive practice that reads The Book of Mormon as a text overspilling with the racial presumptions of its moment of composition:  a recapitulation of nineteenth-​century colonizing racism at its most uncontoured.

 

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And yet and yet. If it’s not wrong to say The Book of Mormon makes villains of the accursed dark-​skinned Lamanites, neither is it quite right. The Book of Mormon actually does something weirder and more elaborate. This is so not only because it is, finally, the Lamanites who win the millennial race war the book depicts, and so survive as the sacred remnant, the carriers of the seed of Lehi into the future. (Though that survivance, as we will see, is not inconsequential.) Rather, the work itself employs a narrative structure that, as many critics have noted, stands The Book of Mormon in vivid contrast to most sacred scripture. And it does so, I think, in large measure to bring into relief the possibilities of a racial counternarrative. As critics like Terryl Givens, Grant Hardy, Elizabeth Fenton, and especially Jared Hickman remind us, one of the very most striking features of The Book of Mormon is its insistent foregrounding of the conditions of its production, preservation, and transmission.6 That is, this sacred text is pointedly not unfolded in the voice of narrators who are “anonymous, omniscient, reticent, and unobtrusive,” which is how Hardy rightly describes the narrators of the Hebrew Bible (Understanding The Book of Mormon, 15). If you go looking to The Book of Mormon for the unmarked and unchallengeable omniscience of sacred texts you will be frustrated. Instead, you will find narrators who write from what Hardy calls “limited, human perspectives” (15). Our first narrator, Nephi, Hardy writes, “presents his life story with a particular point of view, a theological vision, an agenda,” though in truth he could be speaking as well of Mormon and Moroni (Understanding The Book of Mormon, 13, emphasis added). But the fact that the book’s narrators could be said to have an agenda matters for more than narratological reasons. It makes an especially crucial kind of difference, too, to the emplotments of race and racial salvation The Book of Mormon seems on its surface to endorse. The Book of Mormon is assembled by editors and scribes, each of whom is marked as a character within the racial dramas being played out and elaborately recounted—​with, we could crudely say, skin in those games. They are, each and all of these narrators, Nephites. And though they might be telling a story of their people’s decline and decimation, describing in intricate historical detail a tragedy of fallen righteousness, still they can be seen to have an investment in Nephite aggrandizement that is, at moments, conspicuous. From the first, this aggrandizement comes at the expense of the Lamanites. For instance, Hardy exemplifies his overarching claim about the human situatedness of the text’s narrators by looking closely at the first story told by the first narrator we encounter, Nephi. It is from Nephi that we first learn of the wickedness of Laman and Lemuel, Nephi’s own brothers. But that imputed wickedness is not altogether without contour. We might note particularly that the way Nephi regards Laman and Lemuel is markedly different from how they are regarded by other characters in the drama he

 



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unfolds. No one makes this difference clearer than Lehi, the father of all three of them. As narrated in 1 Nephi, Lehi the patriarch produces little of the vehement condemnation that Nephi does, his supposedly righteous son. As Hardy astutely frames the matter, “Lehi speaks as a concerned father, Nephi as a condemning brother (and a younger one at that)” (Understanding The Book of Mormon, 54–​ 55). These discordant notes—​the differences of perspective between Lehi and Nephi—​remind us of the limited, the invested, position from which the text is written. His brothers may indeed be unrighteous but Nephi himself has also, in several senses, usurped them. And this is a fact to which he is in no hurry to draw our attention. So we misread the originary disparagements of Laman if we approach them apart from Nephi’s own investments, and especially his tendency (in Hardy’s words) to “minimiz[e]‌his personal struggles, weaknesses, and mistakes” (Understanding The Book of Mormon, 55). Hickman calls this, winningly, the “sheer ‘me’ factor of Nephi’s first-​person narrative,” while Avi Steinberg, striking a similar note, invites us to read The Book of Mormon as transpiring in “the energetically deluded first person.”7 From the outset, these self-​invested delusions torque the narrative in particular ways. What we learn of Laman’s wickedness, that is, we learn not omnisciently—​not from the all-​seeing perspective of a God who has judged—​but from a rival brother who has risen above his station to claim the mantle of righteousness. Consider too the Book of Mosiah, where we encounter “The Record of Zeniff.” Here is an embedded narrator who, unlike Mormon and Moroni, actually pauses amid his accounts of Lamanite–​Nephite warfare to offer us something of the Lamanite sense of the war’s inciting causes. (Hardy describes Zeniff’s comments at this moment in Mosiah as “nothing less than an explanation of the war—​from the Lamanites’ perspective” [Understanding The Book of Mormon, 129].) We are told, Believing that they were driven out of the land of Jerusalem because of the iniquities of their fathers, and that they were wronged in the wilderness by their brethren, and they were also wronged while crossing the sea; and again, that they were wronged while in the land of their inheritance, after they had crossed the sea. (Mosiah 10:12–​13) According to Zeniff, the Lamanites persist in their bloody antagonisms not because of any ingrained moral wretchedness, signified phenotypically or otherwise. This is an account not of Lamanite wickedness but of Lamanite grievance: of a people precipitated into sustained warfare by a sense of usurpation, harm, and lasting injustice. Indeed, that they object to being punished in the name of “the iniquities of their fathers” gives point to their understanding of the Nephites as persecutors who use the idea of bloodlines, of inherited sins, to authorize their depredations. It is, we might say, a glancing indictment of the

 

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Nephite’s racialization of righteousness. Hardy suggests that, “There is no comparable passage in the rest of The Book of Mormon,” though in his thoroughgoing attention to embedded counternarratives Hickman turns our attention to the other voices (Ammoron in Alma 54; Samuel, especially in Helaman 15)  that ratify Zeniff ’s and echo his sense of grievance (Hardy, Understanding The Book of Mormon, 130; Hickman, “The Book of Mormon,” 450–​455). In a work as intricate and vast as The Book of Mormon, even this litany of irruptions may indeed be small. But their consequences are not. They clarify for us the workings, as well as the racial and theological stakes, of what Hickman calls The Book of Mormon’s strategies of “self-​deconstruction” (“The Book of Mormon,” 441). We know that The Book of Mormon is, in its largest movements, a tragedy. It tells the story of a people especially chosen by God who fail, catastrophically, to live up to that God’s word. But in what precisely does that failure consist? Of what is it made? Faithlessness and avarice, surely, rank among the Nephites’ most dire failings, and the text returns to them repeatedly. But the arrangement of The Book of Mormon as the work of historians, of scribes and editors who have taken part in the dramas they depict, and indeed taken sides, gives us another way of measuring Nephite declension. Hickman avers that, once we begin to take the situatedness of its narrators with the seriousness it warrants, The Book of Mormon “comes into view as an ethnocentric document, the governing cultural myth of the Nephite people.” Nephi and Mormon and Moroni, he argues, write “to prop up Nephite cultural identity” (Hickman, “The Book of Mormon,” 448). Another way of saying this is to suggest that the racism of The Book of Mormon is not some underthought cultural effect, some reflex of Smith’s embeddedness in an antebellum world inescapably ordered by settler-​colonial logics he cannot help but reproduce. Instead, that racism—​that guiding, distorting ethnocentric narrative framing—​emerges as an essential element of the Nephites’ undoing. It marks the failure of righteousness for which they are most chastised and that they are least capable of narrating.8 The text overturns the expectation of a naturalized omniscience in sacred history making to remind us of the falsity, the literally damning falsity, of imperial historiography. Read against the grain not of its narrative but of its narrators, this sacred and authorizing epic is secretly the story of a vilified people triumphing over enemies who, though they cannot conceive of themselves as anything other than the very pattern of exemplary and God-​sanctioned virtue, are actually hubristic, backsliding, un-​self-​knowing, and, finally, wicked. In this way, The Book of Mormon may be less an exemplification of colonizing racism (and racist historiography) than a sustained performed critique of it, in which it is exactly the Nephites’ imperiousness, their incapacity to recognize themselves as anything other than chosen and holy and their foes as anything other than benighted, that dooms them. It is, we could say, a vast chastisement of the self-​blindedness of imperial arrogance.

 



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Secularism’s Others By the time the Mormons head into the Wasatch Range, these dramas around racial imperialism are far from abstract, and their morals far from clear. In truth, the complications had begun even earlier. But the matter is hardly that the Mormons themselves, as they ventured west, ceased to understand The Book of Mormon as an indicting document of imperial hubris and decline, especially pertinent to a nineteenth-​century America racing toward crisis and soon to founder on its own wild hypocrisies. On the contrary, precisely that reading of The Book of Mormon—​as the story of a people who fall and whose decline follows from its imperial arrogance—​animates the rhetoric of postmigration Mormonism, though not perhaps in the ways we might expect. When, for instance, Brigham Young declares in 1849, in a quote we have seen already, “I am prophet enough to prophesy the downfall of the Government that has driven us out,” he outlines something of the slipperiness, the fractious multiplicity, of Mormon identifications with and around the defining trajectories of their sacred epic. In this moment, Young is decrying the federal government’s refusal to let the Mormons continue to use the incorporated land they called the Winter Quarters as a gathering place for their westward migrations. And Winter Quarters, it transpires, is an especially revealing vantage point from which to encounter some of the most fraught dilemmas of postmigration Mormonism. Consider the scene: It’s the winter of 1846, and Young and the Saints are beginning the great migration. “In 1846,” environmental historian Jared Farmer writes, Young needed a wintering place to prepare for the migration. He could have set up camp in Western Iowa, but the Mormon persecution complex propelled him across the Missouri River to unorganized territory. Better to live among the red men than among whites. Young knowingly violated a federal law that forbade contact with Indians on reserved land. He went ahead and negotiated his own extralegal treaties with Omahas and Otoes, both of whom claimed the land at Winter Quarters.9 These are the very Winter Quarters of which Young biographer John G. Turner writes, “One of the unusual aspects of life [there] was the partial emergence of the church’s altered and expanded family structures” (Brigham Young, 153). It is an irresistible tableau:  Mormons and Omahas and Otoes wintering out together on the western bank of the Missouri, with their adjacent histories of violent displacement, their like yearnings for landed spaces of self-​rule, their familial forms that, from the perspective of the white secular nation, could read only as derangements of normative intimacy. The scene of layered colonial contact would be arresting in itself—​two very different displaced people

 

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reaching accords over the sharing of land—​but of course what makes it all only the more strange, beguiling, and fractally complex is the fact that the Mormons are encountering those Omahas and Otoes through the prism of a dense system of beliefs, indeed an entire cosmology, in which the indigenous people of North America play, as we have seen, an immeasurably important part. The Book of Mormon has, in a sense, endeavored to tell their story. They are Brother Laman. And here they are, with the Mormons, suffering at the hands of the imperious Gentiles, whose “downfall” Young prophesies with an eager certainty. The note Young strikes in his prophetic denunciation is vehement, but for the Mormons it is not new. Decades of persecution, violence, contempt, and many, many failed promises of protection had left the Mormons not just suspicious of federal authority but, rather more broadly, convinced of the spiritual malignity of the Gentiles. In 1845, with the pre–​Civil War saber-​rattling beginning in earnest, Young had declared “This nation is doomed to destruction,” but this merely echoed Smith’s own dire prophecies about the fate of a nation so given over to wickedness, and so divided as well.10 This was not, however, a position without shifting and intricate complications, both geopolitical and scriptural. For instance, as the scene at Winter Quarters begins to suggest, the Mormon disidentification from the imperiousness of the midcentury United States could only prompt an allegiance with those Native Americans, those latter-​day Lamanites, who, quite plainly, suffered grievously federal betrayals and depredations. Again, this was an allegiance—​or at least an identification—​ that would rise to the level of explicitness, as when Young, in virtually the same breath as he foresaw the doom of the American nation, declared, “The nation has severed us from them in every respect and made us a distinct nation just as much as the Lamanites.”11 In scriptural terms, this striking cross-​identification makes real sense. Indeed, for scripture-​minded Mormons newly arrived in the west an identification with the “Indians” was, in a way, compulsory. The Lamanites, after all, are for the Mormons the sacred remnant: the surviving descendants of Lehi, who carry the promise of his line into the future. And just so, the initial years after the Mormon arrival in the West witnesses a revival of what was called “Lamanism”—​a fervent, pious, short-​lived burst of interest in the welfare and spiritual education of the indigenous people among whom the Mormons now lived. I want to turn in a moment to the pressurized instability of Mormon–​Indian identification, and to the passage of revivalist “Lamanism” and its effects. But it’s worth addressing as well the other dilemmas nested in Young’s reading of the United States as tracing out a fate similar to that of the once-​righteous Nephites, whose escalating sinfulness The Book of Mormon can be understood to indict. That originary righteousness matters a great deal. Joseph Smith himself was not at all shy of a certain kind of nationalist chauvinism. The person who finds sacred

 



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plates buried in the earth of the misnamed “New World,” who narrates Jesus’s resurrection in America, is not a man upon whom the emergent vocabularies of American exceptionalism had had no effect. That Mormon theology understood the Constitution itself to have been inspired by a beneficent, intervening God (D&C:  101:80) is in this respect not much of a surprise. When Harold Bloom, a critic with as much enthusiasm for American exceptionalism as anyone we might name, calls Mormonism “the American Religion,” he does so with reason.12 The vast revisionist undertaking of Mormonism itself—​with its relocated sacred drama, its fixation on the secrets of the North American soil, its branching racial dramas—​might well be described, still more exactly, as an effort toward the indigenization of Christianity.13 What begins to open up here, then, is a persistent doubleness in Mormon relations to the United States, and to the idea of America, a doubleness that reiterates what we might think of as the ambivalent heroism of the Nephites in The Book of Mormon. To read The Book of Mormon is to encounter a people of great promise, gifted with a tremendous initial extension of God’s grace. But through their backsliding and unrighteousness, they have blighted that promise. It is the story of opportunity and of fall, of a tragic departure from an originary moment of promise, in which that declension (if we are correct in our counterreading) takes the form of violence, injustice, expropriation. The Book of Mormon in this way gives to believers a narrative architecture in which it might be possible both to revere and to reject the United States of the nineteenth century—​to think, say, that the US Constitution is a sacred document and that the nation is, as Smith and Young averred, doomed. Importantly, as Young’s observations about Mormons and the Lamanites indicate, the Mormon disidentification with the doom-​struck United States is leveraged by an understanding of the Nephites as a people themselves brought to cataclysm by the self-​inflating hypocrisies of imperialism. How, then, does a people equipped by their scripture with what could well be called anti-​imperial critique, a people attuned to the violence of colonial hubris, comport itself as it ventures west, into a more intimate contact with those Lamanites whose abuse at the hands of an unchecked federal authority Young himself recognized as an element of Gentile declension? Part of the answer involves that revival of Lamanism that envelops the newly emigrated Mormons after their arrival in the Salt Lake Basin. Farmer deftly describes both this moment and its recession, noting that the increase in pious attentiveness to the fate of the “Indians” ran headlong into the more nakedly expropriative forms of interrelation that would come to define Mormon engagements with native peoples in the West. Turner puts the matter with admirable concision, remarking that Young “attributed the survival and safety of Utah’s settlements to his willingness to ‘kill every soul of them [the Indians] if we had been obliged to do so.’ ”14

 

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Whatever slumbering protopolitical identifications, whatever scripture-​induced passages of empathy or alliance, the Mormon drive for resources—​land, above all, but also food, water, and secured trading routes—​ensured that relations with the Lamanites would be the conventional ones, made up of principally imputations of an anti-​civilizational savagery, dubiously legal seizure of lands, great violence, and finally moments of haphazard “charity.” But the conventionality of this ending to the story of Mormon–​Native encounter can obscure some stranger trajectories, some inside narratives that give point to the vexations of Mormon–​Native proximity. The Lamanism that captivated the emigrated Mormons for a few years in the mid-​1850s intimates, after all, the possibility of an encounter tuned significantly otherwise—​one marked less by racial difference than by a shared disidentification from imperious “American” injustice and exploitation. As Farmer notes, the revival of Lamanism picks up in earnest around 1856, “when Congress rejected Utah’s opening bid for statehood—​a repudiation of veiled theocracy and unveiled polygamy” (On Zion’s Mount, 92). This was, of course, precisely the rebuke to foment the disidentification strain in Mormon relations to the government of the Gentiles, and to the whole of America itself, both of which would appear to the Mormons at this moment more menacing than worth the labor of redeeming. In the glow of this new rejection, Farmer writes, “many Mormons anticipated an alternative scenario—​an independent LDS nation that would flourish even as the iniquitous United States burned to ashes. As foreseen by Joseph Smith,” Farmer continues, “the Mormon apocalypse included a prominent role for the ‘remnant of Jacob’ ” (On Zion’s Mount, 92–​93, emphasis added). Here, then, was precisely the apocalyptic anti-​imperial vision of The Book of Mormon, come to vivid life in the mountain West and routed through a redoubled commitment to the Lamanites. In moments of precarity and crisis such as this, anti-​Americanism trumps the hierarchies of racial distinction under the authorizing sign of scriptural and prophetic decree. Indeed, at a conference in Provo, Utah, in 1855, designed by Mormon leaders to incite a solidifying Mormon revivalism among the backsliding faithful, future President Wilford Woodruff struck a note that reminded his auditors in no uncertain terms where their allegiances, spiritually speaking, must lie. Mormon declension, he suggested, made itself visible not least as an unsavory likeness to white America. “You will eat their fish,” Woodruff told the Saints of the Utes among whom they were then living, on which they depend for a living one part of the year, and every service berry that you can find in the mountains, and still you grumble to let them have a little with them . . . . Before the whites came, there was plenty of fish and antelope, plenty of game of almost every description;

 



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but now the whites have killed off these things, and there is scarcely anything left for the poor natives to live upon.15 Backsliding Mormons, Woodruff says, look like Americans: the Gentiles, whose destruction The Book of Mormon foretells and whose imperiousness it warns against through the example of the Nephites and their terrible fall. “Woodruff castigates the Saints,” Farmer observes, “for treating the Indians the way the Gentiles had treated the Mormons” (On Zion’s Mount, 93–​94), which, again, is to encourage a delicate, unstable sort of Mormon–​Native indistinction among the faithful. In this iteration of devout Mormonism, to believe in the remnant of Jacob is to identify with them: to recognize the colonial violence with which they, too, have been treated by the Gentiles—​by Americans—​and to refuse to replicate it. Good Mormons, under such a dispensation, could only be anti-​ American Mormons. This is why the backsliding faithful appear in Woodruff ’s account not as “Mormons” or as “Saints” but, strikingly, as “the whites”—​a designation, in this moment, remarkably equivocal. Nor was such equivocality lost on Native peoples themselves, forced into increasingly dire negotiations with these various, varying white people. Listen to Kanosh, a leader of one band of Utes, speaking of the disastrous treaty signed in 1865, relinquishing indigenous “possessory right of occupation”:  “If the Americans buy the land, where would the Mormons, who live here go to?”16 Kanosh gives back to the Mormons in this moment a stark reading of their own oft-​stated commitments. In the throes of Lamanism at least, the Mormons might be many things—​difficult interlocutors, changeable politicians, unsteady allies—​but they could not be mistaken for Americans. As the treaty itself had made clear, though, the Mormons had thrown in their lot, and it was not in dissent from colonial whiteness. (Indeed, it’s hard not to read, in Kanosh’s commentary, a recriminatory kind of satire.17) Despite their fluctuating allegiances, when it came to matters of land, of access, and of the management of Native populations, the Mormons were more than willing to collude with the doomed and persecutorial Gentiles. But I’d insist again that these abrupt recastings of identification and allegiance reveal more than the Saints’ hypocrisy, or a willingness to forget scripture in the name of securing settlement, or even the inevitable force of a kind of postmigration realpolitik. They suggest a good deal too, I think, about the stakes, as well as the intractabilities, of Mormon identifications with Lamanites—​an identification at once compulsory and intolerable. We begin to see as much when we remember that that identifications of Mormons with “savages” were always being made in the nineteenth century, and not typically by the Mormons themselves, with scripture in hand. Rather, Mormons were more typically described as “Indians” by their most committed enemies, those most devoted to the erasure of the possibility

 

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of Mormon self-​rule, if not of Mormonism itself. As Nancy Bentley’s work makes clear, readings of the Mormons as colonial civilization’s unassimilable Others were commonplace in the later nineteenth century, especially in the vibrant pseudo-​pornographic genre of anti-​Mormon novels, but not only there.18 Such comparisons proceeded, of course, on grounds other than a shared oppression at the hands of colonizing powers. Instead, the Mormons were read as “Mohammedan,” “Muslim,” and, most pervasively, Indian. No one has made this case more forcefully than W. Paul Reeve, whose excellent new book Religion of a Different Color portrays in plentiful detail the strategies by which Mormons were cast, by what he calls “the Protestant majority,” as degenerating and unassimilable racial Others, closer not merely in their political allegiances but in their racial character to “Indians,” to “Blacks,” and to “Orientals,” than to the white Americans whose rightful hold on the spaces of national authority was being threatened from without by these and other mongrel upstarts. As Reeve’s book makes inarguably clear, Mormon–​Native likeness was not only a tale told by attentive Mormon readers, fiery sermonizers, and eager apocalypticists. It was not only a revivalist story. Far more prominently, it was a story of delegitimation—​one in which, given their previous decades’ experience, the Mormons could hardly be blamed for hearing a pretext for annihilating violence. It had come before. Writing of the 1838 massacre at Hawn’s Mill, Reeve writes, “In essence the Missourians appropriated the rhetoric of Indian hating in an effort to eliminate the moral compunction of exterminating and removing white people from their land”—​in this case, Mormons—​“in the same way that Americans had been exterminating and removing Native Americans for over two hundred years.”19 In respect to crossings like these, we might demur a bit from Turner’s account of Brigham Young’s style of racism—​his lasting horror of “amalgamation,” his alternating exterminatory violence toward and paternalist seizure of Native persons—​as, essentially, normative:  an expression of the times. Such racial contextualism, which echoes the racially normativizing readings of The Book of Mormon we saw earlier, leaves us underequipped to describe the density and peculiarity of the Mormon place in the racial imaginary of nineteenth-​ century America. It forgets, perhaps above all, the exquisite pressure postbellum Mormons found themselves under, in their dangerous proximities to an indigeneity they both expropriate and, as Book of Mormon readers, revere, but from which they must also labor to distinguish themselves. Little of this density, this multiplicity of investment, can find room for itself in readings of the Mormons as just another among the ordinarily racist subjects of the American nineteenth century, awash in malign settler-​colonial visions of nonwhite degradation and therefore eager to deploy, rather than be targeted by, such fantasies.

 



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Neither do we best grasp the intricacies of the scene surrounding the Mormons in the West by understanding them as Reeve’s book encourages us to do, which is as the victims of a kind of category mistake—​a people persistently misapprehended as nonwhite despite being, in fact, “overwhelmingly white” (Religion of a Different Color, 9, 16). “Protestant America,” Reeve writes at the outset of the work, “constructed elaborate illogical arguments that struck at the morals, intellect, and the heart of a fabricated Mormon body,” as though readings of the Indians as, say, racially Other were the issue of some proper deployment of logic (Religion of a Different Color, 6). Or again, considering representations of Mormons as “a racial threat to democracy”: “The irony, of course, was that nineteenth-​century Mormons were overwhelmingly white and should have easily blended into the racial mainstream” (Religion of a Different Color, 9). Reeve understands whiteness here to mean, essentially, “Anglo-​European lineage,” which, if it is not a wildly unreasonable premise, also begs a great many more questions than it answers. These questions are concerned less with the mistaking of one actually white populace for some other, somehow properly racialized populace than with the invention of precisely these taxonomies, their extraction, implantation, circulation, and enforcement. Not least in the ways it exceeds the conceptual parameters of these modes of social history, the Mormon story seems to me to mark out, with an almost diagrammatic clarity, how much something nearer to a genealogy of whiteness might be salutary: a critical story about the emergence of whiteness as a category of outsized and multifaceted social utility. As the Mormon story shows us with exceptional persuasive force, Anglo-​European lineage is perhaps necessary for entrée into this talismanic category, but it does not in itself secure or guarantee it. The Mormons are “overwhelmingly white” only according to a taxonomy not yet invested with any such easy clarity in the nineteenth century, but whose insecurity—​whose unsteadied vagrancy—​makes for so much of the racial anxiousness we see in postmigration Mormonism. Such modes of approach to the Mormon story—​the social historical and the genealogical, say—​are not so much opposed as adjacent; they intersect as much as they diverge. For instance: If the widely circulating national fantasies of Mormon–​Native indistinction are for Mormons in the West particularly fraught and particularly multivalent, it is not only because the Mormons regard the Indians as spiritual kin, the sacred remnant, Brother Laman, or for that matter as potentially indispensable allies in the event of cataclysmic war with the United States. As the Mormons themselves again and again recognize, both they and the Lamanites are complexly colonized subjects of a violently imperial nation, one that in its imperialism hews closely to the narrative arc set out in The Book of Mormon as the fate of the once-​righteous Nephites.

 

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Beyond this, though, are affinities far more troubling to the Mormons and far less easily managed. Notably, both the Mormons and the “Indians” assemble themselves around social structures elaborated away from an anchoring in monogamous coupledom—​a departure that, as Bentley’s reading shows with great force, ruptures their allegiance to the hugely powerful fantasy of the nation as a scene of family feeling, cohered on the model of the monogamous coupled household. Put most plainly, both Mormons and Natives are, from the purview of the United States, sexual deviants. Precisely that deviancy, that committed derangement of normative forms of intimacy, grounds the racialization of Mormons and Natives both. On the Native side, this is an old and violent story. From Jefferson’s speculations about Native impotence onward, indigenous people in North America had suffered a style of racialization anchored by and sustained in accusations of sexual errancy. As critics like Andrea Smith, Bethany Schneider, Deborah Miranda, and Mark Rifkin make splendidly clear, it was precisely Native arrangements of gender, property, and intimate life—​precisely the way (to quote Schneider) “the kinship structures of . . . tribal relation stood directly against the heteronormative structures of private property ownership and inheritance”—​that rendered Indians the object of an immensely punitive kind of racialization: a racialization, again, substantiated through imputations of sexual errancy.20 By midcentury, the avowedly polygamous Mormons had made themselves available to a like set of racializations, these biopolitical seizures of subjects at the level of population. This is not, as Reeves suggests, a matter of racial epistemology being somehow misapprehending, fantastic, or “illogical.” It is the inner logic of race. And yet the Mormon story fractures even these expanded, more properly intersectional accounts of the mechanics of racialization. Reeve’s claim is that the Mormons, as a rival strain of mainstream Protestantism, were cast as racial outsiders. “Religion” figures, in this reading, chiefly as an element of distortion:  something that incites a misreading of the Mormons’ actual, biologically substantiated whiteness. But in the casting of Mormons as, precisely, Indian-​like, we see something consequentially different. We encounter a set of figures racialized by both extremities of doctrinal devotion that violated the putatively “secular” codes of liberal Protestant polity and by the forms of specifically sexual deviancy that could be read alternatingly as cause and effect of these deranging orthodoxies of belief. These are not separate or separable integers. They are not distorting mirrors in which the hard facts of lineage or phenotype reappear in “illogical” combination. They are, rather, again, what race is: the conceptual grounding points through which whiteness and nonwhiteness and the degrees of distinction between them are given their substance. So when a character in one of the anti-​Mormon novels Bentley reads announces, “They ain’t whites . . . they’re Mormons” —​when they insist, in essence, that the devotional

 



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practice of polygamy is racializing—​we are in the presence not of any failure of logic or reason but of the racial force of secularism, of secularism as an always racialized and racializing regime. The failures of the Mormons to live to the normalizing secular codes of devotional practice, along with their failure to live to the normative codes of intimate life, are not, however, all that entangles them with Native peoples in the midcentury American imaginary. Woven across all these likenesses, and drawing gravity from their coordination, is something else as well: Both Mormons and Indians imagine themselves to be sovereign peoples, peoples whose rights to authority, land, and self-​determination exceed that of any rival governmental power. In 1885 the Salt Lake Tribune put the matter most concisely: “The essential principle of Mormonism is not polygamy at all, but the ambition of an ecclesiastical hierarchy to wield sovereignty.”21 It is that rare editorial that can claim for itself the virtue of being absolutely correct. In the Mormon story we do indeed find the case of a group of “faithful” adherents devoted to practices that set them so at odds with the secularizing parameters of belief that they fail to appear as religion—​a people who in this way make secularity, which understands itself as the cure to all orthodoxies, visible as orthodoxy—​claiming for themselves nevertheless the right to sovereign self-​rule. These, I  think, are the layered pressures investing what Reeve rightly describes, from his title onward, as the Mormon struggle for whiteness. Again, this struggle indexes something other than some reflex-​like contextual “racism,” the invocation of which seems to me calculated both to lightly indict, but also finally to exonerate nineteenth-​century Mormons. (To make Mormons into racist postbellum Americans is to make them racists we can tolerate, if not celebrate: the victims of a kind of history we are pleased to understand ourselves to have seen through, if not outlived.) As I read it, the Mormon story is more unconsoling, and rather nearer. What I hear in the extravagant racism of Young’s Mormonism, and in its afterlives in the “deplorable record of theological racism” Hickman cites, is not bland conventionality. It is a straining effort not to be mistaken for Indians, or for that matter Muslims, or Catholics, or anything other than a people imperiously white: an effort to shore up, absolutely, and as against these repeated imputations, the whiteness of Mormonism. But if we understand this to be an entangled, self-​contradicting, and finally vastly brutalizing pursuit of whiteness, we should observe too that it is a pursuit grounded in the belief, the entirely accurate belief, that only whiteness could secure a claim to the one thing postbellum Mormons most desperately wanted. This, of course, was sovereignty. Brigham Young was under no illusions about the fact that, in the United States, there could be no sovereignty without whiteness, one ratified less by phenotype than a strict accordance with the interwoven protocols of normative sex and secularity. If the Mormons needed any reminder of this, they had one very near to

 

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hand. The fate of Native peoples in the American West gave especially vivid testament to the cataclysms of failed sovereignty. It was lost on none of the Mormon leaders that the Lamanites had been a people made to suffer, repeatedly and immensely, for a belief in their own inviolable sovereignty, and their persistent exposure of what Mark Rifkin calls “the co-​presence of discrepant . . . incompatible geographies within the United States.”22 This was a fate that, in fealty to Joseph Smith’s vision and the redemptive apocalypticism of The Book of Mormon, had to be avoided. In this way what had been a shared disidentification from American imperialism becomes, for the Mormons, a disidentification with Natives themselves, in which every form of likeness had to be unraveled, whatever the scriptural precedent. Only one of the bitter ironies here is that such a fate was not avoided, or not quite. When in a letter of 1889 then-​president Wilford Woodroof wrote of the impending need to renounce polygamy, he observed, “We are now, politically speaking, a dependent or ward of the United States.” In his language of infantilized dependency, he marks nothing so much as how the Mormons had been, in a word, Indianized.23 In response, the Mormons pledged to adhere at last to the secular codes of normative intimacy; to begin their long transformation into another, newer denomination of American Protestantism; to accept, in barter, the protections afforded by the limited sovereignty of statehood; and, undergirding all of this, to become white, with all the revisionary historicizing, scriptural recalibrating, and “deplorable theological racism” that would entail. This is something of what I mean when I say that one obstacle to seeing clearly the counterracialist possibilities of The Book of Mormon, that capacious primary text, is the arc of nineteenth-​century Mormonism itself. The fate of the Nephites, it proved, was not so easily avoided.

Notes 1. Joseph Smith, The Essential Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1995), 66. 2. Jared Hickman, “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse,” American Literature 86.3 (September 2014): 434. 3. Quoted in John G. Turner, Brigham Young:  Pioneer Prophet (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2012), 197. It is Hickman’s point throughout his pathbreaking essay that The Book of Mormon was legible in the register of anti-​imperial critique not only to early Mormons but to a great range of indigenous and nonwhite figures. His essay accordingly takes up both the “affirmations of Amerindian cultural and spiritual identity” that one might mine from The Book of Mormon, and its affordances for a wealth of nonwhite theologies keyed to anti-​ imperial liberation (see esp. “The Book of Mormon,” 435–​436). My interest here lies less in the liberationist possibilities of The Book of Mormon than in the collision of scriptural anti-​ imperial critique, on the one hand, and on the other the multifaceted colonizing practices of Mormons in the latter half of the nineteenth century. 4. Resources for thinking about race, modernity, and the regime of the secular are plentiful. Some of the works that have been most galvanizing to me include José Casanova, Public

 



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Religions in the Modern World (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1994); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); John Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Vincent Lloyd, ed., Race and Political Theology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 5. Joseph Smith, The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ (Salt Lake City, UT: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​Day Saints, 1981), 66. Cited internally hereafter, by chapter, book, and verse. 6. The reading I offer here of race and narrative form in The Book of Mormon has been enabled by the work, as well as the conversation, of many of the authors featured in this volume. Of particular importance to me have been Terryl L. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Grant Hardy, Understanding The Book of Mormon:  A Reader’s Guide (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2010); Elizabeth Fenton, “Open Canons:  Sacred History and American History in The Book of Mormon,” J19:  The Journal of Nineteenth-​Century Americanists 1.2 (2013): 339–​361; and, most crucially, Hickman, “The Book of Mormon.” 7. Hickman, “The Book of Mormon,” 447. Avi Steinberg, The Lost Book of Mormon:  A Journey Through the Mythic Lands of Nephi, Zarahemla, and Kansas City, Missouri (New  York: Doubleday, 2014), 9. 8. As Hickman puts it, there is one voice “the Nephite narrative does not, at least not willingly, include—​the prophetic voice of the Lamanite” (“The Book of Mormon,” 452). 9. Jared Farmer, On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 59. 10. Quoted in Turner, Brigham Young, 120. 11. Quoted in Turner, Brigham Young, 120, emphasis added. 12. Harold Bloom, The American Religion:  The Emergence of the Post-​ Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). 13. On Mormonism as “a kind of North American indigenization of Christianity,” see Peter Coviello, Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-​Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 14. Turner both notes Young’s violence with respect to the Utes and, in essence, apologizes for it by means of analogy. “Young’s call for a Ute reservation was very much in keeping with developments with U.S.  government policy,” he writes (Brigham Young, 215). This is true enough, but it ignores the pressing fact that this is a government, and, broadly conceived, these are themselves policies, with which the Mormons want increasingly little to do, for reason of their scripturally resonant imperialism. To say the Mormons are in their racism really just like ordinary nineteenth-​century Americans is, for them, more insult than apology. This is the paradox at the center of my consideration of The Book of Mormon’s anti-​imperial critique. 15. Woodruff ’s speech, quoted in Farmer (On Zion’s Mount, 94), was printed in the Mormon Journal of Discourses in1856. 16. Quoted in Farmer, On Zion’s Mount, 102. 17. I take this to be what Farmer means when he suggests that Kanosh’s remarks may be offered “with sarcasm” (On Zion’s Mount, 102). 18. Nancy Bentley, “Marriage as Treason:  Polygamy, Nation, and the Novel,” in The Futures of American Studies, Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman, eds. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 341–​370. 19. W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color:  Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 55. 20. See especially Daniel Heath Justice, Mark Rifkin, and Bethany Schneider, “Introduction,” GLQ 16.1–​2 (2010): 5–​39, 17; Deborah A. Miranda, “Extermination of the Joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California,” GLQ 16.1–​2 (2010):  253–​284; as well as Rifkin’s indispensable When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2011). As all these critics remind us, one of the

 

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foremost Indian crimes against normative national intimacy was, of course, their non-​ monogamousness. This was a non-​monogamousness keyed particularly to structures of sociality that, whatever else they were, could not be read as patriarchal; as I’ve suggested elsewhere, I think postbellum Mormons look to manage this cross-​identification in part through the pursuit of a kind of patriarchal sublimity, a hypernormativity in gender relations meant to mark a difference between their own derangements of normative coupledom and those of indigenous people. That, however, is a story for another place. 21. Quoted in Richard S. Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy:  A History (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1989), 135. 22. Mark Rifkin, The Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writings in the Era of Self-​Determination (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 23. Quoted in Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy, 137. For a spectacular reading of the rhetoric of “wards” and queer infantilization, see Schneider’s remarks in the introduction to the coedited GLQ volume (GLQ 16.1–​2),  13–​22.

 

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Nephites and Israelites The Book of Mormon and the Hebraic Indian Theory Elizabeth Fenton

The third chapter of The Book of Mormon (one of the books comprising the larger, eponymous work) situates The Book of Mormon at the nexus of two debates concerning the origins of Amerindian peoples. After recounting his efforts to convince the Nephite people to abandon their wicked ways and respect their divine calling, Mormon shifts his plea for repentance to his book’s potential audience. “I write unto you all . . . ” he explains, “that ye may know that ye must all stand before the judgment seat of Christ, yea, every soul which belongeth to the whole human family of Adam—​and ye must stand to be judged of your works, whether they be good or evil” (Morm 3:20).1 With this intervention, Mormon extends the timeline of his narrative into whatever present the reader inhabits, transforming the particular history of Nephite failure into a general story of human accountability. But though evocations of the universal and timeless sweep of divine judgment are now common in many Christian discourses, at the time of The Book of Mormon’s 1830 publication the question of whether indigenous Americans owed their origins to the creation of Adam and were heirs to the Bible’s promises remained unsettled. In his extensive work on the discourses of human origins that emerged in the aftermath of Europe’s encounter with America, David Livingstone shows that despite the fact that the notion of a single human ancestor is central to Christian, Jewish, and Muslim theologies, challenges to monogenism have appeared in a variety of forms since the Middle Ages.2 As European Christians engaged with cultures claiming histories longer than the biblical record allowed and heard tales of “monstrous races” living at the margins of the known world, their sense of a singular creation began to erode. Perhaps most seriously, “the encounter with the New World threw into yet sharper relief the growing tensions between geography and the Mosaic record.”3 The revelation that other continents teemed with previously Elizabeth Fenton, Nephites and Israelites: The Book of Mormon and the Hebraic Indian Theory. In: Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon. Edited by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190221928.003.0012

 

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unknown peoples caused many to rethink Adamic genealogy and embrace theories of polygenism. Thus Mormon’s linking of the Nephites to his book’s future readers, and his situating of both within the “whole human family of Adam,” is more than mere rhetorical flourish. The Book of Mormon explicitly takes sides in a debate that extended from the colonial era into the nineteenth century, asserting without qualification that Amerindians are the descendants of Adam, one branch of a family tree extending from a single root. Even as The Book of Mormon asserts that American peoples share the same ancestor as the rest of the world, it reminds readers of its unique contribution to the monogenist story of American origins. In the same passage linking Amerindians to Adam, Mormon announces, “I write unto all the ends of the earth, yea, I write unto you twelve tribes of Israel, which shall be judged according to your works by the twelve whom Jesus chose to be his disciples in the land of Jerusalem. And I write also unto the remnant of this people” (Morm 3:18). This reference to the “twelve tribes of Israel” makes explicit the book’s status as a significant revision of one popular account of American origins:  the Hebraic Indian theory.4 For those who accepted the notion of a singular creation, the question of American origins remained a perplexing puzzle. The urgency of explaining how diverse civilizations could inhabit a long-​hidden hemisphere arose from the belief that all human lineages tracked back to Noah’s three sons, who ostensibly had produced a tripartite world following the great flood in Genesis. Europeans, in this formulation, owed their origin to Japheth, Africans to Ham, and the inhabitants of what is now deemed the Middle East to Shem.5 The discovery of a “fourth” part of the world threatened to undo centuries of thinking about the relationship between sacred and profane history, as well as the authority of ancient texts.6 Those wishing to square a monogenist narrative with the information generated by colonial voyages scrambled to either locate the Americas within the biblical record or explain why they weren’t there. Monogenists often countered polygenist theories (rather reasonably) with the argument that the Americas had been populated by migrations that simply were not germane to the biblical story. For many, though, the most compelling—​and in some respects most enduring—​ version of this theory was that indigenous Americans were the descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel. The lost tribes narrative, which I  explore in more detail in this essay’s first section, attributed the peopling of America to the disappearance of the Kingdom of Israel following its conquest by Assyria around 722 BCE. But though The Book of Mormon does present an ancient Hebrew origin for the Americas, Mormon’s assertion that he also writes for the “twelve tribes of Israel” and “the remnant of this people” reminds readers that the Hebraic Nephites and their Lamanite enemies are not members of these missing tribes. With Mormon’s words, then, the text announces its simultaneous adoption and refiguring of a popular monogenist notion. The Book of Mormon’s Americans are

 



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Hebrews, indeed, but they are not the Bible’s missing tribes, and thus their story does not repair that gap in the biblical record; it creates one. Though its proponents often deemed it universally and immutably significant, the Hebraic Indian theory served a variety of religious and political aims over the course of several centuries. Richard Popkin has documented the theory’s evolution from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth, linking its rise to the Jewish and Christian millennialism that characterized the earlier period and its eventual decline to the emergence of more sophisticated scientific and geographic discourses.7 (The eighteenth-​century revelation, for example, that the Bering Strait was at times quite traversable, forced a dramatic revision of prevailing narratives regarding human migration patterns.) Still, the theory’s decline was neither linear nor absolute, and the Hebraic Indian remained an important figure in some millennialist Christian circles well into the nineteenth century. While it is beyond the scope of this essay to offer a comprehensive analysis of the theory in all of its forms, this essay’s first section examines its exposition in the late-​colonial and post-​Revolutionary eras to show how the idea of Hebraic Indians allowed some white Christians to position American colonialism and the emergence of the United States as crucial nodes on a sacred, millennialist timeline. I first show how James Adair’s foundational exposition of the theory, A History of the American Indians (1775), uses pseudo-​ethnographic descriptions of indigenous populations to refute polygenist theories and assert a single human history. Adair’s work thus established a clear monogenist argument that positioned Amerindians as tribes lost not only in terms of territory but also in terms of memory. Having forgotten who they are, indigenous Americans need a sharp observer to see their customs for what they are and trace their past to where it began in the Bible. Turning from Adair to two works that draw heavily on his History—​Elias Boudinot’s A Star in the West (1816) and Ethan Smith’s A View of the Hebrews (1825)—​I show that these works use “evidence” of American Hebraism to argue for the United States’ special place in a coming Christian millennium. Though their writings focus on the ostensible particulars of various Amerindian cultures, Boudinot and Smith are in the main concerned with the future of the United States, a future they predict will be short-​lived. Once the Hebraic Indian synchs the American past with biblical history, the stage is set for the millennium. Though it is a close contemporary of Boudinot’s and Smith’s works, and it offers a story of Hebraic Indians, The Book of Mormon does not present the lost tribes of Israel as the ancestors of American peoples and is in fact explicit in its rejection of that theory.8 Unlike other expositions of the theory, which rely on biblical exegesis and cultural analyses for their claims, The Book of Mormon is a narrative history of America, providing an elaborate picture of ancient people spanning a thousand years. But even though it is explicitly invested in eschatology

 

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and articulates many millenarian themes, I would argue that The Book of Mormon continually disrupts its own chronology and, often through its revision of the Hebraic Indian theory, resists the collapsing of sacred and national histories into a uniform line. My reading of the text owes much to Lloyd Pratt’s recent reassessment of early American print culture’s relationship to time. As Pratt notes, “the vision that pervades this period’s writing is of a United States inclined uniformly toward a single glorious destiny,” and critical accounts have tended to take the era’s literature at its word and iterate its claims of temporal homogenization and singularity. Thus an understudied phenomenon is the “strong counterevidence of form suggesting that this period and its literature articulate a conflicted experience of time working against this notion of destiny.”9 Pratt particularly focuses on how “incoherencies of genres” produce temporal disorientation that works against the period’s explicit interest in the consolidation of national and racial interests.10 Generically speaking, The Book of Mormon is incoherency at its finest; the text is, quite marvelously, all of the things its critics ever have accused it of being (a romance, a found manuscript, a Bible) and more. While I think it would be possible to read The Book of Mormon precisely within Pratt’s parameters, here I am mainly interested in how the text’s atemporal narration destabilizes its own apocalyptic eschatology.11 Though it certainly foretells an end to human history, through its formal structure The Book of Mormon offers readers a glimpse of a world in which temporal planes proliferate and run out of joint, leaving open the possibility that there are other peoples, other histories, and other texts yet to be revealed. In this way, the book’s revision of the Hebraic Indian theory allows it to effect an endless deferral of the millenarian millennium, even as it insists on the imminence of such an end.

Views of The Hebrews, Views of America Within the framework of monogenism, the Lost Tribes theory possessed an elegance that other American origins stories lacked, because it simultaneously explained the existence of Western peoples and solved the more long-​standing problem of a significant absence in the Bible. The tribes in question were ten of the twelve descending from Jacob’s sons, which formed the ancient Kingdom of Israel (the other two tribes—​Judah and Benjamin—​formed the Kingdom of Judah). The ten tribes vanish from both sacred and secular histories when they are conquered and displaced by the Assyrian army; the Hebrew Bible recounts the story of Israel’s disappearance in 2 Kings: And it came to pass in the fourth year of king Hezekiah  .  .  .  that Shalmaneser king of Assyria came up against Samaria and besieged it.

 



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And at the end of three years they took it . . . . And the king of Assyria did carry Israel unto Assyria, and put them in Halah and in Habor by the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes. (2 Kgs 18:11)12 Though this passage would seem to suggest several locations for the captive Israelites—​Halah, Habor, and the river of Gozan—​those place names correspond to no known locations. The tribes thus exist as a lacuna in the sacred rec­ ord, appearing after this passage only fleetingly, in prophecies foretelling their return. Isaiah, for example, predicts a day when “the Lord shall set again his hand the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which shall be left, from Assyria . . . and from the islands of the sea . . . and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth” (Isa 11:11–​12). On the question of the tribes’ postconquest location, however, the Bible remains mute. As Zvi Ben-​ Dor Benite has noted in his extensive history of the lost tribes, the status of the tribes was a central concern of millenarianism in the colonial era, as European Christians generally believed the return of Christ would either require or bring about the conversion of all Jewish people. Thus the “conversion of the ten lost tribes was depicted as a harbinger of the conversion of their brethren from the remaining two”—​the tribes of Judah, from which the world’s known Jewish people had descended.13 Within this epistemological framework, colonization of the Americas took on exciting eschatological significance: If indigenous Americans were indeed the lost tribes of Israel, then the revelation of their secret dwelling place certainly portended the coming millennium. As it turned out, the end of days did not follow on the heels of American colonization. Still, though it did not bear that promised fruit, the Hebraic Indian theory persisted in English and Anglo-​American writings. Until the eighteenth century, most English versions of the theory were produced by people who had never visited the Americas and who based their acceptance of the theory on biblical sources rather than on interactions with indigenous peoples.14 James Adair’s 1775 The History if the American Indians marks an important shift in both the content and the tenor of discussion regarding indigenous origins. Having spent forty years living in what is now the southeastern United States, Adair drew his conclusions about the Hebraic origins of America out of observations of various indigenous cultures as well as from other accounts of colonial encounter. His book became one of the most influential source texts for nineteenth-​century expositions of the lost tribes theory. The History opens with a volume divided into twenty-​three “argument” sections describing cultural practices that ostensibly demonstrate “Jewish descent” in American peoples. Argument XI, for example, rather charmingly notes that, “consonant to the MOSAIC LAWS OF UNCLEANLINESS,” during their “lunar retreats,” women “build small huts at considerable distance from their dwelling houses . . . where, during the space of

 

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that period, they are obliged to stay.”15 It never occurs to Adair that he might be observing autochthonous practices, and he even detects a Hebraic trace in interstitial spaces. His first argument makes much not only of the fact that, like the Israelites, Native Americans “divide themselves; each tribe forms a little community within the nation,” but also that “there is no tribe or individual among them, however, called by the name opossum which is with the Cherakee [sic] stiled seequa . . . synonymous with that of a hog.”16 Forgetting for a moment that opossums are not actually hogs, and that there were no pigs in North America until Spain imported them in the sixteenth century, it is possible to see how Adair constructs a Hebrew presence out of an actually meaningless absence. The lack of tribal affiliation with “opossums” takes on significance only in light of the Levitical injunction against consuming swine: “he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you” (Lev 11:7). Thus indigenous Americans appear as Hebrews in what they don’t do as much as in what they do. Viewed through Adair’s lens, all American roads lead to Jerusalem. Although Adair’s History is not explicitly millennialist, his argument bears theological import in its rejection of polygenism. The History opens with a direct reply to Henry Home, Lord Kames, whose Sketches of the History of Man (1734) had asserted that “rational conjecture leans to a separate creation” for the Americas and that it was “scarce necessary to insist upon this topic, as the external characters of the Americans  .  .  .  reject the supposition of their being descended from any people of the old world.”17 Polygenesis would become an increasingly significant topic of scientific and pseudoscientific inquiry in the nineteenth century, particularly among those dedicated to furthering the proj­ ect of white supremacy. But while the theory certainly shaped conceptions of racial difference, it also bore religious consequences, particularly in its potential to undermine Christian interpretations of the Bible. As G.  Blair Nelson notes, polygenesis theories “clashed with the traditional reading of Genesis,” and contradicted the New Testament assertion that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26).18 Polygenesis threatened to undercut certain teleological understandings of sacred texts, because it raised the possibility of a multitude of sacred timelines. One Adamic creation produces one human history, driving toward an inevitable end; more creations might mean more lines, perhaps running parallel and never merging to form a singular end. Thus when Adair asserts that, “to form one creation of whites, a second creation for the yellows, and a third for the blacks, is a weakness, of which infinite wisdom is incapable,” he is making a theological as well as anthropological argument.19 As proof of his claim, Adair offers the odd, but in context understandable, suggestion that indigenous people’s “copper or red-​clay colour” is “not natural,” and “that the external difference between them and the whites, proceeds entirely from their customs and method of living, and

 



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not from any inherent spring of nature.”20 Deeming human difference a product of cultural specificity rather than divine distinction, Adair makes a claim for the inherent humanness of Amerindian populations and places them in the same sacred timeframe as their European counterparts. Even though its aim is more ethnographic than exegetic, Adair’s History is deeply engaged with the relationship between sacred and secular time and committed to maintaining that they are of a piece, charting a certain and single course. Adair’s History laid significant groundwork for millenarian theories that would emerge in the nineteenth-​century United States. Where earlier texts predicted that the English Reformation signaled the beginning of the end of days, in these texts Anglo-​Puritan ascendance is reconfigured as the necessary precursor to the American errand. The founding of the United States offers a renewed hope for millennial fantasy. The end result, however, is remarkably similar to earlier works on the theory:  The recovery of the tribes draws the United States into the timeline of sacred history, and the story of the nation drives toward imminent millennium. Elias Boudinot was perhaps the best-​known US proponent of the lost tribes theory. Though he has faded into oblivion in our own century, Boudinot was a prominent statesman, having served as president of the Continental Congress, signed the Treaty of Paris, and directed the US Mint before leaving public office and founding the American Bible Society.21 His lengthy treatise on the lost tribes theory, A Star in the West, draws heavily on Adair’s work and other early texts for its assessments of Amerindian cultures, but his nationalist frame is dramatically different. Boudinot offers many of the same “proofs” as Adair when outlining apparently Jewish undertones in indigenous practices and directly cites the History in several instances—​even mentioning those “lunar retreats.”22 A Star in the West is particularly invested in proving Hebrew to be the root of indigenous languages, and the text includes a multipage chart listing a variety of words and phrases in English, “Charibee. Creeks. Mohegan,” and Hebrew. One particular word held great interest for Boudinot: The “Mississippi Floridians, keep a solemn Feast of Love,” he explains, “They sing Y. O. He. wah. shoo—​Y. O. He. wah. shoo—​Y. O. He. wah. shee—​Y. O. He. wah. shee—​Y. O. He. wah. shai—​with great energy. The first word is nearly in the Hebrew character, the name of Joshua or Savior.”23 Reheard and respoken first as Yehoshu’a ( Joshua), and then as Yahweh or Jehovah, “Y. O. He. wah” becomes an audible trace of the Americas’ ancient past as well as proof of both the forgotten Judaism and latent potential for Christianity embedded in every indigenous subject. Boudinot’s Americans do not realize it, but they have been worshipping the god of Abraham all along. Though he is invested in pseudo-​ethnographic evidence of indigenous origins, Boudinot also spends a great deal of time reproducing oral histories that situate American populations within biblical timeframes and thus fashioning

 

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Amerindian history into sacred history. He offers a catalogue of indigenous tales, including, “the Hurons and Iroquois . . . had a tradition among them that the first woman came from heaven and had twins, and that the elder killed the younger,” and, “one tradition they had was that once the waters had overflowed all the land and drowned all the people then living except a few who made a great canoe and were saved,” and, “a long time ago, the people went to build a high place, [and] while they were building of it they lost their language and could not understand one another.”24 From Adam and Eve and their doomed sons, to the great flood, to the Tower of Babel, the story of Genesis becomes the story of Native America. Boudinot’s express purpose is to offer yet more evidence of Hebraic resonances in indigenous cultures, but these anecdotes also support a monogenist worldview. Refracted through a biblical lens, these legends sync the timeline of American history with biblical events and align the Western Hemisphere with Christian eschatology. Boudinot finds confirmation of his sense of the Americas’ importance to an unfolding sacred history when he reads the Bible itself. Relying on Robert Lowth’s 1778 translation of Isaiah, Boudinot recounts the following prophecy: it shall come to pass in that day the latter day that Jehovah shall again the second time put forth his hand to recover the remnant of his people who remaineth from Assyria and from Egypt . . . and from Hamah and from the western regions (as it should have been translated instead of the islands of the sea).25 Lowth’s text, which Boudinot deems a significant correction to the King James translation, is presented here as an unqualified situating of the Americas in the Bible—​the revision of “islands of the sea” to “the western regions” suggests that the hemisphere has been an obscured presence in the sacred record all along. Once this error is resolved, indigenous peoples occupy a timeline that tracks not only back through the prophetic texts to Genesis but also forward to a promised millennium. The “western regions” are the last secret dwelling place for Israel, and its populations are the remnant of a Jewish past that will produce a Christian future. For Boudinot, the revelation of the lost tribes’ location is inseparable from the question of national policy, because the US treatment of indigenous Americans will determine its place in the coming millennium. The prophecies of Isaiah form the foundation of A Star in the West’s nationalist interpretation of scripture, which ultimately hinges on a particular reading of the book’s eighteenth chapter. In the King James Bible, the chapter predicts, “Woe to the land shadowing with wings, which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia . . . . In that time shall the present be brought unto the Lord of hosts of a people scattered and peeled . . . a

 



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nation meted out and trodden under foot” (Isa 18:1–​7). Citing Anglican theologian George Stanley Faber’s alternative translation of the verse, which reads, “Ho! Land spreading wide the shadow of thy wings,” Boudinot suggests that the chapter’s opening verse is a call to some future nation rather than a warning.26 Building on Faber’s argument that “the shadowy wings here spoken of may mean the sails of their ships,” Boudinot asserts that “some prevailing maritime power of faithful worshippers will be chiefly instrumental in converting and restoring a part of the Jewish nation.” Though Faber interprets the (rather thin) maritime metaphor as a reference to Great Britain, Boudinot suggests that “a union of maritime nations” might be necessary for “so important and difficult and undertaking.” 27 Thus he explains, “We are a maritime people—​a nation of seafaring men . . . . We may under God be called to act a great part in this wonderful and interesting drama. And if not alone we may certainly assist in a union with other maritime powers of Europe.”28 For Boudinot, it is not merely the “discovery” of the Americas that has set the latter days in motion but also the rise of the United States as a merchant and military power. “Who knows,” he writes, “but God has raised up these United States in these latter days for the very purpose of accomplishing his will in bringing his beloved people to their own land.”29 Like the Assyrians who, operating as the arm of the divine, facilitate the Israelites’ disappearance, white US citizens might enable their return. Boudinot asserts that the conversion of the hemisphere’s Jewish Indians will “be the most ample means of publishing the all-​important facts of both the Old and New Testament to all the nations of the earth,” but A Star in the West concludes with a much more practical (and local) argument.30 He asks if “the Israelites have heretofore suffered the just indignation of the Almighty for their sins, what have not their enemies and oppressors to fear in the great day of God’s anger when he cometh to avenge his people?”31 The mistreatment of people who either manifestly are or might one day turn out to be Jews, in other words, could have devastating, eternal consequences for the nations that have enacted cruelties against them. As proof of this conjecture, he offers the prophecy of Zephaniah to the Israelites: “I will undo all who afflict thee . . . for I will make you a name and a praise among all people of the earth, when I turn back your captivity before your eyes, saith the Lord” (Zeph 3:19–​20). Boudinot thus warns his countrymen to “consider our ways betimes, and sincerely to repent of all improper conduct of oppression and destruction to any who may turn out to have been the continual objects of God’s regard.”32 Here again, the timeline of US history merges with that of biblical prophecy, and US–​Indian relations enter the frame of eschaton. The return of the tribes may be a time to rejoice, as it will bring with it the Second Coming, but it may also be a time to fear and repent, as it will entail the destruction of Israel’s enemies. “Would not any impartial person under a just view of our conduct,” Boudinot asks, “draw a pretty

 

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certain conclusion that we had not much to insist on in our favour?”33 If it does not change its course regarding native peoples soon, A Star in the West suggests, the United States runs the risk of becoming a type of Assyria and bearing the brunt of divine wrath at the end of days. Like Adair’s work before it, A Star in the West became a foundational text for those who sought to combine Christian millennialism with American exceptionalism. First published seven years after A Star in the West, Ethan Smith’s A View of the Hebrews draws heavily on Adair’s and Boudinot’s work but is even more explicit in its millenarian predictions. Smith’s View offers many of the same “proofs” of indigenous origins found in earlier texts—​arguing that Native Americans at one time practiced circumcision, citing Boudinot’s claim that “Yo-​ he-​wah” stems from Hebrew roots, and rehearsing Adair’s assertion that “Indians have had their imitation of the ark of the covenant in ancient Israel.”34 Like A Star in the West, A View of the Hebrews ultimately presents a reading of scripture that centers on the United States’ role in an impending apocalypse. His work’s final chapter assesses the same verse referencing a “land shadowing with wings” that Boudinot reads, and Smith explains that, “the Christian people of the United States of America are the subjects of the address or at least are especially included in it.”35 But A View of the Hebrews goes even further than A Star in the West to locate American geography in the sacred record. Citing a passage in Jeremiah that predicts the restoration of Israel “from every hill, and out of the holes of the rocks,” Smith writes, “The description seems well to accord with their being bought in a savage state among such wilds mountains and rocks as the wilds of our continent present; especially the Rocky mountains in the western regions of North America.”36 Here, he solves not only the riddle of American origins but also the ostensible problem of the hemisphere’s apparent absence from the biblical world: The Rocky Mountains have been there in Jeremiah, just waiting for the right reader to recognize them. Where Boudinot’s text concludes with a warning to white Americans—​and implicit comparisons of the United States to Egypt, Babylon, and Assyria—​ Smith’s ends with a vision of mass conversion. “Look at the origin of those degraded natives of your continent,” he writes, “and fly to their relief ”: Teach them their ancient history; their former blessings; their being cast away; the occasion of it, and the promises of their return. Tell them the time draws near, and they must now return to the God of their salvation.37 This is not an argument for policy change. Writing in the aftermath of the passage of the Indian Removal Act, Smith claims that white Christians’ main objective is to remind indigenous peoples of their Hebraic past so that they may convert to

 



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Christianity and usher in a glorious future. “[T]‌hey were for their sins excluded for this long period,” Smith explains, “until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in, and so all Israel shall be saved.”38 Sacred time and profane time operate as a single unit here, with the United States and its native peoples fulfilling ancient prophesies that, it turns out, described the Americas all along. In this way, A View of the Hebrews tracks the Hebraic Indian theory to one of its most logical conclusions. Although Adair and Boudinot both used the theory to argue for the humanity of indigenous Americans, in the end a view of Americans that is also a view of the Hebrews leaves little space for the preservation of cultural practices or the recognition of indigenous sovereignty. As nascent Jews, Amerindians are merely long-​suffering vessels for millennium, housing an ancient secret that, upon its revelation, will confirm the supremacy of white Christians. Though their particular contexts and political aims differ, Adair, Boudinot, and Smith share an interest in synching sacred and profane time into a uniform line that extends back to Genesis and tracks forward to Revelation. Such synching promises to extend divine welcome to Amerindian peoples, but its cost is Amerindian cultures, which become obsolete in the face of millennium.

Eschatology and Deferral in The Book of Mormon There is no denying the fact that The Book of Mormon is explicitly eschatological. Grant Underwood’s detailed study of early Mormon documents demonstrates that the text appealed particularly to those embracing a premillennial notion of sacred history, and there are good reasons for this. As he explains, Mormon writers overwhelmingly focused their attention on places in the text that dealt with “the restoration of Israel” and the final judgments that would accompany it. Thus the twenty-​first chapter of 2 Nephi, which iterates the promise in Isaiah that in the end of days “the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb,” was one of the most commonly cited passages in nineteenth-​century Mormon literature.39 Indeed, The Book of Mormon is rife with millenarian prophecies. A later chapter in 2 Nephi promises, “it shall come to pass that the Lord God shall commence his work among all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people to bring about the restoration of his people upon the earth” (2 Ne 30:8). This phrasing easily lends itself to premillennial interpretation, as the “work” in question appears to be literal and conducted by divinity present in the flesh. In a similar vein, The Book of Mormon informs readers that “[ Jesus] bringeth to pass the resurrection of the dead, whereby man must be raised to stand before his judgment seat” (Morm 7:6). These moments present time as linear: There is a real (though distant) future, which is distinct from the present, in which a sequence of events not already taking place will commence. And this kind of prophecy is not, as

 

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Underwood notes, radically different from certain biblical texts and other apocalyptic literatures that would have circulated among early US Protestants. In 1815 Boudinot himself published The Second Advent, a millenarian treatise describing the future reunification of Israel and asserting that in the last days “all the religious and political governments and powers on earth inconsistent with the reign of Jesus Christ on earth, shall be dissolved, as metal is dissolved by fire” and that “all good and bad will at last be raised to the final judgment.”40 There is obvious overlap, textual and thematic, between this kind of Protestant eschatology and The Book of Mormon. However, while Smith’s text explicitly presents human history as edging ever toward apocalypse, through its narration of Hebraic American history it significantly revises its own eschatological message. Despite its insistence on the apocalyptic drive of history, The Book of Mormon consistently depicts time as multilayered, multidirectional, and running out of sequence. From its outset, Smith’s text announces itself as a different kind of story about Hebraic migration to the Americas. Opening with an account of “the commencement of the first year of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah,” The Book of Mormon essentially begins with an ending (1 Ne1:4). Readers familiar with the Bible know in advance that Zedekiah is Judah’s doomed king, Babylon’s puppet, whose reign will end in the destruction of Solomon’s Temple and mass exile. The Book of Mormon’s first narrator, Nephi, explains that his father, Lehi, received a divine vision “concerning the destruction of Jerusalem, [and] behold, he went forth among the people and began to prophesy” (1 Ne 1:18). Lehi thus appears as a type of Jeremiah, the biblical prophet who predicts the fall of Judah and tries in vain to save it. The Book of Mormon makes its proximity to Jeremiah’s story clear when Nephi warns his brothers that the people of Judah “have rejected the prophets, and Jeremiah have they cast into prison” (1 Ne 7:14). The failure of Jeremiah and the predicted fall of Jerusalem become the impetus for Lehi’s flight with his family first into the wilderness and then across the Atlantic. By situating itself in the time of Jeremiah, the text posits a disappearance of Judaic peoples in the aftermath of the conquest of Assyria; its indigenous Americans are not the missing Israelites, and their story is utterly absent from the biblical record. The Book of Mormon thus simultaneously wrenches open the Book of Jeremiah and inserts itself into the resulting breach. What follows from this opening gesture is a narrative that at once extends perpendicularly out of the biblical record and runs parallel to it. The effect of this intertextuality is temporal disorientation. The Book of Mormon presents time as a set of planes tethered to each other yet running independently. Though its initial action turns on an eschatological prophecy, the text immediately forces readers to think of time in terms of simultaneity and excess rather than simple linearity. The Book of Mormon reminds readers that the lost tribes are still missing, even as, instead of locating them, it offers the stories of a set of people never reported missing in the first place.

 



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In addition to establishing a new sacred timeline, from its earliest pages The Book of Mormon forces readers to experience time out of sequence or in reverse. Before building the ship that will carry his family across the Atlantic, Nephi is visited by an angel who grants him a vision of what will transpire in the Americas. As Hickman notes, in this moment, “Nephi sees the end of his American promised land before he even arrives: ‘And it came to pass that I beheld, and saw the people of the seed of my brethren [the Lamanites] that they had overcome my seed [the Nephites]; and they went forth in multitudes upon the face of the land.’ ”41 Nephi’s westward journey, simply put, is a journey toward extinction. Hickman reads this episode within The Book of Mormon’s complicated presentations of racial difference, noting that the “white and delightsome” Nephite people are destined to fall before their “dark” Lamanite brethren but nevertheless, as the text’s constant narrators, “remain in the position of telling the descendants of the Lamanites who they really are and how they should be.”42 I concur with this reading but also would suggest that Nephi’s prophecy has the effect of disrupting The Book of Mormon’s eschatology before it even fully articulates it. This is partly because prophecy itself has an odd relationship to time, as it often predicts that which has already occurred. The reader of prophetic texts experiences time out of sequence through what Paul Ricoeur calls “the paradox of a prophecy heard and received post eventum,” the prediction of a future that is already a past and thus never will be the present.43 When it predicts its own nineteenth-​century appearance, The Book of Mormon explicitly acknowledges the fact that no one will encounter the Nephite story until it has run its course: “book shall be delivered unto a man, and he shall deliver the words of the book, which are the words of they which have slumbered in the dust” (2 Ne 27:9). Before the Nephites even exist—​in this moment, after all, there is only Nephi himself—​they are dust. Their annihilation is narrated before they even come into being, and by the time The Book of Mormon emerges to offer their history the Nephites will exist only in a past that no one remembers. Readers immediately learn, in other words, that the Nephite story will not be, and never will have been, the story of Native America. Thus even as The Book of Mormon presents the Nephites as Hebrews edging toward an inevitable apocalyptic future, its prophetic mode destabilizes its own timeline and situates its story of indigenous America out of history. Rather than moving forward through time, the Nephites are, from the moment of their emergence, already gone. Given the fact that The Book of Mormon presents Nephite history as a literal dead end, it might be tempting to read the Lamanite narrative as the text’s true eschatology. Though they survive The Book of Mormon’s narration, however, the Lamanites equally inhabit a vexed temporality. Through Nephi’s prophetic narration, readers also come to know the Lamanites’ history before that nation exists. Whereas the Nephite story ends before it begins, Lamanite history projects into

 

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a colonial future. Of his vision, Nephi writes, “I looked and beheld many waters; and they divided the Gentiles from the seed of my brethren [the Lamanites]”: And it came to pass that I beheld many multitudes of the Gentiles upon the land of promise. And I beheld the wrath of God, that it was upon the seed of my brethren. And they were scattered before the Gentiles and they were smitten. (1 Ne 13:14) For nineteenth-​century readers, this passage would have effected a very particular temporal collapsing:  The Lamanites’ future appears as both the colonial past and the immediately present era of US Indian removal. The Lamanites operate as vanishing Indians who don’t yet exist but have already vanished—​first from the biblical record and then from Amerindian memory. Once they do come into being, the Lamanites inhabit a temporal plane organized around reversal and iteration much more than forward progression. Though the first Book of Nephi suggests that the Nephites will be the righteous chosen people, they and the Lamanites exist in a violent cycle of forgetting and remembrance. This is perhaps most evident in the story of Samuel the Lamanite, the prophet who appears in the Book of Helaman to warn the Nephites that their backsliding will incur celestial wrath. Samuel is, in many respects, an atemporal figure. An American Jeremiah foretelling decline, Samuel could have stepped out of either the pages of the Hebrew Bible or a seventeenth-​century Congregational Church. His language, though, echoes New Testament promises:  “cursed be they who hide not up their treasures unto me,” he tells the Nephites, “for none hideth up their treasures unto me save it be the righteous” (Hel 13:19). This is a close match to the command delivered in the Gospel of Matthew: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth . . . . But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven,” which also appears later in The Book of Mormon, when Jesus reveals himself to the Nephites and repeats Matthew’s lines verbatim (Matt 6:19–​20; 3 Ne 13:20). Thus, even as he predicts the Nephites’ doom, Samuel articulates a metaphor that will come to signify their chosen status. This is not the story of the lost tribes moving ever forward from disappearance to recovery and ascendance. It is, rather, national history moving in a continuous loop, in which a people continually loses and regains its calling, forgets and remembers only to forget again. Although The Book of Mormon focuses on the stories of the Nephites and Lamanites, it contains significant moments that force readers to confront other stories of American origins and thus other timelines that are not narrated in detail within its pages. One of the most striking examples of the text’s foregrounding of simultaneity occurs in the Book of Omni, when Mosiah receives a command for the Nephites to flee into the wilderness. “Led by the power of [god’s] arm,” the Nephites discover “the land of Zarahemla,” a place previously unknown to them,

 



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populated by a group who “came out from Jerusalem at the time that Zedekiah, king of Judah, was carried away captive into Babylon” (Omni 1:13–​15). The biblical marker temporally aligns this departure with that of Lehi, but until this point The Book of Mormon has made no mention of this population. The revelation of these other Hebrews thus creates a rupture in the narrative’s progression. The text rewinds to its opening moments and confronts the reader not only with a vision of simultaneous westward migrations but also of stories that have gone unnarrated. The text even emphasizes its own lack of information about the people of Zarahemla when one of its citizens offers the Nephites “a genealogy of his fathers according to his memory; and they are written but not in these plates” (Omni 1:18). The full story of this people will never appear in The Book of Mormon, and a chronological reading of the text provides their sparse genealogy in reverse. The Book of Mosiah, which follows Omni, identifies the Zarahemlans as the descendants of Mulek, whom readers later learn, in the Book of Helaman, was “the son of Zedekiah” (Hel 6:10). Thus even as it appears to gather American stories into a single narrative, the text disrupts its own presentation of time as moving along a single national or genealogical line. The Mulekite’s ancestral line, it turns out, traces back to nothing. Mulek does not exist in the Bible, and his descendants do not appear in the original prophecy of Nephite ascendance and decline. Thus, as The Book of Mormon unfolds, it doubles back on itself to present a people living out of time and without a history. If the revelation of the Mulekites’ existence stands as a kind of rupture in The Book of Mormon’s timeline, descriptions of the people emphasize the iterative nature of the text’s sacred history. Mosiah learns that the Mulekites “had fallen by the sword from time to time. And their language had become corrupted” (Omni 1:17). The Mulekites’ “corrupted” language certainly harkens back to the Genesis story of Babel, in which the Lord confounds the language of those who compete with his greatness, but it also resonates with later Nephite accounts of linguistic change. Mormon, for example, asserts that he has written his account “in the characters which are called among us the reformed Egyptian, being handed down and altered by us according to our manner of speech” (Morm 9:32). This passage in part explains why Joseph Smith did not simply present the golden plates to his audience: They are inscribed in a language that has become illegible. But Mormon indicates that writing in a different language would not have solved this problem: “the Hebrew hath been altered by us also” (Morm 9:33). Thus the Mulekites at once evoke a biblical past and a Nephite future. Hickman reads the Mulekites’ degraded state and their ultimate joining with the (less numerous) Nephites as a kind of assimilation narrative that raises questions about racial and cultural essentialism. Once these two lines become one, questions such as “What does ‘Nephite’ mean?” become operant but are never fully answered within the text.44 While I find this reading compelling, I further would

 

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suggest that cultural lines are not the only ones merging here: Timelines, too, are intersecting. Unbeknown to several generations of Nephites and The Book of Mormon’s readers, the Mulekite story has been running synchronously since the reign of Zedekiah and the book’s opening pages. The Books of Omni, Mosiah, and Helaman certainly raise the issue of, “what does ‘Nephite’ mean,” but they equally force the question, “When does Nephite history begin, and when will it really end?” The story of the Nephite encounter with the Mulekites contains the narrative equivalent of an Easter egg. The Mulekites present Mosiah with “a large stone . . . with engravings on it,” which contains the “account of one Coriantumr and the slain of his people.” Coriantumr, the stone explains, “was discovered by the people of Zarahemla, and he dwelt with them for the space of nine moons” (Omni 1:21). The Book of Omni offers a miniature version of Coriantumr’s history, gleaned from the stone, which makes it clear that this mystery person’s lineage was neither Israelite nor Nephite: his first parents came out from the tower at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people. And the severity of the Lord fell upon them according to his judgments, which is just, and their bones lay scattered in the land northward. (Omni 1:22) This is a startling revelation. The biblical “Tower” that incites a divine confounding of language is Babel. Coriantumr’s people, though long since vanished when Mosiah reads their history, migrated to the Americas before both Lehi’s flight and the disappearance of the ten lost tribes. Preceding even Abraham and Moses, their origin is biblical but not Hebraic. This is history out of sequence: temporal planes running independently, though occasionally intersecting—​some dead-​ending, others trailing off and disappearing, and still others unfolding toward as-​yet-​unknown conclusions. Coriantumr is the last of his line, but the end of his story marks the introduction of this older narrative into the text. Readers progressing chronologically through The Book of Mormon will eventually discover that this first migration is actually the last narrative in the book.45 The story of Coriantumr’s people appears fully in The Book of Mormon’s penultimate book, Ether. Arriving at The Book of Mormon’s end, in other words, readers discover America’s beginning. What they already know upon arrival, though, is that this beginning is a dead end. The Jaredites share a destiny with the Nephites in that their descendants will not populate America. Their last descendant will die alone among the Mulekites, a people without a history. In addition to disrupting The Book of Mormon’s narrative chronology, the Book of Ether offers a story that itself confounds notions of linear time. Detailing the history of the Jaredites, Ether is in many respects a simultaneous retelling of

 



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several stories from both The Book of Mormon and the Bible. Ether opens with “the brother of Jared” begging the Lord not to confound his people’s language and cast them out, and because Jared’s brother is righteous, god instructs him to “gather together thy flocks, both male and female, of every kind, and also of the seed of the earth, of every kind, and thy family, and also Jared thy brother and his family” (Ether 1:41). Like Noah will after him, Jared’s brother collects these flora and fauna to carry inside “barges” that “hold water like unto a dish” (Ether 2:17). And as Abraham will even later, Jared’s brother receives a celestial promise, “I bless thee and thy seed, and raise up unto me of thy seed, and of the seed of thy brother, and they who shall go with thee, a great nation” (Ether 1:43). Present, too, in the text are strands of the Nephite narrative. The Jaredites fall into faction and wage constant war in much the same way that the descendants of Lehi will, and the text notes several times that they, like the Mulekites, have “fallen by the sword” (Ether 15:23). Perhaps the most startling instance of intertextuality, though, occurs in Ether’s story of “the daughter of Jared,” who dances for King Omer’s friend Akish as part of a plot to destroy the king. When Akish, enticed by the dance, asks for the daughter’s hand in marriage, Jared replies, “I will give her unto you if ye will bring unto me the head of my father the king” (Ether 8:12). These verses are strikingly similar to those in the gospels of Mark and Matthew, in which Herodias’s daughter dances for Herod. When Herod, similarly overcome with adoration for a beautiful woman, promises, “Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will give it,” she demands, “in a charger the head of John the Baptist” (Mark 6:23–​25). Because Ether is the narrative that appears last in The Book of Mormon but comes first within that book’s internal chronology as well as within the biblical timeline, these moments of textual overlap operate as both echoes and antecedents. Readers of the Bible who encounter the story of Jared’s daughter are placed in the odd position of remembering that which will come later and anticipating an event that has already transpired. Of all The Book of Mormon’s temporal experiments, perhaps none is more radical than the resurrected Jesus’s appearance to the Nephites. At first glance, this episode in 3 Nephi might appear to literally bring the Nephites up to speed and situate them within the already ticking clock of Christian eschatology. Upon arrival, Jesus reproduces in miniature the core of his teachings. Significantly, though, this reenactment of the gospels presents their events out of sequence. Jesus begins by inviting the Nephites, as he does Thomas in the Gospel of John, to thrust their hands into his wounds. He then engages in mass baptism, chooses twelve followers, delivers a version of the Sermon on the Mount, explains that “a city that is set on a hill cannot be hid,” reassures them that “he that seeketh, findeth,” iterates the analogy in Matthew and Luke that those who follow him are like “a wise man, who built his house upon a rock,” and instructs them in the Lord’s Prayer (3 Ne 12:14, 14:24). Most significant for my purposes, though,

 

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are Jesus’s parting words to the Nephites. “But now I go unto the Father,” he tells them, “and also to shew myself unto the lost tribes of Israel—​for they are not lost unto the Father, for he knoweth whither he hath taken them” (3 Ne 17:4). This is the text’s most explicit assertion of its revision of the lost tribes theory. 3 Nephi most clearly situates the Nephites within the context of Christian eschatology and apocalypse: Jesus appears to the people in the flesh, thereby fulfilling many of the prophecies of The Book of Mormon’s earlier texts. But in this moment, the lost tribes become present in the text as a telling absence, as 3 Nephi reminds both the Nephites and readers that a gap remains in the sacred record, an untold history playing out somewhere in secret. Just as Jesus’s appearance to the Nephites does not inaugurate the millennium, neither will the nineteenth-​ century “discovery” of their history in the form of The Book of Mormon. If the revelation of the lost tribes is required for human and sacred history to form a single line, then Smith’s text explicitly denies readers that kind of temporal satisfaction. They are chosen for divine favor, but the Nephites are doomed from the start. Though the lost tribes’ return is essential to its explicit eschatology, they exist out of time in The Book of Mormon, forever missing and on the cusp of greeting a messiah whose coming is prophesied in biblical texts written after their disappearance. Through its evocation of the lost tribes, The Book of Mormon only foregrounds their absence and reminds readers that the prophecies on which their millennium rests remain unfulfilled, even in America. Through its revision of the Hebraic Indian theory, The Book of Mormon simultaneously offers readers a monogenist human history and a polygenist Christian history. That is, while the text asserts a singular creation for all peoples, it presents Christianity as a belief system with multiple points of origin. After all, the Nephites learn of the coming of Jesus long before anyone in the Bible will. Nephi delivers an extended prophecy not only predicting that “the Messiah cometh in six hundred years . . . [and] his name should be Jesus Christ the Son of God,” but also asserting that “there is none other name given under heaven save it be this Jesus Christ of which I have spoken whereby man can be saved” (2 Ne 25:19–​20). Thus The Book of Mormon’s story of American Christianity precedes the birth of Christ and ends in advance of European colonialism. Despite its insistence upon the Christian history of America, though, The Book of Mormon resists any easy insertion of the hemisphere into any teleological framework. If typical Hebraic Indian theories present the Amerindian remembrance of Judaism and coincident adoption of Christianity as the master key to millennial glory, The Book of Mormon offers a different picture of Hebraic America. Its Christianity is neither a stable nor inevitable condition, and its peoples already have enacted numerous cycles of revelation, conversion, regression, and rejection. Indeed, rather than finding the ten lost tribes, the book presents readers with the specter of other missing Hebrews, other untold stories, and other buried

 



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records. American Protestants might deem themselves the heirs of divine favor, but so did the Nephites before them. Jewish conversion to Christianity might seem the final piece of the millennial puzzle, but the Lamanites who remain in America already have been Christians in a distant past. Through its presentation of lost peoples who are not the lost tribes, The Book of Mormon recasts American history as a set of iterative, synchronous cycles of Christian ascendance and failure. Whether achieved through the translation of golden plates or the detection of cultural overlap, the discovery of these Hebraic Indians will prove insufficient for the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

Notes 1. All citations of The Book of Mormon refer to Royal Skousen, The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2009) and will be cited parenthetically by chapter and verse in the text. 2. David Livingstone. Adam’s Ancestors:  Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). 3. Ibid.,  8. 4. This theory is also referred to as the “Jewish Indian Theory,” but since not all of its variations posit a Jewish migration, per se, I have opted for the slightly more capacious term “Hebraic.” 5. For a detailed assessment of this theory, see Don Cameron Allen, The Legend of Noah: Renaissance Rationalism in Art, Science, and Letters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963). 6. Anthony Grafton’s work on the “shock of discovery” demonstrates how the clash between emerging, practical knowledge of the Americas and traditional reliance on texts about the globe generated an unprecedented epistemological crisis for Europeans in the age of exploration. Anthony Grafton,New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 7. Richard Popkin, “The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Indian Theory,” in Menasseh Ben Israel and His World, Yôsēf Qaplan, Richard Popkin, and Henry Méchoulan, eds. (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1989), 63–​82, 64. 8. As Grant Underwood explains in The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), the book depicts “several migrations from the Kingdom of Judah to the Western Hemisphere around 600 B.C.” Thus early Mormons imagined the ten lost tribes as “sequestered somewhere in the frozen ‘north countries,’ ” distinct from America’s “Jewish Indians” and still missing in the nineteenth century (66). 9. Lloyd Pratt, Archives of American Time (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 5. 10. Ibid.,  13. 11. My thinking about temporality owes much to Todd McGowan’s recent work on what he terms, “atemporal cinema,” films that “turn away from forward-​moving temporality”: Todd McGowan, Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xii. McGowan’s argument is psychoanalytic; he deems the shift to atemporal storytelling within contemporary film a turn toward the death drive—​the endless, and indeed pleasurable, repetition of failure or loss that typically hides behind (rather than develops from) desire for the lost object. Obviously, there are vast distinctions between films produced in the past few decades and Joseph Smith’s nineteenth-​century sacred text, but McGowan’s notion that out-​of-​sequence narration foregrounds the repetitive drive toward impossible satisfaction rather than the actual fulfillment of desire has great implications for discussions of eschatology, which might be described as a projection of future, ultimate, and global satisfaction. In the case of The Book of Mormon, atemporal narration allows the text to explicitly promise the fulfillment of an eschatology that it formally suggests always will be deferred.

 

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12. I cite the King James version of the Bible throughout this essay. 13. Zvi Ben-​Dor Benite, The Ten Lost Tribes:  A World History (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2009), 173. 14. The first English-​language exposition of the Hebraic Indian, Thomas Thorowgood’s Iewes in America, or, Probabilities That Americans Are of That Race (London: n.p., 1650), relied heavily on biblical exegesis for its proofs, and most immediately subsequent publications followed suit. As Richard Cogley notes, even Puritan John Eliot, who established “praying Indian towns” and lived and worked closely with Native Americans, relied chiefly on the Bible as his proof text rather than ethnographic observations when articulating his belief in the Hebraic Indian theory. Though Eliot and Thorowgood exchanged correspondence, their versions of the theory differed dramatically: While Thorowgood believed indigenous Americans to be the lost tribes, Eliot thought them the descendants of the biblical Eber (great-​grandson of Shem, Noah’s son). And though Eliot for a time seems to have accepted the proposition that the lost tribes inhabited some portion of the Americas, he did ultimately rethink that position and inform Thorowgood that there was insufficient evidence for it. (See Richard Cogley, “John Eliot and the Origins of the American Indians,” Early American Literature 21.3 [Winter 1986–​1987]: 210–​225.) 15. James Adair, The History of the American Indians, Kathryn Holland Braun, ed. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 164. 16. Ibid., 76. The word “opossum” actually originates from a Virginia Algonquin language and means something like “white dog” (op = white, assom = dog). 17. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man (Edinburgh: W. Creech, 1788), 76. 18. G. Blair Nelson, “Ethnology and the ‘Two Books’: Some Nineteenth-​Century Americans on Preadamist Polygenism,” in Nature and Scripture in the Abrahamic Religions: God, Scripture and the Rise of Modern Science (1200–​1700), Jitse M. van der Meer and Scott Mandelbrote, eds. (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2008), 145–​179, 147. For more on US interest in the theory of polygenesis, see G. Blair Nelson, “‘Men Before Adam!’: American Debates Over the Unity and Antiquity of Humanity,” in When Science and Christianity Meet, David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 161–​182. 19. Adair, The History of the American Indians, 66. 20. Ibid.,  65. 21. In his assessment of The Age of Revelation (1801), Boudinot’s scathing reply to Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason, Popkin rightly notes that Boudinot “passed into oblivion, probably because his religious views seemed out of keeping with the prevailing deism and liberal Christianity of his time.” Richard Popkin, “The Age of Reason versus The Age of Revelation: Two Critics of Tom Paine: Elias Boudinot and David Levi,” in Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment: Essays Honoring Alfred Owen Aldridge, J. A. Leo Lemay, ed. (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1987), 158–​170, 165. 22. Elias Boudinot, A Star in the West: Or, A Humble Attempt to Discover the Long Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, Preparatory to Their Return to Their Beloved City, Jerusalem (Trenton, NJ: D. Fenton, 1816), 277. 23. Ibid.,  228. 24. Ibid., 113–​114. 25. Ibid.,  42–​43. 26. George Stanley Faber, A General and Connected View of the Prophecies Relative to the Conversion, Restoration, Union and Future Glory of the Houses of Judah and Israel, (London:  F. C.  and J. Rivington, 1808), 146–​147. 27. Faber, A General and Connected View, 146; Boudinot, A Star in the West, 85. 28. Boudinot, A Star in the West, 298. 29. Ibid.,  297. 30. Ibid.,  280. 31. Ibid., 296–​297. 32. Ibid.,  297. 33. Ibid.,  301. 34. Ethan Smith, View of the Hebrews: Or, The Tribes of Israel in America (Poultney, VT: Smith & Shute, 1825), 95.

 

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Ibid.,  228. Ibid.,  232. Ibid.,  249. Ibid.,  250. Underwood, The Millenarian World,  77–​78. Elias Boudinot, The Second Advent, or, Coming of the Messiah in Glory, Shown to Be a Scripture Doctrine and Taught by Divine Revelation From the Beginning of the World (Trenton, NJ:  D. Fenton & S. Hutchinson, 1815), 129, 113. 41. Jared Hickman, “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse,” American Literature 86.3 (2014): 441. 42. Ibid.,  443. 43. Paul Ricœur, Figuring the Sacred:  Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995), n. 264. 44. Hickman, “The Book of Mormon,” 438. 45. The Book of Moroni is the final book in The Book of Mormon, but it is not a narrative.

 

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“Great Cause to Mourn” The Complexity of The Book of Mormon’s Presentation of Gender and Race Kimberly M. Berkey and Joseph M. Spencer

From its initial appearance in E. B. Grandin’s bookshop in Palmyra, New York, The Book of Mormon has been presented to the world as closely tied to the Christian Bible. Paul Gutjahr notes that “the book’s [original] binding style intentionally echoed the bible editions of the day,”1 and subsequent publication efforts have made the book look only even more biblical in nature.2 More strikingly biblical than its physical appearance, however, is the style of The Book of Mormon’s language. Mark Twain’s reading of the book led him to describe it as “a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New Testament.”3 In the spirit of Twain, albeit usually with less art and wit, The Book of Mormon’s critics have long enjoyed underscoring its close dependence on and aesthetic inferiority to the King James Bible that was nineteenth-​century America’s literary mainstay.4 Recent decades, however, have yielded more nuanced approaches to The Book of Mormon’s relationship to the Christian Bible, even seeing its borrowings from and manipulations of biblical texts as theologically sophisticated and worthy of close scrutiny.5 In what follows, we mean to contribute to this burgeoning discussion by looking at a brief biblical borrowing late in The Book of Mormon, one that at first glance seems to be little more than a passing use of biblical language. We have selected this passage in particular, however, because the slight changes it makes to the biblical text from which it borrows are profoundly suggestive. They are suggestive not only because they help to reveal the artistry of the book’s relationship to the Christian Bible, but also because they help to highlight in a remarkable way certain subtle themes that run through the whole of The Book of Mormon, themes that have been almost universally overlooked by its readers. These themes in turn help to situate The Book of Mormon within Kimberly M. Berkey and Joseph M. Spencer, “Great Cause to Mourn”: The Complexity of The Book of Mormon’s Presentation of Gender and Race. In: Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon. Edited by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190221928.003.0013

 



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the nineteenth-​century American cultural setting in which its first readers encountered it. The borrowing we investigate appears in the last part of the Book of Helaman, the shortest of The Book of Mormon’s narrative historical books, on the lips of a certain Samuel the Lamanite.6 Samuel is a rare and complex figure in a lengthy and intricate narrative.7 Hailing from the Lamanites, the book’s dark-​ skinned racial “Others,” Samuel delivers a prophetic message to the Nephites, the book’s light-​skinned protagonists, who are presented as the keepers of the records from which The Book of Mormon was produced. As the only Lamanite in the entire book to be given so much space and attention, Samuel is a crucial figure, a lone voice sounding in the wilderness of the volume’s marginalized.8 His words draw often on biblical phrasing, but one borrowing in particular draws our attention because of the attention it in turn pays to another group of people systematically marginalized in The Book of Mormon:  women. In a brief borrowing from and transformation of Matt 23–​24 ( Jesus’s apocalyptic predictions in the New Testament), Samuel worries about the “great cause” women will have “to mourn” when a prophesied disaster befalls the Nephites (Hel 15:2).9 Not only does a racially marginalized person here attempt, in a call to repentance, to bring the plight of the sexually marginalized to the attention of the majority, he does so through a reworking of a biblical text. The several differences from the biblical passage are minor and subtle, but each of them is deeply telling. They all, as we have already noted, are connected to and help to reveal larger themes in The Book of Mormon. Clarifying both how the book relates to questions of gender and domesticity and how the book relates to questions of race, Samuel’s transformation of the biblical text is suggestive of the remarkable literary and theological complexity of aspects of The Book of Mormon that at first seem straightforwardly damning: its almost complete failure to speak of women and its apparently unreflective racism. To become clear about the complexity of what The Book of Mormon has to say on these topics is to make possible further serious study of the place the book was meant to assume in nineteenth-​ century America—​in a geographical location and historical era characterized by drastic changes in conceptions of the family, as well as by serious conflicts over the status of race. In the last part of this essay, we undertake a brief study along precisely these lines, suggesting something of the way the earliest readers of The Book of Mormon might have understood its subtle critique of attitudes present in nineteenth-​century American culture. Of course, to make clear what Samuel’s recasting of the biblical sayings actually suggests about The Book of Mormon’s relationship to questions of race and gender, we need to turn from broad, introductory generalities directly to the texts.

 

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Borrowings Samuel’s sermon represents a unique political and religious moment in the narrative of The Book of Mormon. Following a surprising mass conversion of the Lamanites to the Nephites’ (pre)Christian faith (see Hel 5), a rare period of political peace ensues with the result that, for the first time in five centuries, “the Lamanites did go whithersoever they would [in the land], whether it were among the Lamanites or among the Nephites” (Hel 6:8).10 Such political peace, however, sits uncomfortably side by side with a stark religious discrepancy, one that marks a major reversal of The Book of Mormon’s usual state of affairs: “the Lamanites had become the more part of them a righteous people, insomuch that their righteousness did exceed that of the Nephites” (Hel 6:1).11 This discrepancy is reiterated several chapters later as a preface to and explanation for Samuel’s prophetic activity among the Nephites: “the Nephites did still remain in wickedness—​yea, in great wickedness—​while the Lamanites did observe strictly to keep the commandments of God” (Hel 13:1). Taking advantage of his newly acquired political freedom to roam among the Nephites and responding to the clear Nephite need for prophetic intervention, Samuel the Lamanite begins “to preach unto the people” (Hel 13:2). The unique circumstances that make for the possibility of Samuel’s preaching are little appreciated by his hearers, however, who soon “cast him out” (Hel 13:2). Commanded by a divine voice to return, but refused entry into the Nephite capital city, he climbs “upon the wall thereof ” in order to deliver his message of repentance (Hel 13:4). Once Samuel concludes his sermon, the Nephites again respond with violence, apparently offended by a call to repentance from someone they consider racially and ethnically inferior. Finding his life again in danger and having now discharged his prophetic commission, Samuel absconds to his homeland and never again appears in the narrative. The brief time in which political and religious circumstances allow Samuel to serve as prophet to the Nephites is over too quickly, and the rarity and fragility of these circumstances are keenly felt by the prophet himself, as is clear from the racial tensions on display throughout his sermon. The chief focus of Samuel’s wall-​top preaching is on the “heavy destruction” for which the Nephites are destined. In order to underscore the trajectory of the Nephites’ present wickedness, Samuel contrasts their “unbelief ” with the “steadfastness” and “firmness” of the Lamanites, for which the Lamanites will be not only preserved from apocalyptic disaster, but also restored “to the knowledge of the truth” should they depart from their Christian convictions in the intervening years (Hel 15:10–​11). The Nephites’ fate is not so promising and is explicitly contrasted with the Lamanites’ divine preservation; if the Nephites remain in their “unbelief,” they will be “utterly destroy[ed]” (Hel 15:17).

 



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Samuel’s apocalyptic focus parallels the apocalyptic focus of Jesus’s teachings in Matt 23–​24. It is thus perhaps unsurprising that the whole of Samuel’s sermon bears intertextual ties with the Matthean sermon. A handful of literary parallels, a similar rhetorical trajectory, and even three direct quotations (two of which are the focus of our detailed considerations here) confirm the close relationship between Samuel’s sermon to Zarahemla and Matt 23–​24. The rhetorical trajectory of Matt 23 begins with Jesus castigating the scribes and Pharisees in a series of woes, condemning them for hypocrisy, pretension, swearing by the temple, and ignoring the “weightier matters” of Mosaic observance in favor of legal minutiae (Matt 23:13–​26). After then comparing his opponents to “whited sepulchers” (Matt 23:27), Jesus announces their culminating offense: Jerusalem’s leaders “kill and crucify” the prophets (Matt 23:34). And despite their repeated violence against God’s messengers, those Jesus criticizes deny responsibility: “if we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets” (Matt 23:30). This duplicity finally spurs Jesus’s famous lament over the chief city of his people: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together!” (Matt 23:37). A nearly identical trajectory appears in the first chapter of Samuel’s sermon. Like Jesus in Matt 23, Samuel delivers a series of condemnatory woes, but in the place of Matthew’s scribes and Pharisees he addresses particular cities: “Woe unto this great city of Zarahemla!”; “Woe be unto the city of Gideon!”; “Woe be unto all the cities which are in the land!” (Hel 13:12–​ 16). In what forms the first direct quotation of the Matthean text, Samuel then, like Jesus, condemns his audience for killing the prophets while denying complicity: “Woe unto this people, because . . . ye do cast out the prophets and do mock them and cast stones at them and do slay them . . . . And now when ye talk, ye say: If our days had been in the days of our fathers of old, we would not have slain the prophets” (Hel 13:24–​25). The first sequence of Samuel’s sermon even concludes, Jesus-​like, with a prophetic lament over the unrepentant self-​ deceived: “O ye people of the land, that ye would hear my words!” (Hel 13:39).12 If the first part of Samuel’s sermon thus privileges the basic trajectory of Jesus’s words in Matthew, the last part of the sermon favors direct quotation, placing two passages from Matt 23–​24 back to back at the opening of Hel 15. Jesus follows his famous lament over Jerusalem with a prediction of the temple’s destruction: “Behold, your house will be left unto you desolate” (Matt 23:38). Samuel borrows these words, adding to them and changing them slightly, in his call to repentance: “Behold, I declare unto you that except ye shall repent, your houses shall be left unto you desolate” (Hel 15:1). In a later passage from the Matthew text, Jesus warns his disciples about the difficulties attending the flight from Jerusalem that will be necessary when the temple is destroyed: “And

 

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woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days” (Matt 24:19). Samuel borrows but substantially reworks Jesus’s couplet, adding it to his borrowing of the reference to desolate houses, clearly in order to illustrate exactly what the predicted disaster will entail: “Yea, except ye repent, your women shall have great cause to mourn in the day that they shall give suck. For ye shall attempt to flee and there shall be no place for refuge. Yea, and woe unto them which are with child, for they shall be heavy and cannot flee. Therefore they shall be trodden down and shall be left to perish” (Hel 15:2). It is to these two borrowings—​from Matt 23:38 and Matt 24:19—​that we intend to give detailed attention. The first of these passages serves in its original context to mark the transition from Jesus’s direct condemnation of the Jerusalem leadership in Matt 23 to his apocalyptic discourse in Matt 24 (often referred to as the “Olivet Discourse”). Following the lament for Jerusalem’s obduracy, Jesus announces their punishment: “Behold, your house will be left unto you desolate” (Matt 23:38). That Matthew understands “house” to refer here to the Jerusalem temple is clear. Jesus makes his announcement while standing in the temple court, and he leaves the temple precincts immediately after announcing its desolation, his action echoing the image from Ezekiel of the divine presence removing from Israel’s first temple and thus signaling God’s rejection of the temple. Moreover, the Olivet Discourse that follows has the temple’s destruction as one of its principal themes.13 By calling the temple “your house,” the Matthean text ironically highlights the temple’s abandonment; it is “God’s house” no longer. Indeed, the very image of a house is ironic—​although a house is a place meant for habitation, Jesus renders it “desolate” and empty.14 The second passage on which Samuel’s words draw appears fairly early in the Olivet Discourse, given as part of Jesus’s response to his disciples’ question about the timing of the temple’s destruction (see Matt 24:3). Jesus responds that when his disciples see “the abomination of desolation” standing in the temple, then they will know that its destruction is imminent and that they must “flee into the mountains” (Matt 24:15–​16). Jesus emphasizes the urgency of this flight by claiming that there will be no time to gather belongings (see Matt 24:17–​18) and by noting the difficulties of speedy flight for those with peculiar circumstances (see Matt 24:19–​20). In particular, he considers the circumstances of Jerusalem’s mothers—​women with pregnant bodies or nursing children will find it difficult to escape the city in time. It is not clear exactly how Jesus envisions motherhood as impeding flight, but he foresees these difficulties as unavoidable.15 Where bad weather might be forestalled by prayer (“pray . . . that your flight be not in the winter,” Jesus recommends in the next verse), the situation of pregnant women and nursing mothers is only to be lamented (“woe unto them”).16

 



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These are the passages on which the Samuel text draws. Strikingly, by adjoining them (the first passage in verse 1 of Hel 15, the second in verse 2 of the same chapter), he brings together the only two maternal images of Matt 23–​ 24, collapsing the textual distance between them in their original setting. (Matt 23:38, the reference to Jerusalem’s house being left desolate, follows directly Jesus’s self-​description as a mother hen, willing to gather “her” chicks under “her” wings. Although Samuel makes no mention of a mother bird, he maintains the gendered context of this statement by bringing it into conjunction with Matt 24:19.)17 Moreover, in his adaptations of the two Matthean texts, the Samuel passage transforms what in their New Testament setting is only a metaphorical force into a literal force, making Jesus’s words serve in a direct condemnatory comment on gender relations and notions of domesticity among the Nephites. Thus, drawing on Jesus’s merely occasional and merely metaphorical references to women in Matt 23–​24, but transforming these references into a focused and quite literal social critique, The Book of Mormon’s singular Lamanite prophet inventively reworks the biblical text. The real brilliance of these two borrowings, however, comes out only as we turn to the details.

Reworkings If one word could be used to describe the feel of the transformed Matthean text as it appears in Samuel’s sermon, it would have to be “domestic.” This is already signaled by the shift from the singular “house” in Matt 23:38—​where the house spoken of is clearly the Jerusalem temple—​to the plural “houses” in Hel 15:1. What is in view in Samuel’s warning is not a public, state-​sponsored center of divine worship, but private, extra-​political centers of family life. It is not the temple that will be transformed into a chilling trace of divine abandonment, but so many families’ houses that will be transformed into chilling traces of interrupted life. And these houses are clearly principally occupied, for Samuel, by the women and children who receive his attention in his immediately following words—​those words that in turn rework Matt 24:19. In the Matthean text, “them that are with child” (the pregnant) are mentioned before “them that give suck” (the nursing), according to the natural biological sequence of maternal care (pregnancy is followed by nursing). Samuel inverts this order, speaking first of “your women . . . [who] shall give suck” and only subsequently mentioning “them which are with child” (Hel 15:2). This inversion itself, disrupting or even reversing the natural biological sequence of maternal care, emphasizes the disorder that coming calamity will impose on domestic life. As houses are left desolate, the very order of life is upset.

 

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The inversion of the ordering in Matt 24:19 in Hel 15:2 is more deeply significant still, however. It not only highlights the way that apocalypse interrupts all things domestic; it also allows Samuel to highlight a certain escalation of violence. Pregnant women and nursing mothers face different specified difficulties in the face of sudden disaster, with the nursing apparently faring better than the pregnant. Concerning nursing mothers, Samuel says that they “shall attempt to flee and there shall be no place for refuge.” Concerning pregnant women, however, Samuel says that “they shall be heavy and cannot flee. Therefore they shall be trodden down and shall be left to perish.” While nursing mothers are said to face serious troubles, looking for a place of refuge and finding none, pregnant women are simply abandoned, left to die after being trodden down by others running for their lives. Parallel to this logic of escalating violence is a logic of increased abandonment by fathers and husbands. Throughout the passage, Samuel speaks of women in the third person (calling them “your [the Nephites’] women”). But when he refers to nursing mothers looking for a “place for refuge,” he shifts suddenly to the plural second person: “Yea, except ye repent, your women shall have great cause to mourn in the day that they shall give suck. For ye shall attempt to flee and there shall be no place for refuge.” This shift from “they” (nursing mothers alone) to “ye” (nursing mothers and the men whose women they apparently are) suggests that Samuel anticipates whole families—​nursing mothers carrying their children and fathers alongside them—​seeking refuge and failing to find it. There is thus a kind of domesticity that continues in the flight from disaster for nursing mothers, although they are unable to find a place to express that domestic family life in their flight. But when Samuel turns from nursing mothers to pregnant women, there is no shift from the third person to the second, no shift from “they” to “ye,” and his prediction concerning the pregnant speaks only of abandonment, violence, and death. Only where the family has already come into being, it seems, does Samuel anticipate men caring for “their” women. Everything Samuel has to say here in his adaptation of Matt 23:38 and Matt 24:19 reflects the complicated status of domesticity among The Book of Mormon’s Nephites. It has often been noted that very few women are to be found in The Book of Mormon, as if the book, at best, unthinkingly reflects the patriarchy of the era of its production or, at worst, blameworthily contributes to and rigidifies patriarchal attitudes for believing mainstream Latter-​day Saints.18 Anticipating such critiques, Samuel impugns the Nephites for the consequences that will follow for the women among them from the thoughtless actions of the men among them. As if perfectly positioned to do so—​because, that is, he is a marginalized Lamanite—​Samuel criticizes within The Book of Mormon what feminist readers criticize from without.19 Thus Samuel’s presence in the book complicates any too-​straightforward interpretation of it. It cannot be simply said that The Book of Mormon is an uncritically patriarchal book when it presents

 



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a marginalized figure who, addressing the mainstream tradition the narrative represents, condemns (certain elements of) Nephite patriarchy in a prophetic voice. The book not only sets forth a predominantly patriarchal history; it also sets forth an internal critique of that history. In this way, it finds a place in complex concert with other literary texts that appeared in English in the 1820s, to which we will give attention later. Of course, one might object that, while Samuel focuses on the sorts of difficulties that face women uniquely in real calamity and even suggests that some of those difficulties are the consequences of men’s willful ignorance of women’s plight, his words are far too brief to build from them an argument that The Book of Mormon is consciously self-​critical when it comes to questions of gender. It turns out, however, that Samuel’s criticism of the Nephites brings to a kind of culmination another and perhaps more direct such critique of Nephite patriarchy earlier in the book. Another marginalized prophet—​albeit a Nephite one—​makes a very similar criticism, one to which Samuel’s words should be referred. The prophet Jacob, brother of the larger-​than-​life Nephi from whom the Nephites take their ancestral name, serves early in The Book of Mormon as a kind of proto-​Samuel figure. The setting of his prophetic condemnation of Nephite patriarchy is relatively simple. After what is presented as a somewhat idyllic period under the reign of Nephi, the era of “the second king” is characterized by a sharp turn toward extravagance ( Jacob 1:15). “Gold and silver” play a major role in this cultural shift ( Jacob 1:16), but the “grosser crime” ( Jacob 2:22) that primarily concerns Jacob is that the Nephites “indulge themselves, . . . desiring many wives and concubines” ( Jacob 1:15).20 Summoning the people collectively to their place of worship, Jacob berates the people for these desires. He quotes the Lord as saying that he has “seen the sorrow and heard the mourning of the daughters of my people in the land of Jerusalem, yea, and in all the lands of my people, because of the wickedness and abominations of their husbands” ( Jacob 2:31). And he further quotes the Lord as announcing that things are intended to be different with the Nephites:  “I will not suffer, saith the Lord of Hosts, that the cries of the fair daughters of this people, which I have led out of the land of Jerusalem, shall come up unto me against the men of my people” ( Jacob 2:32). The punishment to be meted out if repentance is not forthcoming is dire: “I shall visit them with a sore curse, even unto destruction” ( Jacob 2:33). This relatively straightforward condemnation of certain elements of Nephite patriarchy Jacob then combines with a similarly straightforward commendation of Lamanite domestic relations: Behold, the Lamanites your brethren, whom ye hate because of their filthiness and the cursing which hath come upon their skins, are more

 

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righteous than you. For they have not forgotten the commandment of the Lord which was given unto our father, that they should have save it were one wife, and concubines they should have none, and there should not be whoredoms committed among them. And now this commandment they observe to keep . . . . Behold, their husbands love their wives and their wives love their husbands, and their husbands and their wives love their children. ( Jacob 3:5–​7) Although Jacob is not himself a Lamanite like Samuel, he launches his direct attack against Nephite patriarchy from an essentially Lamanite starting point, using the Lamanite example in order to set up his condemnation of the Nephites all the more forcefully. Further, while Jacob announces that the divine retribution for the Nephites’ patriarchy will be utter destruction, he explains that it is because the Lamanites “observe to keep” the commandment regarding things domestic that “the Lord God will not destroy them but will be merciful unto them, and one day they shall become a blessed people” ( Jacob 3:6). To the very extent that the Nephites will be destroyed for their patriarchy, the Lamanites will be preserved for their efforts to be rid of at least certain patriarchal tendencies and practices. Although it is generally overlooked, this prophetic moment early in The Book of Mormon is remarkable. From the outset of Nephite history, a certain tendency toward the patriarchal is prophetically identified and warned against. And the eventual annihilation of the Nephites, as well as the eventual preservation of the Lamanites, is directly tied to that markedly sinful tendency. Carol Lynn Pearson, an influential Latter-​day Saint feminist, once asked whether feminism could have saved the Nephites.21 The Book of Mormon’s own answer to that question may be positive, suggesting at the very least that unchecked patriarchy is one of the principal motives for the act of divine retribution that concludes the volume. Pearson was in fact too quick to suggest in response to her own question that “none of the prophets in The Book of Mormon suggest that the low status and negative portrayal of women is characteristic of their fallen society.”22 Two of the book’s prophets, one Nephite and the other Lamanite, one near the history’s outset and the other nearing its close, explicitly and directly claim that Nephite society—​from beginning to end—​is peculiarly characterized by problematic domestic relations. There is thus no surprise that The Book of Mormon recounts a depressing history of domestic and related abuse.23 The Book of Mormon, then, may be read as a deliberate and intentional history of one culture’s misconstrual of domesticity, a chronicle of the specific abuses of a people said from the beginning to be driven by a certain violent tendency toward women, related in order to stage a critique of such abuses.24 Indeed, the very few narratives in The Book of Mormon where women are given a noble or a

 



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heroic role (rather than being portrayed as merely nameless victims of violence) or where domestic relations are presented as functioning unproblematically always concern specifically Lamanite women or families.25 And it should be noted that at the one moment in the text where Lamanite men are presented as being violent or cruel toward women, such depredations are contrasted with the far-​ more-​depraved misogynistic acts of Nephite men going on at the same time.26 The consistency of the account—​Nephite misogyny against relative Lamanite domestic functionality—​makes it difficult not to see these patterns as intentional.27 The fact that The Book of Mormon appears in an era characterized by major transformation in the American conception of domesticity makes this stand out as all the more significant. From Jacob’s early prophetic attack against Nephite gender relations to Samuel’s late prophetic attack against the same, The Book of Mormon is best read as a narratively complex but nonetheless intentional attempt to contest what it regards as a certain distortion of gender relations, a certain distortion of the domestic. It is far too simplistic just to point out the unmistakable relative absence or invisibility of women in The Book of Mormon, especially if the implication of such pointing out is supposed to be that the book is unaware of its apparent patriarchal trappings. It is necessary, instead, to recognize the remarkable complexity of what the book does in presenting the relative absence or invisibility of women in it. The Book of Mormon is fully conscious of the problematic status of gender in the history it recounts, even if it marks that consciousness and levels criticisms against that problematic status only infrequently and always through clearly marginalized prophetic figures. What is consistent throughout the book, even if only in those infrequent moments of marginalized critique, is its prophetic presentation of a link between misogyny and apocalyptic cultural disaster. And this Samuel foregrounds in a particularly forceful way by a reworking of Jesus’s words from the New Testament, bringing out with startling clarity the effects of Nephite patriarchy on women in a time of apocalyptic crisis.28 That Samuel makes his most forceful attack against Nephite patriarchy as a racially marginalized Lamanite may be of particular importance. Other prophets before and after him who denounce gender relations among the Nephites hail from the lighter-​skinned protagonists of The Book of Mormon, even if those particular prophets are marginalized in important ways. But Samuel speaks of violence toward the marginalized from a position of categorical marginalization.29 And the fact that he makes his criticisms while hailing from a people and a culture portrayed in The Book of Mormon as not given to the kinds of misogyny he denounces makes his denunciation all the more genuine. As it turns out, however, the question of race is more deeply intertwined with the question of misogyny than might at first be guessed. And, as it further turns out, there are real surprises—​and theological complications—​to be encountered

 

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when these connections are investigated closely. Speaking rather generally, the paired questions of race and gender are treated asymmetrically in the text. The same marginalized prophets who are attentive to questions of gender are attentive to questions of race, and they systematically contest racial discrimination. At the same time, however, they implicitly suggest that racial hatred is something God sees rather differently than he does gender-​based abuse. While they announce that domestic abuse directly leads to apocalypse, they indicate that God watches over the racially excluded or abused in mercy. It is this asymmetry that introduces certain surprises and that calls for theological reflection. It is necessary, obviously, to say more about the way that gender and race are coupled by Samuel, as well as by his predecessor Jacob.

Complications In the course of Hel 15, Samuel links the domestic with the racial in remarkably subtle ways, in particular by recontextualizing two key phrases from the adaptation of Matt 23–​24 and applying them to the marginalized Lamanites as he had applied them originally to marginalized Nephite women. After his brief outline of the consequences for Nephite mothers in the imminent disaster, Samuel moves immediately to a comparison between the Nephites and the Lamanites. Where the Nephites have been a people favored by God, the Lamanites have been “hated” (Hel 15:4), but this contrast only serves to make all the more ironic the wickedness of the favored and the righteousness of the hated. Samuel accuses the Nephites of being inconstant and fickle in their religious devotion, unlike the Lamanites who manifest “steadfastness when they do believe” and “firmness when they are once enlightened” (Hel 15:10). This religious constancy, he asserts, provides God’s motivation for preserving the Lamanites from the kind of apocalyptic destruction that awaits the Nephites. But even the divine preservation that will shelter the Lamanites when the Nephites are decimated is to be accompanied by certain sufferings, and it is in describing these that Samuel textually connects patriarchally oppressed Nephite women with the racially marginalized Lamanites. He marks the pinnacle of Lamanite righteousness by referring to their extraordinary act of military pacifism: The Lamanites bury their weapons, preferring “to be trodden down” over engaging in combat (Hel 15:9). Samuel’s wording here connects the Lamanite righteous to pregnant Nephite women facing apocalypse, “trodden down” and “left to perish” in their futile attempts to flee (Hel 15:2). In addition, Samuel announces that the Lord’s promises to the Lamanites will come to fruition only after a long history of abuse: They will be driven from their lands, hunted, killed, and scattered, “having no place for refuge” (Hel 15:12). Here Samuel’s words connect the

 



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descendants of the righteous Lamanites to the Nephites’ nursing mothers who will also find “no place for refuge” (Hel 15:2). There is in Samuel’s words, it seems, an intentional link between the treatment of the racially marginalized and the domestically mistreated: Dark-​skinned Lamanites and Nephite women, mutually oppressed, share a kind of mutual suffering. Once again, Samuel functions as an internal voice of critique for what The Book of Mormon self-​consciously presents as a history of violence and mistreatment, a critique that turns now to racial discrimination as it had earlier addressed Nephite patriarchy. Earlier in his sermon, Samuel had accused the Nephites of taking offense “because I am a Lamanite” (Hel 14:10), and the fact that he here traces the history of the Lamanites as a “hated” people and textually connects them to another oppressed group in the book (women) suggests that The Book of Mormon is as self-​aware on questions of race as it is on questions of gender.30 The connection between racial marginalization and domestic dysfunction is suggestive, but it must be noted that Samuel complicates matters at the same time that he enriches them. Although he portrays the consequences of Nephite women’s oppression as unquestionably negative, his reapplication of those consequences (being “trodden down,” having “no place for refuge”) to the Lamanite situation is woven with a kind of theological optimism. Lamanites, like Nephite women, are “trodden down,” but rather than just illustrating iniquitous violence, the trampling marks a voluntary demonstration of religious devotion. Being trodden down is something the Lamanite righteous willingly “suffer themselves” to undergo “because of their faith in Christ” (Hel 15:9). Similarly, although the descendants of the Lamanite righteous will, like Nephite mothers, have “no place for refuge,” Samuel couples his description of the situation with an expression of hope: “notwithstanding” their situation, “the Lord shall be merciful unto them” (Hel 15:12). The significant toll of destruction for individual Nephite mothers is presented as irreversibly tragic, but these same destructive consequences open onto a more merciful possibility for the Lamanite nation as a whole. Thus, where Samuel’s adaptation of Matt 23–​24 introduces one level of complexity to The Book of Mormon’s presentation of oppression, his reapplication of that same adaptation to questions of race a few verses later introduces further complexity still. For Samuel, troubling as it might seem to say so, the consequences of racial marginalization are not necessarily or straightforwardly negative. And in this attitude Samuel is again anticipated by the prophet Jacob, though in this case with some significant differences. Like the later Samuel, the earlier Jacob weaves questions of gender and race in the sermon previously discussed. Jacob explicitly accuses the Nephites of “hat[ing]” the Lamanites “because of their filthiness and the cursing which hath come upon their skins” ( Jacob 3:5), and this accusation cannot be divorced from his critique of Nephite gender relations, since he accuses them of this

 

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racism in the very same verse where he reproaches the problematic elements of Nephite patriarchy. After berating the Nephite men for their polygamous desires and their relative domestic abuses, Jacob issues the following lament and commandment: O my brethren, I fear that unless ye shall repent of your sins that [the Lamanites’] skins shall be whiter than yours, when ye shall be brought with them before the throne of God. Wherefore, a commandment I  give unto you, which is the word of God, that ye revile no more against them because of the darkness of their skins; neither shall ye revile against them because of their filthiness; but ye shall remember your own filthiness. ( Jacob 3:8–​9) This explicit “commandment” prohibiting racial discrimination corresponds to the only other explicitly named “commandment” Jacob offers in his sermon: the mandate to have only one wife. But while it might at first seem that these two commandments are strictly parallel, setting misogyny (of a particular stripe) side by side with racism and leveling similar ethical injunctions against both, Jacob’s presentation of race, like Samuel’s, includes complicating factors that undermine such a straightforward interpretation. Jacob’s two commandments (first to have only one wife, and then to revile no more against the Lamanites for their racial difference), although they are joined by their designation as commandment as well as by a kind of ethical sensibility, are not strictly equivalent. The domestic injunction derives from “the commandment of the Lord, which was given unto our father” ( Jacob 3:5), whereas the racial question Jacob addresses with “a commandment” which “I give unto you” ( Jacob 3:9). Where the first of these commandments bears the definite article (“the commandment”), the second presents itself as only one among many injunctions (“a commandment”). Further, where the first commandment has a divine basis (“of the Lord”), the second springs from a mortal source (“I give”).31 Finally, where the question of gender appears to be a more deeply moral concern with generational traction (“given unto our father”), the commandment concerning racism has a kind of merely occasional application (“I give unto you”). That Jacob subordinates questions of race to questions of domesticity is readily apparent upon closer inspection. Jacob’s race-​focused accusation is first introduced only so that the racial Others can model right familial relations: “the Lamanites your brethren, whom ye hate, . . . are more righteous than you” ( Jacob 3:5). Racism thus enters Jacob’s sermon as if in a parenthetical aside, in an almost offhand remark outranked by concerns about the Nephite domestic situation. Even when he issues the previously quoted charge to “revile no more against

 



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[the Lamanites],” the command is conditioned by the same differently directed worries: “I fear that unless ye repent . . . [the Lamanites’] skins will be whiter than yours . . . . Wherefore, a commandment I give unto you” ( Jacob 3:9, emphasis added). Further, just as Jacob ultimately contests only certain elements of patriarchy, his critique of racism is not without certain racist elements. For example, his primary worry is that Lamanite “skins will be whiter than” Nephite skins, an apprehension framed in racializing terms, just as his injunction a few verses later against reviling the Lamanites “because of their filthiness” fails to recognize that the Lamanites’ skin color does not make them filthy.32 The fact that this last, still-​racializing injunction against racism inscribes itself within the frame of Jacob’s domestic concerns indicates his subordination of the one theme to the other (see Jacob 3:9). It should be noted, however, that there are some important differences between Samuel’s and Jacob’s ways of suggesting that there is something less overtly egregious about racism than about domestic abuse. Jacob directly subordinates the one concern to the other, privileging domestic morality over the morality governing relations with the racial other. Samuel, however, does not so much subordinate the one concern to the other as subordinate ethical or moral questions more generally to religious or faith-​based questions. Perhaps because of the fact that he is himself a Lamanite, a victim of racial discrimination, Samuel’s asymmetrical treatment of racism and patriarchy betrays a kind of theological hopefulness on his part—​a conviction that God can make good even out of morally reprehensible racism. Jacob, as a Nephite who never entirely shakes off the chains of racism even while he denounces racial hatred, sees only the hopelessness of Nephite immorality. Because of these differences between Samuel and Jacob, there are arguably two fundamentally different ways one might—​charitably—​read The Book of Mormon’s treatment of race in light of its subordination of this question to other questions. First, more attuned to Jacob than to Samuel, The Book of Mormon might be taken to be more progressive on questions of gender and domesticity than on questions of race for the time of its emergence in nineteenth-​century America. One might therefore admire the way it clearly and explicitly struggles against its own prejudices, more successfully when it comes to gender and domestic relations and less successfully when it comes to race. More historically (or even secularly) minded but following the same approach, one might recognize the way The Book of Mormon reflects the struggle, on America’s nineteenth-​ century frontier, over questions of gender and race at Christianity’s margins—​a point to which we will return in a moment. Affirming but not always living up to an admirable universalism, The Book of Mormon overtly claims but sometimes performatively denies that “all are alike unto God”: “black and white, bond and free, male and female” (2 Ne 26:33). Jacob is a kind of case in point, a clear

 

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example of how those who have not directly experienced discrimination fail to free themselves of discriminating attitudes. A second approach to the interpretation of The Book of Mormon’s treatment of race seems to us more appropriate and, in many ways, more theologically compelling. It is, at any rate, an approach more attuned to Samuel—​the actual voice of the racially marginalized in the book—​than to Jacob. It is Jacob, not Samuel, who directly subordinates injunctions against racism to “larger” concerns. If Samuel nonetheless relativizes the weight of the ethical in his presentation of the sufferings of the racially marginalized, he does so in a much more compelling way—​one that should be read as the product of someone who has experienced actual discrimination: Samuel subordinates the ethical to the religious in what might be regarded as a kind of Kierkegaardian move.33 Without denying that there is something essentially sinful (that is, morally or ethically reprehensible) about racism, Samuel implicitly warns against reducing religion to ethics by valorizing the radical act of faith and affirming the God who watches out for the religious faithful even in ethically compromising situations. Given The Book of Mormon’s larger insistence on the radical singularity of faith, this seems to us the better reading. Indeed, it seems to us entirely appropriate to suggest that Samuel should be read in The Book of Mormon as a kind of later corrective to Jacob. The marginalized Nephite cannot see what the marginalized Lamanite can, and the result is that the latter provides a richer theological account of God’s approach to racial hatred and violence. And it is Samuel, after all, who provides his fascinating treatment of both gender and race through a careful adaptation of the biblical text, exhibiting artistry as well as theological complexity.

Contexts Before concluding, we would like to say a few words about how The Book of Mormon’s treatment of domesticity might have spoken to its first readers—​that is, in the 1830s. Students of antebellum American literature well know that the Latter-​day Saint tradition emerged in a context of radical transformation for the cultural understanding and lived structure of American family life.34 Within years of the book’s appearance, Americans would witness the rise of what has come to be called the cult of domesticity, the product of extremely popular domestic advice literature written by women and for women beginning in the mid-​1830s. This literature consciously aimed to replace fathers with mothers at the center of the home and charged women with inculcating spiritual values in the younger generation.35 The Book of Mormon appeared just in time to be read as providing fodder for a response to that literature, although it appeared a few years too early to be read as a direct response—​especially considering the fact

 



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that, as Mary Ryan notes, “the institution of the family [is] one of the most sluggish and entrenched social formations.”36 In her contribution to this volume, Amy Easton-​Flake also recognizes the importance of domestic advice literature for contextually situating The Book of Mormon, analyzing how The Book of Mormon’s presentation of masculinity and fatherhood would have been read by believers in the first era of Latter-​day Saint history as pointing in directions quite distinct from those found in popular advice manuals. The themes explored in this essay, however, suggest that The Book of Mormon would also have resonated in important ways with changing conceptions of domestic structure. It is especially interesting to put The Book of Mormon side by side with the earliest writings of the two women who did the most to establish the cult of domesticity in the 1830s—​Lydia Maria Child and Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Both of these women began their literary careers in the 1820s, but their earliest writings were contributions to the field of literary fiction rather than to domestic advice literature. Interestingly, each woman’s first successful novel closely scrutinized both the already-​implicitly changing status of women in domestic affairs and the fraught relationship between Native Americans and white settlers. Both Hobomok, written by Child and published in 1824, and Hope Leslie, written by Sedgwick and published in 1827, investigated the intersection of domesticity and race by producing Puritan historical romances that imagined interracial marriages and explored potential analogies between rebellious young women and retaliatory natives.37 As if to invite comparative study between these novels and The Book of Mormon, one of them uses the same Matthean language as Samuel to describe the home of a Puritan settler after an Indian attack: “ ‘Stop, stop,’ a witness tells the patriarch of the home, ‘go not thither—​thy house is desolate.’ ”38 What The Book of Mormon shares most with Child’s and Sedgwick’s novels is a sense that unchecked patriarchy in white domestic settings leads to abuse, which can be contrasted with the happy domestic affairs of (at least ideal) native families. Both Child and Sedgwick tell stories of white Puritan women who, under extreme circumstances, end up interracially married to Native American men. Mary Conant, in Child’s Hobomok, in the midst of “a partial derangement of [her] faculties” in part caused by her father’s authoritarian treatment, marries the man whose name is the title of the novel.39 In contrast to the authoritarian ways of her father, the native Hobomok leaves to her genuine domestic control and, when confronted with the news that her first love (supposed dead) is alive and present in the colonies, he not only refuses to kill his rival but relinquishes Mary to her heart’s true desire, disappearing into the forest. The rival lover, having encountered Hobomok and witnessed his stoic resignation, places the capstone on the novel when he reports, “I have a story to tell of that savage, which might make the best of us blush at our inferiority, Christians as we are.”40

 

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In Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, the young girl Faith Leslie, sister to the novel’s eponymous heroine, is taken captive during an attack and grows up among Native Americans, proving unable to speak English when she returns briefly to her family. Married to Oneco, brother to the novel’s other great heroine, the self-​sacrificing young Native American woman Magawisca, Faith Leslie’s actions reveal the domestic happiness that characterizes her marriage. When given a chance to return to her sister, she refuses, and when she is taken captive anyway, she goes into taciturn mourning until her husband rescues her. As Magawisca explains regarding Faith, “both virtue and duty . . . bind [her] to Oneco”; only with him can she “sing as gaily again as the bird that hath found its mate.”41 While Faith enjoys simple domestic happiness, Hope is kept for much of the novel from her true love by Puritan patriarchal notions of marriage,42 attempting with varying success to rebuff the amorous solicitations of an oppressive suitor whose dupery fools all the men in Puritan Boston. (An even more direct comparison between the assuming, oppressive white suitor and the gentle Native American devotee occurs early in Hobomok.)43 The Book of Mormon, on the reading we have offered, makes critiques of the same conjuncture of racial attitudes and domestic problems in a way similar to—​ if nonetheless more subtly and sparsely than—​Hobomok and Hope Leslie. Like these novels, it conceives of racial difference in sentimental rather than biological terms, a matter primarily of accidental cultural accoutrements rather than necessary natural characteristics.44 Although The Book of Mormon never attempts, like so much of the domestic advice literature of the era of its appearance, to make women the spiritual trainers of the younger generation, it does seem to work in tandem with the earliest fictional or romantic output of the writers of those domestic advice manuals in suggesting that white Christian cultures tend toward domestic abuse and patriarchal violence while Native American cultures tend toward a rather different and more laudable domestic tradition. Readers of early American literary fiction might well have heard in The Book of Mormon certain familiar—​if nonetheless still nascent and starkly progressive—​notes.

Conclusion However it is read, questions of race and of gender in The Book of Mormon are complicated matters. As we have shown, the book is essentially self-​critical, intentionally presenting a history of immorality in order to present occasional but largely marginalized criticisms of such immorality. In doing so, it is peculiarly (if nonetheless subtly) attuned to matters of gender and race. It is not possible without drastic oversimplification to dismiss The Book of Mormon as straightforwardly misogynistic or racist on the grounds that it presents misogynistic and

 



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racist persons and peoples in the story it tells. Fully conscious of these questions that lay at the heart of nineteenth-​century American politics and that continue to lie at the heart of twenty-​first-​century American politics as well, The Book of Mormon was and is a profoundly relevant book. It has offered a voice and a perspective on central questions for two centuries, even if that voice and perspective have largely been ignored. Key to hearing that voice and learning from that perspective, moreover, is a willingness to investigate carefully how The Book of Mormon borrows from, adapts, and fundamentally reworks biblical texts, as displayed so beautifully in Samuel’s sermon. Whatever may be lacking in the aesthetic appeal of the book at the literary level (and close comparison with the learned romances of Child and Sedgwick makes this rather apparent!), there is little question that its handling of biblical texts in Midrashic invention is masterful. We hope to have shown here that its handling of biblical texts also provides a window onto the intricacies of its most controversial themes. To take The Book of Mormon seriously is to develop a hermeneutic approach that allows its interrogation of biblical meaning and relevance to be fully clear. Where this is done, the book might finally be recognized for what it is: a uniquely American contribution to world scripture with more than merely predictable moralistic messages. The Book of Mormon says of itself that it would “whisper out of the dust” (2 Ne 26:16). The image is clearly meant to refer to the way the book would come out of a New York hillside. Unfortunately, if the book has done any whispering in its two centuries of circulation, it has had to do so, rather, out of the dust it has collected in its unused and unread condition, sitting ignored on the shelves. We are convinced that The Book of Mormon is prepared to do more than whisper. But because it speaks in a language that was far more familiar to nineteenth-​ century than to twenty-​first-​century Americans—​the language of the King James Bible—​it will take the work of careful readers to begin to translate the book’s meaning into something that speaks with real force.

Notes 1. Paul C. Gutjahr, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777–​1880 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 152. 2. See Paul C. Gutjahr, The “Book of Mormon”: A Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 93–​97. 3. Mark Twain, Roughing It (New York: Signet Classics, 1980), 103. 4. The most systematic exposé of The Book of Mormon’s relationship to the King James Bible is Wesley P. Walters, The Use of the Old Testament in The Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City, UT: Utah Lighthouse Ministries, 1990). 5. This shift seems largely to have begun when Krister Stendahl, renowned New Testament scholar, was invited to present a study of The Book of Mormon at Brigham Young University. The result was a stellar study of how the book’s slight rewordings of the Sermon on the Mount

 

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from the Gospel of Matthew weave into it the basic theology on display in the Gospel of John. See Krister Stendahl, “The Sermon on the Mount and Third Nephi,” in Reflections on Mormonism: Judaeo-​Christian Parallels, Truman G. Madsen, ed. (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, 1978), 139–​154. The most extensive recent study of The Book of Mormon along these lines is Nicholas J. Frederick, The Bible, Mormon Scripture, and the Rhetoric of Allusivity (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016). 6. Of all the books making up The Book of Mormon, the Book of Helaman seems to have received the least detailed attention. The general spirit of this short book, however, can be gathered from the brief discussion of the Gadianton robbers in Terryl L. Givens, The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 56–​58. 7. For a very nice brief analysis of Samuel’s sermon, see Linda Hoffman Kimball, “The Coming of Christ,” in The Reader’s Book of Mormon, Robert A. Rees and Eugene England, eds., 7 vols. (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2008), vol. 6, ix–​xiv. For a representative commentary from the perspective of a believing Latter-​day Saint, see Brant A. Gardner, Second Witness:  Analytical and Contextual Commentary on The Book of Mormon, 6 vols. (Salt Lake City, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2007), vol. 5, 172–​213. 8. For an excellent study of Samuel’s role in The Book of Mormon, see Jared Hickman, “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse,” American Literature 86.3 (Sep. 2014): 429–​461. 9. Throughout this study, we use Royal Skousen’s critical text of The Book of Mormon. See Royal Skousen, ed., The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 10. On the importance of this development in The Book of Mormon’s larger narrative, see Kimberly M. Berkey, “Works of Darkness: Secret Combinations and Covenant Displacement in The Book of Mormon,” in Reading Nephi Reading Isaiah: Reading 2 Nephi 26–​27, 2nd ed., Joseph M. Spencer and Jenny Webb, eds. (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2016), 105–​121. 11. This reversal of centuries of Nephite religious ascendancy over the Lamanites is presented as the whole point of the Book of Helaman, as is made clear by the italicized heading for the book, which describes it as “an account of the righteousness of the Lamanites and the wickedness and abominations of the Nephites, according to the record of Helaman and his sons.” 12. For a theological exposition of Samuel’s accusations against the Nephites, see Joseph M. Spencer, “The Time of Sin,” The Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 9 (2014): 87–​110. 13. This was, it might be mentioned, the standard interpretation on offer in commentaries available at the time of The Book of Mormon’s appearance. See, for instance, Adam Clarke, The New Testament of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ: The Text Carefully Printed from the Most Correct Copies of the Present Authorised Version, Excluding the Marginal Readings and Parallel Texts, With a Commentary and Critical Notes, Designed as a Help to a Better Understanding of the Sacred Writings (New York: B. Waugh and T. Mason, 1833), vol. 1, 205; Matthew Pool, Annotations Upon the Holy Bible Wherein the Sacred Texts Is Inserted, and Various Readings Annexed, Together With the Parallel Scriptures, the More Difficult Terms in Each Verse Are Explained, Seeming Contradictions Reconciled, Questions and Doubts Resolved, and the Whole Text Opened, 3 vols. (New York: Robert Carther and Bros., 1852), vol. 3, 112; Matthew Henry, An Exposition of All the Books of the Old and New Testament, Wherein Each Chapter Is Summed Up in Its Contents, the Sacred Text Inserted at Large in Distinct Paragraphs, Each Paragraph Reduced to Its Proper Heads, the Sense Given, and Largely Illustrated With Practical Remarks and Observations, 5 vols (London: W. Baynes, 1806), vol. 4, 199. This same interpretation remains standard today. See, among modern commentators, Donald A. Hagner, Matthew 14–​28 (Dallas, TX: Word Books, 1995), 681; W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, Jr., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2005), vol. 3, 322; Ulrich Luz, Matthew 21–​28 (Hermeneia 3; Minneapolis, MN:  Fortress Press, 2005), 162; R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew (NICNT 1; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 886. 14. See, among modern commentators, Luz, Matthew 21–​28, 162; France, The Gospel of Matthew, 884. John Wesley made these same points in the eighteenth century. See John Wesley, Notes Upon the New Testament (New York: J. Soule and T. Mason, 1818), 79. 15. A few possible explanations of Jesus’s concern might be that apocalypse would increase risk of premature birth, that pregnant and nursing women would be unable to move quickly enough to escape coming disaster, or that such women would be forced to remain behind to face the

 



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difficulties of enduring a siege against the city. All of these possible interpretations appear in commentaries commonly available in English in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as in more recent commentaries. See Clarke, The New Testament of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, 210; Henry, An Exposition of All the Books of the Old and New Testament, vol. 4, 205; Luz, Matthew 21–​28, 197. 16. See Hagner, Matthew 14–​28, 701. John Nolland, The Gospel of Matthew (NIGTC 1; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 973, points out that this “woe” is to be understood as an expression of sympathy rather than condemnation, unlike other Matthean “woes.” It should be noted that few feminist interpreters pay close attention to this passage. Where it is mentioned in feminist biblical criticism, it is usually just to lament that it is one of so very few passages in the New Testament recognizing the unique difficulties faced by women under Roman oppression or apocalyptic disaster. See, for instance, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Searching the Scriptures:  A Feminist Commentary (New  York:  Crossroad, 1994), 500; Luise Schottroff, Lydia’s Impatient Sisters: A Feminist Social History of Early Christianity (Louisville, KY:  Westminster John Knox, 1995), 162–​163; Elizabeth J. Smith, Bearing Fruit in Due Season: Feminist Hermeneutics and the Bible in Worship (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 232–​234; Ilse von Loewenclau, “Daniel:  Not Counting Women and Children,” in Feminist Biblical Interpretation: A Compendium of Critical Commentary on the Books of the Bible and Related Literature, Luise Schottroff, Marie-​Theres Wacker, and Martin Rumscheidt, eds. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 364–​365. 17. This passage is very often used in feminist New Testament criticism as an example of a passage in which Jesus presents himself in feminine terms. See, for instance, Letty M. Russell, Human Liberation in a Feminist Perspective—​A Theology (Philadelphia:  Westminster, 1974), 100–​ 101; Ben Witherington, III, Women and the Genesis of Christianity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 61; Celia Deutsch, “Jesus As Wisdom:  A Feminist Reading of Matthew’s Wisdom Christology,” in A Feminist Companion to Matthew, Amy-​Jill Levine and Marianne Bickenstaff, eds. (Sheffield, UK:  Sheffield Academic, 2001), 101–​102; Jeannine Hill Fletcher, “Christology Between Identity and Difference: On Behalf of a World in Need,” in Frontiers in Catholic Feminist Theology:  Shoulder to Shoulder, Susan Abraham and Elena Procario-​Foley, eds. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 84–​85. 18. See, for instance, Susanna Morrill, White Roses on the Floor of Heaven:  Mormon Women’s Popular Theology, 1880–​1920 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 49–​50; and, more radically and from within the (larger) Mormon tradition, Dale E. Luffman, The Book of Mormon’s Witness to Its First Readers (Independence, MO: Community of Christ Seminar Press, 2013), 187–​195. For a brief review of the literature, see Grant Hardy, Understanding The Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 288. So as not to impugn Joseph Smith and also because of strong commitments to The Book of Mormon’s historicity, some Latter-​day Saints have condemned the book’s patriarchal bias as an unfortunate but very real facet of ancient cultures, merely reflected in the volume of scripture. See, for instance, Kevin and Shauna Christensen, “Nephite Feminism Revisited: Thoughts on Carol Lynn Pearson’s View of Women in The Book of Mormon,” FARMS Review 10.2 (1998): 9–​61; and Camille S. Williams, “Women in the Book of Mormon: Inclusion, Exclusion, and Interpretation,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 11 (2002): 66–​79, 111–​114. Against all these relatively standard interpretations, at least one author, in reconstruction too fantastic to generate a serious following, has argued that The Book of Mormon should be interpreted as a radically feminist work. See Clyde R. Forsberg, Jr., Equal Rites: The Book of Mormon, Masonry, Gender, and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 19. On the Lamanites’ potentially revealing perspective within The Book of Mormon, see Richard Lyman Bushman, “The Lamanite View of Book of Mormon History,” in Believing History: Latter-​ day Saint Essays, Reid L. Neilson and Jed Woodworth, eds. (New York: Columbia University Pres, 2004), 79–​92. 20. Jacob’s words in The Book of Mormon have played a complicated role in the debates among various Restoration sects regarding the status of polygamy, introduced into the early Latter-​day Saint tradition by Joseph Smith, the movement’s founding prophet. Jacob straightforwardly condemns polygamy, reminding his people of a commandment that men were to “have save it were one wife, and concubines they should have none” ( Jacob 3:5). At one point in his

 

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sermon, however, Jacob seems to indicate the possibility of an exception to this rule: “For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people; otherwise, they shall hearken unto these things” ( Jacob 2:30). For classic statements of the two main positions on the interpretation of Jacob’s words, both produced and published after the demise of polygamy in the largest branch of the Restoration, the Utah-​based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints, see George Reynolds and Janne M. Sjodahl, Commentary on The Book of Mormon, Philip C. Reynolds, ed., 7 vols. (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Books, 1955), vol. 1, 460–​462; Chris B. Hartshorn, A Commentary on The Book of Mormon (Independence, MO: Herald Publishing House, 1964), 158–​160. 21. See Carol Lynn Pearson, “Could Feminism Have Saved the Nephites?” Sunstone Magazine 101 (March 1996): 32–​40. 22. Ibid.,  36. 23. Ibid. Pearson provides a list of the events that make up this depressing history: “Various parts of the Nephite record refer to women being beaten (see Alma 50:30), having their tender hearts broken because of the faithlessness of their polygamous husbands ( Jacob 2:23–​35), being stolen as wives (Mosiah 20:5), being required to defend those who stole them (Mosiah 23:33), being taken prisoners (Alma 54:3), being offered as sacrifices (Morm 4:21), being burned to death (Alma 14:8), being raped, being tortured to death and then having their flesh devoured by men, and being fed on the flesh of their husbands with only a little water” (Moro 9:8–​10). 24. In a similar vein, Jared Hickman has argued that The Book of Mormon can be read as intentionally undercutting the unquestioned authority of its white male narrators, implicitly critiquing certain consistent features of the dominant Nephite culture. See, again, Hickman, “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse,” especially 444–​455. 25. The crucial narrative in this regard is the story of Abish and the Lamanite queen in Alma 19. Significantly, the singular “woman” appears in The Book of Mormon only seven times—​three times in biblical quotations (from Isaiah and the Sermon on the Mount) and four times in the story of Abish and the Lamanite queen in Alma 19. The important relationship between Abish and her father is, however, clearly paralleled by the story later in the Book of Alma of an army of Lamanite boys who sustain a similarly important relationship to their mothers. See Alma 19:16 and Alma 56:47–​48. 26. As if to leave the reader with the force of the history of violence toward women that the book recounts, The Book of Mormon explains in its penultimate chapter that while Lamanite men are feeding captive Nephite women “upon the flesh of their husbands” (Moro 9:8), Nephite men at the very same moment are raping “the daughters of the Lamanites” they have taken prisoner and then “devour[ing] their flesh like unto wild beasts . . . for a token of bravery” (Moro 9:9–​10), as well as leaving their own people’s “widows” to “faint . . . and die” by taking their rations for themselves (Moro 9:16). 27. A major theme in The Book of Mormon helps to make forcefully clear that the book is meant to serve as an intentional critique of those it simultaneously presents as protagonists. Several different figures in the course of the narrative explain that sacred records (including The Book of Mormon itself, of course) are produced in part to “bring to light” the “secrets and abominations” of the people whose history they record (Alma 37:25). Indeed, another of the book’s marginalized prophets, one certainly hailing from the same tradition as Jacob and Samuel, quotes the Lord as saying that Nephite wickedness will result in their utter destruction, but that “they shall leave a record [The Book of Mormon] behind them” precisely so that the Lord “may discover the abominations of this people to other nations” (Mosiah 12:8). That this third marginalized figure—​a prophet named Abinadi—​has as his explicit prophetic task to attack familiar elements of Nephite patriarchy—​the then-​reemergent desire among Nephite men to have “many wives and concubines” (Mosiah 11:2)—​is telling. At the very least, it suggests that The Book of Mormon should be read as inveighing against such practices through its larger narrative. On the close textual relationship between Abinadi and the earlier prophet Jacob, see Joseph M. Spencer, An Other Testament:  On Typology, 2nd ed. (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2016), 125–​134. 28. Also consistent throughout the book, as Amy Easton-​Flake’s essay (Chapter  16 in this volume) makes clear, is a focus on establishing a conception of Christian manhood, aimed at ensuring the generational succession of Christian convictions. We return to this point later.

 



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29. One might at this point raise a general concern regarding the apparently binaristic pres­ entation of marginalization in our treatment of The Book of Mormon. Recent work on nineteenth-​century American literature has noted problems that follow from studying women only “through interlocking sets of binary lenses: the public and private spheres, and agency and victimization.” Such lenses “obscure as much as they reveal.” Alison Piepmeier, Out in Public:  Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-​Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 2. These more recent developments in methodology may be especially important when considering the intersection of race and gender. Ellen Feder, for instance, has argued that closely related but irreducibly distinct mechanisms lie behind the cultural production of gender and race. Especially indicative of this difference is the fact that “gender . . . was not the result of some ‘occurrence’—​that is, it has no clear beginning or ‘historical facts’ that can explain the category of the subjection with which it is associated,” while “the idea of ‘race’ has origins traceable to the early modern period, from which time attributions of racial difference have entailed exploitation, enslavement, and even genocide.” Ellen K. Feder, Family Bonds: Genealogies of Race and Gender (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4. Those marginalized because of their gender arguably cannot be regarded as, strictly speaking, occupying the same place as those marginalized because of their race. As undeniably important as these methodological shifts in literary work on gender and race in nineteenth-​century American literature are, however, it remains unclear how useful they are for close study of The Book of Mormon, which arguably itself employs relatively binaristic conceptions of the public and the private, as well as of agency and victimization, at least when it comes to underprivileged persons presented in the text. Because women, for instance, so seldom emerge in The Book of Mormon as characters with any substantive narrative role, there is little material on which to draw in order to investigate their “modalities of embodiment that make use of both public and private, that are neither fully victim nor agent, that—​rather than being either appropriate or deviant—​are multiple, transitional, strategic, playful, contested.” Piepmeier, Out in Public, 2. 30. This racial awareness finds further expression in the particular context in which Samuel portrays the Lamanites being “trodden down.” Immediately prior to this gruesome trampling, as already noted, Samuel reports that the Lamanites “have buried their weapons of war” (Hel 15:9), a deed reminiscent of the Lamanites’ Anti-​Nephi–​Lehite ancestors who, a few decades earlier, “took their swords” and “did bury them up deep in the earth” (Alma 24:17). This poignant burial occurs explicitly only twice in The Book of Mormon, both times evidencing a type of military pacifism unique to the Lamanites. The consequence for the Lamanites that textually connects them with the marginalized Nephite women (being “trodden down”) results from a distinctly Lamanite cultural behavior such that the Lamanites are presented as enacting the shared experience of gender marginalization at the same moment they enact a rite particularly emblematic of their race. (Although it is possible that the burial of weapons Samuel refers to is the exact event from Alma 24, it seems more likely that he has in mind a separate occasion. Samuel addresses the Nephites some sixty or eighty years after the Anti-​ Nephi–​Lehites first buried their weapons, but the present tense of his own report in Hel 15:9—​“ye can see that they fear to sin”—​suggests a more recent incident. Helaman 5:51, for instance, may be the instance Samuel has in mind.) 31. Jacob makes sure to assert divine authority behind the command (“which is the word of God”), but that authority is added somewhat parenthetically. It is also linguistically distanced from the parallel wording of the former commandment by being only God’s “word” rather than a divinely sourced “commandment.” 32. Hickman takes this racializing facet of Jacob’s condemnation of racism to illustrate “the failure of a critique of racism whose main focus is to highlight the instability of rac(ial)ist categories” because “it demonstrates the perdurance of those categories even when their contents and contexts seem to change.” Hickman, “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse,” 441; see also his direct comments on Jacob 3:8 on 439–​440. For this reason, Hickman assigns Jacob’s critique of racism and Samuel’s parallel critique to distinct “levels” of The Book of Mormon’s treatment of race. See the general discussion of these levels at 436–​437. 33. See especially Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh, eds., trans. Sylvia Walsh (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2006). Incidentally, at least one scholar has attempted to show that Kierkegaard and Joseph Smith share similar

 

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theological commitments. See David L. Paulsen, “What Does It Mean to Be a Christian? The Views of Joseph Smith and Søren Kierkegaard,” BYU Studies 47.4 (2008): 55–​91. 34. In a brilliant work of comparative religion, Lawrence Foster has shown how Latter-​day Saints can be understood to have participated alongside other nineteenth-​century American religions in experimentation with domestic structures and conceptions of sexuality, in part in response to the collapse of earlier conceptions of the family. See Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality:  The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community (Urbana and Chicago:  University of Illinois Press, 1984). Foster’s work, of course, focuses on later developments in the early Latter-​day Saint tradition, largely at some distance from the concerns expressed in The Book of Mormon. 35. Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–​1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 18–​104, provides a detailed analysis of this shift from the Puritan conception of the family to the notion of domesticity emergent in the 1830s in the wake of New England revivalism. An important condition for the possibility of this development was the rise of the notion of “republican motherhood” in the wake of the American Revolution. On the transformation of American motherhood in connection with the Revolution, see Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic:  Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). 36. Mary P. Ryan, The Empire of the Mother:  American Writing About Domesticity 1830–​1860 (New York: Haworth, 1982), 20. 37. Recent editions of these two novels, containing helpful introductions, notes, and supplementary readings, have been made available in the American Women Writers series. See Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians, Carolyn L. Karcher, ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986); Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie; or Early Times in the Massachusetts, Mary Kelley, ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987). 38. Sedgwick, Hope Leslie, 70; see also 96. 39. Child, Hobomok and Other Writings, 120. 40. Ibid., 145. This should be compared with Child’s later (1835) criticisms of Native American domestic affairs in her History of the Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations. See the relevant excerpt in ibid., 170–​180. 41. Sedgwick, Hope Leslie, 331–​332. 42. See especially the conversation regarding Hope’s marital prospects in ibid., 150–​156. 43. See Child, Hobomok,  17–​18. 44. In an important recent book, Ezra Tawil distinguishes between biologizing and sentimentalizing approaches in nineteenth-​century American literature to questions of race. He argues convincingly that Hobomok and Hope Leslie played an important role in the second of these approaches. See Ezra Tawil, The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 92–​128.

 

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“We’re Going to Take Our Land Back Over” Indigenous Positionality, the Ethnography of Reading, and The Book of Mormon Stanley J. Thayne

Individuals read texts from a particular place, geographically and ethnically. Where we are (from) and who we are (from) influences the ways we approach and interpret texts—​how we “read.” Simultaneously, our readings and interpretations of texts influence how we inhabit and relate to those spaces. In this chapter I want to argue for what might be termed an Indigenous reading of The Book of Mormon, which is to suggest that the positionality of being Indigenous places Indigenous peoples of the Americas in a significant relation to a text such as The Book of Mormon. To argue for an Indigenous reading is not to suggest or imply an essentialized Indigeneity; Indigenous readers do not all read or respond to the text in the same way but interpret the text in a variety of different ways, share readings with non-​Indigenous readers, and are not determined by their Indigeneity. But since The Book of Mormon, as typically understood, claims to be about the peopling of the Americas, or at least about the peoples of the Americas, it takes on a particular significance, and politics, for Indigenous Americans, and plays a significant role in the articulation of Indigeneity among Indigenous Latter-​day Saints (Mormons). The Book of Mormon describes the peopling of the Americas—​the “promised land”—​as the result of a migration from Jerusalem by an Israelite prophet named Lehi along with his own and one other family in 600 BCE. After arriving in the promised land, this group split into two factions, the Nephites and the Lamanites, the latter of whom were cursed for rejecting the Israelite covenant and marked with a dark skin to distinguish them from the Nephites, who are described as “white and exceedingly fair and delightsome” (The Book of Mormon, Stanley J. Thayne, “We’re Going to Take Our Land Back Over”: Indigenous Positionality, the Ethnography of Reading, and The Book of Mormon. In: Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon. Edited by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190221928.003.0014

 

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2 Nephi 5:21). After a thousand-​year epic of battles, conversions, and apostasies, the Lamanites destroy the Nephites in a genocidal race war. The Lamanites, then, are understood by most Mormons to be the ancestors, or among the ancestors, of Indigenous Americans. Not only that, but the term Lamanite has commonly been used by many Latter-​day Saints to refer to Indigenous Americans and Pacific Islanders, both individually and as a group, and has come to signify a Mormon variation on the theme of Indigeneity. As several scholars have noted, Indigeneity can be understood as a colonial–​ countercolonial formation.1 People become Indigenous in the face of an invading and colonizing force—​one that often narrates them as such or that they narrate themselves against and in opposition to, or at least in distinction from, as Indigenous.2 Thus, Indigeneity is formed by the dual action of an imposed colonial category and as a mode of countercolonial self-​identification. Typically, it is articulated as a relation to land, or to a specific territory, and to citizenship in a sovereign nation or ethnic community. Indigeneity has also, of course, often been racialized.3 Since the United States, like most modern nation-​states, claims “plenary power” over its claimed (and contested) territories, then to be Indigenous in America is to inhabit, and to read from, a colonized space. This does not mean that every reading of the text by an Indigenous Latter-​day Saint is an entirely “colonized reading,” trapped within what some scholars have termed a “colonization of the mind.”4 It is possible to “read back”—​against the empire or against colonization.5 Reading is a complex activity and is often ambiguous. Even seemingly countercolonial or anti-​colonial readings of the text by Indigenous American Mormons are often entangled in what might strike many as acceptance of colonial imposition, such as the racial curse narrative that typically weighs down Lamanite identity. Yet, Lamanite identity is not simply imposed on Native people without agency. It is often resisted, countered, and sometimes rejected, but even when accepted, it is typically engaged in complex ways. To demonstrate this, in this chapter, I offer an “Indigenous reading” of The Book of Mormon by a citizen of the Catawba Indian Nation who is a lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints; I identify her by the pseudonym Edith Green.

The Catawba Indian Nation Edith Green is a citizen of the Catawba Nation, an American Indian Nation whose traditional homeland covers much of what is now known as the Carolina Piedmont. The Catawba Indian Nation’s territorial base today is located within York County near the town of Rock Hill in the northwestern part of South Carolina. Most Catawba people still live in the Piedmont, many within York

 



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County or bordering counties in South Carolina, but citizens of the Catawba Nation live in nearly every state in the United States and in other foreign nations. In the 1880s, Mormon missionary companionships assigned to York County, South Carolina, then part of the Southern States Mission, often found refuge from frequent mob violence by hiding out in the homes of Catawba people in the Catawba Nation.6 Catawba people were subject to both legal and popular discrimination in South Carolina at the time, as well as economic marginalization. Several Catawba people today believe that this shared experience of discrimination and violent opposition from the outside community forged a connection between Catawba people and Mormon missionaries and is part of what led Catawba people to open their doors to Mormon missionaries. Gradually many Catawba people began accepting baptism, and a branch of the LDS Church was organized in the Nation.7 By the 1920s the majority of the Catawba people had joined the Mormon Church, with estimates ranging from 70% to 100% of the nation on record or at least identified as LDS. Edith Green was born in the Catawba Nation in the 1930s and was raised as a Latter-​day Saint. She left home as a young woman to serve in the Southwest Indian Mission (primarily among American Indian peoples in Arizona and New Mexico). A short time after returning home from her mission, she moved back out West to Utah with other Catawba young adults who were moving there to attend Brigham Young University. There she met her husband, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, and got a job working in Salt Lake City in the Church office buildings, where she came to know many of the general authorities of the Church. She returned to live in the Catawba Nation in the early 2000s after spending most of her adult life in the western United States. I met Edith Green during one of the Catawba Ward worship services in the LDS Chapel on Reservation Road, bordering the Catawba Nation in South Carolina. I  interviewed her in her home in November 2011 and again, three years later, in April 2014. All references to Edith Green’s reading of The Book of Mormon come from those two interviews and from subsequent conversations. I conducted fieldwork in and near the Catawba Indian Nation, and in the homes of Catawba people living outside of the Nation, between 2011 and 2014.

Reading Indigenously Edith Green’s reading of The Book of Mormon stems both from her particular place, as/​at Catawba, and from a broader identification with all other Native peoples in the Americas. Thus, Edith Green’s reading is both local and hemispheric. She is Catawba and she is Indigenous. This is demonstrated by her reading of certain passages in The Book of Mormon, which she, with many other

 

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Latter-​day Saints, reads as a prophecy regarding a future gathering of Latter-​day Saints in the land of Missouri, where, based on prophecies by Joseph Smith, they anticipate the building of the city of Zion, or the New Jerusalem. In Edith Green’s reading, Indigenous peoples will play a special role in this gathering. Further, a driving point of the initial gathering will be an Indigenous reclaiming of stolen land. “All Native Americans are descendants of the Lamanites and the Nephites [The Book of Mormon peoples],” Edith explained, “the ones that mingled together”: And, um, and South America—​all those Indians down there are. And then when they started coming up here, migrating up here, I told my husband, I said, It’s getting towards the end of time, because the Lord says—​I think it’s in Second Nephi, or no Third Nephi, I  believe it’s Third Nephi—​he is going to remember us, and that this is the land of our inheritance, that he gave us, and he is going to call us all together, and we’re going to take our land back over, and he says we’re going to be like wolves among the sheep: when he gives us the word, we’re going to rise up and slaughter all of ’em. The verses Edith is referencing, regarding the destruction that is going to occur at the time of the gathering, are found in 3 Nephi 20–​21. In these chapters, Jesus, as a resurrected being visiting the Americas, explains to the gathered Nephite–​ Lamanite people that in the last days the scattered “remnants” of their people will be “gathered in” from all parts of the earth: And the Father hath commanded me [ Jesus explains] that I should give unto you this land, for your inheritance. And I say unto you, that if the Gentiles do not repent after the blessing which they shall receive, after they have scattered my people—​Then shall ye, who are a remnant of the house of Jacob, go forth among them; and ye shall be in the midst of them who shall be many; and ye shall be among them as a lion among the beasts of the forest, and as a young lion among the flocks of sheep, who, if he goeth through both treadeth down and teareth in pieces, and none can deliver.8 Edith’s reading of these verses is remarkably similar to the way many of the earliest members of the Church of Christ (the original name of the Mormon Church) read The Book of Mormon, as what some have called an “Amerindian Apocalypse.”9 It was, in fact, the dominant reading of the early 1830s.10 When early Mormons read those passages, the “scattered remnants” of the house of

 



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Jacob or Israel referred to in the text were taken as a clear reference to American Indian peoples. And the Gentiles referred to in these passages were Europeans and their Euro-​American descendants who settled in the Americas—​the “promised land” of Lehi’s seed.11 While this reading of the text has become much less prevalent or dominant, it has persisted and surfaced from time to time, particularly in Indigenous contexts.12 An important part of Edith Green’s reading of 3 Nephi and other parts of The Book of Mormon, and one shared with the earliest reading tradition, is the idea that Native converts to Mormonism—​the “remnants” of Israel in America—​will take the lead in building the city of New Jerusalem in Jackson County, Missouri, the revealed site of Zion, following the great war in the last days. This reading also is derived from passages in 3 Nephi, among others. 3 Nephi 20:22 states, “And behold, this people will I establish in this land, unto the fulfilling of the covenant which I made with your father Jacob; and it shall be a New Jerusalem. And the powers of heaven shall be in the midst of this people; yea, even I shall be in the midst of you.” Further on, 3 Nephi 21 explains that any Gentiles who do not believe and accept this covenant (that is, by joining the Mormon Church) will be cut off and destroyed, presumably at the hand of the gathered remnant of Jacob, “as a young lion among the flocks of sheep.” But those Gentiles who repent (that is, join the Mormon movement) shall come into the covenant and be numbered among this the remnant of Jacob, unto whom I have given this land for their inheritance; And they [the repentant Gentiles] shall assist my people, the remnant of Jacob, and also as many of the house of Israel as shall come, that they may build a city, which shall be called the New Jerusalem. And they shall assist my people that they may be gathered in, who are scattered upon all the face of the land, in unto the New Jerusalem. (3 Nephi 21:12–​14, 22–​24; emphasis added) Again, to early Mormon readers, the “remnant of Jacob” in these passages refers to American Indian peoples and they themselves were the Gentiles who would be adopted in—​white settlers who will merely assist in building Zion, presumably in a subordinate role.13 Edith Green’s reading is again remarkably similar. In reference to these passages Edith explained, “I think it’s referring to the Native Americans. And it’s going to be before the coming of the Savior. And I think it’s referring to a war that’s going to be here, between the Native Americans and the rest of the people. And it’s before we build a temple, in Jackson . . . . Because you’ve got to clean it up before you build it up!” Further, she explained that “the Native Americans will build the temple. That is my understanding. But, what you would call the

 

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Gentiles will assist them.” And a “Gentile,” she explained, is “anyone who is not Native American.” Thus, Indigenous Americans will take the leading role while Gentiles will assist. To support this idea, she referenced a verse in The Book of Mormon, drawn from Isaiah, that states, as Edith paraphrased it, “they [the Gentiles] should carry them [the Lamanites] up on their shoulders.”14 This verse has typically been used by white Mormons to explain and justify white paternalism in federal and Church Indian affairs. Here Edith seemed to be using this verse for just the reverse, though not without some qualifying considerations (dominant usage does, after all, exert weight): “A lot of them [Gentiles],” Edith explained, “will probably have more knowledge about building the temple than most of us Lamanites will. So they will have to be kind of like in a, a supervisory, maybe, situation there. And there could be quite a few Lamanites, Native Americans, that know how to do that. But then, they may need more people than that.” Here, the dominant position of white “Ephraim” as Gentiles (or adopted Israel) in later readings of the text seems to rupture and even threatens to reverse Edith’s reading, pulling it more in line with dominant and “authoritative” readings of the past century by placing white Mormons (Ephraim) in supervisory roles. This is counterbalanced, however, by her consideration that “there could be quite a few Lamanites, Native Americans, that know how to do that.” Whatever else it is, interpretation of Zionist prophecy is an ordering of power relationships. In Edith’s reading, the great gathering will bring about a great reversal in that relationship, though even that is not entirely secure.

Reading from Catawba Edith Green expects the fulfillment of these prophetic Zionist events to occur within her own lifetime. Indeed, Edith anticipates a call from her bishop or stake president any day, announcing the gathering to Zion. While she seems to be excited about this possibility, she is concerned, however, about her age. “Now how in the world am I going to [go to Missouri]?” Edith asked, rhetorically. “I’m so old, with arthritis and everything. I can’t carry anything. I’m sure there won’t be any highways or gas for our cars to ride on. And probably the roads will all be torn up or something—​who knows.” She seems to have it figured out, however. “Well, I’ve got one of those carts that you pull along . . . . And then, you know these little things they hook onto the backs of bicycles, pull kids and so forth? I thought, ‘I’ll get one of those and hook up to my bicycle. I can do that too!’ So, I’ve been thinking all about that. I’ve got about three pairs of sneakers ready to go!”

 



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These, of course, are concerns Edith Green might share with a number of her non-​Indigenous Latter-​day Saint friends, who also anticipate gathering in similar circumstances. However, what followed these remarks points to Edith’s position as someone reading specifically from Catawba. As we continued our conversation, her narrative naturally flowed from this anticipated migration to a previous one. Regarding the gathering to Zion, Edith said, “I just hope it’s not in the winter, because when the government put the Catawbas with the Cherokees on the Trail of Tears, it was in the winter time. Moved us out to Oklahoma and all those places over there.” Edith Green’s location in the American Southeast makes the movement to Zion roughly approximate to the route covered by the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Her Indigenous identification with other Indigenous peoples, in this case Cherokees, and with white domination of Indigenous peoples makes the link a natural one. (Catawbas and Cherokees have historically occupied contiguous territories, and the current Catawba Reservation is approximately 175 miles from the Quallah Boundary of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians.) Green’s inclusion of Catawbas in the Cherokee Trail of Tears speaks to the power of that event as an iconic representation of the land loss, removal, and suffering shared by many American Indian peoples, particularly those from the American Southeast.15 After the 1840 Treaty of Nation Ford divested the Catawba people of their homeland, with a never-​realized promise of a new reservation in North Carolina, the Catawba people found themselves in a scattered condition. Many relocated for a time and lived with the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation in North Carolina.16 Though a core group returned to a much smaller state reservation in the 1870 and 1880s, several others migrated away. During the 1850s some Catawba people migrated to the federal Indian Territories and settled with the Choctaw people.17 In the 1890s, five Catawba families migrated to the San Luis Valley of Colorado as part of a larger Mormon migration from the Southern States Mission.18 For Edith Green, the Trail of Tears serves as a powerful symbol that represents the forces that have combined to coerce, force, or otherwise draw Catawba people away from their homeland and reduce their numbers, whether it be federal force, settler pressure, economic circumstances, religious colonization, local persecution, or a combination of these factors.

Reading Indigenous Reading: Mormon Zionism and Indian Removal To flesh out this connection requires some background on the first “Mission to the Lamanites.” In September of 1830, just months after the publication of

 

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The Book of Mormon and the organization of the Church of Christ, founding prophet Joseph Smith received a revelation calling his colleague and scribe Oliver Cowdery on a mission to “go unto the Lamanites & Preach my Gospel unto them & cause my Church to be established among them.” In this same revelation, Cowdery was told that the location of the anticipated city of Zion (the New Jerusalem previously referenced) would be revealed during the course of this mission, and, further, “that it shall be among the Lamanites.”19 Since early Church of Christ members interpreted “Lamanites” to be the Indigenous peoples of the Americas (and most immediately relevant to them at the time, North American Indian people), it could presumably be in any of a number of places. But this was 1830, the same year President Andrew Jackson signed into policy the Indian Removal Act. Accordingly, to a citizen of the Republic in 1830, the location of the Lamanite people was simply a given. The mission call, as Cowdery and his associates interpreted it, was to the recently organized Indian Territory, on the frontier of the expanding American Republic. It was there that they expected the New Jerusalem to be built, following the massive conversion of American Indian peoples and the great war they anticipated, based on their reading of The Book of Mormon. (The site of Zion became identified as Jackson County, Missouri, only after the missionaries were expelled from the Indian Territory by a federal agent, and they recouped in the town of Independence, which Joseph Smith subsequently identified as the “center place” of Zion.20) The gathering of Lamanites was already underfoot, as they saw it, being directed by none other than their American president, Andrew Jackson, and the great American Republic.21 It was this movement, of forced removal and relocation, that in essence charted the course of this first “Mission to the Lamanites.” The route taken by Cowdery and his associates, departing from western New York, is roughly approximate to the course, for example, that the Delaware people had taken during their coerced migration–​removal westward to what would become the Indian Territory—​and it was, in fact, to the Delaware people, or Leni Lenapi, that these missionaries first preached their message in the Indian Territory.22 Thus Edith Green’s narrative flow from her anticipated return to Zion to the Trail of Tears is not simply a coincidence of location but speaks to the historical connection between the first Mission to the Lamanites (and the concomitant location of the Mormon-​anticipated Zion) and the federal policy or force of Indian Removal. The latter charted the course for the former. Edith Green’s anticipated march to Zion and the Trail of Tears bear roughly the same relation to each other as the first Mission to the Lamanites and the Delaware removal. The Mormon movements are, in essence, reflections of (as charted by) the federally coerced removal–​migrations. Some early Mormons lauded the federal policy of Indian Removal and President Jackson for carrying out what they saw

 



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as the Lord’s purposes, even if federal officials did not understand, as these early Mormons saw it, the true purpose of the gathering.23 This makes it ironically fitting (if discomfiting) that the location of the anticipated Mormon Zion is not, as originally anticipated, in the Indian Territory, which was broken up and largely overwhelmed by territorial expansion and the processes of statehood, but in Jackson County, which Edith Green sometimes refers to simply as Jackson, and that is, in fact, named after none other than Andrew Jackson—​a name, she told me, that Catawba people are not even supposed to say.24 Edith Green of course did not make—​at least explicitly or consciously—​this connection between Jackson County, Missouri, and Andrew Jackson. This is my reading of her reading, with some additional historical contextualization by me. For Edith Green, the anticipated return to Zion is a liberating event, associated with but not marked by the forces of Indian Removal. In a poetic twist of apocalyptic fate, it is the time during which the Lord is going to remember his covenant and a time when, as Edith narrates it, speaking for all Indigenous peoples of the Americas, “we’re going to take our land back over.”

Reading the Americas: Book of Mormon Geography To Edith Green, an accurate understanding of Book of Mormon geography—​ where the story took place—​is integral to correct interpretation. In Edith Green’s mental geography—​one she shares with many other Latter-​day Saints—​the majority of the story takes place in “the southern part of the Americas,” in South and Central America or Meso-​America. Only toward the end of the narrative do the people move into North America. Though The Book of Mormon text does not make reference to any geographical landmarks that can be easily identified by contemporary place names, references to the “land southward” and “land northward” separated by a “narrow neck of land” have traditionally been interpreted by many Mormons to be references to North and South America, separated by the Isthmus of Darien/​Panama, or Central America more generally. It narrates a gradual migration of the Nephite people (and some Lamanite converts) from the “land southward,” pushed by warring and marauding Lamanites, into the “land northward.”25 Book of Mormon geography has, however, been an ever-​morphing and politically fraught venture. During the 1970s and 1980s, BYU Anthropology Professor John L. Sorenson promoted and popularized a “limited geography” model of The Book of Mormon, suggesting that the entire Book of Mormon narrative takes place somewhere near the Yucatan Peninsula in Central America, and that The Book of Mormon people in reality made up only a small percentage of a much larger Indigenous population.26 More recently, Rod L. Meldrum popularized a North

 

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American “heartland theory,” placing the entire narrative of The Book of Mormon within the Great Lakes Region (with the “narrow neck of land” running between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie).27 These “limited geography” and limited population models have grown in popularity in response to DNA research,28 which has not typically borne out a Middle Eastern provenance for the vast majority of Indigenous Americans (at least not within the timeframe suggested by The Book of Mormon), and because of the political leanings, at least for the “heartland model,” of proponents. 29 A number of other theories and models have been proposed by others (including one that argues for a since-​sunken landmass in the Gulf of Mexico with Florida as the “narrow neck of land”). Church leaders have been hesitant to take a stance on the issue and many members have followed suit, satisfied, as Sorenson put it (despite his specificity elsewhere), that “the Book of Mormon account did take place somewhere.”30 Many Latter-​day Saints continue to hold to, or simply assume, a hemispheric model like early Saints did. Edith Green seems to locate most of The Book of Mormon events as taking place in Meso-​America. She explained this to me in the context of her anthropological coursework as an archaeology major in college. EG: I majored in archaeology, but you have to take three classes in every field in anthropology, regardless of what field you go into . . . . In cultural anthropology, . . . they gave me India . . . [and] Africa. And then I got one in South America. I didn’t mind that because I wanted the part in Mesoamerica. So that South American one was all right with me. I asked her later why she wanted to study Meso-​America and she explained—​as though it should be perfectly obvious to me—​“Because . . . that’s Book of Mormon land!”31 Edith’s description of her anthropology coursework, and her subsequent engagement with anthropological and archaeological narratives of Indigenous migration, brought out certain tensions between the sometimes competing but mutually constitutive narratives that inform her subjectivity. This tension at times demonstrates how closely intertwined her Catawba narrative identity and her sense of Book of Mormon lineage have become, both formed in conversation with historical, linguistic anthropological, and archaeological discourse. For example, when I asked her where Catawba people come from, she replied, EG: Well, we’re supposed to be branch of the Sioux. Our language is a Siouan dialect language. And, um, I  guess probably we came—​just my opinion again—​from the snake mounds in the Missouri. You’ve heard of the snake mounds up there? I think we may have come, branched off from there and come down here.

 



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ST: Okay. What about before that? EG: Well, we came from South America! We came from Mesoamerica with those mean Lamanites behind us! [laughs] This comment also seems to suggest that for Edith, The Book of Mormon lineage and identity is a hemispheric Indigenous identity, focused on the Americas. It strikes me as significant that her anthropological and archaeological interests drew her to Meso-​America and not to Jerusalem—​to “Book of Mormon Land” rather than to the Holy Land. It would seem implicit in her acceptance of Book of Mormon lineage that she would consider her ancestry to extend from Jerusalem, where The Book of Mormon narrative typically begins, and if questioned on this matter, I assume she would likely acknowledge this. But she did not voluntarily make this connection in my conversations with her. Her focus and emphasis were on South and Central America and the gradual migration into North America. As far as one could gather from my conversations with her, the story begins in South America. Coupled with her reading, as previously discussed, of contemporary Mexican and South American migration into the United States as a prophesied Indigenous gathering—​“He’s getting ready for us to get together”—​Edith Green’s conception of Book of Mormon descent and identity seems to be basically equivalent to a hemispheric Indigenous identity. Thus, while The Book of Mormon is technically a migration narrative, narrating Nephite–​Lamanites as Israelites from Jerusalem, since Edith Green’s reading (insofar as it can be represented by my interviews with her) tacitly downplays a Near Eastern diffusionist narrative (by silence, at least), it might functionally be more closely aligned with autochthonous creation or emergence narratives, though on a hemispheric–​Indigenous rather than a particular tribal/​national  level. Edith Green’s rejection or modification of certain archaeological and anthropological narratives also demonstrates how closely she identifies her Indigenous identity with The Book of Mormon peoples. Speaking of archaeologists and anthropologists she encountered in college, she said, EG: Well they think that because the women couldn’t raise food anymore that they migrated up this way. That’s the way anthropologists think. But, you know, as members of the church, we know that they were—​we were fightin’ the war and we came up this way. And then, I  guess the majority of them stayed out west. Maybe they were tired of marching. But, those were the Lamanites that were forcing us out, because they were behind us. So those are the mean ones out there! [laughs] ST: Out where? EG: Out west! [laughs]

 

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The corrective shift from “they were” to “we were” in the paragraph just quoted demonstrates how closely Edith Green identifies with the people in The Book of Mormon. Not only are they her distant ancestors, but they are we: “we were fightin’ the war and came up this way.” Her differentiation of that we from “those mean Lamanites” who forced them out of the land southward further illustrates that she identifies specifically with a select group of The Book of Mormon people—​ those being driven northward by the Lamanites, the “mean ones,” the majority of whom, she states, stayed “out west.”32 Her identification of western tribes, jokingly, as mean ones (and as the descendants of the Lamanites) is intriguing. As several Indigenous scholars have pointed out, American Indians of the Southeast have had to fight an uphill battle in gaining recognition as authentically Indigenous peoples in the eyes of many outsiders.33 As Vine Deloria points out, since the most prominent southeastern tribes were removed (though not totally) from the Southeast, they have largely disappeared from American mainstream consciousness, perhaps willingly so.34 According to this popular narrative, “real Indians”—​those who match the phenotypic, linguistic, and material expectations of most Americans—​are located out West, and especially in the desert of the Southwest, the “wild West.”35 This juxtaposition of recognition and authenticity (of western tribes) and invisibility and purported inauthenticity (for southeastern tribes) may sometimes manifest as narrative tension in articulations of southeastern Indigeneity. Edith Green’s dualistic positioning of southeastern versus western Indians incorporates both groups within The Book of Mormon anthropology, but affords southeastern tribes a more positive position by associating western tribes with Lamanites. (Of course, this is my interpretation; as she assured me after reading a draft of this essay, Edith does not really think western tribes are mean; she has many friends there and she was using the term jokingly, not disparagingly.)36 In keeping with this differentiation between Catawba people and the Lamanites, Green explained that she does not like to be called a Lamanite: “People call me a Lamanite, and I say, ‘I’m not a Lamanite,’ ’cause, when you’re converted to the gospel, you’re no longer Lamanite.” But if Green does not refer to herself as Lamanite, plenty of other Latter-​day Saints do, and on this point—​that of resisting outsider labeling—​the distance she articulated between Catawbas and western Native peoples seems to collapse into one, non-​ Lamanite yet Book of Mormon—​descended Indigenous solidarity. “The church calls us Lamanites,” she explained, and when I asked if that is still the case, she replied, “Yeah, you hear it in conference from Salt Lake.” Motioning to a magazine on a table by the couch she added, “You read it in there too, in the Ensign; they refer to us as Lamanites.” Both of these references point to official rhetoric, from the highest Church leaders and from Church-​endorsed publications.

 



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I was a bit surprised by this; I knew that this was common rhetoric in the 1970s and 1980s, and for the 150 years prior to that, but some have marked a noticeable decline in usage of the term Lamanite to identify American Indian people in recent decades.37 But Edith feels that she hears the term used today “probably just as much as always.” I asked Edith how she feels when people refer to Catawbas, or other Native peoples, as Lamanites. “Oh,” she replied, “they are either not listening to the spirit or they are uneducated [laughs]. Even though they’ve been to a university—​they’re uneducated!” I asked if there is another term she prefers. Well  .  .  .  I  prefer, you know, to be referred to as Catawba. But then people have to be familiar with the names of all the tribes, so Native American is fine. But I don’t like being called an Indian, because I’m not from India. Of course, Columbus didn’t know where he was, or what he was talking about, but people now days . . . should know the difference, and not keep it up. I thought it was interesting that she equated both Indian and Lamanite as misnomers and terms of opprobrium that people who should know better continue to use out of willful ignorance, yet she does identify herself, Catawbas, Native Americans, and all Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere as descendants of the people of The Book of Mormon.

Conclusion: The Book of Mormon and Indigeneity Edith Green’s Indigenous Book of Mormon identity is complex. Her subjectivity is shaped by multiple, overlapping narrative identities, each of which she actively and consciously engages. Her anthropology is tempered by her Mormon beliefs and her Mormonism is shaped by her Indigenous identity, and each of these is shaped according to her own, personal reading of these different narratives. For her, Book of Mormon identity is an Indigenous identity and it is rooted in the Americas. While the book marks Indigenous people with a racial curse, it also prophesies of a time when they will take their land back. The complex relationship among her Mormon, Catawba, and Indigenous identities might be well described by what Osage anthropologist Jean Denison has termed a “colonial entanglement”—​an example of Native peoples taking categories and materialities from the colonizer and putting them to their own uses.38 In this case, Edith Green’s Indigenous reading articulates hope for an Indigenous future expressed through the language of The Book of Mormon. It is, in a sense, simultaneously colonial inheritance and anticolonial liberation theology.

 

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Edith Green’s reading of The Book of Mormon is influenced by her positionality, geographic and ethnic, as an Indigenous person reading from/​as Catawba. Her understanding and articulation of what it means to be Catawba and to be Indigenous is profoundly influenced by her reading of The Book of Mormon, and her reading of The Book of Mormon is profoundly influenced by her positionality as a Catawba person. A close reading of Edith Green reading exemplifies the complex entanglement of The Book of Mormon in the lives of Indigenous American people. Her affiliation with the Church and her identity as a descendant of The Book of Mormon people has influenced several movements in her life. It carried her out West, as a missionary to other Native peoples, and it connects her, at least in her own articulations of Indigeneity, to Indigenous peoples throughout the Western Hemisphere. And although in retirement she has chosen to return home to Catawba, she still anticipates another move, according to her reading of The Book of Mormon, which prophesies of a millennial gathering of all Indigenous peoples to Zion when they will take their land back over. She’s waiting for the call, and she’s got her sneakers ready.

Notes 1. On the emergence and articulation of Indigenous identities, see James Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-​First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), esp. part I; Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn, eds., Indigenous Experience Today (Oxford and New  York:  Berg, 2007); and Maile Arvin, “Analytics of Indigeneity,” in Native Studies Keywords, Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, Michelle Raheja, eds. (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2015), 119–​129. 2. As Clifford explains, “The term ‘indigenous’ typically refers to societies that are relatively small-​ scale, people who sustain deep connections with a place. Applied to diverse communities, the name does not presume cultural similarity or essence but rather refers to comparable experiences of invasion, dispossession, resistance, and survival. Indigenous, in this definition, makes most sense in places like the Americas, Australia, the Island Pacific, and the Arctic” (Returns, 15). “Lamanite” or The Book of Mormon identity typically pertains to Indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Island Pacific. 3. On this point, see Jean Dennison, Colonial Entanglement: Constituting a Twenty-​First Century Osage Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Eva Marie Garroutte, Real Indians:  Identity and the Survival of Native America (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2003); Malinda Maynor Lowery, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 4. “Colonization of the mind” typically refers to the idea that colonized subjects often become complicit in, or trapped within, their own oppression or colonization by accepting the terms, ideas, racial categories, hierarchies, etc., imposed on them by the colonizer. In regard to Indigenous peoples, and on the topic of “decolonization,” an often-​cited source is Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies:  Research and Indigenous Peoples (Otago, New Zealand:  Otago University Press, 2012); see also Waziyatawin Angela Wilson and Michael Yellow Bird, eds., For Indigenous Eyes Only: A Decolonization Handbook (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 2005). 5. On “reading back”—​as a discursive form of resistance that counters colonial narratives of possession and dominion—​as it pertains to biblical hermeneutics, see R. S. Sugirtharajah, The Bible and the Third World: Precolonial, Colonial, and Postcolonial Encounters (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2001).

 



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6. See Patrick Mason, The Mormon Menace:  Violence and Anti-​Mormonism in the Postbellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Daniel Liestman, “‘We Have Found What We Have Been Looking For!’ The Creation of the Mormon Religious Enclave Among the Catawba, 1883–​1920,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 103.3 ( July 2002): 226–​246. 7. See Jerry D. Lee, “A Study of the Influence of the Mormon Church on the Catawba Indians of South Carolina 1882–​1975” (MA thesis, Brigham Young University, 1976). A group of five families migrated westward to Colorado as part of a migration of Latter-​day Saint converts led by Southern States Mission President John Morgan. See Dana Echohawk, “Struggling to Find Zion: Mormons in Colorado’s San Luis Valley” (MA thesis, University of Colorado Denver, 2012). 8. The Book of Mormon, 3 Nephi 20:13–​16. Verse 16 is an allusion to Mic 5:7–​8. 9. On this point see Grant Underwood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism (Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 1999), chap.  5; Ronald Walker, “Seeking the ‘Remnant’: The Native American During the Joseph Smith Period,” Journal of Mormon History 19.1 (Spring 1993): 1–​33; Jared Hickman, “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse,” American Literature 86.3 (September 2014): 429–​461. 10. Gradually this interpretation of the text faded. Several explanations have been offered to explain why. One explanation is that after the failure of the first “Mission to the Lamanites” in 1830, Joseph Smith shifted attention away from proselytizing to American Indian peoples and tried to tone down the emphasis on the role Lamanite people would play in the building of Zion and the culmination of sacred history as attention, shifting instead his attention and missionary efforts to white settlers, among whom the movement was finding much more success. See Graham St. John Stott, “New Jerusalem Abandoned: The Failure to Carry Mormonism to the Delaware,” Journal of American Studies 21 (April 1987): 71–​85. This idea has been challenged by others who point out that interest in and missionary efforts among American Indian peoples continued in significant measure beyond this first mission but were toned down gradually after the violent expulsion from Missouri, which resulted at least in part because of fears that Mormon settlers were trying to rile up and collude with American Indians in the bordering Indian Territory in an all-​out war with other settlers (fears that were not entirely unfounded) (see Walker, “Seeking the ‘Remnant’ ”). Sociologist Armand Mauss suggests that the violence of frontier settlement in the Great Basin and meager missionary success brought a gradual shift in attitudes toward Indigenous peoples that he sums up as a transition “from Lamanites to Indians,” that is, from being perceived as the covenant seed of Israel and millennial hopefuls to being considered simply as savage impediments and, after being “pacified” and removed to reservations, a remote and, to most, invisible memory (see Armand Mauss, All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003], chap. 3). And finally, as John-​Charles Duffy convincingly explains, usage of the term (and focus on) “Lamanites” in official LDS discourse greatly declined in the last decade of the twentieth century and the early part of the twenty-​ first in response to a perceived “need to promote unity in a culturally diverse church, greater investment in a universal Christian message, and shifting social attitudes about race,” all of which “worked to make Lamanite identification a liability in the eyes of Church leaders.” John-​Charles Duffy, “The Use of ‘Lamanite’ in Official LDS Discourse,” Journal of Mormon History 34.1 (Winter 2008): 165–​166. Probably all of these can be considered as factors in a gradual fading of early readings and interpretation of these passages. Another factor has been an expansion of the category “Israel” and a contraction of the category “Gentile” in Mormon usage and conceptions. Though the idea that white Americans of primarily European descent could be members of the House of Israel predated Mormonism and may have been present among early Mormons from near the beginning (see John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire:  The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–​1844 [Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1994], 139–​143; D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View [Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1998], 35), early Mormons seem to have interpreted the passages referring to Gentiles in 3 Nephi 20 as referring primarily to Europeans and Euro-​Americans (and presumably to Asians and Africans) and Israel as Jews and Lamanites. Gradually, however, because of, at least in part, the importation of British Israelite theories from missions conducted in England (see Mauss, All Abraham’s Children, chap. 2), and later

 

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the practice of Patriarchal Blessings—​which reveal or assign one’s Israelite lineage—​Latter-​ day Saint conceptions of the House of Israel expanded to include basically anyone who converted to the LDS Church—​and not only by adoption but by literal descent. White Europeans, particularly those of English descent, came to be associated in particular with the tribe of Ephraim, who was narrated as and generally understood to be the dominant and superior (and typically white) tribe. Though certain Gentile passages in The Book of Mormon continue to be interpreted as a general reference to European nations, and especially the United States—​ particularly when it places them at advantage or in paternalistic relationships (e.g., 1 Nephi 13; 2 Nephi 10:9)—​the “remnant of Israel” passages in texts like 3 Nephi have broadened to include Ephraim and others and have largely lost their specificity as reference to Indigenous peoples of the Americas, as Lehi’s Israelite seed—​at least in predominant readings. 11. Underwood, Millenarian World, chap. 5. 12. See Hickman, “Amerindian Apocalypse”; Thomas W. Murphy, “Other Mormon Histories: Lamanite Subjectivity in Mexico,” Journal of Mormon History 26.2 (2002): 179–​214; David Grua, “Elder George P. Lee and the New Jerusalem: A Reception History of 3 Nephi 21:22-​ 23,” at The Juvenile Instructor:  A Mormon History Blog (http://​juvenileinstructor.org/​ elder-​george-​p-​lee-​and-​the-​reception-​history-​of-​3-​nephi-​2122-​23/​). 13. See Underwood, Millenarian World, et passim. 14. The allusion is to Isa 49:22, which is quoted or alluded to multiple times in The Book of Mormon, applied to a future Lamanite context. For example, 1 Nephi 22:8: “And after our seed is scattered the Lord God will proceed to do a marvelous work among the Gentiles, which shall be of great worth unto our seed; wherefore, it is likened unto their being nourished by the Gentiles and being carried in their arms and upon their shoulders.” The reference to Gentiles in this and similar verses is typically interpreted to mean either the LDS Church or the United States (or both). For example, see Monte S. Nyman, “I Have a Question,” Ensign (August 1994), https://​www.lds.org/​study/​ensign/​1994/​08/​i-​have-​a-​question/​i-​have-​a-​ question?lang=eng (accessed March 15, 2019). See also discussion on US government and Indian Removal herein. 15. Though some historians may characterize Edith Green’s inclusion of Catawbas in the Cherokee Trail of Tears as an appropriation of a well-​known historical event in order to express the much less visible Catawba experience of loss and suffering, as anthropologist Charles Hudson explains, up to half of the Catawba population were living with the Cherokees in North Carolina during the 1830s, prior to Cherokee removal. See Charles M. Hudson, “The Catawba Indians of South Carolina,” in Southeastern Indians Since the Removal Era, Walter M. Williams, ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979), 114. And though they are typically described as territorial enemies prior to the early nineteenth century, there were a significant number of intermarriages between Catawba and Cherokee peoples. It is thus entirely plausible that some Catawba people were included in the 1838–​1839 forced removal and relocation known as the Trail of Tears. 16. See James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors From European Contact to the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 250. 17. See Douglas Summer Brown, The Catawba Indians: The People of the River (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1966), 327–​335. 18. See Echohawk, “Struggling to Find Zion.” 19. Revelation, September 1830-​ B [D&C  28], Revelation Book 1, in Revelations and Translations:  Manuscript Revelation Books, Facsimile Edition, Robin Scott Jensen, Robert J. Woodford, and Steven C. Harper, eds. (Salt Lake City, UT:  Church Historian’s Press, 2009),  51–​54. 20. See Stan Thayne, “Indian Removal, Zion, and the Westward Orientation of Early Mormonism,” Juvenile Instructor: A Mormon History Blog, at . 21. As Underwood points out, some early Mormons “were able to see in the U.S. government’s Indian-​removal policies of the 1830s Gentile ‘nursing fathers’ [an allusion to Isaiah, as quoted in the Book of Mormon] at work gathering the Lord’s chosen people” (Millenarian World, 31). Underwood also points out (82), “The concurrent U.S. government policy of relocating the Indians just west of the revealed Missouri site for Zion . . . struck the Saints as too coincidental

 



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not to be providential. For those who could read the handwriting on the wall, it was clear that Jehovah was using Andrew Jackson just as he had earlier used Cyrus the Great to facilitate the gathering of his people.” I want to make the further claim that the federal removal policy had a causative influence on the location of the revealed Missouri Zion (which was originally to be in Indian Territory). It was revealed there because of Indian Removal to that area. 22. See Warren A. Jennings, “The First Mormon Mission to the Indians,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 37 (1971): 288–​299. 23. For example, as the editor of the Church periodical Star wrote in the December 1832 edition, “Last week about 400, out of 700 of the Shawnees from Ohio, passed this place for their inheritance a few miles west, and the scene was at once calculated to refer the mind to the prophesies concerning the gathering of Israel in the last days.” Quoted in Underwood, Millenarian World, 82. See also W. W. Phelps, “The Indians,” Latter-​day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate 2.4 ( January 1836): 245–​248; Parley P. Pratt, A Voice of Warning (New York: W. Sanford, 1837), 191. 24. Green, like many others, is much less sanguine in her estimation of Andrew Jackson than early Mormons such as W. W. Phelps were. Regarding Jackson and Catawba people, she told me, “We always say, ‘We know one person that’s going to hell.’ ” Further, she explained (in exasperation), “and Jackson was raised by Catawbas right over here in Waxhaw!” (twenty minutes from the Catawba Nation). 25. For an overview of how early Mormons tended to read this narrative geography onto the Americans, see Dan Vogel, Indian Origins and the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Book, 1986), 30–​31. 26. Sorenson was prolific on the topic; a popular and representative work is John L. Sorenson, An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon (Provo, UT:  Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1985). 27. Rod L. Meldrum has likewise been prolific and has reached a wide audience with his DVD series and web presence as well as his published books. For a list of his works, see his web page, Book of Mormon Evidence, at . 28. For two sides on the DNA debate, see Thomas Murphy, “Simply Implausible: DNA and a Mesoamerican Setting for the Book of Mormon,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 36.4 (2003):  109–​131; “Book of Mormon and DNA Studies,” at . 29. “Heartland Model” promoters often cite The Book of Mormon prophecies referring to the Promised Land as a prophesied “land of liberty,” and argue that such a description does not fit South or Central America and must refer to the United States. See, for example, Rod L.  Meldrum, “The Scriptural Basis for the Heartland Model,” at The FIRM Foundation, . 30. Quoted in Terryl L. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 126. 31. When I asked her if she had been to Meso-​America, she replied, “I’d love to go down there. I’d love to be the one to find the cave where all those Book of Mormon records are [breathes in excitedly]—​wouldn’t that be sum’in? Find the brass plates in there . . . [sighs] I guess we—​and I wonder sometimes, are we gonna get those before the millennium? We might not get ’em until the millennium. Cause it’s close. I have a feeling: it’s close. But, um, that would really—​ I’d love to be able to read those.” 32. This East–​West divide between “us” and “the mean ones out there” [“Lamanites”] is intriguing. As she quipped elsewhere, “it was the bad brethren that chased us good ones up here. And naturally I’m going to put myself in with the good ones [laughs] . . . . Of course I believe that the best ones are the Catawbas” [laughs]. 33. See Mikaela Adams, “Who Belongs? Becoming Tribal Members in the South” (PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2012). 34. See Frye Gailard and Carolyn DeMeritt, As Long as the Waters Flow: Native Americans in the South and the East, forward by Vine Deloria Jr. (Winston-​Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 1998), ix. 35. On the broader issue of cultural “authenticity,” race, and recognition, see Garroutte, Real Indians; Joanne Barker, Native Acts:  Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter

 

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from the Late-​ Nineteenth-​ Century Northwest Coast (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2005). 36. I am careful to point out here that she was being humorous in making this last statement, about western tribes as “mean ones,” and it would probably be reading too much into it to take the comment as disparagement. It struck me more as banter, in reference to people she considers friends. 37. Duffy, “The Use of ‘Lamanite’ in Official LDS Discourse,” 165–​166. 38. Jean Dennison, Colonial Entanglement:  Constituting a Twenty-​First Century Osage Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

 

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The Book of Mormon and the Reshaping of Covenant Terryl Givens

Jan Shipps noted decades ago that the appearance of The Book of Mormon in 1830 was so shrouded in supernatural claims involving gold plates, “magic spectacles,” and ancient Christians that many non-​Mormons “wonder how any intelligent person could ever accept it as true.”1 One answer may be found in the ways in which the record appropriates and reshapes an extensive language and theology of covenant that would have been powerfully resonant to nineteenth-​century readers. The Book of Mormon emerges in the context of the period’s pervasive pseudo-​biblicism and, more particularly, within a long tradition of covenantal rhetoric. The book is replete with Midrash-​like texts built around Isaiah, aspects of Israelite religion, Jewish protagonists, and temple building. At the same time, the book is introduced by its final editor as an assurance to an American remnant of Israel of “the covenants of the Lord, that they are not cast off.”2 The term covenant further occurs almost 200 times—​but undergoes particular permutations that endow the concept with recontextualized and therefore new shades of meaning. A consideration of the scripture’s engagement with and reconfigurations of covenant theology can go a long way, then, toward explaining its initial successful reception. The Book of Mormon’s new covenant theology also proves absolutely essential to Smith’s own restoration project—​which would consist of implementing his particular vision of the gospel as the “new and everlasting covenant.” Finally, The Book of Mormon serves the essential function of Puritan covenant theology by itself embodying an alternative means of salvational certitude, both in its alleged concrete facticity and in modeling the possibility of personal, dialogic revelation from God to each seeking individual.

Terryl Givens, The Book of Mormon and the Reshaping of Covenant. In: Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon. Edited by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190221928.003.0015

 

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Covenant and Certitude In Catholic soteriology, assurance of salvation comes when an imperfect faith is supplemented, as Adolf von Harnack long ago characterized the principle, “by the doctrinal authority of the Church on the one side and by the Sacramental Church institution on the other, and yet in such a way that it is obtained only approximately.”3 In other words, salvation comes from belonging to the true church and receiving its sacraments by authorized administrators. Those conditions provide a degree of assurance that may fall short of absolute certitude, but is as close to a guarantee as is humanly obtainable. Protestants denied an authoritative priesthood of an elect class, who alone can administer saving sacraments in the only divinely authorized church institution. This step was tantamount, as soon became apparent, to denying the role of the sacraments themselves as the vehicles of salvation. As the clerical class no longer served as arbiters of personal salvation, so would the sacraments no longer serve as the channels of grace. But there was an additional consequence of redefining the role and efficacy of the sacraments. By negating their vital function as conduits of saving grace, Protestants demolished the principal hedge against the personal dread of damnation that has for so many centuries been a constant in the Christian mind. If innate guilt and depravity are our natural inheritance and eternal torment our fitting destiny, then where is the balm of Gilead to be found, if not in Mother Church and her saving sacraments and commandments, faithfully upheld? Protestants had to necessarily supply a new answer to the age-​old question: What constitutes the certitudo salutis [personal assurance of salvation], and how is it to be secured? For Protestants, writes one historian of theology, “the test of the Christian was not that he was so living as to secure the promise, but that he had experienced in himself the certain conviction that the promise was indefectibly his. This conviction—​the ‘assurance’ of a status that cannot be lost—​ . . . is the palladium of orthodox Protestantism.”4 Martin Luther found a new solution to this problem before he even broke with the church of his youth. Institutional abuses aside, Luther’s unease with Catholic doctrine itself was precipitated in large measure because of the spiritual insecurity he found in his life of monastic commitment. No matter how devoutly he observed the rules and commandments of his faith and his order, he found himself incapable of confidence in his spiritual standing and future. “My situation was that, although an impeccable monk, I stood before God as a sinner troubled in conscience, and I had no assurance that my merit would assuage him.”5 “Assurance” emerges here as a critical preoccupation in Luther’s mind, and it will assume paramount importance in the theological systems of most Protestant forms that follow in his wake. The solution to this hunger for assurance, Luther found, was to repose trust in

 



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Christ’s faithfulness rather than in his own. When St. Paul said “the one who is righteous will live by faith,”6 Luther took this to mean not that we live in a constant state of hopeful uncertainty. The power of faith did not for him refer to a human capacity for or exercise of simple trust. Rather, the righteous should live by full confidence in Christ’s promises. And given the fact that the object of that faith is certain and steadfast, being Jesus Christ himself, his reliability was of such perfection as to ground incontestably the confidence we repose in him. Our faith can relieve us of the purgatory of uncertainty, not because our mind is firm, but because our foundation is Christ’s faithfulness, not ours. The object, not the practitioner, of faith endows faith with its saving power but also confers its fruits: confidence and spiritual tranquility. “I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn.”7 This idea would be codified by Anglicans in the Westminster Confession: “Although hypocrites and other unregenerate men may vainly deceive themselves with false hopes and carnal presumptions of being in the favor of God and estate of salvation, which hope of theirs shall perish, yet such as truly believe in the Lord Jesus, and love him in sincerity, endeavoring to walk in all good conscience before him, may in this life be certainly assured that they are in a state of grace” (emphasis mine). Furthermore, “this certainty is not a bare conjectural and probable persuasion . . . but an infallible assurance of faith, founded upon the divine truth of the promises of salvation.”8 And this assurance, or “calling and election made sure” is one that all may obtain “without extraordinary revelation.”9 Luther’s self-​diagnosis—​and the prescribed cure—​resonated across much of the European continent and across the English Channel. The fear of damnation, soon reinforced by Calvinist preaching that emphasized human depravity and a fully merited eternal punishment, drove thousands and eventually millions to seek spiritual relief. A popular eighteenth-​century school collection “of English Prose and Verse,” captured the religious terrors that were increasingly normalized. One writer in the anthology agonized over “the vast uncertainty I am struggling with . . . the force and vivacity of my apprehensions; every doubt wears the face of horror, and would perfectly overwhelm me, but for some faint gleams of hope, which dart across the tremendous gloom. What tongue can utter the anguish of a soul suspended between the extremes of infinite joy or eternal misery . . . . I tremble and shudder.”10 As a main strand of Protestant thought developed, the assurance made available through the grace of Christ took the form of a highly developed theology—​ covenant theology. When Puritanism migrated to America especially, the assurance of salvation by grace was framed in terms of a covenantal relationship to God. In the words of John von Rohr, “the often anguished Puritan search for

 

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personal assurance of salvation found substantial assuagement in covenantal certainty.”11 The interpretation of this new covenantal relationship varied even within Puritan theology, from the antinomian end of the spectrum, where conviction became dangerous certitude, to the Arminian end of the scale, where the role of personal choice threatened to undermine the role of grace. But in neither case was confidence in God’s assurance shaken or in doubt. As John Preston affirmed, “If thou art in covenant with God . . . then thy election is sure; and be sure that God will never alter it.”12 The general view was that God had established a covenant of works with Adam; in the aftermath of Adam’s failure to fulfill his obligation of perfect obedience, God made provision for a new covenant—​the covenant of grace, inaugurated by Christ’s atoning sacrifice. English Puritans such as Obadiah Sedgwick traced this covenant to Abraham (in contradistinction from the old, Adamic covenant of works), seeing it “ratified and confirmed to them by the death of Christ.”13 In America, William Ames further divided covenantal history into its Mosaic, as well as Abrahamic, precursors.14 His countryman Peter Bulkeley, too, saw the Mosaic code as pointing toward Christ rather than recapitulating the Adamic law of works. Though Mosaic sacrifices were themselves an important typology, covenant theology was derived from the New Testament’s express differentiation of Christ’s sacrifice and the gospel it inaugurated from the Mosaic code and sacrifices that preceded it. Jesus himself referred to the Eucharistic wine as emblem of a new covenant,15 and the author of Hebrews called Christ the “mediator of the new covenant” the “law [being] a shadow of the good things to come.”16 With writers such as Ames and Bulkeley, assurance was the dominant feature of the covenant, even if one needed to find one’s own way to such a recognition of God’s faithfulness. Predestination and God’s omnipotence were the bases of absolute certainty that the elect were saved. God “effects what he hath decreed, and as he decreed,” wrote Ames, and that is what “doth make this inheritance firme and sure unto us.”17 Thus Bulkeley argued that though Christ’s gift was unconditional, its benefits were only realized individualistically. One “must enter into a particular covenant with God.”18 Or, as he argued with fine precision, God’s absolute promises are unconditional, and “the foundation of our salvation.” However, our personal claim upon them is contingent on us, and to that extent “conditionall as the foundation of our assurance.”19 In the eighteenth century, covenant theology continued to evolve. The most substantive reworking of the idea would be in response to the emphasis of Jacob Arminius on the role of human agency in salvation. As a consequence, “the difference between Arminius’s federal theology and that of the continental Calvinists (and the British Puritans) is the former’s conditionality and the latter’s absoluteness. That is, for Arminius, inclusion in the covenant of grace is not determined solely by God but by the free response of the human person to God’s initiative

 



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in Christ.”20 With John Wesley, the whole program of salvational assurance has once again been thrown into radical doubt. In his “Call to Backsliders,” Wesley obliterated any hope of an abiding spiritual security: “We have known a large number of persons, of every age and sex, from early childhood to extreme old age, who have given all the proofs which the nature of the thing admits, that they were ‘sanctified throughout.’ . . . Nevertheless, we have seen some of the strongest of them, after a time, moved from their steadfastness” and “utterly los[e]‌the life of God.” Even those “sanctified” in “the blood of the covenant” could indeed “fall away from sanctifying grace.”21 Is, then, no greater assurance possible? A limited one at best, opines Wesley. “This, otherwise termed ‘the full assurance of faith,’ is the true ground of a Christian’s happiness. And it does indeed imply a full assurance that all your past sins are forgiven, and that you are now a child of God. But it does not necessarily imply a full assurance of our future perseverance.”22 In Wesley’s mind, then, the covenant of grace can tend toward acquiescence to predestination, which covenant, he protests, “I understand not.”23 Like God’s pledge to Abraham, the archetypal covenant, “though everlasting, was conditional.”24 His characterization of the Puritan precedent may indeed be “a caricature” as his editor acknowledges,25 but it reveals how unstable the solution of the certitudo salutis had become in the years leading up to Joseph Smith. At the same time, political developments provided additional impetus to Puritan theology’s transformations. Gordon Wood has noted how the Revolution was itself a development readily folded into an American variety of covenant theology.26 “Americans, like the Israelites of old, were God’s chosen people,” the colonists were reminded by their preachers, and Britain’s oppression was chastisement for their sins. As the nineteenth century dawned, Americans continued fervent in their belief that “republican regeneration” was part of their New World covenant destiny.27 (Not coincidentally, The Book of Mormon would pick up this same theme, describing a thinly veiled American Revolution as the New World Gentiles going “out of captivity” and being “delivered by the power of God out of the hands of all other nations” [1 Ne 13:19]).

Joseph Smith and the Search for Assurance Mormonism’s beginnings connect the movement’s founder—​and The Book of Mormon he produced—​to its Protestant forebears in crucial ways. For many decades, Latter-​day Saints have dated the origins of Mormonism to the fourteen-​ year old Smith’s remarkable theophany in an upstate New York grove of trees. Recent historians have pointed out that the event was actually of an almost exclusively personal nature. As Smith’s most authoritative biographer Richard

 

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Bushman notes, “In the minds of Mormons today, the events of that morning marked the beginning of the restoration of the Gospel and the commencement of a new dispensation. The vision is called the First Vision because it began a series of revelations. But at the time, Joseph did not know this was the First Vision . . . . [Even] twelve years after the event, the First Vision’s personal significance for him still overshadowed its place in the divine plan for restoring a church.”28 In actual fact, both the historical revisionists and the Mormon laity are correct; Smith’s experience in the upstate New York woods in 1820 was an intensely personal experience that neither involved nor intimated any commission to inaugurate a new religious tradition. At the same time, however, the particular motives and outcomes behind that spring theophany situate Smith firmly within a long-​ standing Protestant narrative and can fruitfully connect the Mormon Church’s founding to an ongoing history of covenant theology. The typical Protestant conversion story occurring at the intersection of salvational anxiety and covenant theology was of the form described by John Wesley. Like young Luther, he found his spiritual quest one of perpetual anxiety until a decisive moment when, he recorded, “I felt that I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me, that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”29 Out of Wesley’s personal experience and entrepreneurial religiosity, Methodism was born. Joseph Smith’s personal journey and religion-​making career began in very similar circumstances. Smith himself dated his ministry to the publication of The Book of Mormon, but certainly the seeds of his project can be traced to his earlier theophany.30 The cause of his prayerful quest was—​as the case with countless other before and since—​spiritual unease. “I [had] become convicted of my sins,” he recorded of his early adolescence, “therefore I cried unto the Lord for mercy for there was none else to whom I could go.” In the ensuing theophany—​which Mormons call the First Vision—​Smith heard the words that place him within the tradition of the Protestant conversion narrative: “Joseph my son thy sins are forgiven thee”;31 far from being the opening scene in the forging of a new religion, the experience was an intensely personal and private response to his acutely felt predicament. And yet, three years later, the specter of damnation and eternal torment again plagued his mind. So once more, he records, “I betook myself to prayer and supplication,” seeking “a manifestation of my state and standing before him.”32 Smith’s spiritual odyssey was to this point but one example of an oft-​repeated pattern: a devout individual, conscience plagued by introspection and chastened by hellfire sermons, seeking solace and tokens of grace.33 On this latter occasion, as the former, Smith’s prayers were met with heavenly visitation. Smith recorded that an angel appeared in response to his supplication. However, as Smith’s earlier experience foreshadowed, no merely personal

 



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assurance would resolve Smith’s religious quest for relief from anxiety. His case was complicated to some extent by the fact that remedies available to the spiritual heirs of Puritanism were not available to him. By personal inclination on the one hand and Methodist influence on the other, he was averse to the two preconditions of Puritan covenantal theology: “piety and predestination.” Smith was famously disinclined to claims of personal piety. In his 1838 narrative, he remembers “evincing the weakness of youth and corruptions of human nature.”34 Years later, he frankly admitted that “I am not so much of a Christian as many suppose I am.”35 He repeated the point: “I do not want you to think that I am very righteous, for I am not.”36 At the same time, his early partiality to Methodism equally rendered any Calvinist version of covenant assurance impossible. “I abhor the doctrine of predestination,”37 thundered Wesley, and Smith followed suit: “God did not elect or predestinate.”38 One way, then, to characterize Smith’s religion-​making project was as a quest for an emotional and spiritual surrogate for the consoling balm of that covenant framework—​one that would appeal to its pervasive resonance, and effect the same manifest assurance, without invoking what he saw as its theological pitfalls. What in actual fact eventually emerged from Smith’s second spiritual encounter was The Book of Mormon. Joseph Smith—​and legions of converts—​ found in The Book of Mormon a perfect instrument for this very task. Replete with allusions to and explications of God’s covenant with Israel, the scripture resonated deeply with a public attuned to that language. At the same time, The Book of Mormon effectively served the role and function of a reconstituted covenant theology: it replace the dichotomy of old and new covenants, grace and works, with an unparalleled merger of the two, even as it exploited and literalized the earliest conceptions of covenantal history to create a people with a rare spiritual cohesion; and it provided a concrete nexus for experiential religion that was a remarkably successful surrogate for the covenant of grace, channeling as it does a comparable effect of salvational assurance.

Resonance and Reception Considering the role and function of The Book of Mormon in the context of covenant theology may enrich our understanding of its early reception history and account in some measure for the widespread appeal the book held for religious seekers of the age. The language of covenant is pervasive in nineteenth-​century religious discourse. During Joseph Smith’s early years, works such as James Morgan’s Sermon on the Covenant of Grace and the Covenant of Works (1818), Samuel Petto’s Great Mystery of the Covenant of Grace (1820), David Russell’s Familiar Survey of the Old and New Covenants (1824), and Thomas Boston’s

 

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View of the Covenant of Grace (Philadelphia 1827) were commonplace. Joseph Smith—​and The Book of Mormon in particular—​engaged and expanded this antebellum immersion in the rhetoric of covenant. The word “covenant” itself appears in The Book of Mormon 174 times: That’s about ten times as often as it does in the New Testament. It first shows up in the title page itself: One of The Book of Mormon’s central purposes, its final editor tells readers, is to affirm the continuing efficacy of God’s covenants with contemporary Israel (“that they are not cast off forever”). When Joseph announced the conditions of the Church restored, he referred to a “new and everlasting covenant.” Even that more particular language had precedent, in Obadiah Sedgwick’s important Bowels of Tender Mercy Sealed in the Everlasting Covenant (1660). More exactly, David Russell had introduced his Familiar Survey of the Old and New Covenants (1824) by denominating the plan of redemption “the new and everlasting covenant.”39 The expression appears frequently in works contemporary with Joseph Smith, from Susanna Anthony’s Life and Character of Miss Susanna Anthony to Richard Challoner’s Considerations Upon Christian Truths and Christian Duties.40 In an 1832 revelation, Smith chastised the Saints for not remembering, in his telling words, “the new covenant, even The Book of Mormon” (D&C 84:57). At this point, in other words, the “new and everlasting covenant,” elsewhere applied to the Church, baptism, and eternal marriage, here finds expression and its most concrete embodiment as an equivalent for The Book of Mormon itself. However, this is not a covenant that replaces or substitutes the Old Testament, covenant of works, or the role of historic Israel. The Book of Mormon does not, as the Bible has been understood to do, describe God’s covenants with Noah, Abraham, and Moses, and refashion those covenants in light of Christ’s atonement. It does not, in other words, recapitulate the contrast between the old covenant of works and the Protestant covenant of grace; The Book of Mormon reconstitutes covenant theology into something rather new. In so doing, The Book of Mormon prepares the ground for the Church Smith was about to found. The Book of Mormon provides, more specifically, the rationale and theological foundation for the Church’s very establishment. Rather than enacting the supplanting of the Old Law by the New, the Old Covenant by the New, historical Israel by spiritual Israel, The Book of Mormon instead fully encompasses and unifies the diverse strands of history, scripture, and gospel dispensations into one.

Reconstruction Where we first find something radically new in Smith’s refashioning of covenant is in his collapse of the dualities on which Puritan covenant theology had been

 



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built. The premise of covenant theology is that the original covenant given the human race in the Garden of Eden was a covenant of works, of obedience. But disobedience on Adam and Eve’s part ruptured their relationship with God and incurred Divine wrath and condemnation. Incapable of rising from the ashes of the perdition they had incurred and the state of sin to which humans would naturally and inevitably revert, they and their posterity could be rescued only by the intervention of a Savior and a reconstituted relationship to God predicated on Christ’s righteousness, rather than on their own. This new covenantal relationship was built on the foundation of grace—​and being reliant upon Christ’s faithfulness rather than human obedience, the covenant was secure and absolutely reliable. All that was necessary was for the sinner to know that he or she fell under the covenant’s provisions, as one of the elect. This binary opposition between works and grace in covenant thought is paralleled at many related levels of Christian understanding. The New Testament (New Covenant) supplants the Old Testament (Old Covenant). The gospel supplants the law (“no two words are more distinct in their signification than law and gospel,” wrote Alexander Campbell).41 Spiritual Israel takes the place of historic Israel. The hidden Church transcends in the divine plan any visible Church, as inward piety is more salvific than outward ordinances alone. In Ambrose Serle’s 1793 Church of God, we read how God’s choosing of the people of Israel was “prophetic and emblematic . . . of his conduct towards the true and spiritual Israel,” and “God’s true and spiritual people are partakers of a better covenant,” that is, the covenant of grace.42 Or in Matthew Henry’s Exposition of the Old and New Testament,43 we find that God’s “everlasting covenant . . . of grace” pertains to “all God’s spiritual Israel.” Again, in Isaac Penington’s 1761 works, Moses led literal Israel by the “outward” law, as God’s spirit would later lead “spiritual Israel” according to His “inward law”; God’s “statutes and ordinances” conveyed on Mt. Sinai were “but a shadow of the inward and spiritual covenant, the new and everlasting covenant, which God makes with his inward and spiritual people in the latter days.”44 In regard to the Christian scriptures, the qualifiers “Old” and “New” seem self-​ evidently instituted as emphatic differentiators of covenants, dispensations, even churches in Thomas Campbell’s formulation:  “Although the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are inseparably connected,” he writes, “yet as to what directly and properly belongs to their immediate object, the New Testament is as perfect a constitution for the worship, discipline, and government of the New Testament Church, and as perfect a rule for the particular duties of its members, as the Old Testament was for the worship, discipline, and government of the Old Testament Church, and the particular duties of its members.”45 From the very beginning of his restoration project that The Book of Mormon launched, Joseph Smith collapses and conflates these binaries. This transpires,

 

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in early Mormon thought, in several ways. First, historic Israel is not supplanted by spiritual Israel in God’s eyes as was the case with supersessionist thought. Rather, historic Israel is revealed to be present in the community of believers, literally rather than figuratively. The principal antagonists in The Book of Mormon narrative, the “Lamanites”—​or American Indians in whole or in part46—​are from “the house of Israel,” tracing their literal descent from a Manassehite exile from sixth-​century Jerusalem (Alma 10). Amos had referred anciently to God’s future mercy toward “the remnant of Joseph,” meaning descendants of Ephraim, Manasseh, or both, and Ezekiel had similarly intimated their eventual restoration.47 In The Book of Mormon, Lehi’s people self-​identify as Lehi that remnant who would be preserved and later gatheredgathering by the Lord (Alma 46:24). The Book of Mormon resists supersessionist readings of covenant history by arguing for a seamless continuity between the promises made to ancient Israel and their literal fulfillment among an Israelite remnant in the modern era. Though the narrative ends with the fratricidal elimination of the book’s protagonists, the promise is made to the record keepers that “a mixture of [their] seed” will survive” to find redemption in a future day (1 Ne 13:30). The Book of Mormon prophesied its own transmission through “Gentiles” and the work of the Gentiles in bringing “the remnant” of that people back into covenant Israel through their conversion. Isaiah had prophesied to Israel that “the Gentiles [will] set up my standard to the people: and they shall bring thy sons in their arms, and thy daughters shall be carried upon their shoulders.”48 The Book of Mormon repeated that prophecy, but then narrated a story, past and yet to unfold, in which it is fulfilled. A remnant of Israelites (The Book of Mormon’s Lehites) travel to the New World, where their surviving descendants eventually fall into disbelief. In a future day, the Lord promises to “raise up a mighty nation among the Gentiles  .  .  .  upon the face of this land.” Those Gentiles will bring that remnant (which “meaneth us in the days to come,” notes The Book of Mormon chronicler) to a knowledge and enjoyment of the covenant made to Abraham (1 Ne 22:6–​9). In other words, the work predicts that in the modern era, converted Gentiles (spiritual Israel) will successfully evangelize the descendants of the house of Israel (historic Israel). So literal, historic Israel and spiritual Israel converge in this prophetic vision narrated by The Book of Mormon. And early Mormons thought they were living in the very moment of its prophesied fulfillment. Significantly, The Book of Mormon narrates the role of those Gentiles in redeeming lost Israel as part of a national destiny that was foreordained, and involved God’s particular involvement in both America’s discovery and settlement, and her liberation from the “mother Gentiles,” presumably referring to Columbus and the British colonizers, respectively (1 Ne 13:12–​19). Samuel

 



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Danforth had first asked fellow Puritans, “to what purpose then came we into the Wilderness, and what expectation drew us hither,” and answered, “the expectation of the pure and faithful Dispensation of the Gospel and Kingdome of God.”49 The Puritan vision of America as an “elect nation” was further entrenched with Cotton Mather’s sermon, “Theopolis Americana” (1709). There, Mather had inscribed America into covenantal history, with a divinely decreed role to play in God’s purposes. God “will have a holy city in America,” he prophesied.50 The American Jerusalem both heralded and accelerated the coming apocalypse. The Book of Mormon’s explicit scriptural foundations to such interpretive moves spoke a compelling language of covenantal theology. The difference was that for the Puritans, the connections were figurative or suggestive at best. John Winthrop (later governor of Massachusetts) was (metaphorically) a modern Moses, leading saintly migrations to a new land of promise. But for Mormons, their new scripture narrated a continuing covenantal history with no breaks in the links. For example, for Native Americans the Indian Removal Act signed into law by Andrew Jackson was an unmitigated tragedy. For settlers on the frontier it was a welcome prelude to even more dramatic expansion into the frontier. But for Mormons, the (forced) relocation of scattered southern tribes to a designated federal territory represented the latest iteration of an ongoing fulfillment of Israel’s covenantal history. The church paper proclaimed in 1832, it was “marvelous, to witness the gathering of the Indians.” As evidence of scripture fulfilled, it quoted a modified Psalm 80: “Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, thou that leadest Joseph like a flock, through the instrumentality of the Government of the United States.”51 As Parley Pratt gloried in language Native Americans would likely find appalling, he wrote, See Congress stand, in all the power of state, Destined like Cyrus, now to change the fate Of Joseph’s scattered remnants! long oppressed, And bring them home.52 The first LDS missionaries sent to the Indian Territory saw those Delaware and Shawnee they visited as living emblems not of ethnic cleansing, but of God’s mercy and providential designs. As the Evening and Morning Star opined, “What a beauty it is to see the prophecies fulfilling so exactly,” then quoted Nephi that the Lord “shall bring them again out of captivity, and they shall be gathered together to the lands of their inheritance, and they shall be brought out of obscurity and darkness.”53 The conception of a modern remnant of Israel restored to the covenant comes to encompass the convert base of early Mormonism itself, as Smith develops his

 

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restoration thought. In an Abrahamic text that Smith produced in 1835, he expanded upon the biblical version of the covenant God made with that patriarch: I will make of thee a great nation, and . . . thou shalt be a blessing unto thy seed after thee, that in their hands they shall bear this ministry and Priesthood unto all nations; And I will bless them through thy name; for as many as receive this Gospel shall be called after thy name, and shall be accounted thy seed, and shall rise up and bless thee, as their father; . . . and in thy seed after thee (that is to say, the literal seed, or the seed of the body) shall all the families of the earth be blessed, even with the blessings of the Gospel, which are the blessings of salvation, even of life eternal.54 Smith believed that not only the “Lamanites,” but also many Latter-​day Saints were descended from Israel, for in that Abrahamic text he described the Abrahamic covenant as promising that the “literal seed” of Abraham would exercise the priesthood in order to bless “all the families of the earth . . . with the blessings of the gospel.”55 The Book of Mormon referred to the general European-​ American population as gentiles, but Smith saw those who accepted the gospel as literal descendants of Abraham. Several revelations seemed to confirm this understanding, with their repeated references to the imperative work of Smith and his fellow Saints “to recover my people, who are of the house of Israel.”56 As Young explained the principle, God has had regard to the blood of the covenant for his oath’s sake. That promised blood has trickled down through our parents until now we are here. I know who has the right to the Keys—​the Prophet has! That blood has been preserved and has been brought down through father to son, and our heavenly Father has been watching it all the time and saw the man that has received the blood pure through descent—​that is what Joseph meant the Lord had regard to: . . . Ephraim is the character who has the pure blood of promise in him. The Lord has respect unto it. This doctrine is perfectly plain and simple. Those who have the right will redeem the nations of the Earth.57 Mormons were here replicating the language of New England Puritans, who taught that God sent his elect into the world “through the loyns of godly parents,” and referred to America as the “New Israel.”58 But the Latter-​day Saints went further, believing that the blood of Israel literally flowed in the missionaries—​and in their converts as well. In an 1841 sermon, Smith taught that in the last days, “the Lord will begin by revealing the House of Israel among the gentiles.”59 This

 



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“revealing” was largely effected by their receptivity to the gospel—​those who accepted the message of the restoration thereby identified themselves as true Israelites. A second, more conspicuous collapse of the divide between Old and New, biblical Israel and adopted Israel, was The Book of Mormon itself, constituting a scriptural synthesis of Old and New World texts. The narrative begins in the Old World, in the city of Jerusalem, “in the reign of King Zedekiah, king of Judah” (1 Ne 1:4). The narrator tells us Jeremiah has been cast into prison (1 Ne7:14), and the prophecies of Isaiah are quoted liberally. But this seamless record chronicles a Jewish remnant’s exodus under the leadership of one Lehi to the Western Hemisphere, and six centuries later, describes the preaching of a New World John the Baptist (Samuel the Lamanite, a descendant of Lehi) on the eve of the Messiah’s birth. Then, recapitulating the Book of Acts in this New World setting, the chroniclers describe the visit and ministry of a resurrected Christ, his ordination and commission to twelve disciples, and the institution of church sacraments. It is as if The Book of Mormon rewrites the Old and New Testament records into a holistic gospel narrative in which Christ is the fulcrum rather than the culmination of Christian history, with both sides of the historical divide equally Christocentric. Grant Hardy refers to a third unexpected conflation of The Book of Mormon. “It portrays two distinct types of salvation working in harmony,” he notes in Chapter  5 of this volume. “Nephite writers are deeply concerned with salvation history, that is, with God’s intervention in the rise and fall of entire nations and peoples—​Nephites and Lamanites, Jews and Gentiles—​yet those same writers also repeatedly address individual sinners in need of the “atoning blood of Christ” (e.g., Mosiah 3:18, 4:2; Alma 5:27; Hel 5:9; Moro 10:33).” He further notes that this dual preoccupation would have been particularly resonant at this nineteenth-​century moment of historical transition: “1830 seems to have been a propitious moment for the publication of such a book—​a time when Americans were turning their attention from Old Testament notions of national salvation to New Testament harvests of individual souls.” Finally, and most profoundly, The Book of Mormon enacted the collapse of old and new covenants, the laws of Moses and of Christ. Or rather, the preparatory law of the Old Testament, the old covenant, and the new covenant of the gospel, the covenant of grace, find harmonious coexistence in the religious world described in The Book of Mormon. We read, for instance, that the ancient writers of The Book of Mormon “had a hope of [Christ’s] glory many hundred years before his coming,” and “keep the law of Moses” even as they “look forward with steadfastness unto Christ” ( Jacob 4:4; 2 Ne 25:24). In a telescoping of the Old and the New, righteous Nephites believed “in him to come as though he already was” and see “all things which have been given of God from the beginning of

 

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the world, unto man, [as] the typifying of him” ( Jarom 1:11; 2 Ne11:4). Faith, repentance, baptism, and reception of the Holy Ghost are enjoined (2 Ne 31). At the same time, The Book of Mormon invokes a central image of Mosaic religion and covenant Israel, the temple, and describes its replication and dispersion in the New World: a pattern that foreshadows Smith’s erection of temples in the early nineteenth century, merging even Old Testament and New Testament worship forms. The Book of Mormon, as the extra-​biblical text most used by Mormons and employed by the thousands (and then tens of millions) to disseminate their message, was the principal conduit for a view of ecclesiastical and covenant history that minimized the transition from the Judaism of the prophets to the gospel of the apostles. Before Smith ever organized the first branch of the Church, he was steeped in a text that depicted a pre-​Christian people worshipping Christ and a tribe of Hebrews making a covenant to be called the children of Christ. This extension of the new covenant backward in time to a pre-​Christian people, Joseph Smith will then push even further in his restoration theology, affirming not just an ancient American Christianity, but one that originates with Father Adam himself. In 1833 Smith published in the Church newspaper the shocking claim that “Adam was the first member of the church of Christ on earth.” “The plan of salvation was revealed to Adam,” noted a subsequent treatment of his biblical revisions.60 Indeed, Smith’s interpolations in the Genesis account (as part of his Bible retranslation project) even had Adam learning about the atonement, experiencing baptism for the remission of sins and the gift of the Holy Ghost.61 As Smith’s popularizer Parley Pratt put it with his typical self-​assurance, “we have only the old thing. It was old in Adams day it was old in Mormons day & hid up in the earth & it was old in 1830 when we first began to preach it.”62 Those readers accustomed to accept the new covenant as a total displacement of the failed Adamic law of works would see in this revision the most radical reconstitution imaginable of the covenant of grace—​one that collapses into one seamless gospel not just Old and New Testaments, but all of dispensational history itself. As a visible emblem to his followers of the harmonious coexistence of pre-​ and post-​Christian versions of the covenant, Smith took one more cue from The Book of Mormon. As temples dotted the terrain of The Book of Mormon saga, so did Smith incorporate temples, with their washings and anointings and other rituals he associated with Solomonic practices, into the heart of Latter-​day Saint worship. There are two final ways in which The Book of Mormon built upon the foundations of covenant theology, effectively promising the same salvational assurance that the Puritan covenant theology had so effectively grounded. This was in the direct access The Book of Mormon gave and modeled to a personal, dialogic encounter with Deity, situating one firmly in a covenant relationship with

 



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God; and through the artifactual concreteness of the gold plates at the story’s core, which possessed an iconic status that pointedly heralded an open heaven, even as it channeled personal conviction in a textually directed way.

Dialogic Revelation As we saw in Puritan covenant theology as articulated by Bulkeley, the unconditional nature of Christ’s gift did not negate the crucial fact that one “must enter into a particular covenant with God.”63 So too are covenantal relationships in The Book of Mormon individual as well as communal. Thematically, a consistent focus in The Book of Mormon is the means by which individuals engage in a direct, literal, dialogic encounter with God. The first Book of Mormon chronicler introduces this motif, pursuing his own visionary experience of Christ full of confidence that “I might see, and hear, and know of these things, by the power of the Holy Ghost, which is the gift of God unto all those who diligently seek him, as well in times of old as in the time that he should manifest himself unto the children of men” (1 Ne 10:17). As the narrative virtually opens with this theme, so does it conclude. The final editor, Moroni, offers a concluding promise of spiritual certainty so unequivocal and literal that it has elicited cries of blasphemy from 1831 to the present day.64 After reading The Book of Mormon, he directs, “if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost. And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things” (Moro 10:3–​5). This theme of spiritual certitude is apparent in the reconstituted language of Mormon conversion and in its pervasive rhetoric of certainty. The salvific, transformative encounter with the God of Protestantism results in an affective experience of grace. For Protestants, personal “assurance must come through personal awareness of the inner presence of that saving faith which is election’s sign.”65 In Mormon culture, the private, experiential aspect of conversion becomes radically transposed into an affirmation of historical truths and tangible artifacts, generally centering on The Book of Mormon. Still, the new scripture approaches through artifactual concreteness and the allure of individualized revelation what covenant theology achieved through contractual obligation, that is, confidence in one’s quest for salvation. The Book of Mormon’s most potent illustration of a personal covenantal assurance occurs between these hopeful bookends of Nephi and Moroni. Enos, who is Nephi’s grandson, has a visionary encounter with the Christ that is particularly significant because it reflects the twin aspects of a refashioned covenant theology: an individualistic dimension experienced through an expressly dialogic revelation, and a collective dimension that reinserts a literal Israel at the heart of

 

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God’s historic, covenantal dealings with mankind. The story is archetypal in its essentialist brush strokes: The young Nephite finds himself deeply yearning for spiritual illumination and assurance. In his simple words, my soul hungered; and I kneeled down before my Maker, and I cried unto him in mighty prayer and supplication for mine own soul; and all the day long did I cry unto him; yea, and when the night came I did still raise my voice high that it reached the heavens. And there came a voice unto me, saying: Enos, thy sins are forgiven thee, and thou shalt be blessed. And I, Enos, knew that God could not lie; wherefore, my guilt was swept away. And I said: Lord, how is it done? And he said unto me: Because of thy faith in Christ, whom thou hast never before heard nor seen. (Enos  1:4–​8) Not content with a solitary salvation, Enos redirects his supplication on behalf of the Lamanites, that Israelite offshoot Smith would associate with Native Americans. But his petition is very specific in this regard: Enos prays that the sacred record he writes will be preserved and serve as an instrument to reincorporate that people into salvational history: “And he covenanted with me that he would bring them forth unto the Lamanites in his own due time. And I, Enos, knew it would be according to the covenant which he had made; wherefore my soul did rest” (Enos 1:16–​17). No more pointed instance could be imagined of a surrogate for the post-​Reformation burden of certitudo salutis. The Book of Mormon at one and the same time is a catalyst to personal adoption into a covenantal relationship with Christ, even as it serves as the instrument to redirect and repair the covenantal history of a wayward Israel.

The Book of Mormon as Holy Relic An abundant literature confirms the irony of The Book of Mormon’s religious status:  It was prima facie evidence of fraud to the skeptics, even as it was proof incontrovertible of Smith’s prophetic power and salvific authority to the believers. Claims of a new Bible translated from gold plates endowed Smith’s religious pretensions with a distinct difference. Evangelizing rhetoric of early Mormonism (little changed today) placed far more emphasis on the scripture’s value as a signifier than as a signified. In the narrative itself, the gold plates, the material base of the story unfolding over a thousand years, presage this role. Against the narrative’s stark apocalypticism, against the sibling rivalries and cataclysmic fratricide that no Smith figure is present to heal (as in the Genesis saga),

 



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the gold plates themselves emerge as the stark, material, enduring counterpoint to the ebb and flow of war, apostasy, and disintegration. They embody the durability of covenant, an imperishable, concrete token of God’s providential guardianship of this record and its promises. In Smith’s self-​narrative, he is rescued from the abyss of uncertainty and spiritual anxiety by an angel in possession of more than comforting words. The gold plates he claimed to receive at the angel’s hand become the seed out of which a radically material cosmology springs. Embodied Gods, resurrected messengers, spirits of “more refined matter”—​it is not hard to see in Smith’s religion making an attempt to fully respond to the Protestant demand for a certitudo salutis. Beyond reconstituting covenant theology in novel fashion, Smith found The Book of Mormon could perform the same spiritual work of the covenant of grace it displaced. The radical materiality with which he endows Mormon cosmology, as well as a radical epistemology of dialogic revelation, both coalesce in the physical artifact of The Book of Mormon. Once in Smith’s possession, the plates come to signify a divine commitment to his people that spans millennia and that establishes Smith’s authority to clarify that covenant’s present meaning. The twin appeals of nineteenth-​century religion to supernaturalism and to rationality has been widely noted. “Popular theology,” Nathan Hatch noted, “combined odd mixtures of . . . renewed supernaturalism and Enlightenment rationalism,” producing what Craig Hazen calls “the village Enlightenment.”66 A splendid instance of this binocular appeal to faith is the set of testimonies incorporated into the first (and subsequent) printing of The Book of Mormon. In their published testimony, the first three witnesses describe an encounter that is orchestrated and supervised by heavenly agents. They see the plates “through the grace of God.” They know the translation is true, because the voice of God “declared it unto” them. The plates themselves were brought and laid before their eyes by “an angel of God [who] came down from heaven.” Although they were close enough to the relics to see “the engravings thereon,” as they twice tell us, they neither touched nor handled them for themselves. On the other hand, the testimony of the eight is lacking in any traces of supernaturalism. Joseph Smith simply showed them the plates, allowing them to make their own examination and draw their own conclusions. Their verdict, being freely drawn, is thus more compelling even as it is more qualified. The plates, they write, do indeed have “the appearance of gold,” the engravings have “the appearance of an ancient work,” and as for the translation itself, they mention it without testifying to its truthfulness. What emerges as alone indisputable is the fact that Joseph Smith does possess a set of metal plates: “[W]‌e did handle [them] with our hands,” they affirm; “[W]e have seen and hefted, and know of a surety that the said Smith has got the plates of which we have spoken.” Taken together, the two experiences seemed calculated to provide an evidentiary

 

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spectrum, satisfying a range of criteria for belief. The reality of the plates was now confirmed by both proclamation from heaven and by empirical observation, through a supernatural vision and by simple, tactile testimony, by the testimony of passive witnesses to a divine demonstration, and by the testimony of a group of men actively engaging in their own, unhampered examination of the evidence. If The Book of Mormon does not itself constitute the basis for a certitudo salutis, it seems clear that it addresses and satisfies the same yearning to assuage the pervasive Christian anxiety about salvation, an anxiety with shifting forms and solutions that have emerged in response to historic Christian developments, from the Reformation’s anti-​sacramentalism to the Second Great Awakening’s tumultuous sectarian controversies. The Book of Mormon, with its invocation and literalization of covenant, rootedness in artifactual concreteness, and invitation to dialogic encounter with God, all combined to produce a promise of assurance that manifests to this day in a Mormon cultural rhetoric of certainty. Arising out of Mormonism’s reconstituted covenant theology that was rooted in The Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith developed a temple theology and emphasis on sacramentals that gave more emphatic form to the certitudo salutis. That theology culminated in a sacramentalized version of what Peter referred to as the “sure word of prophecy,”67 which Smith defined as follows: “The more sure word of prophecy means a man’s knowing that he is sealed up unto eternal life, by revelation and the spirit of prophecy, through the power of the Holy Priesthood.”68 This word, Smith taught, “was an anchor to the Soul Sure and Steadfast though the thunders might roll & lightnings flash & earthquakes Bellow & war gather thick around, yet this hope & knowledge would support the soul in every hour of trial trouble & tribulation.”69 John Greenleaf WhittierWhittier, John Greenleaf perceptively noted that Mormonism spoke “a language of hope and promise to weak, weary hearts, tossed and troubled, who have wandered from sect to sect, seeking in vain for the primal manifestations of the divine power.”70 The Book of Mormon’s appeal to a covenant-​conscious public may explain its success as a conduit to such manifestations, and a basis for the holy grail of salvational assurance, for nineteenth-​century converts especially.

Notes 1. Jan Shipps, “The Mormons: Looking Forward and Outward,” in Where the Spirit Leads: American Denominations Today, Martin E. Marty, ed. (Richmond, VA: John Knox, 1980), 29–​30. 2. Title Page, The Book of Mormon. All subsequent citations of The Book of Mormon are by chapter and verse parenthetically, based on Royal Skousen, ed., The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

 



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3. Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma, trans. William M’Gilchrist (London:  Williams & Norgate, 1899), chap. 6, 133. 4. Kenneth E. Kirk, The Vision of God (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 414. 5. Martin Luther, quoted in Roland Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (New York: Abingdon, 1950), 65. 6. Rom 1:17. All biblical citations are from NRSV unless otherwise indicated. 7. Quoted in Bainton, Here I Stand, 65. 8. Westminster Confession, XVIII.1,2, in Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), vol. 2, 627. 9. Westminster Confession, XVIII.3, in Pelikan and Hotchkiss, vol. 2, 628. The NT reference to calling and election is 2 Pet 1:10 (KJV; “call and election” in NRSV). 10. Arthur Masson, ed., A Collection of English Prose and Verse for the Use of Schools, 7th ed. (Edinburgh: 1773), 196. 11. John von Rohr, The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought (Eugene, OR:  Wipf and Stock, 1986), 2. 12. John Preston, Life Eternall (London:  E.P., 1631), 2:84–​85, cited in von Rohr, Covenant of Grace, 13. 13. Obadiah Sedgwick, The Bowels of Tender Mercy Sealed in the Everlasting Covenant (London: Edward Mattershed, 1660), 7. 14. Von Rohr, Covenant of Grace, 49. 15. Matt 26:28, Mark 14:24. “New covenant” in Young’s literal translation. “Covenant” in the NRSV, and “new testament” in KJV. 16. Heb 12:24, 10:1, KJV. The KJV is used for all citations, unless otherwise indicated, since it was the Bible used by Joseph Smith and clearly influenced his translation of The Book of Mormon. 17. William Ames, The Morrow of Sacred Divinity (London: Edward Griffin, 1642), 23 and An Analytical Exposition of Both the Epistles of the Apostles . . .  (London: Edward Griffin, 1641), 10–​11; both cited in von Rohr, Covenant of Grace, 189. 18. Peter Bulkeley, Gospel-​ Covenant or the Covenant of Grace Opened (London:  Matthew Simmons, 1651), 45 cited in von Rohr, Covenant of Grace, 55. 19. Bulkeley, Gospel-​Covenant, in Covenant of Grace, von Rohr, 189. 20. Roger E. Olson, Arminian Theology:  Myths and Realities (Chicago:  InterVarsity Press, 2009), 53. 21. John Wesley, “A Call to Backsliders,” in Sermons on Several Occasions (Nashville, TN: Stevenson & Owen, 1855), vol. 3, 396–​397, 394, 387. 22. Wesley, “Free Grace,” Sermons, vol. 4, 377–​378. 23. Albert C. Outler, ed., John Wesley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 456. 24. Outler, John Wesley, 457. 25. Outler, John Wesley, 456 note. 26. Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776–​1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 114. 27. Wood, Creation, 115–​124. 28. Richard Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling:  A Cultural Biography of Mormonism’s Founder (New York: Knopf, 2005), 39. 29. John Wesley, May 24, 1738, in The Heart of Wesley’s Journal (New Canaan, CT:  Keats, 1979), 43. 30. “I have been laboring in this cause for eight years,” he wrote in a letter published in Messenger and Advocate 1.12 (September 1835): 179. 31. Joseph Smith Papers: Histories, Karen Lynn Davidson et al., eds. (Salt Lake City, UT: Church Historian’s Press, 2012), vol. 1, 11–​13. 32. Joseph Smith Papers, vol. 1, 221. 33. For a discussion of Smith’s vision within the context of Methodist conversion narratives and the “experience of assurance” especially, see Christopher C. Jones, “The Power and Form of Godliness: Methodist Conversion Narratives and Joseph Smith’s First Vision,” Journal of Mormon History 37.2 (Spring 2011): 88–​114.

 

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34. Joseph Smith Papers, vol. 1, 221. 35. Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook, eds., Words of Joseph Smith (Orem, UT:  Grandin, 1991), 178. 36. Ehat and Cook, Words, 204. 37. Wesley, “Free Grace,” Sermons, 385. 38. Ehat and Cook, Words, 74. 39. David Russell, Familiar Survey of the Old and New Covenants (Edinburgh: Waugh and Innes, 1824), ix. 40. Susanna Anthony, Life and Character of Miss Susanna Anthony, Samuel Hopkins, ed. (Portland, ME: Lyman, Hall, 1810), 112; Richard Challoner, Considerations Upon Christian Truths and Christian Duties (London: J. P. Coghlan, 1784), 169. 41. Alexander Campbell and W. A. Morris, The Writings of Alexander Campbell: Selections Chiefly From the Millennial Harbinger (Austin, TX: Eugene Von Boeckmann, 1896), 44–​45. 42. Ambrose Serle, The Church of God (London: M. Trapp, 1793), 91. 43. Matthew Henry, Exposition of the Old and New Testament (Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute, 1791), chap. 4, 767. 44. Isaac Pennington, The Works of the Long-​Mournful and Sorely Distressed Isaac Pennington (London: J. and T. Kendall, 1761), chap. 2, 276. 45. Thomas Campbell, Declaration and Address (Washington, PA: Brown and Sample, 1809), 16. 46. Smith and his contemporaries equated Lamanites with the Native Americans of North and South America as a whole. In more recent years, LDS scholars have argued that The Book of Mormon itself makes no such sweeping claims, and a revised introduction (2007) declares the Lamanites to be “among the ancestors” of the American Indians. 47. Amos 5:15; Ezek 37. 48. Isa  49:22. 49. Samuel Danforth, “A Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand Into the Wilderness,” in American Sermons (New York: Library of America, 1999), 167. 50. Cotton Mather, Theopolis Americana, cited in Jonathan Dickinson, Sermons and Tracts (Edinburgh: M. Gray, 1793), iv. 51. Evening and Morning Star 1.7 (Dec. 1832): 54. 52. Parley P. Pratt, Millennium (Boston: Parley P. Pratt, 1835), 22. 53. Evening and Morning Star 1.8 ( Jan. 1833): 62; 1 Ne 22:12. 54. Times and Seasons 3.9 (March 1, 1842):  706 (Abraham 2:9–​11, Pearl of Great Price [hereafter PGP]). 55. Times and Seasons 3.9 (March 1, 1842): 706 (Abraham 2:11, PGP). 56. Book of Commandments (hereafter BC) 41:10 (Doctrine and Covenants [hereafter D&C] 39:11); see also BC 12:5 (D&C 14:10), BC 15:5 (D&C 18:6), Evening and Morning Star 1.2 ( July 1832): 1 (D&C 42:39), etc. 57. Brigham Young, Collected Discourses, Richard S. Van Wagoner, ed. (Salt Lake City, UT: Smith-​ Petit, 2009), chap. 1, 66. 58. E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 68; Conrad Cherry, ed., God’s New Israel:  Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 59. Ehat and Cook, Words, 67. 60. Evening and Morning Star 1.10 (March 1833): 73; 1.11 (April 1833): 81. 61. Moses 5:7; 6:64–​65, PGP. 62. Parley P. Pratt, Miscellaneous Minutes from 25 April 1847 Meeting, cited in Terryl L. Givens and Matthew J. Grow, Parley P.  Pratt:  The Apostle Paul of Mormonism (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2010), 242. 63. Bulkeley, Gospel-​Covenant, in von Rohr, Covenant of Grace, 55. 64. Alexander Campbell admonished his readers “who believe [ Joseph Smith] to be a prophet, hear the question which Moses put into the mouth of the Jews, and his answer to it—​“And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the Lord hath not spoken?”—​Does he answer, “Ask the Lord and he will tell you?” . . . . Nay, indeed.” In 1997, an evangelical protested that “Without some external checks and balances, it is simply too easy to misinterpret God’s answer when we try to apply a test like that of Moroni 10:4–​5 and ask him to reveal through

 



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his Spirit the truth or falsity of The Book of Mormon.” Alexander Campbell, “Delusions: An Analysis of The Book of Mormon,” Millennial Harbinger II (Feb. 7, 1831):  85–​96; Craig L. Blomberg and Stephen E. Robinson, How Wide the Divide: A Mormon and an Evangelical in Conversation (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 40. 65. Von Rohr, Covenant of Grace, 26. 66. Hatch’s comment is cited in Craig James Hazen, The Village Enlightenment in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 7. 67. 2 Pet 1:19. 68. D&C 131:5. 69. Ehat and Cook, Words, 201. 70. J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780–​1850 (New Brunswick, NJ:  Routledge, 1979), 191. Cited in Gordon S. Wood, “Evangelical America and Early Mormonism,” New York History 61 (Oct. 1980): 358–​386..

 

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“Arise From the Dust, My Sons, and Be Men” Masculinity in The Book of Mormon Amy Easton-​F l ake

Published in 1830, The Book of Mormon contributed to a conversation of American manhood in flux. Revolutionary changes to the social, economic, and physical landscape of the nation greatly expanded possibilities for men and, in the process, altered perceptions of what it meant to be a respectable man in early nineteenth-​century America. Ministers, teachers, moralists, and reformers—​ concerned by these shifting ideals—​wrote sermons, conduct books, and other texts outlining what they believed to be the ideal man. Into this print culture and contest of ideals came The Book of Mormon, which is, at least in part, a polemical text intended to instruct its early nineteenth-​century readers how to be God-​fearing men. While masculinity within The Book of Mormon agrees with many aspects of the Protestant male ideal of early nineteenth-​century conduct books, it also shifts emphasis and challenges fundamental notions of what it means to be a successful man. For instance, it privileges spiritual over temporal motives and activities, and places the home and inculcating religious values, rather than business and economic achievements, as the signals of efficacious manhood. Such significant departures from the feminization of American religion thesis—​which promotes the presentation of nineteenth-​century women as pure and pious, the guardians of home and religion, and men as ambitious and self-​interested, the spurs of industrialization, economic expansion, and urbanization—​compel us to ask questions of that narrative. Was the feminization of religion as prevalent in reality as it remains in the historiography?1 Or was it primarily not only a story about Protestants but also a Protestant story that presupposes Protestant categories and thus has conspicuously limited explanatory power? The Book of Mormon indicates the latter, as it deconstructs prevalent Amy Easton-Flake, “Arise From the Dust, My Sons, and Be Men”: Masculinity in The Book of Mormon. In: Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon. Edited by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190221928.003.0016

 



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narrative forms of moral discourse, opposes America’s growing emphasis on wealth and materialism, shores up fatherhood and patriarchy, and offers an alternative ideal of nineteenth-​century Christian manhood. Men, not women, according to The Book of Mormon, are to be the moral anchors of home and society. While Ann Braude and other historians have noted the limits of the feminization narrative when applied to faiths outside of Protestantism, such as Catholicism or Judaism,2 the feminization’s thesis inability to account for the Church of Christ (later to be known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​ day Saints and often referred to as the Mormon Church) is particularly interesting because the faith may be seen as growing out of the resurgence of primal Protestantism in early nineteenth-​century America.3 While the Church of Christ became increasingly distinct throughout the nineteenth century, in its foundational text—​The Book of Mormon—​we may see some of the gender and religious ideals that immediately differentiated it from a Protestant context; differentiations that suggest we must complicate our understanding of religion, parental roles, and gender ideals in early nineteenth-​century America.

Conception of Manhood in 1820s and 1830s America At the center of this chapter is the simple, yet intriguing, question of how The Book of Mormon’s ideals of manhood relate to the larger national conversation about manhood. What in The Book of Mormon’s presentation of masculinity would have been novel and what would have been familiar to its initial nineteenth-​century American audience? To answer this question I  focus primarily on conceptions of manhood found in early nineteenth-​century conduct books, not only because they were widely read and gave explicit direction on how to become a successful man, but also because conduct books were written from a religious perspective with the intent of producing God-​fearing, moral individuals. As William Alcott—​author of an enormously popular conduct book that went through twenty editions between 1833 and 1849—​wrote, “The leading purpose of the Young Man’s Guide . . . is to aid in the form of the character of young men for time and for eternity. . . . [I]‌ts end is to make the young better, no less than wiser.”4 As a subgenre of advice literature, conduct books are distinguishable from etiquette books and other advice manuals by their focus on behavior and character formation rather than on the art of living in society. Written for white, generally middle-​class young men and young women, conduct books define both gender roles and an ethical, Protestant-​based code of behavior.5 Conduct books also serve as a valuable point of departure for analyzing

 

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The Book of Mormon within a nineteenth-​century context because they are repositories for the ideals that scholars have come to define as the feminization of American religion.6 Consequently, as The Book of Mormon diverges in significant ways from the Protestant male ideals set forth in conduct books, it also challenges the dominant religious historiographical narrative that religion became feminized in nineteenth-​century America. Authors of conduct books often wrote in response to the image of the self-​ made man that was increasingly prevalent in nineteenth-​century American culture. Prior to the turn of the nineteenth century, an ideal of communal manhood prevailed in colonial New England as the father, whose social status came largely from the family into which he was born and from fulfilling his duty to family and community, ruled over his home as a patriarch.7 Because public usefulness and fulfillment of one’s duties were crucial measures of a man’s worth, qualities that enabled him to work well with others were highly valued. The ideal man was expected to possess integrity, self-​restraint, piety, and amiability; he was to be “pleasant, mild-​mannered, and devoted to the good of the community.”8 Beginning in the early nineteenth century, however, this ideal lost sway as the move toward industrialization, the settlement of vast new areas, the dynamic view of the social order, the Second Great Awakening, and the spread of the market economy all created spaces for exploring manhood. And while manhood was far from monolithic—​its performance differed according to family background, personal wealth, race, religion, occupation, and geographic location9—​ certain ideals of the self-​made man, originating from middle-​class northern white men, became so pervasive that they transcended racial and economic divisions.10 These ideals included individualism, competition, self-​reliance, ambition, and economic success.11 However, while popular culture applauded the self-​made man, professing that happiness would come from economic success,12 many individuals believed otherwise.13 Conduct books, which flourished in the early nineteenth century,14 played a significant role in criticizing some aspects of the self-​made man and in popularizing an ideal of Christian manhood in the 1820s and 1830s while also promoting the feminization of American religion.15 Meshing virtues from both eighteenth-​century communal manhood and nineteenth-​century self-​made manhood, conduct books for men promoted values like initiative, diligence, industry, integrity, ambition, education, moral behavior, piety, benevolence, and social responsibility.16 They encouraged men to improve constantly and to achieve economic success not for the sake of wealth itself but in order to provide for their families and to uplift their communities.17 Reverend A. B. Muzzey, author of The Young Man’s Friend, for instance, encouraged men to ask themselves the following questions to ensure their motive was correct: “Are you absorbed in the love of gain? Do you regard money as the main thing in your hopes, aims, and

 



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toils? . . . Would you surrender any one of your principles rather than lose your property? Do you believe that riches can fill and satisfy the immortal soul?”18 Hence, the ideal man within conduct books was to combine a competitive, assertive pursuit of success with values such as altruism, piety, and self-​sacrifice. Repeated emphasis on self-​denial, self-​discipline, and self-​control underscores the fact that moral qualities such as compassion and benevolence were not seen as inherent in the male character, but rather, were hard won.19 “[Men’s] passions will be easily restrained from enormous excess,” Charles Butler counsels readers of the American Gentleman, only “if you really wish and honestly endeavor to restrain them.”20 In contrast, the gentler virtues such as love, patience, kindness, and meekness were most often set forth in conduct books as part of women’s nature.21 Within conduct books, we also find the images that may have promoted women’s growing influence and authority within the home and religion. While in the colonial era men were often presented as the superior and more virtuous gender given responsibility for the moral and intellectual training of their children, 22 in the nineteenth century women were portrayed as more virtuous, more pure, and more able to act with self-​restraint; consequently, women were expected to make others good as well as happy, acting as moralizers to keep their husbands’ passions in check.23 Traits defined as feminine (or gentler virtues) gained greater status as men were counseled to obtain them as well as spend time in the company of their mothers and sisters for their ennobling influence.24 A  passage from a Young Man’s Own Book suggests how maternal tutelage naturally expanded its reach into a child’s youth and even into adulthood as the theory of entreating moral education replaced harsher colonial practices of breaking the will.25 It is well for the child that his mother, and his sisters . . . had the formation of his infancy. Gently were his ideas expanded under such fostering care; sweetly were his feelings trained to sensibility and honour, and his limbs to activity. Is the time come for despising their assistance?—​No! says common sense, nor will it ever. Our connection with that fairer, feebler, more refined part of our nature, is too intimate, too constant, too efficient, ever to be disregarded with propriety.26 In these lines, we see the division of gender traits; both men’s more tenuous hold upon these “fairer, feebler, more refined” traits and women’s natural possession of the “gentleness and sweetness” necessary to put in place invisible restraints through loving nurturance. While conduct books and church authorities still counseled fathers in the early nineteenth century to guide their family in spiritual matters—​by leading in worship and demonstrating proper

 

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Christian behavior—​patriarchy was situated in the past; mothers, according to advice literature, were primarily responsible for the critical task of forming a child’s moral character. 27 Fathers were to complement a mother’s governing influence over her children; however, their primary responsibility was to provide for the family through means that most often took them outside of the home.28 The feminization of American religion narrative asserts that when mothers became the moral center of the home women also moved to the center of many religious groups and assumed public roles based on their position as the guardians of morality and piety.29 According to Barbara Welter, who first applied the term feminization to American religion, the perceived critical importance of political and economic activity made [the political and commercial spheres] “more competitive, more aggressive” and put them under the purview of men. Whereas “religion, along with the family and popular taste, was not [perceived to be] very important, and so became the property of the ladies . . . [and thus] more domesticated, more emotional, more soft and accommodating—​in a word, more ‘feminine.’ ”30 Society regarded traditional religious values such as piety, purity, humility, and compassion as the innate qualities of women; whereas, men were to be naturally competitive, self-​reliant, and industrious (qualities deemed necessary for economic and political success).31 Further explaining the feminization process, Ann Douglas describes how Calvinism and its accompanying male-​ dominated theological tradition lost ground following the disestablishment of state religions and how an anti-​intellectual, sentimental tradition that privileged so-​called feminine traits over male traits and stories over treatises replaced it.32 Conduct books were a part of this shift as they increasingly employed fictional techniques and emphasized the virtue of gentler traits; men were to embrace some of these attributes even as they maintained distinct gender roles and focused on worldly endeavors (a combination that at times created a paradox). So, while scholars have described conduct books as vehicles for the feminization of American religion, they may also see them as a symptom of the feminization of American culture, specifically the fusion of supradenominational didacticism with techniques of fictional representation (explained most persuasively by Ann Douglas). My analysis of a dozen of the most popular male conduct books of the 1820s and 1830s reveals an amalgamation of rhetorical elements as authors incorporated maxims, precepts, biblical quotations and stories, biographical role models, sermons, letters, dramatic examples, anecdotes, dialogue, and literary foils.33 Written to define and encourage ideal character formation and conduct of life in white, generally middle-​class men, authors organize their texts around the attributes and behavior they believe will enable success in this life and the next. Most sections begin with an admonishment to obtain a certain trait followed by an explanation of its advisability. Pastor Joel Hawes, for instance, opens one section by reminding his readers to “Ever bear it in mind that your success in life

 



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depends, under God, on yourselves.” Men are to “look to [God] for his guidance and blessing” and then use all “such means as God has put within your power” to obtain success in this life and the next.34 To persuade his audience of the wisdom of his words, he uses the negative example of “thousands of young persons [who] are every year ruined by relying on something besides their own exertions for success in the world”; the practical maxim “that to secure success in life you must depend on yourselves;” the wisdom of Lord Bacon that “the mould of a man’s fortunes . . . is in his own hands;” and metaphors of waves against rocks, a “wheel in motion,” and the “world’s great workshop.”35 Hawes weaves all these elements together to teach a quintessential lesson of conduct book literature: man’s need to couple initiative and self-​reliance with obedience to and dependence upon God. Of particular interest to this study is the increasing incorporation of narrative fiction techniques to promote ideal qualities because of the connections that can be made to similar forms found within The Book of Mormon. Conduct book author Jacob Abbott explained that he used a “great number of narratives, and dialogues . . . to give vividness to the conceptions of my readers . . . [because readers] will understand readily enough, if they are interested in the form and manner in which the subject comes before them.”36 As indicated here and in many conduct book introductions, authors were deliberate and calculating in their rhetorical choices.37 Consequently, their decision to include fictional elements to inculcate moral and religious values (whereas these techniques were widely denounced a couple generations earlier)38 adds further evidence to this aspect of Douglas’s thesis. Moralizing narratives take many forms in conduct book literature. At its simplest are the constant recall of famous historical and biblical men and admonishment of what readers may learn from their examples. For instance, Rev. Hubbard Winslow, author of The Young Man’s Aid, inspires young men to believe in their ability to accomplish great things by rattling off in quick succession the accomplishments of Joseph, David, Josiah, Daniel, and Nehemiah of the Bible and Alexander, Julius Caesar, Bonaparte, Calvin, and Martin Luther from history.39 Believing that “example is so much more powerful than precept,” 40 Winslow, along with many other conduct book authors, relates accomplishments or brief episodes from these men’s lives to illustrate the desirability of various attributes. Becoming increasingly imaginative, authors also sketch dramatic scenarios to illustrate, as Reverend J. B. Waterbury does, how ambition and an indomitable spirit motivate men to “toil in the study, breast themselves to danger in the field, and travel among polar snows or scorching deserts.”41 Or, as Alcott does, they use depictions of wasted lives in order to warn readers against the dangers of tobacco and indolence.42 Creating character foils was also a particularly popular and effective literary technique employed to illustrate the consequences of life choices.

 

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Abbott, for instance, recounts the story of two brothers who disobey their father by skating out on the ice and the subsequent effects on their character as one brother confesses to his father and resumes filial duty while the other does not.43 Many authors also invent dialogue to debate various positions, most often between fictional characters but sometimes between two known men, such as Butler’s “dialogue of the dead between Cicero and Lord Chesterfield.”44 Separated in reality by seventeen hundred years, Butler brings the two imaginatively together to let Cicero, one of ancient Rome’s greatest orators and philosophers, call Lord Chesterfield a “Contemptible fop” and voice Butler’s and many other conduct book writers concerns with Lord Chesterfield’s famous, and oft-​printed, advice letters to his son. Most significantly, Cicero charges Lord Chesterfield with “omitting religion and virtue in [his] system” and “set[ting] too high a value on qualifications which dazzle the lively perceptions with a momentary blaze, and depreciate[ing] that kind of worth which can neither be obtained nor understood without serious attention and sometimes painful effort.”45 Captured here are distinguishing features of the conduct book from the advice manual; while conduct books and advice manuals instructed men on how to succeed, conduct books had a core emphasis on morality and altering an individual fundamentally rather than on one’s surface appearance. The proliferation of narrative discourse throughout conduct books illustrates the increasing acceptance and preference for teaching religion and morals through story and the growing “prejudice against essays, lectures, or sermons” noted by Waterbury and other conduct book authors.46

Masculinity in The Book of Mormon First published in Palmyra, New York, in 1830, The Book of Mormon’s scriptural narrative provides an additional example of the shift from straightforward theological treatise to narrative theology found in nineteenth-​century religious print culture.47 Regarded as a divine book of scripture by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints, The Book of Mormon is a complex, multivoiced, and multigenre text that defies easy description. Part biography, part sermon, part narrative, part conduct book, part scriptural commentary, it contains elements similar to many of the most widely read texts of the nineteenth century—​most strikingly, the Bible. Similar to the Old Testament, The Book of Mormon is a composite text tracing a line of Israel over many centuries. It features stories of exodus and civilization, church building and war, family discord and national calamity, divine punishments and blessings.48 Like the Bible, it too attests to the reality of God and shows how he plays a critical role in the lives of his creations by

 



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making covenants with individuals and directing their lives. Similar to the Old Testament, The Book of Mormon employs narrative theology, using stories to teach readers how to be God-​fearing individuals. And like the New Testament, it augments stories with sermons and letters that offer direct counsel and explain complex theological ideas. The Book of Mormon is strikingly different from the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, though, in its forefronting of its authors and editors. Unlike the anonymity of authorship typical of much of the Hebrew Bible and gospels, The Book of Mormon emphasizes the reality of its historical authors and their first-​hand accounts, distinguishing itself as the work of two primary authors or editors: Nephi and Mormon.49 In analyzing Nephi, Mormon, and manhood within The Book of Mormon, I follow Grant Hardy’s lead and treat The Book of Mormon as a “ ‘history-​like’ narrative (a term that can encompass both historical fictions and authentic histories),” which allows for the attribution of text to Nephi and Mormon (rather than the much more cumbersome process of acknowledging authors, implied authors, and narrators) even as it acknowledges and encompasses those who accept and reject the divine origin of the text.50 In analyzing Nephi’s and Mormon’s narrative and authorial roles, along with their presentations of other men, the value of looking at The Book of Mormon in relation to both conceptions of masculinity and the forms that conveyed them in nineteenth-​century moral discourse becomes evident. Admittedly, The Book of Mormon’s use of narrative devices similar to those of conduct books—​such as role models, sermons, letters, dramatic examples, anecdotes, dialogue, and literary foils—​need not connect the two, as many of these devices date back to ancient times and can be found in innumerable texts. However, their appearance in both provides not only a convenient structure for comparing their ideals of manhood but also enables a discussion of how these forms further presentations of masculinity within didactic texts generally as well as an analysis of how the texts may reflect upon and critique one another by their very contemporaneous existence within the same early American print culture. In the division of the book between the small plates, with their intradiegetic, retrospective narrator Nephi, and the large plates, with their extradiegetic, interjecting narrator Mormon, one may find a reflection on two popular modes of nineteenth-​century moral discourse:  biographies and conduct books. 51 The first 120 pages of The Book of Mormon, told through the narrative voice of Nephi, resemble an autobiography. The narrative does not stray from Nephi’s subjective vantage point. And each episodic moment, along with many of the sermons and scripture included, teaches readers how to behave or interact with man or God. Similar to other biographical texts, the extensive focus on one individual may be powerful as readers come to know Nephi, or his projected self, from the time his family leaves Jerusalem and travels to America in 600

 

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BCE until his death. However, the limitations of a biography–​autobiography also become apparent when analyzed in relation to the remaining four-​fifths of the book, attributed to Mormon, a prophet and general living in the Americas in the fourth century CE, who presents himself as the editor or author of the rest of the narrative (except for the last fifty pages, written by his son, Moroni, after his death). Although Mormon’s section of The Book of Mormon—​as a lengthy, integrated, fundamentally theological narrative—​is in its basic structure quite distinct from conduct books, I compare it in some respects to conduct books because it employs many of the same narrative forms, focuses on sharing the character and lives of numerous men, and is vastly different from Nephi’s autobiographical section. While Nephi’s account offers a penetrating view into one man’s life and psyche, providing a level of connection and identification with an individual (strengths of the biographical–​autobiographical form); Mormon’s account is more fragmented and diffuse, constructed from the hundreds of years of his people’s history and the many records he reports to draw from.52 What Mormon’s account offers, similar to conduct books and in contrast to Nephi’s account and biographies in general, are diverse (and at times seemingly contradictory) examples of manhood. These examples broaden the definition of ideal Book of Mormon manhood and make clear its essential elements. By containing different types of moral discourse within the same text, The Book of Mormon both discloses strengths and weaknesses of these types while simultaneously showing how they are complementary and may be joined together to create a more satisfying work. Likewise, juxtaposing Nephi’s and Mormon’s presentations of ideal manhood highlights similarities and differences while simultaneously revealing a more complete picture of Book of Mormon manhood. The Book of Mormon’s presentation of how to be a God-​fearing man may be seen as part of the nineteenth-​century print culture that denounced aspects of the self-​made man to affirm ideals of a manhood built on religious and moral training. While the ideal manhood advocated in The Book of Mormon (hereafter referred to as Mormon manhood) and the ideal manhood defined in early nineteenth-​century conduct books (hereafter referred to as Protestant manhood) correspond in many respects, the two manhoods, stemming from different faith traditions, also diverge in some significant ways—​particularly in relation to fatherhood and patriarchy, wealth and labor, and communication with and dependency upon God. Consequently, within the pages of The Book of Mormon we find a new vision of ideal Christian manhood that challenges the idea that American religion was feminized in the nineteenth century, as it does not support the proposed gender divisions and societal constructions and emphases. Additionally, since the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints emerges out of a primal Protestantism context, the inability of the

 



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feminization’s thesis to account for this movement should cause us to rethink some basic assumptions of the period regarding women’s and men’s changing responsibilities in the home, religious community, and society as well as religion’s diminishing status.

The Autobiographical Small Plates: Lehi and Nephi’s Story The Book of Mormon begins by shoring up ideas of patriarchy and communal manhood, which according to nineteenth-​ century conduct books were quickly becoming displaced by the independent, self-​reliant male (notably, conduct books registered concern with this changing image as well). Unlike popular fiction authored during the early nineteenth century, such as James Fennimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, that feature an individual escaping the evils of society for a new life in the wilderness and promote masculine ideals of personal freedom and autonomy, The Book of Mormon features a family commanded by God to leave Jerusalem and depart into the wilderness. Departure of a lone man would be fruitless, for the point of this exodus is to build the family into a God-​fearing society in the land of promise. Lehi, the patriarch, flees Jerusalem with his wife, Sariah; their two obedient sons, Nephi and Sam; their two often-​disobedient sons, Laman and Lemuel; and possibly unnamed and unnumbered daughters.53 Laman and Lemuel do not believe their father’s vision of the destruction of Jerusalem and do not wish to leave and travel across the ocean to a new continent; the fact that they submit to go is evidence of Lehi’s patriarchal control. The Book of Mormon’s overt emphasis on fathers teaching and passing down religious knowledge to their progeny is in opposition to conduct books’ espousal that mothers were responsible for the moral and religious education of their children. Such a contradiction highlights a cultural tension over which parent should fulfill this crucial role. Rather than the widespread acceptance of the mother as moral anchor and religious educator argued for by the feminization thesis, the likely reality was that parental responsibilities were far more nuanced and disparate from one family and religious faith tradition to the next. Consequently, The Book of Mormon’s presentation of Lehi, not Sariah, as the moral preceptor and chief family educator may have critiqued a growing trend as well as supported a more established and recognizable family configuration in 1830 America. For in The Book of Mormon, the father’s responsibility for his children is undisputed: Lehi is the parent who shares his vision with his sons, pleads with them to follow God, admonishes them to live moral lives, reads and expounds scriptures to them, prays with them, and offers religious sacrifices

 

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with them. Each of these things he does presumably without sharing responsibility with his wife. Though at times she joins him in offering praises or sacrifices to the Lord, the only extended account of Sariah in the text is an episode in which she complains against both her husband and the Lord, questioning Lehi’s judgment in removing the family from Jerusalem, as she fears for the lives of her sons.54 Because Sariah’s complaints contradict Lehi’s faithfulness, the text supports in some respects eighteenth-​century (as well as biblical) patriarchal ideals—​that according to the feminization thesis were on their way out—​where men were believed to be more virtuous, more righteous, more in touch with spiritual matters, and consequently more capable of raising moral children.55 Looking at The Book of Mormon in its entirety, there is only one mention of mothers teaching their children in contrast to the numerous examples of fathers teaching their children. 56 Thus, The Book of Mormon assigns men, not women, the essential task of children’s spiritual and intellectual instruction and thereby offers a deafening critique of any culture that encourages the growing absence of men from the home. At its core, The Book of Mormon is a narrative about the necessity of passing on religious beliefs and instilling moral character from one generation to the next. From our twenty-​first-​century lens, this retrenchment of parental authority to fathers may be read as highly problematic since, according to the accepted historiography, women’s role as moral compass in the home led to many advancements for women in the private and public spheres.57 Consequently, when The Book of Mormon places men in this role, one may interpret the text as a curtailing of women’s voices and access to advancement. However, as leading biblical feminist scholars Phyllis Bird and Sharon Ringe remind us, we must be cautious of reading ourselves onto the text and history.58 Nineteenth-​century women well versed in the Bible and patriarchal church structures were accustomed to religious texts highlighting male rather than female actions; they were adept at finding meaning—​and also themselves—​in the stories of men. For instance, many female preachers in early America compared themselves to and drew strength from Jonah and Jeremiah, seeing these prophets as their personal models and predecessors.59 Consequently, for nineteenth-​century women, the absence of female characters in The Book of Mormon may not have suggested a diminished role for women in actuality. While the text and the religion it founded certainly placed men at the head of the home and its religious institution, as Susanna Morrill points out in her article on women and The Book of Mormon, nineteenth-​century women too found themselves within the text and made it “meaningful for their own lives and priorities.”60 Furthermore, when we take into account the way in which nineteenth-​ century women often went about influencing and altering society, we may even begin to see how The Book of Mormon—​as it asserted religion and parenting

 



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as men’s foremost concerns—​may have raised the status of parenting, religion, and the domestic sphere within the Church of Jesus Christ community, and thereby possibly aided nineteenth-​century women who (to the extent that conduct books and popular literature reflect reality) had these as their chief concerns. Forty years later, we find Harriet Beecher Stowe employing a similar tactic when, in My Wife and I, she depicts marriage as a man’s rather than a woman’s quest, and by so doing, raises the status of the domestic and reinforces it as the essential space for both men and women.61 In a similar vein, although Stowe was one of the most renowned women of her time, she still recognized the sexual double standard that existed and acknowledged in a letter to her brother Henry Ward Beecher that at times “the things to be said are such as a man can far better say & such would only draw malignant reaction on me.” Consequently, she urged him to run an article she had written “as editorial [so] . . . it will have the sanction of your authority.” 62 Stowe is one example among many nineteenth-​century authors who placed their ideas within male characters to give greater weight to their opinions in a male-​dominated nineteenth-​century American society.63 The pervasiveness of this rhetorical move in the nineteenth century, the different expectations that readers brought to scriptural texts, and the historical reality that the domestic sphere increasingly became women’s domains as economic pressures took men outside the home, open up multiple possibilities for how nineteenth-​century readers would have read The Book of Mormon’s presentation of fatherhood. Some would possibly read it as a move to displace women, some as a reassertion of religion and family’s chief importance, and others as either a challenge to changing parental and gender ideas or as a confirmation of a lived reality not often portrayed in texts of the time. Regardless of the interpretation, The Book of Mormon’s presentation of fathers and family dynamics speaks to significant nineteenth-​century issues of parenting, religious authority, and men’s increasing presence outside the home—​certainly indicating more diversity in ideals than accounted for by the feminization thesis. Turning to Nephi, the narrator of the first one-​hundred-​plus pages of The Book of Mormon, we readily recognize his similarities to the Protestant ideal within nineteenth-​century conduct books and biographies as well as how the text establishes him as the ideal God-​fearing man whom readers should emulate.64 In essence, Nephi combines tenacity and initiative with obedience, integrity, and piety. Each story in his narrative illustrates his masculine superiority over his three older brothers in both spiritual and secular terms. Nephi is the brother who fulfills the Lord’s command to return to Jerusalem and obtain the brass plates (a set of scriptures similar to the Hebrew Bible). He is the brother who provides food for his family when they are starving in the wilderness by constructing a bow and seeking inspiration from the Lord on where to hunt.

 

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He is the brother who receives inspiration from the Lord on how to build a ship to take his family over the ocean to the land of promise. For a resistant reader, Nephi’s narrative of himself as the consummate hero may come across as unrealistic (as would most idealized men in nineteenth-​century conduct books and biographies). Regardless, though, readers will likely recognize that Nephi, in his narrative, seeks to exhibit an appropriate mix of initiative and dependence on God; for in each of these instances, Nephi does what he is capable of and then seeks divine assistance to accomplish what he alone cannot.65 As illustrated previously in the excerpt from Hawes, a similar mix of personal initiative and dependence on God was often advanced within many conduct books as well;66 however, the nature of communication and expected reliance on God in The Book of Mormon looks drastically different than in conduct books because of a dissimilar view of how and what God communicates with humankind. This distinction is part of a larger debate over continuing revelation and a closed canon that David F.  Holland persuasively argues is central to understanding religion in early America.67 While many Protestants expected an interactive faith in which God would communicate directly with believers, these communications were personal—​they did not (and could not) constitute new doctrine or direction for the Church. The closed biblical canon reigned supreme, and all personal revelation needed to align with it or be dismissed. God too was bound to uphold acceptable nineteenth-​century moral standards.68 In contrast, through Lehi’s and Nephi’s interactions with the divine, The Book of Mormon emphatically declares God’s sovereignty over moral questions and his ability to offer new and further truths. God does not restrict his counsel to personal direction about leaving Jerusalem, hunting for food, and building a ship; instead, he at times, contradicts established morality, such as when the Spirit of the Lord commands Nephi to take someone’s life so that God’s chosen people may take a record of the House of Israel’s prophetic history to the new world (1 Ne 4:10–​13). Further, God expands on biblical teachings, revealing new truths about Jesus Christ, Adam and Eve’s fall, the scattering and gathering of Israel, repentance, baptism, judgment, and a variety of theological topics. Thus The Book of Mormon—​both in its very existence and in the stories it contains of numerous men receiving direct guidance from the Lord as they see him or hear his voice—​ provides the scriptural precedence for Mormons’ belief in continued revelation and presents a new standard for what it means to seek God’s counsel and direction. This challenge to sola scriptura becomes more pertinent when we see that, as Holland’s work points out, The Book of Mormon is simply one example among many in early America. This phenomenon supports my contention that recognizing distinctions between Protestant and Mormon manhoods is significant, partly because the distinctions reveal larger cultural tensions that decenter the feminization thesis.

 



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The Large Plates: Mormon’s Edited Narrative Approximately ¼ the way through The Book of Mormon an important shift takes place in the book’s narration: Mormon, a prophet who lived nearly 1,000 years after Nephi, introduces himself as the editor of the rest of the book and then explains how he discovered Nephi’s account and decided to include it unchanged within his own work. The placement of Nephi’s autobiographical work before Mormon’s own edited narrative is advantageous not only in terms of content—​ it covers the time prior to the beginning of his narrative—​but also in terms of structure. Following the autobiographical form, Nephi’s narrative has the advantage of featuring a single coherent storyline that draws readers into the text. It therefore works as a gateway into Mormon’s more complex narrative, which features simultaneous storylines, parallel characters and situations, and many forms found in nineteenth-​century conduct books—​biographical role models, sermons, narrative examples, maxims, literary foils, redemption narratives, advice letters, and direct editorial commentary. By analyzing an example of some of these in The Book of Mormon, we may see how these forms contributed to the creation of both Mormon and Protestant manhood as well as how Mormon creates a more complete picture of Book of Mormon manhood—​a manhood that privileges family and community over self, sacred labor and incentives over secular, self-​mastery and the development of the gentler virtues over competition and ambition, and correct motive coupled with obedience to God above all else. Biographical Role Models: King Benjamin. Notably, the first man Mormon writes about in his account is similar to Nephi in many respects. King Benjamin is highly competent, industrious, vigilant, virtuous, benevolent, and obedient. Like Nephi, he speaks to divine beings and receives divine commands that he obeys. The fact that Mormon begins with a description of a man so similar to Nephi indicates a continuation rather than a disconnect of manhood ideals between Nephi’s narration and Mormon’s historical account. Mormon portrays King Benjamin as a man who, like Nephi, acts as a religious and political leader of God’s chosen people, protecting them from temporal and spiritual harm. That the two men privilege the spiritual over the temporal is noticeable in the amount of text devoted to recounting Nephi’s and King Benjamin’s achievements in each area. While the text does briefly acknowledge how each man wields the sword to defend his people, the majority of text about these men concentrates on the spiritual counsel and help they provide their people. This narrative decision underscores the spiritual intent of The Book of Mormon and is at odds with the feminization thesis that men were to be over secular rather than spiritual concerns, which again leads to questions of whether The Book of Mormon destabilized nineteenth-​century ideals that prioritized secular concerns and negated religion’s status or instead supported lived experience. It also illuminates

 

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a discrepancy within conduct books. While many conduct books also explicitly state that piety is more important than worldly prosperity,69 the majority of their text is devoted to teaching worldly success; thus indicating a fissure or way in which the text may be undermining its own message. Sermons:  King Benjamin’s Final Address. Similar to many nineteenth-​ century conduct book authors, Mormon embeds a sermon within his text. His is a sermon with a difference, however, as it is embedded within the narrative of an ideal king. As such, this address draws on the strengths of the sermon form by offering direct admonitions and expanded reflection on chosen topics, while also illustrating how conduct books may enhance their embedded sermons by placing them within a character’s voice whom readers admire—​a technique greatly expanded upon within nineteenth-​century sentimental fiction. While much of King Benjamin’s sermon is devoted to teaching about Jesus Christ and man’s salvation through Christ’s atonement, it also contains instructions on how to become “the children of Christ” (Mosiah 5:7)—​or, in other words, how to become ideal God-​fearing individuals. Stated directly within a sermon, rather than implied through narrative, the qualities that make up Mormon manhood become more explicit, and significant similarities and distinctions between ideal Mormon and Protestant manhood become more apparent. As fear that the self-​ interest, competitive impulse, and individualism promoted by the self-​made man ideal would run unchecked, nineteenth-​ century conduct books advocated a counterideal that stressed, as Anthony Rotundo explains, “Christian benevolence  .  .  .  an ethic of compassion that directed a man’s attention to the needs and concerns of others.”70 King Benjamin epitomizes this ideal as he tells his people he has not “sought gold nor silver, nor [any] manner of riches of [them];” rather he has spent his “days in [their] serv­ ice” (Mosiah 2:12 & 16). Likewise, The Book of Mormon’s presentation of labor and industry is similar to that of conduct books, as both display the benefits of labor: honest labor leads to happiness, peace, and prosperity while idleness is often the source of mischief and wickedness.71 Both also agree that men should pursue wealth to fulfill their responsibilities to provide for their families and to help others in need.72 Distinctions between the two manhoods in this area then are more subtle, only becoming apparent when one notes the motive emphasized and the attitude toward wealth prescribed. King Benjamin, for instance, encourages his people to follow his example by teaching them their relationship to God and explaining their indebtedness to him. In serving others, they serve God; and through their righteousness, they may become his children and receive eternal life.73 While in other places The Book of Mormon does attach moral living to prosperity—​ for instance, “inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments, ye shall prosper in the land” (Alma 9:13) is an oft-​repeated refrain—​qualifying for eternal life with

 



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God remains the clear, foundational motive within The Book of Mormon.74 This is at variance with the primary motive discussed in conduct books. While conduct books do at times motivate through allusions to the next life and mention, as Alcott does, that “the highest of human motives to action [is] the love of God,”75 the constantly emphasized, and thus dominant, motivation in conduct books is how “piety is favorable to worldly prosperity.”76 As Muzzey explains, “genuine piety, instead of being, as you fear, an obstacle in your worldly affairs, would be a positive advantage to you . . . . Integrity, honesty, a pure heart, the habitual reference of your conduct to God, everything that Religion requires of you is thus for your present interest.”77 In fact, the stated primary purpose of most conduct books was to help young men develop the attributes that would enable them to be economically successful.78 In contrast, The Book of Mormon presents wealth as a natural by-​product of labor, industry, and obedience to God’s commandments, but not as something for men to pursue unless they seek it specifically to aid others.79 The Book of Mormon does not explain what exactly a man may do to obtain economic success (though occasional references to industry and labor do occur), and far more warnings against the dangers of wealth than explanations of its benefits appear throughout. For instance, King Benjamin explains, all wealth belongs to God, and men will face “condemnation for withholding [their] substance, which doth not belong to [them], but to God” (Mosiah 4:22). Later in a grippingly postmodern moment in the text, Moroni—​who has received a vision from God of the early nineteenth century—​reaches across time to directly condemn his readers fourteen hundred years in the future for their materialism: “For behold, ye do love money, and your substance, and your fine apparel, and the adorning of your churches, more than ye love the poor and the needy, the sick and the afflicted. O ye pollutions, ye hypocrites, ye teachers, who sell yourselves for that which will canker . . . . Why do ye adorn yourselves with that which hath no life, and yet suffer the hungry, and the needy, and the naked, and the sick and the afflicted to pass by you, and notice them not?” (Mormon 8:37–​39). Moroni’s castigation to a future generation leaves no room for doubt that The Book of Mormon intentionally speaks out against nineteenth-​century America’s increasing emphasis on wealth and commodities to the neglect of Christian alms and benevolence. Narrative Examples:  Missionary Models. The Book of Mormon also narratively underscores the subjection of obtaining wealth to other concerns by forefronting labor for the souls of men rather than temporal welfare. Men are responsible not only for teaching their children about God but also for teaching their neighbors and the whole of society; consequently, the book offers several examples of effective missionaries. Coming from a book that self-​consciously writes about its role in converting nations to Christ, this is not surprising.80 Not only does the book speak about the necessary doctrines of salvation, but

 

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it also provides templates of model missionaries for the many nineteenth-​ century Latter-​day Saint men called to spread their faith.81 While the occasional nineteenth-​century conduct book author, such as Reverend Winslow, does speak of spiritual labor in terms of “evangelizing the world,” with men being asked to “lend [their] sustaining aid to the preaching of the gospel,”82 conduct books do not contain examples or explanations for how to do so, and much more often the spiritual labor mentioned pertains to philanthropy or serving in one’s community. As Rev. Muzzey writes, “An opportunity is now presented to young men, in the various Public Charities, for the culture of a pure philanthropy, and for extensive usefulness. They give scope for every individual, who desires to do good, to lend his efforts and influence, according to his taste, talents, and leisure.”83 So while both The Book of Mormon and conduct books remind men that there are greater things to labor for than wealth, The Book of Mormon structurally and narratively emphasizes this position by providing numerous illustrations of effective missionary work while conduct books offer copious examples of how to succeed in business.84 This is an anticipated distinction given the nineteenth-​century “Protestant ethic that,” as Ann Braude writes, “placed worldly endeavors in competition with otherworldly concerns.”85 Conduct books are clearly a product of this dual emphasis. In contrast, The Book of Mormon’s consistent subjection of the secular to the spiritual provides not only a standard for its followers but also a real, rather than a feigned, challenge to America’s growing emphasis on materialism and removal of men to the commercial sphere—​two aspects of the feminization thesis that appear to be widely accepted if judged by conduct books’ content. Maxims:  Self-​Control. The creation of either ideal manhood—​Mormon or Protestant—​according to their respective texts must be crafted consciously through diligent and strenuous efforts. King Benjamin warns, “If ye do not watch yourselves, and your thoughts, and your words, and your deeds, and observe the commandments of God. . . ye must perish” (Mosiah 4:30). Similarly, as Sarah E. Newton found in her study of conduct books, “self-​control, self-​government, self-​denial, self-​restraint, and discipline of the will are all terms used repeatedly in the conduct book lexicon to reinforce the social construction of masculinity.”86 The ideal man must discipline himself into qualities of character that lead to success; or, as the author of the Young Man’s Own Book writes, “no virtue can become a fixed principle; no principle constantly operative; no operation ready, adroit, and satisfactory; unless it be thus tied, trained and pruned, with a steady, and undeviating hand.”87 Somewhat ironically, the qualities men must work to possess according to both Protestant and Mormon manhood are those commonly presented in conduct books as the natural inheritance of nineteenth-​century women.88 King Benjamin’s list of necessary qualities—​individuals are to be “submissive, meek,

 



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humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him” (Mosiah 3:19) as well as “steadfast and immovable, always abounding in good works” (Mosiah 5:15)—​could be found in most nineteenth-​ century conduct books as a description of qualities women already possessed or may readily acquire.89 Whether intentional or not, this suggests that nineteenth-​ century women, at least as represented in conduct books and popular literature, were in some ways closer to God’s ideal than were their male counterparts. While the endowment of ideal qualities onto men rather than women could again be read as a displacement of women or a throwback to eighteenth-​century America when men were regarded to be the more pious, good, and admirable sex,90 The Book of Mormon’s presentation of women does not support eighteenth-​century notions of women and consequently does not support such a reading. For while The Book of Mormon does privilege men’s experiences with God and rarely mentions women’s spiritual experiences, the text does present women, in gen­ eral, as more righteous and inherently good than men. Spiritual leaders bemoan that they must speak harsh words to men when their “pure” wives and children are present ( Jacob 2:10), and the text repeatedly presents wickedness (with only a solitary exception) as stemming from the workings of men rather than women.91 The image of women as sinful, lustful Eves responsible for the vanity, deceit, and frailty of the world (ubiquitous in the colonial period)92 is certainly not the image of the Nephite and Lamanite women in the text. Further distinguishing itself from both eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century thought, The Book of Mormon rewrites readers’ understanding of Eve and her role in bringing about humanity’s fall. While Eve’s choice has been used by many in the Christian world to justify misogyny, The Book of Mormon presents Eve and her decision as paving the way for posterity, growth, and joy (2 Ne 2:18–​25). Consequently, although The Book of Mormon does continuously assert that men should lead out in the religious life of their homes and communities, it also recognizes the superiority of many of the gentler traits associated with women in the nineteenth century, prioritizes home and family, praises women for their righteousness, and rewrites Eve in a more favorable light. Each instance provides further evidence that The Book of Mormon, as Spencer and Berkey argue in their chapter (Chapter 13 in this volume), cannot be seen as “an uncritically patriarchal book.” Conversion Narratives: Alma the Younger. The text’s complicated relationship with women becomes even more pronounced when its multiple depictions of conversions, most strikingly the central conversion of Alma the Younger, is viewed within the context of early American conversion narratives. For while the vast majority of conversion narratives in The Book of Mormon focus on men, the description mirrors most closely the conversions of women, not men, in early America, which once again indicates that The Book of Mormon (whether intentionally or not) may be endowing the female experience with more validity

 

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by placing it onto men. The experience of conversion was at the center of evangelical Protestantism in early America. In published conversion narratives, individuals describe the personal battle with his or her will to relinquish all claims of self and completely submit to the will of God. Only then do individuals experience peace, joy, and salvation.93 As Susan Juster has found, “The metaphor of rebirth is the most pervasive literary expression for the process of conversion found in evangelical writings.”94 The individual best known for his spiritual rebirth in The Book of Mormon is Alma the Younger. Prior to his rebirth, Alma is a persuasive, powerful speaker who devotes his energy to convincing many to leave the Church that his father, the prophet, has established among the Nephite people. Alma’s persecution of the Church comes to an abrupt end when he experiences a Paul-​like vision: an angel of the Lord appears and commands him to stop persecuting the Church. During the visitation, Alma falls to the earth and remains in a coma-​like state for three days; upon awakening, he is completely transformed. Where he was once idolatrous, wicked, and self-​interested, he is now pious, hardworking, and concerned with helping others. He becomes such a trusted and exemplary figure that he is appointed as both the high priest over the Church and the chief judge of the nation—​leading his people for a time both spiritually and temporally, like Nephi and King Benjamin before him.95 When we focus on the precise wording of Alma’s conversion experience, his narrative becomes interesting from a gender perspective because of its resonation with nineteenth-​century female converts. Juster and Barbara Epstein, in two independent studies of more than 200 detailed conversion narratives published between 1800 and 1830, report the following gender differences: Women dwelled at length and with more emotional intensity on their sinful states and estrangement from God; in proportion to the guilt they felt at their moral failings, grace was experienced with an overwhelming sense of relief and joy. Men tended, on the other hand, to emphasize the practical aspects of sin and salvation. The ‘sins of the world’ took precedence over the ‘sins of the heart’ in their accounts, and were presented almost ‘perfunctorily’ with little of the emotional anguish found in the women’s narratives. Likewise, grace—​when it came—​was received with equanimity and quiet confidence.96 Alma’s description, like those of nineteenth-​century female converts, is one of extreme pathos as he describes his feelings of guilt, sin, and estrangement from God: “I was racked with eternal torment, for my soul was harrowed up to the greatest degree and racked with all my sins . . . . Oh, thought I, that I could be banished and become extinct both soul and body, that I might not be brought to stand in the presence of my God, to be judged of my deeds” (Alma

 



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36:12–​15). Alma also joins these women in describing overwhelming feelings of relief and joy after he submits his will and is saved. In both words and actions—​ being overcome by the spirit and falling to the ground was reported chiefly as occurring among women97—​Alma’s experience parallels most closely a woman’s rather than a man’s conversion experience in nineteenth-​century America.98 That this fact was likely not lost on the book’s initial readers carries interesting implications, as once again the ideal male figure—​even the prophet—​models supposed nineteenth-​century female attributes and behavior. Likewise, Alma’s eventual choice to forego political leadership so he could devote his life to “preaching the word of God in much tribulation” (Mosiah 27:32) provides not only another example of a manhood at odds with nineteenth-​century men’s increasing focus on economics and politics but also a clear privileging of the spheres more closely associated with nineteenth-​century women. That the text aims to teach men to give priority to religion and moral education over politics and business, no matter the cost, is clear. That it also illuminates a cultural undercurrent that resisted seeing these traits, priorities, and spheres as feminine rather than masculine (and thus stands in opposition to the feminization thesis) is also readily apparent when studied within a nineteenth-​century context. What is much more nebulous is the text’s message to (and about) women. For while women lack an overt presence in the text, their implicit presence may be felt throughout as the book continuously privileges the traits, actions, and spheres commonly associated with nineteenth-​century women in conduct books and other popular literature. Editorial Commentary:  Captain Moroni. The Book of Mormon’s depiction of ideal manhood is both complicated and refined when Captain Moroni, a man who does not fit the ideal standard of men previously established, receives Mormon’s highest endorsement.99 Of him, Mormon writes, “If all men had been, and were, and ever would be, like unto [Captain] Moroni, behold, the very powers of hell would have been shaken forever; yea, the Devil would never have power over the hearts of the children of men” (Alma 48:17). In some respects, Mormon’s great regard for Captain Moroni is to be anticipated: A brilliant military strategist, he saves his people repeatedly from enemy armies and expands the nation’s empire through his constant technological innovation; yet he also consistently acknowledges his dependency upon divine guidance, giving God—​ rather than himself—​credit for his people’s victories (Alma 44:3–​5). As shown within the text, however, Captain Moroni does not possess in abundance many of the gentler virtues advocated by Nephi and Mormon, such as temperance, patience, meekness, compassion, and self-​control. Instead, he often appears to be highly passionate, emotional, rash, and quick to anger. Consequently, in Mormon’s presentation of Captain Moroni as an ideal man, he expands the possibilities of what Mormon manhood may look like because while man must

 

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place God before all temporal concerns and desires, his personal strategy for doing so may vary.100 Similar to both conduct book writers and sentimental novelists, Mormon uses editorial commentary throughout to admonish readers to follow his counsel and to make explicit actions, situations, or characters that may otherwise remain obscure. As Captain Moroni’s motives and devotion to God are often not readily apparent through his actions—​which at times seem aggressive or overbearing—​Mormon’s employment of editorial commentary to alter readers’ perceptions of Moroni’s actions is necessary. For instance, embedded letters from Captain Moroni to other military leaders included in the text reveal that he is rash and quick to anger. In one instance, his temper overwhelms reason and he breaks off negotiation for prisoner exchange with an enemy leader; in another example, Moroni severely condemns the chief judge for not sending him desired provisions and reinforcements before realizing that difficult circumstances impeded the chief judge from doing so.101 Yet, Mormon recasts and justifies Captain Moroni’s actions by linking them to his commendable passion for liberty and by endowing him with pure motives: For example, he writes that Moroni acts only for “the welfare and safety of his people” (Alma 48:12); he is “firm in the faith of Christ” and will “defend his people, his rights, and his country, and his religion, even to the loss of his blood” (Alma 48:13). Mormon also explicitly writes that this military leader is a man of God just like “Alma and his sons” (Alma 48:18), men known for their dedication to God and tireless missionary service, even though there is no record of Moroni laboring for the souls of men nor directly communicating with God.102 Consequently, the image that Mormon creates of Captain Moroni in his editorial comments is quite different from the one created solely by his actions and historical documents within the narrative. Fused together, then, Captain Moroni’s actions and Mormon’s commentary create an alternative standard for manhood in The Book of Mormon—​one that shows seedlings of ideals that would become popular in the late nineteenth century in what scholars have defined as Muscular Christianity, an ideal that “linked Christian ideology with rugged masculinity” and that reportedly grew out of protest to the perceived feminization of religion.103 Captain Moroni may be impetuous, outspoken, and quick to anger over real and perceived injustices, but he is also firmly committed to keeping God’s commandments and using his masculine prowess to protect his people and his faith. Within the context of this chapter, the overtly masculine nature of this ideal also raises the question of where women stand in relation to this ideal as their implicit presence is now absent. While the typical ideal manhood in The Book of Mormon embodies the prescribed concerns and attributes of nineteenth-​century women—​suggesting that either women were closer to God’s ideal or that these qualities were not

 



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as gendered as conduct books indicate—​Captain Moroni’s manhood does not. By presenting two such different models, as personified in King Benjamin and Captain Moroni, Mormon not only opens up the possibilities of what men may be like to gain approval but also reveals what he believes to be most essential: a privileging of family and community over self and a devotion to God before all worldly pursuits. This variation in manhood also resonates with The Book of Mormon’s conception of a sovereign God, who, while typically upholding conventional morality, may under extenuating circumstances alter his position. Mormon manhood allows for the same.

Conclusion Lehi, the founding patriarch of The Book of Mormon, implores his sons to “arise from the dust, my sons, and be men” (2 Ne 1:21). The Book of Mormon in turn functions, in a sense, as a guidebook for nineteenth-​century men to do just that. In employing similar rhetorical forms to those found in conduct books and biographies (though notably in a much more complex and intricate narrative), The Book of Mormon provides not only an alternative model to Protestant manhood but also an implicit critique of these forms and an illustration of the advantages of bringing different types of moral discourse together. While the ideal manhood portrayed in The Book of Mormon shares with the Protestant manhood of conduct books an emphasis on self-​control and industry, concern for others over self-​interest, and a call to develop the gentler virtues of humility, compassion, and piety (presented as the innate inheritance of nineteenth-​ century women), it also sets forth an alternative standard for how men are to interact with one another and with God. In The Book of Mormon’s ideal manhood, a focus on self and personal wealth is condemned and a devotion to the spiritual labor of saving souls is assumed. In one’s relationship with God, greater reliance and obedience are required, as men may expect God to give them personal commandments and to assist them in becoming ideal followers of Christ. Together, these departures from the manhood of conduct books reveal a significant challenge to the feminization thesis, as The Book of Mormon manhood unabashedly places faith and family as men’s primary responsibilities and makes men the moral center of the home and the distiller of religious teachings from one generation to the next (notably recalling in many ways the manhood of the Bible as well as of eighteenth-​century America). The text’s placement of prescribed feminine attributes and concerns onto male figures not only leads to questions about whether these qualities were as gendered as conduct books indicate but also complicates the book’s message to its earliest female readers. While women’s lack of prominence in The Book of Mormon may at first appear

 

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to be a displacement, women who read sacred texts (most often the Bible in nineteenth-​century America but also the Quran, the Torah, etc.) have historically found meaning in the stories of men, identified with male characters, and understood female stories through the lens of male narrators and family members. Consequently, The Book of Mormon’s continuous privileging of the traits, actions, and spheres commonly associated with nineteenth-​century women in conduct books and other popular literature may have actually validated and raised the status of these attributes and priorities—​and perhaps even women themselves (within the faith community). Without a detailed study of readers’ responses to The Book of Mormon, the actual impact on male and female readers remains obscure. However, what can be understood through a nineteenth-​century contextual analysis of the text is how The Book of Mormon’s prescription for ideal manhood critiques the American culture that it enters, engages with some of the most pressing religious and gender questions of the nineteenth century (such as continuing revelation, sola scriptura, increasing materialism, and changing gender dynamics and responsibilities), and provides the precedent for the religion Joseph Smith founded—​a religion that, in its nineteenth-​century context, called for its followers to gather to communal societies, to labor spiritually to convert others to their faith, to place fathers as the moral heads of the home, and to seek direct communication with the Lord. To learn how to succeed at such aspirations, nineteenth-​century Church members needed only to look to the examples of their spiritual forefathers in The Book of Mormon.

Notes 1. While this thesis has been challenged by many scholars, it still remains the dominant narrative. For an overview of the historiography of the feminization narrative see Patrick Pasture, “Beyond the Feminization Thesis: Gendering the History of Christianity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Beyond the Feminization Thesis:  Gender and Christianity in Modern Europe, Patrick Pasture and Jan Art, eds. (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2012),  9–​35. 2. Ann Braude, “Women’s History is American Religious History,” in Retelling U.S. Religious History, Thomas A. Tweed, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 105. While Braude and other historians have scaled back the feminization thesis to see it as primarily an explanatory narrative for only Protestant faiths, other historians such as Barbara Welter have seen it as an explanatory narrative for all American faiths. Significantly for this article Welter included Mormonism as an example of one of the faiths that had been feminized (see Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions:  The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens:  Ohio University Press, 1976), 149–​150). Her discussion, however, is quite brief and superficial: To make her argument, she mentions only the female organization of the Relief Society and the necessity of marriage to obtain salvation. She also does not engage in any way with The Book of Mormon. 3. Primal Protestantism, as Claudia Stokes explains, “encouraged ordinary people to take their religious cues directly from scripture, without the meditation of clerical interpretation or religious convention.” See Claudia Stokes, The Altar at Home:  Sentimental Literature

 



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and Nineteenth-​Century American Religion (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 58. 4. William Andrus Alcott, The Young Man’s Guide, 1833, 20th ed. (Boston: T. R. Marvin, 1849), 4. 5. For more information see Sarah E. Newton, Learning to Behave: A Guide to American Conduct Books Before 1900 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994), 2–​11. 6. See for instance Welter’s Dimity Convictions. 7. For more information on colonial manhood, see E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity From the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 2, 10–​18. 8. Rotundo, American Manhood, 13. 9. For more information about competing ideas of nineteenth-​century manhood, see Clyde Griffen, “Reconstructing Masculinity From the Evangelical Revival to the Waning of Progressivism: A Speculative Synthesis,” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 183–​204; Rotundo, American Manhood, 11–​30; Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 11–​29. 10. Even black slaves, Eugene D.  Genovese explains, prescribed to the idea of the Self-​Made Man, taking pride in their masculine efforts of obtaining for their families provisions that slave owners did not provide. While the action of hunting to provide food for the family was seen as a rite of passage into manhood, “women’s work”—​domestic tasks perceived as emasculating—​was largely avoided. For more information see Eugene D. Genovese, “Husbands and Fathers,” in The American Man, Elizabeth H. Pleck and Joseph H. Pleck, eds. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-​Hall, 1980), 173–​181. 11. Rotundo, American Manhood, 3. 12. For more information on the Self-​Made Man’s need for economic success, see David G. Pugh, “The Jacksonian Mystique,” in Sons of Liberty:  The Masculine Mind in Nineteenth-​Century America (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983), 13–​38. 13. As a group, moralists and reformers were particularly concerned about shifting patterns of masculine behavior and sought to promote a type of masculinity where men exercised restraint and self-​discipline in all areas of their lives. For more information on these reformers see Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women:  Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 102–​124. 14.. For information on the popularity of conduct books and their basic construction see Jane E. Rose, “Conduct Books for Women, 1830–​1860: A Rationale for Women’s Conduct and Domestic Role in America,” in Nineteenth-​Century Women Learn to Write, Catherine Hobbs, ed. (Charlottesville, VA:  University Press of Virginia, 1995), 37–​58; Stephen M. Frank, Life With Father:  Parenthood and Masculinity in the Nineteenth-​Century American North (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 26–​28; Newton, Learning to Behave, 43–​ 61; Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-​Class Culture in America, 1830–​1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 1. 15. For a more detailed overview of the ideal Christian man presented in conduct books see Newton, Learning to Behave, 43–​61; Griffen, “Reconstructing Masculinity,” 185–​190. 16. List drawn from Newton, Learning to Behave, 46, 59; Frank, Life With Father, 27–​28. For a list of qualities found in conducts book, see Artemus Bowers Muzzey, The Young Man’s Friend (Boston: J. Munroe & Co., 1836), 10, 24; The Young Man’s Own Book: A Manual of Politeness, Intellectual Improvement and Moral Deportment, Calculated to Form the Character on a Solid Basis, and to Insure Respectability and Success in Life (Philadelphia:  Key, Meilke & Biddle, 1832), 50–​64; Letters to a Younger Brother, on Various Subjects, Relating to the Virtues and Vices, Duties and Dangers of Youth (Philadelphia: American Sunday-​School Union, 1838), 2–​4. 17. For examples, see Alcott, The Young Man’s Guide, 31–​38; Hubbard Winslow, The Young Man’s Aid to Knowledge, Virtue, and Happiness (Boston:  D. K.  Hitchcock, 1837), 29; Jared Bell Waterbury, Considerations for Young Men 1832 (New York: American Tract Society, 1851), 52–​53; Muzzey, The Young Man’s Friend, 59. 18. Muzzey, The Young Man’s Friend, 59. 19. See for example Charles Butler, The American Gentleman (Philadelphia: Hogan & Thompson, 1836), 14, 55; Alcott, The Young Man’s Guide, 55; Young Man’s Own Book,  40–​43.

 

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20. Butler, The American Gentleman, 15. 21. As Newton writes, “According to the common wisdom [of nineteenth-​century advice manuals], woman is different from man in qualities of the heart, in compassion, kindness, chastity, and charity. Her softer disposition makes her more amendable to piety and the habit of virtue; she enjoys an exquisite sensibility . . . . Conduct literature promotes all of these qualities, and more, as natural to the female sex” (Newton, Learning to Behave, 71). For more information, see Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–​1860,” American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151–​174; Rose, “Conduct Books for Women, 1830–​1860,” 49–​50. Though much research has discounted these ideals as presenting the actual, the focus of my research is not actual women but rather the ideal presented in conduct books. 22. For more on colonial men’s responsibilities toward their children, particularly their spiritual and moral upbringing, see Rotundo, American Manhood, 3; Frank, Life With Father,  10–​14. 23. As Rotundo writes, “Females took on the tasks of controlling male passion and educating men in the arts of self-​denial” (American Manhood, 4); as Kimmel further explains, “It was a woman’s job to act as a moral restraint, since men, alone, were not capable of restraining their baser emotions, their violence, their aggressive, competitive, acquisitive edge” (Manhood in America, 37). See also Rose, “Conduct Books for Women, 1830–​1860,” 46, and Catherine A. Brekus, Strangers & Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America 1740–​1845 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 146–​149. 24. See for example Letters to a Younger Brother, 34–​35; Young Man’s Own Book, 289–​294; Butler, The American Gentleman, 284–​285. 25. For a good account of this shift, see Mary P. Ryan, The Empire of the Mother: American Writing About Domesticity 1830–​1860 (New York: Hawthorne Press, 1982), 45–​70. 26. Young Man’s Own Book, 289. 27. See Frank, Life With Father, 31–​35; Ryan, Empire of the Mother,  56–​58. 28. See Frank, Life With Father, 26–​28. According to Frank, “Companionate family ideals and the mother’s acknowledged importance had become so widely accepted [by the 1830s] that such backtracking [to patriarchalism of the past] was out of the question. Accordingly, fatherhood’s midcentury publicists urged men to complement, not replace, the mother’s influence over her children. Even so strong a proponent of men’s domestic duties as Theodore Dwight, Jr. saw the mother, rather than the father, taking the lead in the all-​important task of forming the child’s moral character” (26). 29. For more information, see Barbara Welter, “The Feminization of Religion in the Nineteenth Century,” in Clio’s Consciousness Raised:  New Perspectives on the History of Women, Mary S. Hartman and Lois Banner, eds. (New  York:  Octagon Books, 1976), 137–​157; Mary P. Ryan, The Cradle of the Middle Class:  The Family in Oneida County, New  York, 1790–​ 1865 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1981), 75–​83; Richard D. Shiels, “The Feminization of American Congregationalism, 1730–​1835,” American Quarterly 33.1 (Spring 1981): 46–​62. 30. Welter, “The Feminization of Religion,” 138. 31. Welter, “The Feminization of Religion,” 138,151. 32. Ann Douglas, Feminization of American Culture, 1977 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998), 23–​28, 36, 121–​165. 33. For this study I drew examples from the following dozen conduct books written and published in the 1820s and 1830s. Jacob Abbott, The Young Christian Or A Familiar Illustration Principles Christian Duty (New York: American Tract Society, 1832); Alcott, The Young Man’s Guide; Butler, The American Gentleman; Joel Hawes, Lectures Addressed to Young Men of Hartford and New Haven, and Published at Their United Request (Hartford, CT: Oliver D. Cook & Co., 1828; Boston: Congregational Board of Publication, 1856); A Father’s Gift to His Son, on His Becoming an Apprentice. To Which is Added Dr. Franklin’s Way to Wealth (New York: Samuel Wood & Sons, 1821); Letters to a Younger Brother; Muzzey, The Young Man’s Friend; Waterbury, Considerations for Young Men ; Winslow, The Young Man’s Aid to Knowledge; Young Man’s Own Book ; The Young Man’s Sunday Book; A Practical Exhibition of Doctrines, Duties, and Principles, Adapted to Improve the Taste, to Excite the Reflection, and to Promote the Piety, Usefulness, and Happiness, of the Young (Philadelphia: Key & Biddle, 1835). 34. Hawes, Lectures Addressed to Young Men, 122.

 



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35. Hawes, Lectures Addressed to Young Men, 122–​125. 36. Abbott, The Young Christian, 4. 37. For more examples see Winslow, The Young Man’s Aid to Knowledge, viii; Waterbury, Considerations for Young Men 1832, 5; Butler, The American Gentleman, vii. 38. Interestingly, many of the conduct books studied came out against novels in favor of reading biographies and history. See for instance, Muzzey, The Young Man’s Friend, 48–​51; Letters to a Younger Brother, 72, 120. 39. Winslow, The Young Man’s Aid to Knowledge,  26–​27. 40. Letters to a Younger Brother, 121. 41. Waterbury, Considerations for Young Men 1832,  57–​59 42. Alcott, The Young Man’s Guide 1833, 183–​191, 48. 43. Abbott, The Young Christian, 13–​17; For other examples, see Muzzey, The Young Man’s Friend, 93–​99; Letters to a Younger Brother, 13–​25, 31–​33, 63–​67,  78–​79. 44. Butler, The American Gentleman, 114–​119. 45. Butler, The American Gentleman, 115, 117. 46. Waterbury, Considerations for Young Men 1832, 5; Douglas, Feminization of American Culture, 86–​88, 121–​165. 47. For more on this shift see David S. Reynolds, “From Doctrine to Narrative: The Rise of Pulpit Storytelling in America,” American Quarterly 32.5 (Winter 1980): 480–​488. 48. For a good overview and introduction to The Book of Mormon, see Terryl Givens, The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3–​81. 49. For a good introduction to these two narrators see Grant Hardy, Understanding The Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 12–​28, 89–​120. 50. Hardy, Understanding The Book of Mormon, 26. See pp. 23–​28 for an explanation on the acceptability of this approach within literary studies. 51. Conduct books lauded both biographies and autobiographies as important tools of instruction. Found within many of the conduct books previously discussed are endorsements of biographies. As Rev. Muzzey asserts, “there is no kind of reading which is more entertaining than biography, and there is none which is more instructive .  .  .  . I  have never found any books which made me more anxious to excel, than good biographical sketches” (Muzzey, The Young Man’s Friend, 20). Written to instruct and provide life models, biographies and autobiographies enjoyed an immense readership in the nineteenth century, the most popular being Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, which was reprinted in various forms nearly 120 times before 1860. For information on the popularity of biographies and autobiographies in nineteenth-​century America, see Scott E. Casper, Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-​Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 1–​2. Information on Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography may be found in Nian-​Sheng Huang and Carla Mulford, “Benjamin Franklin and the American Dream,” in The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin, Carla Mulford, ed. (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2008), 150. 52. Mormon at the beginning of his narrative writes, “I cannot write a hundredth part of the things of my people” (152). 53. See Sidney B. Sperry, “Did Father Lehi Have Daughters Who Married the Sons of Ishmael?,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 4.1 (Spring 1995): 235–​238; Daniel H. Ludlow, Companion to Your Study of The Book of Mormon, (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Books, 1976), 131–​132. 54. 1 Ne 5:1–​9. 55. For more information about eighteenth-​century perceptions on the moral superiority of men, see Frank, Life With Father, 9–​15. Frank explains, “General cultural assumptions about women’s moral and intellectual inferiority, and suspicion that mothers were prone to indulgence, made them less suitable parents in the Puritan mind . . . . Protestant family advisers insisted that fathers should take the predominant role in child rearing and should exercise moral leadership of the family” (Life With Father, 10–​11). Sariah’s concern for her children and complaining against her husband could be taken as a negative example of motherly indulgence. 56. The Book of Mormon records the account of 2,000  “stripling warriors,” a group of young men known for their exact obedience to God and their unwavering diligence, courage, and

 

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strength. Mormon writes that they “had been taught by their mothers, that if they did not doubt, that God would deliver them.” As they voluntarily went to war to defend their people, “they rehearsed unto [their captain] the words of their mothers, saying: We do not doubt our mothers knew it” (Alma 56:47–​48). 57. See footnote 30. 58. Phyllis A. Bird, Missing Persons and Mistaken Identities: Women and Gender in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis, MN:  Fortress, 1997), 6–​7; Sharon H. Ringe, “When Women Interpret the Bible,” in The Woman’s Bible Commentary, Carol A Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe, eds. (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1992), 1–​2. 59. Brekus, Strangers & Pilgrims, 165, 172. 60. Susanna Morrill, “Women and The Book of Mormon:  The Creation and Negotiation of a Latter-​Day Saint Tradition,” in Historicizing “Tradition” in the Study of Religion, Steven Engler and Gregory P. Grieve, eds. (New York: de Gruyter, 2005), 130. Notably, Morrill primarily looks at how women discussed Eve and the mothers of the stripling warriors. My own study of the Woman’s Exponent, however, sees them also drawing on the examples of Nephi, Lehi, King Benjamin, and Alma. 61. For a more in-​depth analysis of this, see Amy Easton-​Flake, “Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Multifaceted Response to the Nineteenth-​Century Woman Question,” New England Quarterly 86.1 (March 2013): 53. 62. As cited in Joan Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 372. Stowe makes a similar move when she chooses to publish her House and Home Papers, a series of essays on domestic matters that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, under the pseudonym “Christpoer Crowfield” and to make a man rather than a woman the narrative voice. On a religious note, Stowe also “used Christ to deepen awareness of what she took to be the special gifts of women and blacks” by endowing him with what she regarded to be the ennobling qualities of women and African Americans (Richard W. Fox, Jesus in America:  Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession (New  York:  HarperCollins, 2004), 219. 63. Suffrage and anti-​suffrage novels throughout the nineteenth century display this move often, as the arguments for or against suffrage are often shared by men. In a related move, “women tried to validate their call to preach by writing their stories over the Bible,” using the Bible’s ethos as a means to promote their own position (Brekus, Strangers & Pilgrims, 172). Likewise they “patterned their memoirs on male examples in order to sound more orthodox” (Brekus, Strangers & Pilgrims, 171). 64. Put succinctly, “The conduct book ideal for American men combines the Masculine Achiever’s traits of industry, competitiveness, and self-​assertion  .  .  .  with the Christian Gentleman’s moral values and emphasis on self-​denial and self-​sacrifice” (Newton, Learning to Behave, 51). 65. In each of these stories, Nephi combines self-​reliance with dependence on the Lord in order to be successful. Building the ship is clearly partnership between Nephi and the Lord as he does what he is capable of and then asks God for direction (1 Ne 17:7–​12). To obtain food, he constructs the bow on his own but seeks inspiration from the Lord through his father on where to hunt (1 Ne 16:23–​31). To obtain the plates, he first devises a plan to purchase the plates from Laban with their immense wealth, but when it fails, he then relies completely on the Lord to prompt him and then does as God commands him. When these promptings include killing Laban, Nephi makes it clear that this idea is reprehensible to him, but after he is prompted three times, he obeys. This moment is meant to showcase Nephi’s complete submission and obedience to God (1 Ne 3–​4). 66. Griffen, “Reconstructing Masculinity,” 186; Newton, Learning to Behave, 61; For examples see, Abbott, The Young Christian, 61, 121; Hawes, Lectures Addressed to Young Men, 55, 122–​ 125; Muzzey, The Young Man’s Friend, 39. 67. David F. Holland, Sacred Borders:  Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 68. For a good overview of evangelical Protestants’ beliefs and actions in early America, particularly their views on revelation and a closed biblical canon, see John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm:  Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1998), 104–​124.

 



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69. For instance, Hawes writes, “All knowledge is worthless in comparison to this. To know Thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent:—​this is true knowledge—​this is eternal life” (Hawes, Lectures Addressed to Young Men, 176). 70. E. Anthony Rotundo, “Learning About Manhood: gender ideals and the middle-​class family in nineteenth-​century America,” in Manliness and morality Middle-​class masculinity in Britain and American 1800–​1840, J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 38. 71. Nephi offers a good example of the benefits of temporal labor immediately after separating his people from his brother’s people. He describes his people as living “after the manner of happiness” as they harvest, raise stock, and construct buildings (2 Ne 5:9–​27). He describes his brother’s people as “an idle people, full of mischief and subtlety, and did seek in the wilderness of beast of prey” (2 Ne 5:24). 72. Frank, Life With Father, 29–​31; Rotundo, “Learning about Manhood,” 38. For primary examples, see Winslow, The Young Man’s Aid to Knowledge, 29; Alcott, The Young Man’s Guide35; Muzzey, The Young Man’s Friend, 59; Waterbury, Considerations for Young Men52–​53. Muzzey and Waterbury both ask a series of questions to readers to help them evaluate their motive for seeking wealth. 73. See Mosiah 2–​5. 74. See also 1 Ne 2:20, 1 Ne 4:14, 2 Ne 1:9, 2 Ne 1:20, 2 Ne 4:4, Jarom 1:9, Alma 36:1, Alma 36:30, Alma 37:13, Alma 38;1, Alma 50:20. 75. Alcott, The Young Man’s Guide 1833, 16. 76. Muzzey, The Young Man’s Friend, 151. 77. Muzzey, The Young Man’s Friend, 151. 78. See Newton, Learning to Behave, 59–​60. For primary examples, see Muzzey, The Young Man’s Friend, 74, 150; Alcott, The Young Man’s Guide 1833, 140; Young Man’s Own Book, 35, 40; Hawes, Lectures Addressed to Young Men, 23–​24, 80–​81, 105–​106; Winslow, The Young Man’s Aid to Knowledge, 101–​102. 79. “But before ye seek for riches, seek ye for the Kingdom of God. And after that ye have obtained a hope in Christ, ye shall obtain riches, if ye seek them; and ye shall seek them, for the intent to do good; to clothe the naked, and to feed the hungry, and to liberate the captive, and administer relief to the sick, and the afflicted” (126). 80. Nephi, for example, writes toward the beginning of his record, “The fullness of mine intent is that I may persuade men to come unto the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, and be saved” (16). Later, Nephi concludes his record by addressing three groups ( Jews, his family’s posterity, and the Gentiles) and explaining how the record he is writing will be the instrument for bringing them all back to Christ:  “[the record] shall be given them for the purpose of convincing them of the true Messiah” (104; see also 105, 110–​ 111). Mormon, in an impassioned effort to explain his reason for writing his record, also declares that he does so to bring all to a knowledge of Christ (524). 81. To learn more about early Mormon missionary efforts, see Davis Bitton, “Kirtland as a Center of Missionary Activity, 1830–​1838,” BYU Studies 2 (Summer 1971):  497–​516; R. Lanier Britsch, “The Boldness of the Mormon Missionary Enterprise,” in Go Ye Into All the World: The Growth and Development of Mormon Missionary Work, Reid Larkin Neilson and Fred E. Woods, eds. (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Books, 2012), 309–​321. 82. Winslow, The Young Man’s Aid to Knowledge, 408. 83. Muzzey, The Young Man’s Friend, 175–​176. 84. See for instance Letters to a Younger Brother, 86–​92; Young Man’s Own Book, 40–​41; Hawes, Lectures Addressed to Young Men, 9, 128; Winslow, The Young Man’s Aid to Knowledge, 110–​111,  31. 85. Braude, “Women’s History is American Religious History,” 96. Here Braude discusses the widespread acceptance of Perry Miller’s thesis, that “the primary threat to religion in American culture came from the marketplace, and from a Protestant ethic that placed worldly endeavors in competition with otherworldly concerns” (94). 86. Newton, Learning to Behave, 59. 87. Young Man’s Own Book, 47; see also Hawes, Lectures Addressed to Young Men, 90, 125; Alcott, The Young Man’s Guide 1833, 7.

 

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88. As Newton writes, “Conduct literature promotes all of these qualities, and more, as natural to the female sex” (Learning to Behave, 71). See also Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–​1860,” 151–​174; Rose, “Conduct Books for Women, 1830–​1860,” 49–​50. Brekus, Strangers & Pilgrims, 146–​149. 89. See Newton, Learning to Behave, 71, 77. 90. Rotundo, American Manhood, 10–​18; Brekus, Strangers & Pilgrims, 146–​147. 91. For example, Jacob addresses his people, chastising the men for their wicked behavior, comparing their wickedness against the gentle, delicate and pure nature of their wives ( Jacob 2:5–​10); wicked men cast righteous women and children into a fire (Alma 14:8); Nehor uses flattery and cunning to persecute the Church and incite rebellion and pride in the people (Alma 1:2–​6); Korihor convinces groups of people that there will be no Christ (Alma 30:12–​18); wicked men come together to create “secret combinations,” rebellious groups that conspire to overthrow governments, murdering both religious and political leaders (Helaman 6–​9); Mormon, as he grieves over the wickedness of his people, describes the suffering inflicted by men upon women and children (Moroni 9:8–​10). The one example of female wickedness is from the Jaredite nation when a daughter comes up with a plan to help her father obtain the kingdom (Ether 8:8–​10). 92. Brekus, Strangers & Pilgrims, 146–​147. 93. Susan Juster, “‘In a Different Voice’: Male and Female Narratives of Religious Conversion in Post-​Revolutionary America,” American Quarterly 41.1 (March 1989): 34–​62. 94. Juster, “ ‘In a Different Voice,’ ” 37. 95. See Mosiah 27–​29. 96. Juster, “ ‘In a Different Voice,’ ” 36; See also Barbara Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelicalism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-​Century America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), 45–​65. 97. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm, 121. 98. Likewise Alma is closer to early nineteenth-​century female preachers who emphasize supernatural encounters—​dreams, visions, voices—​when explaining their call to preach; in contrast to men who consistently downplay more supernatural elements (Brekus, Strangers & Pilgrims, 182–​183). 99. Another sign of Mormon’s great regard for Captain Moroni is that he names his son after the military hero. 100. Two examples of Moroni’s obedience to God include when he states, “it is according to his commandments that I do take my sword to defend the cause of my country” (Alma 60:28). And, “I, Moroni, am constrained, according to the covenant which I have made to keep the commandments of God” (Alma 60:34). 101. See Alma 54:5–​14, 55:1–​2, and 60:1–​13. 102. Moroni has the prophet Alma inquire of the Lord where the armies of the Nephites should go rather than asking the Lord himself. This could signal an appropriate understanding of the chain of revelation or it could signal his own inability to receive direct counsel from the Lord (Alma 43:23–​24). 103. Bryce Traister, “Muscular Christianity,” in American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003), 323.

 

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“I Lead the Way, Like Columbus” Joseph Smith, Genocide, and Revelatory Ambiguity Zachary McLeod Hutchins

In 1831, when Alexander Campbell examined The Book of Mormon, he found a text deeply engaged with contemporary political and theological disputes. Campbell charged that the volume’s translator, Joseph Smith, through his stone spectacles, wrote on the plates of Nephi, in his book of Mormon, every error and almost every truth discussed in New York for the last ten years. He decides all the great controversies;—​infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government, religious experience, the call to the ministry, the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the question of free masonry, republican government, and the rights of man. All these topics are repeatedly alluded to.1 Discussing current events in the antiquated English of the King James version of the Bible was a popular pastime for aspiring American authors, who produced many pseudo-​biblical texts that referred directly to prominent political and social leaders. “By conditioning contemporaries to apply biblical language to American content,” Eran Shalev suggests, these political tracts written in the sacred idiom of scripture “may have helped to ameliorate readers’ reactions to and digestion of the Mormon Bible.”2 But notwithstanding Campbell’s discernment of specific allusions to the religious, political, and social movements of antebellum New York, The Book of Mormon does not dwell on particulars and name names in the way that other pseudo-​biblical texts did; no person, place, or Zachary McLeod Hutchins, “I Lead the Way, Like Columbus”: Joseph Smith, Genocide, and Revelatory Ambiguity. In: Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon. Edited by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190221928.003.0017

 

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occurrence in US history is ever mentioned in the text.3 If The Book of Mormon is a commentary on the happenings of nineteenth-​century New York, it is an exceptionally indirect and abstruse reflection on those events. Only one passage in The Book of Mormon refers to historical figures and events with sufficient specificity to establish an exegetical consensus. In its opening pages, Nephi, an ancient prophet contemporary with Jeremiah of the Bible, who journeys with his family from Jerusalem to the Americas, beholds a vision of European travel to and conquest of the Western Hemisphere: And it came to pass that I looked and beheld many waters; and they divided the Gentiles from the seed of my brethren. And it came to pass that the angel said unto me, behold the wrath of God is upon the seed of thy brethren! And I looked and beheld a man among the Gentiles, who was separated from the seed of my brethren by the many waters; and I beheld the spirit of God, that it came down and wrought upon the man; and he went forth upon the many waters, even unto the seed of my brethren, who were in the promised land. (1 Nephi 13:10–​12) Within eleven years of The Book of Mormon’s publication, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints had come to agree that the “man among the Gentiles” led by God across “many waters” to the Americas was Christopher Columbus.4 Nothing in the text identifies Nephi’s man among the Gentiles as Columbus; he could be Columbus’s cabin boy, Bartholomew de las Casas, Amerigo Vespucci, John Cabot, John Smith, or a thousand other Renaissance-​era explorers. This insistence on naming Columbus is just one manifestation of a larger exegetical tradition Mormon readers participate in with many other Christians who employ a hermeneutics of specificity that identifies particular individuals and events as the fulfillment of prophecy, rendering sacred text transparent to faithful readers.5 Indeed, Columbus himself evinced a belief in the particularity of revelation when he identified a biblical prophecy foretelling his discovery “of these lands by the mouth of Isaiah, in many places of his Book, affirming that from Spain His holy name should be proclaimed” in the Americas; throughout his life, Columbus collected textual fragments from the Bible and the works of secular writers, such as Seneca, in a new compendium of inspired writings on the Americas sacralized with the title Libro de las Profecias [Book of Prophecies].6 In that sense, reading Columbus into The Book of Mormon only extends an extant tradition of Columbian exegesis, in which the discovery of America is predicted in and sanctified by a new, extra-​biblical  canon.

 



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A unanimous belief in the clarity of Nephi’s vision has led readers of The Book of Mormon from Joseph Smith and Parley Pratt to Phebe Young and Orson Scott Card to characterize Columbus as a model of prophetic leadership. This exegetical tradition makes Columbus into the first of the modern Mormon prophets, a figure who both predates and posthumously authorizes the prophetic missions of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and their apostolic successors. But identifying Columbus as the man “wrought upon” by the spirit of God in Nephi’s vision would seem to make claims for the holiness of The Book of Mormon contingent on the divine origins—​and, presumably, the outcomes—​of Columbus’s errand to the Americas. Revisionist historians demonized Columbus as a genocide in the years leading up to the 1992 Quincentennial of his arrival in the Americas, yet readers committed to The Book of Mormon’s truthfulness have continued to honor Columbus, and many now wrestle with the question of how to reconcile their belief that his travels were inspired by God with an awareness of the horrific consequences of his voyage. The particularity and exclusivity of Mormon interpretive practices has committed the LDS Church and, thus, most readers of The Book of Mormon, to the defense of an individual who died almost three centuries before Joseph Smith was born; unfortunately, this persistent link between The Book of Mormon and Columbus threatens to make Smith’s translated history of indigenous America into an apology for the atrocities of European imperialism and Amerindian genocide—​which it is not. However, the Mormon commitment to Columbus has shaped the ways in which LDS readers address the question of theodicy. Paradoxically, this commitment to Columbus and a narrow interpretation of Nephi’s prophecy also underscores the ambiguity and opacity of revelation in the Mormon theological tradition. If Columbus, who went to his grave convinced that he had sailed to China, Japan, and the East Indies, was inspired to discover the American continents, then he badly misunderstood that divine communication. Making the Genoese admiral into a model of prophetic leadership means acknowledging that the receipt of revelation is an imperfect, iterative process by which inspired individuals discern the will of God to the best of their abilities and then accept correction or clarification as necessary to fully implement or explain divine purposes.7 Like the apostle Paul, Columbus and other members of the Mormon prophetic pantheon “see through a glass darkly” and “know in part” during mortality; Nephi and the other prophets who speak in The Book of Mormon regularly acknowledge their own fallibility and the limits of their knowledge, although LDS readers have seemingly been slow to take those acknowledgments seriously.8 As for Smith: He never led the way like Columbus more convincingly than when he interpolated mistaken notions about the earth’s shape or the admiral’s biography with declarations of divinely revealed truth.

 

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Golden Pages, American Edens Reading The Book of Mormon in tandem with primary documents recounting Columbus’s four journeys to the Western Hemisphere would seem like an obvious interpretive move even in the absence of an exegetical tradition linking the admiral to Smith’s translation of sacred history. The Book of Mormon declares itself to be an account of biblical peoples living in the ancient Americas, and stories about Columbus’s voyages represented an important knowledge source for nineteenth-​century men and women interested in pre-​Columbian Native American culture and history. Before his introduction to the golden plates on which The Book of Mormon had been written, whatever Joseph Smith knew (or thought he knew) about the inhabitants of ancient America likely originated with contemporary understandings of Columbus, the subject of a popular 1828 biography by New York’s own Washington Irving. That Smith found a history of the Americas—​“the islands of the sea,” in Nephi’s parlance (2 Nephi 29:11)—​written on golden plates seems more than a little ironic given Columbus’s famously fruitless search for gold throughout the islands of the Caribbean. Irving speaks of Columbus and his men receiving “golden ornaments” and “masks ornamented with gold,” but the original Spanish account, summarized by Irving, explains that Native gifts to Columbus consisted of gold plates beaten so thin that they resemble the pages of a book: “Este oro facian en fojas muy delgadas” or “This gold they make into very thin pages.”9 Although Smith probably did not comprehend the precise nature of these golden ornaments and masks, both he and Columbus came to understand Native culture and biblical history through the prism of gold plates; the finding and interpreting of golden Native artifacts ultimately defined the prophetic missions of both men.10 For Columbus, the discovery of rivers running with gold dust and golden artifacts beaten to the slenderness of paper prompted a belief that he had rediscovered the gold mines of Ophir, the legendary source of Solomon’s wealth. Perhaps Columbus saw himself foreshadowed in the biblical account of Job as well as in the prophecies of Isaiah:  “Then shalt thou lay up gold as dust, and the gold of Ophir as the stones of the brooks.”11 Speaking of the easy riches King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella might expect from him on future voyages, Columbus wrote, “To Solomon on one journey they brought six hundred and sixty-​six quintals of gold  .  .  .  and you may command it to be collected there, if you wish.” However, Spain’s access to these riches is made contingent on a mixture of magical and sacred skills possessed only by Columbus. Anticipating that others might attempt to locate Ophir without his help, Columbus declared that “to return to it, they would have to follow an unknown route; it would be necessary for them to go to discover it as if for the first time. There is a method

 



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and means derived from astrology and certain, which is enough for one who understands it. This resembles a prophetic vision.” Prophecy—​a process of understanding divine truth through the supernatural—​was the key to discovering gold, but the discovery of mineral wealth also reciprocally spurred Columbus’s receipt of revelation.12 After handling small quantities of Native gold on his first and second voyages, Columbus progressively sacralized the American landscape, declaring that the New World housed both Solomon’s mines and Eden itself. On his third voyage, encountering cooler-​than-​expected equatorial weather, light-​skinned Native peoples, and an unanticipated freshwater current from the Amazon and Orinoco river plume, Columbus concluded that the earth was not spherical but pear shaped: the earth “is like a very round ball, and on one part of it is placed something like a woman’s nipple.” The Western Hemisphere tapers inward to a mountain so massive that this section of the earth resembles the “stalk” of a pear, and Columbus was sailing uphill, so to speak, toward its stem. Dante, in his Divine Comedy, had located Eden on top of a mountain in the Western Hemisphere at Jerusalem’s antipode, and Columbus came to adopt similar geographical views, declaring that at “the summit of the extreme point . . . I believe that the earthly paradise is there.”13 However, Columbus never sought to enter Eden or even verify his tentative identification of its location; rather, his discovery of Eden constituted a sign that the lands he had discovered were full of riches to be used for the conquest of another holy site: Jerusalem. Columbus saw the “plates of gold” crafted for Native necks and ears as scriptural signifiers that clarify and locate biblical narratives, but these revelations were coincidental to his quest for gold, signs that God approved of the use to which he would put his soon-​to-​be-​found wealth (financing another campaign against the Muslim occupants of Jerusalem in preparation for the Millennium), not an end in and of themselves.14 Prophetic visions, biblical exegesis, and the discovery of sacred sites were by-​products of his eschatological quest for funds to finance the next crusade, not the reason for Columbus’s interest in Native peoples. Columbus viewed the riches of the New World from a position of theological imperialism, determined to mine mineral and scriptural resources for the benefit of an Old World ecclesiastical hierarchy, exporting gold and biblical clarity in an attempt to retake Jerusalem. Smith began his prophetic career with a similar (and similarly unrewarded) fixation on material wealth, rather than the revelatory significance of invaluable Native relics. Richard Bushman explains that in the years following an 1820 vision in which Smith saw the embodied forms of God the Father and Jesus Christ, the boy prophet often employed divination skills to recover lost objects and in 1825 spent several weeks employed by Josiah Stowell, Sr., searching for “an ancient Spanish mine where coins had been minted and buried.”15 Smith’s

 

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familiarity with tales of buried treasure led him, like Columbus, to conflate astrology and folk magic with prophetic vision and biblical revelatory aids like the Urim and Thummim. Smith also reportedly confessed to an associate that his first sight of Nephi’s gold plates stimulated greed instead of a reverence for and interest in the sacred history they contained; despite an angelic warning that the record could only be obtained “with an express view of glorifying God,” Smith sought the plates to “add to his store of wealth.” However, on “attempting to take possession of the records a shock was produced upon his system, by an invisible power.” Then, imagining that the records might be published and sold as a sort of prequel to the story of Columbus’s expedition, Smith struggled to strip his interest in the book’s contents from calculations of its value: A history of the inhabitants who peopled this continent, previous to its being discovered to Europeans by Columbus, must be interesting to every man; and as it would develope the important fact, that the present race were descendants of Abraham, and were to be remembered in the immutable covenant of the Most High to that man, and be restored to a knowledge of the gospel, that they, with all nations might rejoice, seemed to inspire further thoughts of gain and incom[e]‌from such a valuable history. Surely, thought he, every man will seize with eagerness, this knowledge, and this incalculable income will be mine.16 Even as Smith fought to turn his mind from the material wealth represented by the gold plates to their presentation of sacred history, he found himself monetizing truth. The defining issue of Smith’s nascent career as a prophet became his ability to divest his interest in The Book of Mormon from his desire for wealth. Forced by an angel to wait four years before retrieving the gold plates, Smith gradually abandoned his dreams of Spanish mines and bestselling history books to seek financial stability in pursuits unrelated to the golden plates.17 Like Columbus, Smith regarded the gold he eventually handled as evidence of the landscape’s sacred history. Nephi identifies the Americas as a “promised land” in his vision of the “man among the Gentiles,” and that phrase appears almost fifty times in The Book of Mormon (1 Nephi 13:12); Smith extended that designation temporally in subsequent revelations by identifying North America—​and Daviess County, Missouri, more specifically—​as the land “east of the garden of Eden” where Adam and Eve lived after being cast out of paradise.18 Heber Kimball, one of the original twelve apostles ordained in the LDS Church, recalled that atop a hill near the Grand River, Smith “led us a short distance to a place where were the ruins of three altars built of stone, one above the other, and one standing a little back of the other . . . . ‘There,’ said Joseph, ‘is the place where Adam offered up sacrifice after he was cast out of the garden.’ ”19

 



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Both Columbus and Smith identified the Western Hemisphere as the location of a historical Eden, but their respective reactions to this information speak to a divergence in their understandings of sacred geography and the burden of eschatological preparation. Columbus rejected, out of hand, the possibility of visiting or regaining Eden, arguing that “the earthly paradise is in the form of a rugged mountain” and “that no one could reach the summit.” The purpose for which God had inspired him with this understanding was to identify the New World as a source of sacred wealth to be used for the reclamation of an extant holy site prior to the Millennium. Smith, on the other hand, planned to found a new, sacred city in Eden’s Missouri outskirts. Columbus saw prophecy as the key to a reconquest of Canaan, while Smith regarded revelation as a means by which to construct a new, sacred society and landscape from scratch. Smith learned in the golden plates that the New World would be “the place of the New Jerusalem,” relocating the burden of eschatological anticipation to lands occupied or coveted by the proto-​imperial United States (Ether 13:3). Gold is a sign of millennial aspirations for both men, but the locus of those aspirations is markedly different for Columbus, a child of Europe, and Smith, who was born in Vermont. According to Oliver Boardman Huntington, who met Smith as a teenager and recorded his memories of the prophet’s teachings many years later, Smith shared Columbus’s conviction that the earth’s shape was irregularly ovoid rather than spherical.20 But whereas Columbus imagined a single mountainous “protuberance” in the Western Hemisphere, Smith apparently believed that explorers would eventually find two, one at each pole, and “described the shape of the earth at the poles as being a rounded elongation, and drew a diagram of it in this form: which any one can readily see will allow the sun’s rays to fall so near perpendicular to the center that that part of the earth may be warmed and made fruitful.”21 In this secondhand account of Smith’s theology, mountainous protuberances at the poles provide a temperate refuge for the lost Ten Tribes of Israel, who The Book of Mormon promises will eventually be “gathered in from the four quarters of the earth, and from the north countries” (Ether 13:11), a phrase Smith apparently understood to mean the North Pole, before “Zion will be built upon this [the North American] continent” and “the earth will be renewed and receive its paradisiacal glory.”22 Smith identifies the earth as ovoid in order to locate peoples whose conversion is key to a larger program of salvation that will culminate in the human family’s return to Eden—​a return Columbus rejected in his search for gold. Both prophetic programs of geographic analysis were keyed to the possession of holy sites in preparation for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ: Columbus hoped to retake Jerusalem in fulfillment of biblical prophecy, while Smith sought to realize Book of Mormon prophecies by sending missionaries to convert the “remnant of the house of Joseph”—​Amerindians—​ who would eventually build a New American Jerusalem “like unto the Jerusalem

 

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of old; and they shall no more be confounded, until the end come, when the earth shall pass away” (Ether 13:8).

Crowd Sourcing Columbian Hermeneutics Joseph Smith’s admiration of the admiral may have originated in the teachings of Parley Pratt. An early convert convinced of Smith’s divine calling by The Book of Mormon, Pratt devoured the book over the course of twenty-​four hours. He subsequently “shaped the Mormon theological system” more than anyone other than Smith, as Terryl Givens and Matthew Grow have demonstrated; when Pratt delivered a sermon on The Book of Mormon, “even [Oliver] Cowdery and Joseph Smith ‘were surprised at the great amount of evidence there was in the Bible concerning these things.’ ” Pratt introduced the Mormon view that Columbus was inspired into print in his 1837 pamphlet, A Voice of Warning and Instruction, a text that, “Next to the Book of Mormon itself  .  .  .  soon became the principal vehicle presenting Mormonism to the Latter-​day Saint faithful and the general public alike, and it was elevated by both to near canonical status.”23 Pratt, more than Smith, is likely responsible for the Mormon reverence for Columbus. In A Voice of Warning and Instruction, Pratt casts Columbus as an announcer of unpopular truths whose vindication—​his discovery of America—​foreshadows the inevitable validation of Smith and The Book of Mormon. Pratt’s description of Columbus as “an obscure individual of limited education, but blessed with a largeness of heart, a noble genius, a mind which disdained to confine itself to the old beaten track,” emphasizes characteristics he shares with Smith, Pratt, and other early Mormon leaders, who framed their ignorance and socioeconomic disadvantages as signs that their theological and ecclesiastical achievements must have divine origins. Pratt’s Columbus, in fulfillment of biblical prophecy, “soared aloft, as it were on eagles wings” until “a new world presents itself to the wondering nations of the East, destined, at no distant period, to become the theatre of the most glorious and astonishing events, of the last days.”24 The discovery of America was, from Pratt’s perspective, divinely directed in preparation for the program of millennial restoration that Smith announced. Pratt reiterated his Columbian message in a second pamphlet three years later. In An Address (1840) Pratt hails The Book of Mormon’s discovery “as among the most glorious events of the latter times” and asks rhetorically, “why then, is it so much opposed and neglected at the present time?  .  .  .  Answer,—​Upon the same principle that a Messiah was crucified, a Stephen stoned, a James slain, a Paul beheaded, a Peter crucified, a John banished, a Rogers burned, a Columbus neglected, ridiculed, and envied.” Pratt’s Columbus is one of many

 



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visionary figures who fulfill divine purposes by enabling the dispersal of truth, but he holds no unique significance in Mormon theology; Pratt never wrote of Columbus as “the man among the Gentiles.”25 Instead, Columbus’s relevance to The Book of Mormon was first delineated in Charles Thompson’s treatise Evidences in Proof of the Book of Mormon (1840), which extends and develops Pratt’s praise for the admiral. Thompson does not explicitly identify Columbus as the fulfillment of Nephi’s vision, but his words echo The Book of Mormon: And be it known unto you, O ye Gentiles, that this Columbus was inspired by the Almighty Jehovah to make this discovery, that the poor and meek of the earth, and the persecuted and oppressed of all nations might have a place to which they could fly and be secure from the iron grasp of poverty, wretchedness and want, and from the cruel unrelenting hand of the oppressor.26 Nephi describes American colonists as Gentiles fleeing “out of captivity” to the Western Hemisphere in search of freedom from “their mother Gentiles” (1 Nephi 13:16–​17). Thompson’s account of Nephi’s vision translates Gentile “captivity” into the “iron grasp of poverty,” transforms hostile “mother Gentiles” into “the cruel unrelenting hand of the oppressor,” and names Columbus as Nephi’s “man among the Gentiles.” The splinter sect of Mormons that Thompson presided over after Smith’s death (Baneemyites) quickly dispersed, but his insertion of Columbus into The Book of Mormon constitutes a more enduring theological legacy. In the following decades, Thompson’s insinuation that Columbus’s discovery had been predicted in The Book of Mormon would become an interpretive consensus. A biographical essay on Columbus printed in two different nineteenth-​ century LDS periodicals taught that the explorer “felt that he was destined by God for the great work of discovering a new world. This agrees with the Book of Mormon, which expressly states that he was moved upon by the Spirit of God to accomplish his work.”27 Of course, Columbus believed that he had found an old world described by Marco Polo, and The Book of Mormon does not state that Columbus was inspired to discover a new world. But the ambiguity of Nephi’s vision was erased by an early Mormon belief in the particularity and transparency of scripture; it was not Thompson’s exegetical authority that created interpretive unanimity but a collective confidence in the specificity and clarity of prophecy. Columbus was celebrated as Nephi’s “man among the Gentiles” in sermons by Orson Hyde, Brigham Young, and George Cannon; poems by Hannah King and Orson Whitney; essays by William Gibson and Phebe Young; and an early Book of Mormon commentary by George Reynolds and Janne Sjodahl.28

 

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More important, Columbus’s special relationship to The Book of Mormon and the LDS Church was cemented in a vision received by the apostle Wilford Woodruff in 1877. Woodruff presided over the St. George Temple, where Church members administered baptism and other saving ordinances to the deceased by proxy. In a September 1877 sermon, Woodruff reported that two weeks ago, “the spirits of the dead gathered around me, wanting to know why we did not redeem them,” and he responded to their plea for redemption by being immersed in the waters of baptism on behalf of 100 “eminent men . . . including John Wesley, Columbus, and others.”29 The admiral’s posthumous induction into the ranks of salvation irrevocably solemnized his standing as an inspired leader who prepared the way for a Mormon restoration, and Woodruff ’s views of Columbus were ratified and extended by the LDS Church in 1990 and 1991, when baptismal work was completed for 108 men thought to have sailed as crew members under the admiral.30 Having accepted Woodruff ’s evaluation of Columbus, subsequent Mormon thinkers—​more familiar with the explorer’s checkered moral record, perhaps, than Pratt or Woodruff—​have labored to reconcile their belief in The Book of Mormon’s account of inspired action with the horrific consequences of Columbus’s discovery, which precipitated the decimation of Native peoples.31 Collective certainty as to the identity of actors in Nephi’s relatively vague vision has inspired a century of apologetics and theodicy.

Genocide and the Breaking of Eggs When Robert Wiley unearthed a collection of six bell-​shaped brass plates “covered with ancient characters” from a mound near Kinderhook, Illinois, editorials in the local newspapers demanded that Joseph Smith translate the inscriptions in order to demonstrate the divinity of his earlier translation of The Book of Mormon. John Taylor, an apostle and editor of the Mormon newspaper at Nauvoo, the Times and Seasons, responded confidently, asserting that although Smith had not yet announced “what his opinion concerning them is,” he could and would translate the Kinderhook plates.32 Soon thereafter, in a May 1, 1843, editorial, Taylor called on Columbus’s discovery of the New World as a precedent for Smith’s discovery of the gold plates and his work as a revelator.33 Speaking of The Book of Mormon, Taylor declared, “A few years ago, although supported by indubitable, unimpeachable testimony, it was looked upon in the same light by the world in general, and by the religious world in particular, as the expedition of Columbus to this continent was by the different courts that he visited.” Taylor wrote that the discovery of the Kinderhook plates

 



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might “convince the sceptical, that such things have been used, and that even the obnoxious Book of Mormon, may be true; and as the people in Columbus’ day were obliged to believe that there was such a place as America; so will the people in this day be obliged to believe, however reluctantly, that there may have been such plates as those from which the Book of Mormon was translated.”34 Implicit in Taylor’s analysis is a belief that Columbus and Smith are parallel figures, prophetic leaders whose inspired discoveries were prematurely dismissed by shortsighted skeptics. This comparison to Columbus found at least one receptive reader: Smith himself. In a sermon delivered three weeks later, on May 21, 1843, Smith reflected on the parallels between his life and that of Columbus—​reflections stimulated, presumably, by Taylor’s recent editorial. Speaking on the first chapter of Peter’s second epistle, Smith declared, I am going to take up this subject by virtue of the knowledge of God in me, which I  have received from heaven .  .  .  . I  break the ground; I lead the way, like Columbus when he was invited to a banquet, where he was assigned the most honourable place at table, and served with the ceremonials which were observed towards sovereigns. A  shallow courtier present, who was meanly jealous of him, abruptly asked him whether he thought that in case he had not discovered the indies, there were not other men in Spain who would have been capable of the enterprise? Columbus made no reply but took an egg and invited the company to make it stand on end. They all attempted it, but in vain; whereupon he struck it upon the table so as to break one end, and left it standing on the broken part, illustrating that when he had once shown the way to the New World, nothing was easier than to follow it.35 The Columbus that Smith invokes as a model of Mormon prophetic leadership is an iconoclast defined by his willingness to destroy, both materially and intellectually (a belief in the inviolability of the egg as well as the egg itself), in order to accomplish sacred purposes. A prophet, Smith suggests, is an individual capable of discerning when breaking is an evil to be avoided and when brokenness is an inevitable precursor to standing. Smith’s story of the broken egg is a powerful reminder of violence justified in the name of Mormon theology as well as the hemispheric suffering incurred by Columbus’s arrival.36 Although Nephi’s account of colonization attributes the mass enslavement, infection, and murder of Native peoples to divine orchestration, the larger canon of Mormon scripture clearly indicates that a loving Heavenly Father mourns whenever his human children suffer—​even when God

 

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himself has imposed that suffering as a punishment for wickedness. Speaking of Noah’s Flood, God declares, the fire of mine indignation is kindled against them and in my hot displeasure will I send in the floods upon them . . . but behold their sins shall be upon the heads of their fathers Satan shall be their father and misary shal be their doom and the whole heavens shall weep over them even all the workmanship of mine hands wherefore should not the heavens weep seeing these shall suffer?37 The Mormon deity mourns even his own acts of destruction, and while God explicitly commands his covenant people to commit genocide in the Bible—​ “go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass”—​The Book of Mormon never endorses ethnic violence so bluntly.38 In fact, genocide is consciously rejected on multiple occasions in The Book of Mormon as prophetic leaders refuse to allow their armies to continue killing their sworn enemies once a battle is decided (Alma 43–​44; 3 Nephi 3–​5). On another occasion in the Book of Alma a group of sworn pacifists, the “righteous people” of anti-​Nephi–​Lehites, choose not to resist against Lamanite violence; approximately a thousand are killed, but their extermination is avoided when the attacking Lamanites unexpectedly abandon this project of ethnic cleansing (Alma 25:14). Many of the Lamanites choose to join the people of anti-​Nephi–​ Lehites, and the ancient Nephite prophet Mormon, who narrates the account, draws a lesson from this abortive attempt at genocide: “the people of God were joined that day by more than the number of those who had been slain; and those who had been slain were righteous people; therefore we have no reason to doubt but they are saved. And . . . there were more than a thousand [Lamanites] brought to a knowledge of the truth; thus we see that the Lord worketh in many ways to the salvation of his people” (Alma 24:26–​27). Mormon contends that in this instance, at least, God worked salvation by allowing the innocent to suffer; both the innocent victims and their repentant attackers are gathered into the covenant fold. But Nephi rationalizes the Amerindian genocide, attributing atrocities associated with European colonization to his God: I beheld the spirit of God, that it wrought upon other Gentiles; and they went forth out of captivity, upon the many waters. And it came to pass that I beheld many multitudes of the Gentiles, upon the land of promise; and I beheld the wrath of God, that it was upon the seed of my brethren; and they were scattered before the Gentiles, and were smitten.

 



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And I beheld the spirit of the Lord, that it was upon the Gentiles; and they did prosper. (1 Nephi 13:13–​15) Nephi “beheld the wrath of God” scattering Native peoples, but he did not, presumably, see a visible manifestation of God’s wrath; rather, he saw that Native peoples were smitten and attributed that outcome to divine agency. Yet the ultimate cause of Native genocide, in Nephi’s account, is clearly divine. Foretelling the genocide of Native peoples, “even that they are not,” he explains that their downfall will come about “after the Lord God shall have camped against them round about, and shall have laid siege against them with a mount, and raised forts against them” (2 Nephi 26:15). He laments “the pain, and the anguish of my soul for the loss of the slain of my people” but feels constrained to “cry unto my God, thy ways are just” (2 Nephi 26:7). For Nephi, at least, the genocide that followed Columbus’s arrival was both divinely sanctioned and reconcilable with his belief in a perfectly just and loving God. Although Jared Hickman has emphasized the dissonance of competing prophetic voices in The Book of Mormon and, in particular, places Nephi’s vision at odds with the declarations delivered centuries later by the resurrected Jesus to Nephi’s descendants, Christ’s words in The Book of Mormon seem to restate Nephi’s basic understanding of European colonization. Framing the imperial conquest of the Americas as a product of the divinely established Abrahamic covenant, the resurrected Christ explains, then fulfilleth the Father the covenant which he made with Abraham, saying, in thy seed shall all the kindreds of the earth be blessed, unto the pouring out of the Holy Ghost through me upon the Gentiles, which blessing upon the Gentiles, shall make them mighty above all, unto the scattering of my people, O house of Israel: and they shall be a scourge unto the people of this land. (3 Nephi 20:27–​28) Both Book of Mormon accounts of colonization associate a European incursion into the Americas with the scattering of Israel and the scourging of Amerindian peoples; both accounts indicate that God has blessed or prospered the colonizing Gentiles. But another passage cautions against reading this divine blessing as an unconditional approval of the colonizing Gentiles’ treatment of Native peoples. Jesus warns “that if the Gentiles do not repent, after the blessing which they shall receive, after they have scattered my people,” they will be destroyed (3 Nephi 20:15). Colonizing peoples have been blessed by God, but Jesus suggests that blessing comes in spite of Europeans’ heinous handling of Amerindian relations and not because of it. The Gentiles must repent for their treatment of Native peoples or be destroyed.

 

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In the nineteenth-​century United States this position might have surprised some readers; public opinion generally embraced ethnic cleansing as a necessary prelude to colonization. Indeed, when The Book of Mormon was published in 1830, a belief that God intended European immigrants to displace the indigenous inhabitants of North America was relatively common. The possibility that Native peoples might eventually disappear and cede their land to peoples of European descent was even codified in the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which stipulated that Indian “lands shall revert to the United States, if the Indians become extinct.”39 Three years later, William Cullen Bryant expressed a poetic certainty that this apparently inevitable process of racial replacement was divinely directed. Describing the decline of Native populations, Bryant declared, Thus change the forms of being; thus arise Races of living things, glorious in strength, And perish, as the quickening breath of God Fills them or is withdrawn.40 Of course, neither Bryant nor the twenty-​first US Congress claimed to speak by inspiration, and modern readers have both decried the Indian Removal Act and largely forgotten Bryant’s poetry. The Book of Mormon, on the other hand, enjoys a much broader readership today than it did in 1830, and the vast majority of its audience are committed to its teachings in a way that Bryant’s remaining readers, for example, are not. And so Mormon readers continue to ask why God would inspire Columbus to cross the Atlantic when that event precipitated so much suffering and death. Fittingly, Pratt was the first to recognize and respond to this interpretive quandary. However, rather than resort to an essay or sermon citing the biblical justifications for genocide typically deployed by American Protestants, Pratt sorrowfully considers the Native deaths incident to European exploration in his abbreviated epic poem, The Millennium.41 When America’s indigenous peoples see Columbus’s ship arrive on the ocean, they Nor little dreamed, the Gentiles were at hand, To smite and drive them, from their blessed land. With warmest friendship, they their guests sustain, Until too late, they find their struggles vain: Whole fleets and armies, lined their lengthened shore; With din or armour bright, and cannon’s roar; Their cities burned, and drenched with human gore, They sunk in ruin and were known no more.42

 



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Pratt’s account of “Gentiles” who “smite” Native peoples and populate a “blessed land” is clearly indebted to The Book of Mormon, but the Mormon apostle casts the victims of colonial violence in a far more sympathetic light than Nephi or even Jesus Christ did. Their “warmest friendship” is betrayed, and in disturbing phrases like “drenched with human gore” Pratt makes visible the abstract violence of the “wrath of God” in Nephi’s vision. Furthermore, Pratt associates the Native peoples who resist colonization with values held sacred by European colonists-​cum-​citizens:  “liberty still thundered” from the tongues of Native orators who “Assert their rights” and then, overpowered, “with reluctance yield their lawful right” and “give the struggle o’er,/​Tamely submit, and seek their rights no more.”43 This repetitive emphasis on Native rights diverges from the Nephite worldview, in which righteousness—​and not the Lockean natural rights Pratt seems to be invoking—​guarantees life, liberty, and property within the promised lands of America. Nephi’s father Lehi declares that those who “shall keep [God’s] commandments, they shall prosper upon the face of this land . . . . But behold, when the time cometh that they shall dwindle in unbelief . . . he will cause them to be scattered and smitten” (2 Nephi 1:9–​11). From this theological perspective, Lehi’s descendants who abandon Nephi’s faith in Jesus Christ—​“we talk of Christ, we rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, we prophesy of Christ” (2 Nephi 25:26)—​have no rights to the land. Pratt’s palpable unease at the erasure of Native rights suggests a measure of uncertainty with respect to the justice of Nephi’s theology and the Native genocide precipitated by Columbus’s arrival.44 Indeed, Pratt proceeds to plead with God for the end of Native suffering, a plea that is answered, in the poem, by Smith’s nineteenth-​century restoration of Christ’s church in the Americas. Pratt—​who wrote long before the LDS Church publicized Joseph Smith’s first prayer and his ensuing first vision of God the Father and Jesus Christ as an originary moment authorizing the restoration of an apostolical church—​makes an Indian’s prayer the precipitating cause of that revelation. Thus, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints becomes an answer to the pleas of Native peoples suffering the pains of colonization, an institution meant to prevent Amerindian extinction rather than a theological system that justifies genocide. The poem preserves a Book of Mormon emphasis on the centrality of Amerindian spirituality in the work of restoration, in opposition to the autobiographical emphasis of Smith’s First Vision. Pratt’s unnamed and imagined representative Native youth prays, Great Spirit of our fathers lend an ear, Pity the red man—​to his cries give ear, Long hast thou scourged him with thy chastening sore,

 

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When will thy vengeance cease, thy wrath be o’er; When will the white man’s dire ambition cease, And let our scattered remnants dwell in peace? Or shall we, (driven to the western shore) Become extinct and fall to rise no more? Forbid, great Spirit; make thy mercy known, Reveal thy truth, thy wandering captives own.45 The truths of The Book of Mormon are Pratt’s response to genocide. As Hickman notes, The Book of Mormon predicts “the future glory of the descendants of the Lamanites—​modern Amerindians”—​and foretells a day when “America is suddenly no longer the promised land of white Christians, but rather the ‘land of [Indian] inheritance.’ ”46 Instead of supersession, The Book of Mormon predicts the resurgence and revenge of Native peoples, who “shall be among the Gentiles, yea, in the midst of them, as a lion among the beasts of the forest, as a young lion among the flocks of sheep, who, if he go through both treadeth down and teareth in pieces, and none can deliver” (3 Nephi 21:12). But Pratt’s emphasis on this inclusive, triumphant Native future sidesteps The Book of Mormon’s entanglement with a problematic, violent American past and its catalyst: Columbus.

Insanity and Historical Counterfactuals Confronted by new details about, or at least a new perspective on, the immoral actions of Columbus—​who enslaved Native peoples and presided over scenes of violence, even if he did not personally inflict bodily harm—​Mormon readers have struggled to reconcile their belief in his prophetic mission with their revulsion for his documented misdeeds. An awareness of Columbus’s moral failings seemed to reach the collective Mormon consciousness in 1892, during preparations for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Emmeline Wells, in an editorial for the LDS Woman’s Exponent, acknowledged that when Columbus “became avaricious, rumors of his misrule” led to his banishment from Hispaniola.47 The details of Columbus’s crimes and the extramarital sex that produced his bastard son Ferdinand are left unspoken, omissions that are due to Victorian politeness, perhaps, more than the theological discomfort their inclusion might have caused. But thinking about Columbus’s moral failings did cause discomfort and raise troubling questions. “Was Columbus Inspired?” asked Susa Gates, Brigham Young’s daughter and a prominent LDS author. Gates affirms that Columbus was inspired, but she also differentiates between revelation—​which she defines as the exclusive provenance of a prophet possessing the priesthood authority given by Jesus Christ

 



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to Peter—​and inspiration. Inspiration, Gates explains, may come regardless of an individual’s personal failings. Columbus, she writes, was inspired “when he felt a persistent guiding to find the way around the earth. He had not a revelation; if he had, he would not have supposed this land to be India, for revelations are never partly true.” By insisting on revelatory essentialism—​it is or it is not; there is no room for revelatory mistransmission or human error—​Gates strips Columbus of his prophetic status but stops short of denouncing the explorer for his sins: “Can we who are finite and full of follies afford to condemn where He does not?” If God allowed Columbus to visit Woodruff, Gates implies, the admiral clearly deserves his place in heaven whether we understand the logic of that decision or not, and so she concludes by insisting that “up in that bright place where the spirits of the great and good of the earth are dwelling, one of the highest and noblest spirits there is that of Christopher Columbus.”48 Although Gates and Wells acknowledge Columbus’s failings, they, like Pratt, largely skirt the question at hand: How could God work through a man so obviously sinful? Arnold Garr, writing for a press given to Mormon apologetics, concluded that God could not and therefore did not. The end of Columbus’s second voyage, when “the Admiral succumbed to pressure to provide a profitable export to Spain, and therefore consented to the establishment of forced labor and enslavement of native Americans,” Garr concludes, “seems to have been a turning point in Columbus’ career. There is very little evidence in the following few years that he received the same kind of divine guidance and inspiration that he had been so blessed with earlier in his life.”49 Rather than rejecting his status as the divinely inspired prophet–​leader of Nephi’s vision, Garr concludes that Columbus was a prophet on the first voyage—​until he wasn’t on the second and third voyages—​until he was, again, on the fourth voyage when he heard the voice of God once more.50 Garr seems to provide a Mormon twist to the insanity theory, which posits that after his first voyage Columbus’s life suggests “a weakened mind or evidence of senility” and “mad ravings.” But Columbus, as Carol Delaney demonstrates, was remarkably consistent in both his thought processes and his claims to divine guidance; readers who accept his claim to inspiration on the first voyage would seem to have scant grounds for rejecting similar claims made on subsequent Atlantic crossings.51 James Talmage, a twentieth-​century apostle, accepted Columbus with all of his warts and offered a different answer to Gates’s question. God, Talmage explained, uses even the selfish desires of mankind, their passions and their prejudices, their antipathies, their loves and their hates, by overruling for eventual good. Queen Isabella wanted brighter diamonds for her ears, more lustrous pearls for her neck, richer spices for her table, rarer

 

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perfumes for her boudoir; but the hand of the Lord was in what she did! Columbus thought of wealth and fame, but he was doing the work of God nevertheless.52 Talmage flirts with a Leibnizian optimism in which evil—​selfishness, prejudice, and hate—​is repurposed by God to create the best of all possible fallen worlds. Central to this perspective is the Mormon belief in a fortunate Fall; as Lehi teaches, “Adam fell, that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy” (2 Nephi 2:25). Adam’s transgression and its associated consequences, characterized as curses by most Christians, are understood to be blessings in Mormon theology. The Fall serves God’s purposes because “death hath passed upon all men, to fulfill the merciful plan of the great Creator” (2 Nephi 9:6). “[I]‌t must needs be,” Lehi stipulates, “that there is an opposition in all things,” and The Book of Mormon insists on juxtaposing pairs of radically opposed values: There can be no health without sickness, no happiness without misery, no pleasure without pain, and death is a merciful, necessary prerequisite to eternal life (2 Nephi 2:11). In Pastwatch:  The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (1996), the controversial LDS novelist Orson Scott Card comes to a similar conclusion. At the novel’s end, as Card’s Columbus reflects on the meaning of his life, the explorer determines that “There is no good thing that does not cost a dear price. That is what Cristoforo learned by looking back upon his life. Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price.”53 In a sophisticated defense of Columbus’s election to a Mormon pantheon of prophets, Card centers his novel around the proposition—​key to the broader corpus of Card’s work—​that pain, death, murder, and even genocide may be necessary evils that serve a greater good and fulfill sacred purposes, just as the Fall and physical death are keys to happiness and eternal life in Mormon theology. Abner Doon, the genocide of Card’s first epic, The Worthing Saga, is a figure of God whose decision to destroy human civilization leads to humanity’s rebirth in a brighter, happier future, and Card invites his readers to sympathize with Doon’s choice.54 Similarly, in the Ender Wiggin series, Ender’s involuntary commission of xenocide (the genocide of an entire alien species) leads to a future in which many sentient species learn to coexist peacefully, including a more progressive and egalitarian version of the insectoid aliens (buggers) that Ender had supposedly destroyed.55 The majority of Card’s early career thus revolved around the work of offering faith-​promoting answers to a single theological question: How can a loving God countenance or even promote pain, not just at an individual level, but at the scale of genocide? Pastwatch is the apotheosis of this iterative probing, a novel in which Card addresses that question within a specifically Mormon context, justifying and then reversing, within his fictional

 



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world, the hemispheric pain imposed by Columbus and prophetically foretold by Book of Mormon prophets. Pastwatch presupposes the ability of future historians to view and, through the use of time machines, to alter the past—​producing a new counterfactual history. The preeminent historian of Card’s novel, Tagiri, decides that Columbus’s discovery of the Americas was the single worst event in world history, a pivotal moment that eventually led to devastating famines, wars, and environmental crises. Determined to keep Columbus from decimating Native populations and opening the New World to African slavery, she studies the admiral’s life only to learn that Columbus’s voyage of discovery (and, thus, her own timestream) has been engineered by the time travel of Interveners, another group of Pastwatch historians who had survived an alternative future even worse than Tagiri’s present, a counterfactual world in which the Tlaxcalan conquest of Europe had globalized the Amerindian practice of human sacrifice.56 This act of moral imagination, in which Card conjures up a hypothetical history even more horrific than that produced by the transatlantic slave trade, is a first step in his project of defending Columbus as a divinely inspired figure, a step Card takes even as he mournfully acknowledges the atrocities stemming from Columbus’s discovery.57 If The Book of Mormon God (or, here, semi-​omniscient Pastwatch Interveners from the future) chose to send Columbus to the New World, Card implies, how can mortals with a much more limited perspective know that his discovery and its attendant consequences were not for the best? Or, at least, for the better—​ because the godlike Pastwatch historians of Tagiri’s timestream also change history, constructing a new future for the Americas better than the Columbian genocide spurred on by the Interveners and foretold by Book of Mormon prophets. That Card has Smith and his golden plates in mind becomes apparent by the end of the novel, if not earlier.58 When the historians of Pastwatch travel in time and successfully prevent the Columbian genocide, they carry with them “a metal plate” that “separated into four thin leaves, on which there was a great deal of writing—​all of it almost microscopically small”—​leading the inhabitants of this new future to an invaluable archive recounting our own past, a now-​ counterfactual history of Native death, African slavery, and European domination (PW 396–​397). This record, modeled on the metal plates and alternative American history discovered by Smith, suggests that Card has kept Mormon records in mind throughout and that The Redemption of Christopher Columbus is just as much an apology for Smith or The Book of Mormon as for Columbus himself. Indeed, Card positions Columbus as a stand-​in for Smith, a charismatic prophet wrongfully persecuted as a delusional zealot by historians. When the Interveners send Columbus west, seeking to prevent the Tlaxcalan conquest of Europe, those omniscient figures appear to him in a holographic

 

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projection clearly meant, by Card, to recall Smith’s own First Vision. Tagiri and her team of Pastwatch historians, previously puzzled by the certainty of Columbus’s faith in an impossibly short Atlantic route to the Indies, eventually see the Interveners revealing themselves to a kneeling Columbus, who has just survived a life-​and-​death struggle, on an isolated Portuguese beach: “The vision resolved itself into two men, shining with a faint nimbus all around them. And on the shoulder of the smaller of the two men there sat a dove. There could be no doubt in the mind of any medieval man, especially one who had read as much as Cristoforo, what this vision was supposed to represent. The Holy Trinity” (PW, 115). This image of two embodied, anthropomorphic deities—​God the Father, standing at the side of Jesus Christ—​delivering a prophetic commission is a re-​creation of Smith’s own theophany, and the Pastwatch detection of these Interveners suggests, in the spirit of John Taylor, that future events and historical discoveries will someday corroborate Smith’s account of divine communication. Like Card’s Columbus, Smith began his prophetic journey in a similar moment of solitude in nature, when he saw the physiological forms of Jesus Christ and God the Father: “I saw two personages (whose brightness and glory defy all description) standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name, and said, pointing to the other) ‘This is my beloved Son, hear him.’ ”59 Card collapses the distinction between Columbus and Smith, giving the lie to Givens’s declaration that “There can only be one first Mormon prophet.”60 Smith, in his role as translator of The Book of Mormon, and Columbus, as the explorer foretold by Smith’s scripture, have jointly authored American history in Card’s novel. For Card, any consideration of Columbus necessitates a reevaluation of Smith and vice versa; the two are inseparably linked by virtue of their mutually reinforcing prophetic missions. Columbus—​and thus, implicitly, Smith—​predictably emerges as the hero of Card’s novel; even Tagiri expresses admiration for the man whose life she seeks to undo. Card, through Tagiri, excuses Columbus for his crimes because he “understood too well that in the minds of the Spaniards, their victims had not been human,” any more than the buggers destroyed by Ender were human (PW, 43). Columbus “caused the destruction of the world,” Tagiri concludes, but he was not “responsible for the devastation of our planet” because “I’m not talking about moral responsibility anyway, I’m talking about cause” (PW, 46–​47). In distinguishing between causation and accountability, Card seeks to rescue the admiral’s moral character and prophetic potential; he is a “great man” whose “virtues transcended the milieu of his life” (PW, 48), and thus he is a worthy vessel for “the spirit of God” (1 Nephi 13:12), Card implies, because like the Roman soldiers forgiven by the crucified Christ, Columbus and his sailors “know not what they do.”61

 



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But if Columbus could not know the consequences of his actions, The Book of Mormon God who sent him to the New World surely did, and the larger question of theodicy—​How can a loving God countenance or even promote genocide?—​still stands. Card’s answer dwells on the dilemma faced first by the Interveners, who effectively ended the future in which they lived when they sent Columbus across the Atlantic, and then by Tagiri herself, whose decision to stop Columbus would similarly unmake the future in which she lives and thus instantaneously kill everyone—​millions—​in the timestream she inhabits. Tagiri secures the global consent of those whose lives she would end (a population facing devastating famines and war: horrors that persuade them to accept a quick, painless transition to nonexistence for the good of humanity as a whole), but she still throws a switch that will commit mass murder. She does so to prevent the suffering of those in her own time and also to stop Columbus, providing a better future for the African and Native peoples exploited in Europe’s colonization of the New World, so readers are inclined to sympathize with her decision. Card clearly presents genocide as the best possible choice in at least this one context. And when Tagiri commits genocide so that Columbus will not, Card extrapolates from her decision a larger principle: “Always something must die so that another organism can live. And now a community, a world of communities must turn their dying into a banquet of possibilities for another” (PW, 262). This, then, is Card’s theodicy: Just as biological life is always inescapably enabled by the suffering and death of other biological life forms, so too is spiritual life, and while it is necessary that we join God in weeping for the losses inherent in that trade (especially when it involves the suffering of sentient beings, whether Noah’s contemporaries or the anti-​Nephi–​Lehites or the Taino Indians), grief should not prevent the faithful from appreciating the possibilities and new life enabled by death. Furthermore, Card suggests that if we—​like The Book of Mormon God or Pastwatch historians—​could weigh the human suffering incurred by the Columbian genocide against the benefits of promoting Christianity and Enlightenment ideals, as well as the averted suffering of counterfactual alternatives to Columbus’s discovery, we might well conclude that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Yet Card imagines a better world than that authorized by Nephi’s vision anyway, a world in which Tagiri’s second wave of Interveners prevent European colonization, Native smallpox epidemics, and African slavery. The progressive but iterative nature of Card’s American history—​first a global Tlaxcalan empire based on human sacrifice; then the putatively less disastrous Columbian genocide; and finally a peaceful, intercultural Caribbean empire fusing indigenous and European culture—​projects a better future than any present possibility based on the Columbian exchange, yet it also reflects the iterative and progressive

 

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character of American history in The Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon, like Pastwatch, describes three successive waves of American civilization, each supposedly more enlightened than the last: first, a people known as the Jaredites, who occupied the Americas between approximately 3000 and 200 BCE and were destroyed because of “the mysteries and the works of darkness, and their secret works . . . yea, all their murders, and robbings, and plunderings, and all their wickedness, and abominations” (Alma 37:21); second, the descendants of Lehi, who learn from the Jaredites’ mistakes and reach a greater state of holiness before collapsing into wickedness; and third, a prophetic vision of the modern Americas and their triumphal march toward the millennial glory of a New Jerusalem built by a resurgent Amerindian church and its Gentile converts. Card’s novel mimics the structure of Book of Mormon history, but in suggesting that the apotheosis of this iterative progress cannot be based on a Columbian discovery and European colonization, Card indicates his discomfort with the providential surety of Nephi’s vision. At the heart of Card’s theodicy is an uneasy awareness that readers of The Book of Mormon cannot acquire the perspective of an eternal God or Pastwatch historians. Notwithstanding Nephi’s assurances, the devastation of the Americas and New World slavery will always be horrors surpassing our understanding of justice and our capacity for rationalization.

Certainty, Ambiguity, and Revelation In accepting that readers of The Book of Mormon can never perfectly understand the justice of a God who enables or allows genocide, Card warns against self-​ righteous interpretive certainty as to divine meanings and motives, cautioning against a Mormon hermeneutics of specificity even as he accepts one of its conclusions: that Christopher Columbus was, in fact, Nephi’s “man among the Gentiles.” Ironically, any reader who accepts this interpretive consensus with certainty must also accept that Columbus, as a model for Mormon prophetic leadership, illustrates the ambiguity and uncertainty inherent in revelatory communications between God and man. George Handley, a Mormon scholar of Latin American literature and culture, writes that honest histories of revelation must acknowledge this paradox: It is often assumed that Nephi’s vision sees Columbus in a state of divine inspiration that moves him across the waters. There is little doubt from the historical record that Columbus felt so inspired, but there is also little doubt that he was blinded by a great many false traditions and ideas that caused him to fail to understand accurately where he was geographically during his voyages in the New World. This failure and

 



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his arrival had no small consequences. It is hard to see why we should celebrate Columbus’s arrival unambiguously.62 Readers of The Book of Mormon cannot celebrate Columbus’s arrival unambiguously because hailing Columbus as a model of inspiration foregrounds the ambiguous and messy process by which fallen humans process divine promptings; his confused accomplishment of divine purposes warns against revelatory hubris. To claim Columbus is, paradoxically, to renounce interpretive certainty about the claim. If Columbus was an inspired but fallible prophetic leader, so too was the man who published Nephi’s vision. When Joseph Smith declared, “I lead the way, like Columbus,” he illustrated that claim with a story about Columbus’s life that was almost certainly apocryphal; as Samuel Eliot Morison explains, “the egg story had already done duty in several Italian biographies of other characters, including the architect Brunelleschi,” before it became attached to Columbus’s life story.63 Fittingly, given the Columbian parallel he draws, Smith supported his assertion of revelatory insight with suspect evidence. The Mormon tradition of prophetic leadership that Columbus and Smith collectively established is thus a theological system that accepts error and ambiguity as by-​products of a revelatory process subject to refinement and correction as prophets and the people they lead await further light and knowledge from heaven. This tradition of fallible prophets serving God’s purposes despite—​and because of—​their imperfections is a central theme of The Book of Mormon, which identifies weakness as a necessary precursor to communion with the heavens. Nephi exclaims, “O wretched man that I am; yea, my heart sorroweth because of my flesh. My soul grieveth because of mine iniquities. I  am encompassed about because of the temptations and the sins which doth so easily beset me” (2 Nephi 4:17–​18). Other Book of Mormon prophets are similarly transparent with respect to their own shortcomings. Nephi’s brother Jacob worries that he might “get shaken from my firmness in the spirit, and stumble because of my over anxiety for you” ( Jacob 4:18), and in the face of questions from his son, the prophet Alma admits his uncertainty as to when the various groups of the dead will be resurrected:  “Now, my son, I  do not say that their resurrection cometh at the resurrection of Christ; but behold, I give it as my opinion, that the souls and the bodies are re-​united, of the righteous, at the resurrection of Christ, and his ascension into heaven. But whether it be at his resurrection, or after, I do not say” (Alma 40:20–​21). In response to yet another mournful declaration of prophetic imperfections and uncertainty, God explains to The Book of Mormon prophet Moroni, “I give unto men weakness, that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then

 

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will I make weak things become strong unto them” (Ether 12:17). Prophetic foibles and weakness, in The Book of Mormon, are not only acceptable but inevitable and even comforting: Imperfection is a necessary prerequisite to humility, grace, and revelation. Alma celebrates the miracle of resurrection contingently and provisionally—​ ambiguously. He declares some truths without reservation and hedges on other matters, acknowledging that his revelatory understanding is imperfect, subject to “the weakness which is in me, according to the flesh,” as well as the taint of personal opinion and circumstance (1 Nephi 19:6). Nephi’s vision of Columbus demands that LDS readers who, like Smith and Pratt, hold up the admiral as a model of prophetic leadership, adopt a similarly nuanced understanding of the revelatory process. To celebrate Columbus ambiguously, as Handley seems to urge, is to reconsider the very interpretive hubris that led Columbus to see himself in Isaiah’s prophecies and sail across the Atlantic. To celebrate Columbus ambiguously is to follow Hickman’s lead in “drawing attention to rather than away from the human medium of scripture.”64 To celebrate Columbus ambiguously is to embrace uncertainty and even doubt as healthy and humbling reminders of the weakness that enables grace and revelation. To celebrate Columbus ambiguously is to imagine, with Card, that God’s purposes could have been fulfilled by less violent means and, finally, to pray that the price for our own misplaced certainties never amounts to genocide.

Notes 1. Alexander Campbell, ed., Millennial Harbinger (Bethany, VA:  Alexander Campbell, 1831), vol. 2, 93. 2. Eran Shalev, American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text From the Revolution to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 114; on the broader pseudo-​biblical tradition, see 84–​117. 3. The opening lines of Gilbert Hunt’s pseudo-​biblical account of the War of 1812 provide a representative example of the specificity with which such accounts typically referred to contemporary figures and events: 1 Now it came to pass, in the one thousand eight hundred and twelfth year of the christian era, and in the thirty and sixth year after the people of the provinces of Columbia had declared themselves a free and independent nation; 2 That in the sixth month of the same year, on the first day of the month, the chief Governor, whom the people had chosen to rule over the land of Columbia; 3 Even JAMES, whose sir-​name was MADISON, delivered a written paper to the GREAT SANHEDRIM of the people, who were assembled together. See Gilbert Hunt, The Late War, Between the United States and Great Britain, From June 1812 to February, 1815, 3rd ed. (New York: G. J. Hunt, 1819), 9. 4. Terryl L. Givens notes this consensus in People of Paradox:  A History of Mormon Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 59–​60. 5. This hermeneutics of specificity is distinct from typology, which presumes that sacred narratives are bound to recur and therefore treats history as open-​ended prophecy subjected

 



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to repeated fulfillment. Whereas Nephi’s vision is prophecy that requires, for the believer, fulfillment in a specific individual, typologists might identify many specific anti-​types of Moses (George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were popularly identified in this way). However, the validity of the Exodus narrative is not contingent on these interpretive readings of US history. Another example of this particularity in the Mormon exegesis of prophecy would be the identification of The Book of Mormon as the “stick of Ephraim” in Ezek 37:16, joined together with the “stick . . . for Judah” (or Bible) as companion volumes of scripture. 6. Christopher Columbus, The Four Voyages of Columbus, Cecil Jane, trans. and ed. (New York: Dover, 1988), vol. 2, 4; Christopher Columbus, The Libro de las Profecias, Delno C. West and August Kling, trans. and ed. (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1991). Columbus later elaborates on this belief that he is fulfilling the prophecies of Isaiah, declaring that, “Of the new heaven and of the new earth, which our Lord made, as St. John writes in the Apocalypse, after He had spoken of it by the mouth of Isaiah, He made me the messenger and He showed me where to go” (Columbus, The Four Voyages, 48); see Isa 65:17 and 66:22. Columbus gives Isaiah prophetic preference, identifying him as “the one that is appreciated and esteemed/​more than all the others . . . . Isaiah is not merely a prophet, but a gospel writer as well” (Columbus, The Libro de las Profecias, 109). This treatment is paralleled in The Book of Mormon, when the resurrected Jesus Christ exhorts Nephi’s descendants to “search these things diligently; for great are the words of Isaiah” (3 Nephi 23:1). 7. Smith, in his translation of the Bible, “made a second pass through many of the pages, often revising his earlier dictation with expanded or clarified meanings.” Revelation is thus contingent on the receipt of future communications from God that correct, qualify, or provide context for the revelator’s prior understanding. See Kent P. Jackson and Peter M. Jasinski, “The Process of Inspired Translation:  Two Passages Translated Twice in the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible,” BYU Studies 42.2 (2003): 36. 8. I Cor 13:12. Jared Hickman has argued that Nephi’s narrative authority—​in valorizing phenotypically white peoples and endorsing European colonization as a necessary chastisement of Amerindians—​ought to be subordinated to other voices in The Book of Mormon (especially that of the resurrected Christ) who question the value of whiteness and of a Nephite perspective on sacred history. See Jared Hickman, “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse,” American Literature 86.3 (2014): 429–​461. 9. Washington Irving, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, Part One, vol. 6 in The Works of Washington Irving (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1904), 260, 257; Diego Alvarez Chanca, The Four Voyages of Columbus, Cecil Jane, trans. and ed. (New York: Dover, 1988), vol. 1, 55; my translation. 10. Examples of pre-​Columbian gold artifacts beaten into thin plates can be seen in Jan Mitchell, The Art of Precolumbian Gold: The Jan Mitchell Collection (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985). 11. Job 22:24. Although Columbus quoted nine other biblical passages referencing the land of Ophir in the Libro de las Profecias, this passage was not included. 12. Columbus, The Four Voyages of Columbus, vol. 2, 104, 98; see also 6. 13. Columbus, The Four Voyages of Columbus, vol. 2, 30, 36. 14. Irving, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, Part One, 344. On Columbus’s desire to finance another crusade, see Carol Delaney, “Columbus’s Ultimate Goal:  Jerusalem,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48.2 (2006):  260–​ 292; Delno C. West, “Christopher Columbus, Lost Biblical Sites, and the Last Crusade,” Catholic Historical Review 78.4 (1992): 519–​541. 15. Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005), 48. 16. Joseph Smith, History, 1834–​1836, josephsmithpapers.org ( June 5, 2014), 94, 84. 17. During his maturity, Smith seems to have returned to treasure seeking only once, to alleviate debts of the church he had founded, during a visit to Salem, Massachusetts, for which God condemned him. See Bushman, Joseph Smith, 328–​329. See also D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1998), 261–​264. 18. Gen  3:24. 19. As quoted in Orson F. Whitney, Life of Heber C. Kimball, an Apostle (Salt Lake City, UT: The Kimball Family, 1888), 222.

 

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20. If Smith came to his conclusions about the earth’s shape and Eden’s location by way of Columbus, it was in spite of, not because of, contemporary accounts of Columbus, such as that penned by Irving. In an appendix to his biography of Columbus, Irving provides a brief summation of “speculations concerning the situation of the garden of Eden” in order to rationalize the “extravagant” speculation of Columbus and “the apparent wildness of [his] ideas” on cosmography. He implies that Columbus made the most of flawed sources but was clearly misguided—​that no reader could reasonably mistake Columbus’s speculations for truth. See Washington Irving, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, Part Two, vol. 7 in The Works of Washington Irving (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1904), 351. 21. O. B. Huntington, “The Inhabitants of the Moon,” The Young Woman’s Journal 3.6 (1891–​ 1892): 264. Smith’s putative geometric understanding of the earth’s relationship to the sun and his representation of the poles as temperate locations mirrors the sixteenth-​century cosmographic analysis of George Best so closely that it is likely indebted to it, albeit indirectly. As I have suggested elsewhere, Best responded to Columbus’s “discovery” of an Edenic mountain in the Western Hemisphere by arguing for the existence of mountains at both poles, where because of “ye high swelling of ye erth, and ye high mountaine under the Pole, they have continual light” received at a right angle to the sun, producing relatively warm weather. If Smith indirectly absorbed Best’s cosmographical response to Columbus, we have yet another reason to think of Mormon theology as indebted to the Columbian Edenic impulse that shaped so much of early American culture. See George Best, “A True Discourse of the Late Voiages of Discoverie,” in The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, Richard Collinson, ed. (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1867), 35, 46–​48; Zachary McLeod Hutchins, Inventing Eden: Primitivism, Millennialism, and the Making of New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 38–​39, 251–​252. 22. Joseph Smith, History, 1838–​1856, vol. C-​1, josephsmithpapers.org ( June 23, 2014), 1285. 23. Terryl L. Givens and Matthew J. Grow, Parley P.  Pratt:  The Apostle Paul of Mormonism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 6, 33, 104–​105. 24. P. P. Pratt, A Voice of Warning and Instruction (New York: W. Sandford, 1837), vii. Given Pratt’s familiarity with and frequent citation of Isaiah, it seems likely that he sees Columbus as a beneficiary of Isaiah’s promise that “they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint” (Isa 40:31; see also Exod 19:4, Deut 32:11, and Rev 12:14). Irving’s biography does not mention Columbus’s conviction that he sailed in fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy, so Pratt was likely unaware he was reaffirming Columbus’s own beliefs. 25. Parley P. Pratt, An Address (London: W. R. Thomas, 1840), 4. In another pamphlet, A Letter to the Queen (1841), Pratt positions Columbus as the man whose revelation enabled the Enlightenment and, eventually, the restoration of a pure and primitive church; he is the forerunner and enabler of nineteenth-​century Mormon prophets such as Smith, but his preparatory role in the divine plan is also subordinated to Smith’s work translating The Book of Mormon (as John the Baptist prepared the way for his spiritual superior, Jesus Christ): “The discovery of America by Columbus 300 years since opened a new era upon the world, and poured a flood of light upon the startling nations . . . . But it remained for the nineteenth century to open a treasure of knowledge and to present to the world a discovery more extensive in its information, more glorious in its intelligence, and of greater magnitude in its final bearing upon men and things, than all the discoveries of Columbus and his contemporaries. I allude to this ancient American record.” See P. P. Pratt, A Letter to the Queen (Manchester, UK: P. P. Pratt, 1841), 8. 26. Charles Thompson, Evidences in Proof of the Book of Mormon (Batavia, NY: D. D. Waite, 1841), 227. Thompson’s phraseology clearly seems indebted to Pratt. He describes Columbus as “an obscure individual . . . blessed with a largeness of mind which disdained to confine itself to the old beaten track” (226). 27. “Christopher Columbus,” The Latter-​day Saints’ Millennial Star, Jan. 3, 1876, 6; this essay was originally printed in The Juvenile Instructor. As Terence Martin contends, crediting Columbus with the discovery of an American continent he already knew existed was a position widely adopted by inhabitants of North America, who ignored “the intent of the original voyage, despite the array of evidence . . . to make the Admiral both an intrepid and a romantic hero.” Terence

 



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Martin, “American Literature Discovers Columbus,” in Discovering Difference: Contemporary Essays in American Culture, Christoph K. Lohmann, ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 22; for a more comprehensive survey of Columbus’s presence in American literature, see Ilan Stavans, Imagining Columbus:  The Literary Voyage (New  York:  Twayne Publishers, 1993). 28. See Orson Hyde, “Celebration of the Fourth of July,” Journal of Discourses vi (1859): 368; Orson Hyde, “Importance of the Present Age to the Saints,” Journal of Discourses x (1865):  375; Brigham Young, “Celebration of the Fourth of July,” Journal of Discourses vii (1860): 13; George Q. Cannon, “The Gospel of Jesus Christ Taught by the Latter-​day Saints,” Journal of Discourses xiv (1872); Hannah T. King, “Columbus,” Woman’s Exponent (Sep. 15, 1876): 59; O. F. Whitney, “Columbus,” Woman’s Exponent (Nov. 15, 1892):  73; William Gibson, “I Have Discovered It,” The Latter-​day Saints’ Millennial Star (Nov. 17, 1866): 731; Phebe C. Young, “Isabella of Castile,” Woman’s Exponent (Nov. 15, 1892): 75; and George Reynolds and Janne M. Sjodahl, Commentary on the Book of Mormon, Philip C. Reynolds, ed. (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret News Press, 1955), vol. 1, 118–​121. 29. Wilford Woodruff, “Not Ashamed of the Gospel,” Journal of Discourses xix (1878): 229. 30. Clark B. Hinckley, Christopher Columbus:  “A Man Among the Gentiles” (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 2014), 237. 31. Determining the precise number of Native deaths that can be attributed to European voyages of discovery is a matter of intense debate, but all parties now agree that deaths number in the millions. For an overview of the scholarly perspectives on these estimates, see Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 105–​109. 32. John Taylor, “Ancient Records,” Times and Seasons (May 1, 1843): 186. 33. For a balanced but apologetic perspective, see Brian M. Hauglid, “Did Joseph Smith Translate the Kinderhook Plates?” in No Weapon Shall Prosper: New Light on Sensitive Issues, Robert L. Millet, ed. (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 2011), 93–​103; he writes in response to anti-​ Mormon arguments such as those presented in Jerald and Sandra Tanner, Mormonism: Shadow or Reality?, 5th ed. (Salt Lake City, UT: Utah Lighthouse Ministry, 1987), 111–​115. 34. John Taylor, “Ancient Records,” Times and Seasons (May 1, 1843): 186–​187. Taylor’s editorial is echoed in an 1851 pamphlet by Pratt; see P. P. Pratt, Proclamation! (Sydney: Hibernian Press, 1851), 12. 35. Joseph Smith, “History of Joseph Smith,” The Latter-​day Saints’ Millennial Star (Mar. 5, 1859): 159. 36. See, for example, Ronald W. Walker et al., Massacre at Mountain Meadows (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 37. Joseph Smith, Old Testament Revision 1, josephsmithpapers.org ( January 7, 2016), 17. 38. 1 Sam15:3. 39. George Sharwood, ed.,The Public and General Statutes Passed by the Congress of the United States of America, From 1828 to 1836 Inclusive (Philadelphia:  P. H.  Nicklin & T.  Johnson, 1837), 2204. 40. William Cullen Bryant, “The Prairies,” The Knickerbocker 2.6 (1833): 412. 41. As John Corrigan explains, in American exegesis, “Old Testament references to the Amalekites are important less for their lesson in obedience to God than for their illustration of the theme of genocide.” Accordingly, “In many [American] encounters we find the oppressors constructing the oppressed as the mirror of certain negative characteristics of themselves, that is, as a doppelganger of the Amalek within the oppressor.” See John Corrigan, “Amalek and the Rhetoric of Extinction,” in The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America, Chris Benke and Christopher S. Grenda, eds. (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 55–​56. 42. P. P. Pratt, The Millennium, and Other Poems (New York: W. Molineux, 1840), 9. 43. Pratt, The Millennium,  10–​11. 44. The Book of Mormon belief that inhabitants of the Americas who behave wickedly will be punished or removed from the land was not a matter of ethnocentrism for its nineteenth-​ century readers and applied to European immigrants as well as to Indians. In 1863 George Sims voiced the popular view that deaths suffered in the Columbian genocide and the US

 

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Civil War shared the same root cause: a rejection of Christ’s gospel. The United States, “like the other [Native] nations that had preceded them, fell into wickedness, rejected the counsel of the last Prophet, Joseph Smith, whom the Lord had raised up, and consequently they are falling, like the other nations who preceded them through their unbelief and wickedness.” See George Sims, “Fulfilment of Prophecies of the Book of Mormon Concerning the Land of America,” The Latter-​day Saints’ Millennial Star (Oct. 31, 1863): 693. 45. Pratt, The Millennium, 15. 46. Hickman, “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse,” 442, 451. 47. Emmeline B. Wells, “Columbus,” Woman’s Exponent (Dec. 15, 1892): 96. 48. Importantly, Columbus himself rejected the notion that revelation comes only to the appointed leaders of a singular, divinely chosen people; in his Libro de las Profecias, Columbus insists that “the Holy Spirit works among Christians, Jews and Moslems, and among all men of every faith, not merely among the learned, but also among the uneducated.” To acknowledge that individuals from other faith traditions speak by the power of the Holy Spirit is necessarily to acknowledge the imprecision of the revelatory process because the competing claims of those faith traditions must be weighed and sifted for evidence of inspiration. (Columbus, The Libro de las Profecias, 107.) 49. Arnold K. Garr, Christopher Columbus: A Latter-​day Saint Perspective (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, 1992), 59–​60. 50. Columbus, shipwrecked and despairing, called “for succour” and then, in his sleep, “heard a very compassionate voice, saying: ‘O fool and slow to believe and to serve thy God . . . . Fear not; have trust; all these tribulations are written upon marble and are not without cause.’ ” To suggest that Columbus was not divinely inspired during the second or third voyage—​when he made his most grandiloquent claims to revelation—​because God eventually called him to repentance during the fourth voyage seems more than a little disingenuous; Garr would never accept similar logic in evaluating Smith’s prophetic authority. Smith was chastised by God repeatedly in his written revelations and disaffected followers repeatedly accused him of committing sins that demonstrated he was a fallen prophet, but Mormon orthodoxy rejects any suggestion that Smith ever lost his authority to speak for God. See Columbus, The Four Voyages of Columbus, vol. 2, 90–​92. 51. Delaney, “Columbus’s Ultimate Goal: Jerusalem,” 274–​275, and throughout. 52. James E. Talmage, Sunday Night Talks: A Series of Radio Addresses Relating to Doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret News Press, 1931), 300. 53. Orson Scott Card, Pastwatch:  The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (New  York:  Tor, 1996), 394; hereafter cited parenthetically as (PW, 394). 54. In justifying his decision to wipe out human civilization Doon paraphrases the language of Genesis, declaring “I have made the chaos for you, and the world is without form, and void.” One character, Lared, accuses Doon of destroying humanity: “He killed it.” Another, wiser character named Jason replies, “He resurrected it. He broke it into little parts that had to change, to grow, to become something new.” Then, in language that clearly points to The Book of Mormon as the source of theology undergirding Doon’s claim to divinity, Card asks, “Is the apple tree glad when you cut it off to graft it into the wild-​apple root?” A man is not a tree. “As you are to the apple tree, Lared, Abner Doon was to mankind. He pruned, he grafted, he transplanted, he burned over the old dead branches, but the orchard thrives.” See Orson Scott Card, The Worthing Saga (New York: Tor, 1990), 108, 91–​92. For The Book of Mormon orchard allegory alluded to by Card in justification of Doon’s destruction, see Jacob 5. 55. John Kessel argues that “the destruction Ender causes is not a result of his intentions; only the sacrifice he makes for others is. In this Card argues that the morality of an act is based solely on the intentions of the person acting. The result is a character who exterminates an entire race and yet remains fundamentally innocent” (PW, 81). This construction of morality continues in Pastwatch, where the novel’s moral conscience studies “to discover, not where her peculiar research would lead, but rather where it had come from” (PW, 20). As in the Ender series, intent, and not consequence, is the dominant moral prism of Pastwatch. See John Kessel, “Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender’s Game, Intention, and Morality,” Foundation 90 (2004): 81.

 



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56. The Native discovery of Europe is a plot device deployed by another Mormon novelist, Brandon Sanderson, who excises Columbus (but not other early explorers) from his alternative history, suggesting unease with Columbus’s messy connection to The Book of Mormon. See Brandon Sanderson, The Rithmatist (New York: Tor, 2013). 57. As Harvey Cox argues, “although the imagination is an indispensable factor in the moral life, most writing and teaching on ethics leave it out completely.” Card’s novel, however, is an exemplary exercise in imaginative ethics, an attempt “to put oneself in situations one has never experienced, to see and especially to feel a moral question from the viewpoint of a different class or race or gender or age, even from a different historical era.” See Harvey Cox, When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 24–​25. 58. As Michael Collings once noted, “Card does not write ‘Mormon fiction’ in the sense that it is about Mormonism, that it discusses Mormonism, or even necessarily that it is by a Mormon. Instead, he is one of the few writers within the LDS community whose works are so fundamentally colored by and informed with Mormonism that in some cases evidence for his Mormonism is barely discernible to LDS readers and virtually invisible to others.” See Michael R. Collings, In the Image of God: Theme, Characterization, and Landscape in the Fiction of Orson Scott Card (New York: Greenwood, 1990), 44. 59. Lucy Mack Smith, History, 1845, josephsmithpapers.org ( July 21, 2014), 76. 60. Givens, People of Paradox, xii. 61. Luke 23:34. Card was either unaware of or completely ignored the most disturbing report from Columbus’s voyages. On the second voyage an Italian nobleman named Michele de Cuneo accompanied Columbus, and “While I  was in the boat I  captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral [Columbus] gave to me, and with whom, having taken her into my cabin, she being naked according to their custom, I conceived desire to take pleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did not want it and treated me with her finger nails in such a manner that I wished I had never begun. But seeing that, (to tell you the end of it all), I took a rope and thrashed her well, for which she raised such unheard of screams that you would not have believed your ears. Finally we came to an agreement in such manner that I can tell you that she seemed to have been brought up in a school of harlots.” Card seems to wish away violence in his counterfactual history and characterizes sexual relations between sailors and Native women as largely consensual: “Cristoforo had to pretend not to know what else was going on between the sailors and the women who came out to the caravels” (PW, 301). In the singular rape that Card allows to occur, the victim is thought dead, but she is later discovered alive and then disappears. As the preceding account dramatically demonstrates, Native women did not come out to the Europeans for sexual encounters; they were kidnapped and violently raped in encounters so noisy that Columbus must have known what would happen to the woman he “gave” to de Cuneo. In this respect, at least, Columbus cannot be excused on the basis of ignorance; perhaps to acknowledge the admiral’s culpability in this and other crimes against the Taino, Card’s Columbus is flogged, suffering in expiation for his sins. It should be noted that the latest LDS biography of Columbus does even less to acknowledge the moral failings of Columbus; though Clark Hinckley is clearly aware of the de Cuneo letter, he does not mention its disturbing contents and glosses over Columbus’s implication in violence against Native peoples. See “Michele de Cuneo’s Letter on the Second Voyage, 28 October 1495,” in Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, Samuel Eliot Morison, ed. (New York: Heritage, 1963), 212; and Hinckley, Christopher Columbus, 117–​136. 62. George B. Handley, “A Poetics of the Restoration,” BYU Studies 49.4 (2010): 67. 63. Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 361. 64. Hickman, “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse,” 447.

 

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Book of Mormon Poetry Edward Whitley *

One of the first poems ever written about The Book of Mormon is “The Golden Bible,” a ballad that appeared in the Ohio Painesville Telegraph in 1837. Unlike the half-​dozen or so poems that Latter-​day Saints had by that time written to celebrate the coming forth of The Book of Mormon, “The Golden Bible” is by an incredulous Ohioan (Painesville is ten miles from the Mormon settlement of Kirtland) who playfully wonders why it took so long for someone to unearth this ancient record inscribed on plates of gold: A new Golden Bible was lately discovered, Which for six thousand years could not be found, But was lately by hoes spades and shovels uncovered, The new Golden Bible that lay under ground. The new Golden Bible, the new fangled Bible. The fictitious Bible that lay under ground.1 This anonymous poet’s Kirtland neighbors would no doubt have been quick to point out that “The Golden Bible” has its chronology wrong: According to The Book of Mormon itself, the Nephite prophet Moroni buried the plates in New York’s Hill Cumorah after the final destruction of his people around 400 CE, not the circa 4000 BCE implied by the reference to the plates’ “six thousand years” of interment. And while Kirtland’s Mormon population would also have taken issue with the idea that The Book of Mormon was found merely by means of “hoes spades and shovels”—​Moroni was said to have appeared as an angel to lead Joseph Smith to the location of the plates—​there are a number

* My thanks to Christopher N. Phillips, Joanna Levin, Matthew Mason, Garrett Nagaishi, Zachary Hutchins, Robert Means, and Gerrit van Dyk for their help with this essay. Edward Whitley, Book of Mormon Poetry. In: Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon. Edited by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190221928.003.0018

 



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of similarities between “The Golden Bible” and the poems about The Book of Mormon that Latter-​day Saints had written by 1837, in addition to the poems they would continue to write for the next 180 years. Specifically, the ballad’s jokey refrain on “The new Golden Bible that lay under ground” pinpoints the most frequently occurring imagery in the more than 200 poems about The Book of Mormon that have been written between the 1830s and today: the burial of an ancient record by the last survivor of a fallen people, its preservation in a New England hillside, and its retrieval in the latter days. And while the ballad form of “The Golden Bible” succeeds in presenting the Mormon sacred text as a cultural laughingstock by combining the image of the buried book with a tune and meter so familiar as to make the poem’s message feel like common sense (indeed, the work of the ballad is to “represent a collective cultural sensibility”2), a persistent trend in the archive of Book of Mormon poetry has been to leverage the formal properties of the epic and the elegy to lend a hallowed air to the events that led up to the “new Golden Bible” being placed “under ground.” These poems have appeared in the official magazines of the LDS and Community of Christ (RLDS) Churches, literary and scholarly journals, missionary newsletters, hymnbooks, self-​published pamphlets, illustrated children’s books, newspapers, broadsides, and chapbooks published by Mormon and non-​Mormon presses alike. The trend toward epic and elegy in much of this poetry—​the trend, that is, to chart the rise of a great civilization and to mourn its subsequent fall—​culminates in the tragically beautiful image of the last Nephite prophet burying the record of his people. The argument of these formal choices is clear: The Book of Mormon is not a cultural oddity to be treated lightly in popular verse, but a sacred text that merits the reverence of elegy and the dignity of epic. At the same time, however, the formal features of epic and elegy foreground elements within The Book of Mormon itself that are often neglected in conventional interpretations of the text. As Jared Hickman has recently argued, Latter-​ day Saint readings have tended to “downplay the more radical implications of The Book of Mormon,” particularly the text’s potential to “inspire a radical racialized apocalypticism” wherein the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas—​the descendants of the people who destroyed Moroni’s countrymen and forced him to bury their records—​will supplant Euro-​Americans as the rightful heirs of the New World.3 As Hickman points out, white American Mormons have tended to emphasize The Book of Mormon’s witness to the divinity of Jesus Christ over its apocalyptic prophecy that the rise-​and-​fall pattern of the peoples whose history it records (the Jaredites, who came to the Americas at the time of the biblical Tower of Babel, and the Nephites, who flourished in the New World from 600 BCE to 400 CE) could return to the continent once again. Elizabeth Fenton calls this a “recursive historical cycle” that “reframes American Christianity as a

 

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cyclical rather than a linear phenomenon.”4 Most readers of The Book of Mormon have not made this prophecy the focus of their exegesis, preferring instead to view their sacred text’s references to an impending millennium from within the framework of the seventeenth-​century Puritan errand in the wilderness or what Lloyd Pratt calls the nineteenth-​century “vision . . . of a United States inclined uniformly toward a single glorious destiny.”5 But by virtue of the formal imperatives of the elegy and the epic to commemorate the past, the poets who have written on Book of Mormon themes have given attention to this apocalyptic reading and the cyclical vision of American history that it requires. Recalling Fredric Jameson’s claim that genres “specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact,”6 we can identify a tension between the cyclical history of The Book of Mormon and the duty of both the epic and the elegy to locate their aesthetic objects firmly in the past. The elegiac mode in Book of Mormon poetry traces its origins to the late eighteenth-​century and early nineteenth-​century Indian elegies by white poets who lament the demise of indigenous cultures while gazing longingly at the silent ruins of once-​great civilizations. And while Book of Mormon elegies emerge from what Max Cavitch calls “the ongoing need of many white Americans to believe in the inevitability of Indian disappearance,”7 these poems assert that the stories of the ancient Americans are not relics of an unrecoverable past that has long since disappeared, but warnings of an inevitable future on the cusp of reoccurring. It is at this moment when the form of the elegy is made to accommodate the rise-​and-​fall narrative of ancient civilizations that these poems turn to the epic mode. Christopher N. Phillips has written that “the blending of epic and elegy” has been “endemic” to the development of the epic in the United States, noting in particular that, “Perhaps more than any other epic subject, Native American subjects led poets to the elegiac, to mourning and the focus on what has disappeared or been lost.”8 As with their borrowings from the tradition of the Indian elegy, Book of Mormon poets who write in the epic mode participate in what Phillips calls the “desire to erase the Indian” from national memory.9 But they also assert that the story of the fallen nations of the Americas will never be completely erased because it is the only story that the continent ever tells. For Book of Mormon poets, the legendary past that the epic is tasked with chronicling is not a relic of ancient history; rather, the story of a divinely guided nation that rose to power on the American continent and then fell from grace when it turned its back on God is the story of the Americas, spiritually written on the landscape as much as it was engraved on plates of gold. In employing genres that depend on a stable, static past to articulate a cyclical view of history, Book of Mormon poems participate in what Lloyd Pratt calls “The strong counterevidence of form suggesting that [the nineteenth century] and its literature articulate a conflicted experience of time working against [a progressive] notion of destiny.”10 Running alongside the US dominant view

 



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of history as progressing toward an inevitably positive future, Pratt argues, exists a countertradition of texts that “pluralized time.”11 The Book of Mormon and its poetic surrogates belong to this textual countertradition that allows “for multiple conceptions of time.”12 The work of epic and elegy in particular to shape perceptions of the past—​a work that Dana Luciano describes as bringing “the affective residue of the vanished past in the present tense”—​encourages readings of The Book of Mormon that allow us to “assess the ongoing significance of the past in a culture speeding ever more rapidly toward the attainment of its historical ‘destiny.’ ”13 And while The Book of Mormon ultimately endorses a vision of historical destiny that culminates in an apocalyptic renewal of the earth and the millennial reign of Jesus Christ, these epic and elegiac imaginings of latter-​day scripture underscore the circuitous path to this historical terminus The Book of Mormon actually presents. * * * Eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century American poets were often drawn to ruins such as the earthwork mounds that indigenous peoples had constructed centuries earlier, finding in these remnants of a lost civilization an occasion for the kind of affective response that is particularly suited to the loss and pathos associated with the elegy. Many of these white-​authored laments for the people who had once inhabited the continent feature a moment when the speaker of the poem listens attentively to such ruins, hoping to hear the lingering voices of the people who had lived there anciently. The poems invariably end bemoaning that the silent landscape refuses to speak. In an 1823 poem on the mound builders of the Hopewell civilization, Sarah Josepha Hale desires to know “Those wonders of the olden dead,” but regrets that the voices of that now-​gone people are buried with them below the ground (they “speak, beneath our silent tread”), and that no matter how long she spends listening to the landscape, “Darkness, silence, evermore /​Brood our vast dominion o’er.”14 Similarly, in William Cullen Bryant’s “The Prairies” (1832), the speaker poses the question, “Are they here—​/​The dead of other days?” directly to the ancient mounds themselves and waits patiently for an answer: Let the mighty mounds That overlook the rivers, or that rise In the dim forest crowded with old oaks, Answer.15 Hearing no answer from a landscape that is as dark and silent as the one Hale encountered a decade earlier, Bryant tries to imagine who the last of the

 

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mound-​builders could have been and sees in his mind’s eye “some solitary fugitive” hounded to death by “roaming hunter-​tribes, warlike and fierce.” Bryant, like many before him, believed that the magnificent earthen structures that had been left on the American prairies could have been built only by some civilization other than the “roaming hunter-​tribes” of Native Americans that he was familiar with.16 If only the “mighty mounds” could tell him about this “disciplined and populous race.” Alas, they cannot. Mormon poets took to the form of the Indian elegy to announce that, thanks to The Book of Mormon, the American landscape is no longer silent. In 1844 a poem appeared in the LDS Nauvoo Neighbor titled, “Lines Suggested on Seeing an Ancient Fortification in Wayne County, N.  Y.” Recalling Philip Freneau’s 1787 poem, “Lines Occasioned by a Visit to an Old Indian Burying Ground,” the Nauvoo Neighbor poet takes the familiar posture of the Indian elegist who scans the silent landscape in hopes of hearing the forgotten voices of the people who once dwelt there: What thoughts do in my mind abound, Whilst I behold these aged trees, Upon this ancient battle ground,  . . .  Oh! could these banks but speak, and tell, What scenes to us they might unfold; Things that they would remember well, Which did transpire in days of old.17 The poem does not mention The Book of Mormon by name, but when it says that “The ancient prophecies will view, /​To see what light they will afford” these “prophecies” tell The Book of Mormon’s story of a Semitic people from the lineage of Joseph of Egypt who settled on the American continent: Then Shem[’]s descendants, Josephs seed, The ancient owners of our soil; Did cross the sea in very deed, And rear these works with pain and toil. The speaker of the Nauvoo Neighbor poem does not, like Bryant’s, require a flight of Romantic reverie to envision “the ancient owners of our soil.” Rather, he presents it as a settled fact derived from the “ancient prophecies” of The Book of Mormon.18 Over the past 180  years, many such poems have claimed that “Voices from Cumorah’s hill” will “Break the silence of the tomb” (1847), that

 



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the landscape will “speak as by magic, /​Through tongues of the earth” (1930), and that “The earth shall surely speak” (1979).19 In claiming that the landscape itself can tell the story of the distant past, Book of Mormon poems create a chain of metonymic connections between the ancient peoples who touched the plates, the plates that touched the landscape, and the landscape traversed by nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century Americans. An 1847 poem that describes the Angel Moroni as bringing the golden plates “Pure from the archives of the sky” is an outlier in this body of poetry, which overwhelmingly characterizes The Book of Mormon as “Truth . . . brought from out the earth.”20 The Book of Mormon itself frequently states that the ancient Americans would speak to the modern world “as the voice of one crying from the dust.”21 This image of voices from the dust appears consistently in Book of Mormon poetry: In 1853 the golden plates are referred to as “The sacred Records from the dust”;22 an 1889 poem tells of “records that shall whisper from the dust, /​Revealing mysteries, unseen, unheard”;23 and poems from the early twentieth century describe The Book of Mormon “As the voice of one that speaketh /​From the dust,”24 and as a text destined “to speak from out the dust.”25 In a quasi-​epic invocation, a 1969 poem begs the ancient inhabitants of the Americas to “Cry from the dust lost and heroic people,” and then addresses the dust itself as if it were the lingering presence of these ancient Americans, saying “Speak low, dust of Joseph, /​Speak to the children of all /​Of another day.”26 In asking the “dust of Joseph” to speak to the world today (the Nephites and Lamanites are said to be descendants of Joseph of Egypt), this poem closes the metonymic circle that connects the people to the record and the record to the landscape such that the dust of the land and the voice of the people are one and the same. Beyond the image of the speaking dust, poets have turned to botanical and maternal metaphors to reinforce the connection between the plates and their earthly housing: An 1889 poem depicts Moroni’s burial of the plates as an effort to “plant for future years, hope’s golden grain”;27 a 2002 poem asks, “If you bury a good book /​will it come back to life /​like a perennial?”;28 and a 1930 poem describes The Book of Mormon as having been “Planted by prophets /​In soil that they chose,” later to fully ripen as the “Flower of a Nation,” the “Rose of Columbia.”29 Poets have also depicted the golden plates as either the heart of or a gestating fetus within a feminized Hill Cumorah. Parley P. Pratt wrote in 1835 that the earth did “obedient, from its bosom yield, /​The sacred truth, it faithfully concealed,”30 and Eliza R. Snow wrote in 1883 of the moment when “Cumorah unbosomed the Records of Truth.”31 A 1909 poem addressed directly to the Hill Cumorah notes that “the story of the past” had been “Written on your heart of gold,”32 and a 1945 poem in the voice of the Hill Cumorah declares that the ancient record “Within my bosom close it slept /​Until its birth.”33 As a

 

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ripening plant, the golden plates are entwined with the landscape through roots that weave their way into the soil of both the nation (“Flower of a Nation”) and the continent (“Rose of Columbia”); as the hill’s “heart of gold,” the plates are linked to the earth via a network of veins and nerves; and as a fetus growing to full term, the plates become the literal offspring of the American landscape—​its genetic duplicate and living heir. In all three instances, the metonymic connection between the ancient record and the ground it touches intimately binds the message of The Book of Mormon to the soil from which it came.34 Linking ancient Americans to the golden plates and the golden plates to the American landscape allows Book of Mormon poets to hear the story of the past that is otherwise denied to US elegists. For example, before her conversion to Mormonism, Eliza R. Snow wrote a poem titled “The Red Man of the West” (1830). Like many similar elegies, “The Red Man of the West” poses a series of unanswered questions to a silent Indian who, like the landscape he inhabits, is unable to tell the story of his ancestry. When Snow revisited the poem after joining The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints, she retitled it “The Lamanite” (after The Book of Mormon’s dark-​skinned and warlike tribes) and added that the “truth that’s speaking from Cumorah’s ground” would answer the questions that only a few years earlier had been met with silence.35 Snow’s poem, as well as several others like it, focuses the affective energy of the elegy onto nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century Native Americans whose lives are depicted as a tragic shadow of the once-​great civilizations of the past. The vast majority of Book of Mormon elegies, however, derive their emotional response from the figure of Moroni, the last of the light-​skinned Nephites, in the moment when his countrymen have fallen to Lamanite armies and he has been tasked with preserving and burying the sacred record alone. Parley P. Pratt’s “Moroni’s Lamentation” (1834), which was reprinted several times in different venues throughout the nineteenth century, tells, in first person, the story of Moroni’s lonely tenure on the earth as the last of the Nephites: I have no home, where shall I go, While I am left to weep below? My heart is pain’d, my friends are gone—​ And here I’m left on earth to mourn.36 For more than a century and a half, Mormon poets have provided images of Moroni as “Alone, serene, deserted,” as he “gazed upon the field of fallen men; /​Upon the silence of a continent.”37 Poets have filtered the tragedy of an entire civilization through the solitary figure of Moroni (“ ‘Til a race was drained; one man alone /​Survived the carnage; with sorrow prone”38), and through the image of the Hill Cumorah itself as a lonely and forgotten remnant of the

 



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past: “The nation crumbled and its sun went down” as Moroni “buried deep in lone Cumorah’s hill /​The golden record of his vanished race.”39 Unvisited, unattended, and unrecognized for its worth, the Hill Cumorah is, like Moroni himself, frequently depicted as “lonely.”40 The pathos of the lonely prophet and the lonely hillside directs readers to a sympathetic identification with the records that both Moroni and Cumorah are assigned to protect. In 1980’s “Cumorah’s Final Scene” we are shown “Alone, Moroni stood on the hilltop” where “An overwhelming loneliness plagued him” before “Reverently, he placed the records /​Back in their resting place.”41 As readers, we are asked to value the sacred record of The Book of Mormon to the same degree that we are made to feel the tragedy of Moroni’s loss and the loneliness that envelops him and the hillside alike.42 A few of these poems direct the affective response we are to have for Moroni and the Nephite people toward the color of their skin. A 1937 poem has Moroni lament, “I—​remained, /​Alone, last white man on the continent. /​I  lived to seal the record in Cumorah,”43 and an 1881 poem for the LDS Millennial Star commemorates the prehistory of the inhabitants of the Americas with the lines, “This race was once both white and fair /​And dwelt in joy as Joseph’s band.”44 Such poems reflect The Book of Mormon’s own racialized language—​recalling, in particular, the prophet Mormon’s lament over the destruction of the light-​ skinned Nephites, “O ye fair ones, how could ye have departed from the ways of the Lord!” (Morm 6:17)—​but they also take from the nineteenth-​century tradition of the Indian elegy the sentiment that the architects of ruins such as the Hopewell mounds were of a different racial background than the “red” Indians met by the first Europeans in the New World. In this sense, Moroni and his Nephite compatriots are, like the members of the “disciplined and populous race” that Bryant imagines in “The Prairies,” deserving of the sympathy of white readers because of a perceived racial similarity. The affective response that such Indian elegies trigger in white readers to mourn for an ancient America populated with people like themselves—​and not a “warlike and fierce” race of Native Americans—​points to the racialized legacies of The Book of Mormon that Peter Coviello, Kimberly Berkey and Joseph Spencer, and Stanley J. Thayne discuss elsewhere in this volume (Chapters  10, 12, and 13, respectively). In addition, when these elegies conjure a vision of a vanishing white civilization in the Americas they redirect readers’ sympathies away from the policies of Indian Removal and toward the potential downfall of the United States’ predominantly white civilization. Book of Mormon elegies that depict a white Moroni in the same language used to lament the tragic but “inevitable” vanishing of Native Americans (“I have no home, where shall I go, /​While I am left to weep below?”) ask their readers to forget about vanishing Indians and start worrying about the potential decline of white American civilization. If the white Jaredites and white Nephites

 

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had risen to power on this continent only to fall from glory, these poems ask, what is to stop a white United States from encountering a similar fate? This is a question that many Book of Mormon elegies implicitly ask; epic poems on The Book of Mormon, however, are much more explicit in issuing this warning to their readers. In 1919 the LDS Improvement Era published “The Solitary Scribe,” a poem about the final days of Moroni that aspires to the monumental silence of the Indian elegy but resigns itself to the chronicling function of the epic: “The Solitary Scribe” directs readers to “Cumorah’s southward side.” where we see Moroni, who “roams the melancholy earth alone with God” as the “sole remnant of his race.” The poem’s speaker pleads, Erase the awful scene, O God of Heaven! This grim reminder of a nation’s guilt. Would that it might be hid eternally Beneath the wreck and ruin of a race.45 Running counter to almost a century’s worth of elegies that celebrate the newfound voice that The Book of Mormon has given to the American landscape, “The Solitary Scribe” asks for a return to the tragically beautiful silence that the Indian elegy associates with ancient ruins. In the same stanza, however, the poem apologizes for its elegiac aspirations and gives itself over to the duty of the epic to recount the history of the past for the benefit of the present: “But this, alas, can never be. /​The Past must needs be bared /​To guide the children of the Present Day.” The story of the past that The Book of Mormon lays bare for latter-​day readers is of a recurring cycle of faith and prosperity followed by apostasy and destruction. It is the story that the Jaredites told during their tenure on the continent; it is the story that Moroni witnessed first-​hand at the end of the thousand-​year history of the Nephites; and it is the story that began the moment Columbus landed in the New World. Orson F. Whitney captures this cyclical view of history in his short 1889 poem, “Lehi.” As the speaker of Whitney’s poem looks out upon the American shoreline, he imagines three successive waves of immigrants that have all been led by God to “The land of Joseph’s promise, freedom’s fame”: From far Jerusalem, destruction-​doomed, By faith upborne, impelled by power divine, Goes Lehi forth, a prophet pioneer; As erst Mahonri, Jared, and their band—​ In later time Columbus—​to unveil The hidden hemisphere.46

 



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Whitney describes the voyage of Lehi from Jerusalem (with his sons Nephi and Laman, the patriarchs of the Nephite and Lamanite civilizations) as an echo of the earlier migration of Jared and his prophet–​brother Mahonri Moriancumer, and as a forerunner of Columbus’s journey to the “hidden hemisphere” of the Americas. The idea that the American continent tells the same story over and over again is at the heart of efforts to write an epic on The Book of Mormon.47 Charles W. Dunn’s The Master’s Other Sheep: An Epic of Ancient America (1929) also foregrounds the idea that Nephite society serves as a cautionary tale for the United States. At the outset of the poem, Dunn gives a vision of futurity to the prophet Lehi about the people that God will bring to the Americas centuries after he and his children have settled there: Then after many moons, the Spirit moved Upon a man who crossed the Mighty Deep, And brought again a people from afar To build anew the cities, till the soil, And rear another empire in the West; A place of refuge, for the weary-​rest.48 And if it’s not clear enough to readers that Columbus is the “man who crossed the Mighty Deep” and opened up the Americas as “A place of refuge” for Europeans seeking religious freedom, Dunn bookends this prophecy at the conclusion of his epic with a similar vision given to Moroni as he witnesses the ultimate destruction of his people: He saw a band of Pilgrims led afar, From Eastern home into a wilderness, And o’er the ocean’s wall, unto a land Proclaimed and heralded in olden time.49 Dunn notes that this third wave of divinely led immigrants will follow the same script of righteous prosperity and faithless destruction as the Nephites: “Oftimes sincere, in righteous paths they trod, /​Oftimes forgot, departed far from God.”50 He also reminds his readers that the narrative of rise and fall that the American Pilgrims will inherit from the Nephites had previously belonged to the Jaredites. The Book of Mormon mentions that the final battles that ended both the Jaredite and the Nephite civilizations took place at the base of the same hill, which the Jaredites called “Ramah” and the Nephites “Cumorah” (Ether 15:11). Dunn underscores this historical parallel when he depicts the Nephite armies facing their demise “In deadly combat on the fatal field /​Of Ramha, [sic] where the

 

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hosts of Jared fell.”51 A  number of shorter twentieth-​century poems similarly connect the cyclical history of the Americas to the landscape surrounding Cumorah. Theodore E. Curtis’s 1909 poem, which identifies the hill as “Ramah of the ancient nation, /​The Cumorah of the last,” reinforces the cyclical history of the Americas by condensing the full sweep of that history into the geography of a single hill that has been Twice a people’s last protection, Twice the witness of a world In the arms of insurrection, To prophetic ruin hurled.52 Not only does the American continent have only one story to tell (a story of “prophetic ruin”), it can tell that story in only one place—​Cumorah. In 1987 the LDS Ensign magazine published a poem depicting Moroni depositing the plates into turf on the hillside of Cumorah that appeared “as if unturned since Ramah times /​when first this hill heard battle cries.” And then, looking forward to another potential (if not inevitable) battle at the foot of this hill, the speaker of the poem asks, “Why must men hurtle here in hate, /​eager to find a foretold fate /​ on Cumorah?”53 The “foretold fate” that brought low the Jaredites and the Nephites—​and that threatens to do the same to the United States—​lies at the heart of Clinton F.  Larson’s Coriantumr and Moroni (1961) and Wallace B.  Shute’s Terra Nova (1988). Both epics are verse dramas that leverage their theatricality to underscore the historical continuity of the three civilizations that have inhabited the Americas. Larson’s two-​act production focuses on the final moments of Coriantumr and Moroni, the lone survivors of the Jaredite and Nephite nations. The closing scenes of both acts give expansive, scenery-​chewing soliloquies to Coriantumr (“Glazed cold, my brittle hands are raised, /​Their prayers the fulcrum for my lolling head”) and Moroni (“The world rolls like a concept /​In the valleys of our utterance. /​Like the veil of heaven the horizon hangs”) as they watch the sun set on their once-​great empires.54 But while Coriantumr sinks into oblivion as little more than dramatic foreshadowing for the play’s second act, Moroni is allowed to project far beyond the proscenium and into the farmhouse in upstate New York where he would someday issue a warning to Joseph Smith that the tragic history of Ramah/​Cumorah was about to repeat itself: Joseph, I reach to you! I reach to you from Sherrizah! He who was slain By the Jews lived among us! Joseph, we lived!

 



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Ask if we have not lived!55 In Terra Nova, Shute similarly breaks the fourth wall when he has Moroni and Ether (the Jaredite prophet who warned Coriantumr of his impending doom) speak directly to a latter-​day audience in a way that presents the destruction of the Nephites and the Jaredites as a twice-​told tale primed for its third recitation. As the narrators of Terra Nova, Moroni and Ether frequently take the stage to recount the tragic story of the rise and fall of both Nephite and Jaredite civilizations. When they first appear in the prologue, they speak first separately and then together: The prophets Moroni and Ether enter right and left. Opening great scrolls they read.  . . .  MORONI: Now as this tale unfolds, eyes weep to see How glorious promising ends tragically. MORONI and ETHER: As those so richly blessed, reject God’s hand And, self-​attainted, perish from the land. The prophets close their scrolls and exit, left and right.56 Despite entering the stage from separate sides, Moroni and Ether have, essentially, the same story to tell. And as the curtain closes on the epic drama, their voices join together to issue a final warning to the current players on the American stage: MORONI and ETHER: Now, through that revelation we, with wonder, Harken as God again with timeless thunder, Blazons abroad that warning all must hear: “Repent, mankind—​My judgment draweth near!”57 R. Paul Cracroft’s Miltonic A Certain Testimony:  A Mormon Epic in Twelve Books (1979)—​its title is drawn from a line in Aereopagitica—​also presents the Americas as a sacred stage upon which to justify the ways of God to men. “This land,” he writes, “had known the tread of Nephite feet.” And it will be on this land that “The fate of man—​one end in Eden tied, /​The other in an Armageddon knot—​/​Must here be packaged and returned to God.”58 Similarly Miltonic in its aspirations is Michael R. Collings’s The Nephiad: An Epic Poem in Twelve Books (1996), which focuses on the rise of Nephite civilization but never loses sight of the cyclical iterations of sacred history that define the American continent. Like Milton before him, Collings wonders to which muse the poet of a religious epic should turn. Rather than supplicate the Holy Spirit, however, Collings realizes

 

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that The Book of Mormon’s muse would be a “Muse of Future History” who could look forward to a recurring past that we already know is coming: Were there a Muse of Future History, A Clio self-​ordained to guard, direct The minds of Heroes in just paths and to Them disclose all that must perforce ensue, And she the gifted Sisters Nine would join In Life Immortal on Parnassus’ Mount.59 Collings’s “Muse of Future History” captures The Book of Mormon’s perspective on the cyclical nature of life in the Americas perfectly:  The future is just a renewed manifestation of the past. Collings’s decision to focus on the brief narrative of Nephi is similar to Marion Sharp’s I Cry, Mormon (1939), which treats in detail the same narrative of the heroic rise of a civilization and then briskly moves through hundreds of years of history to conclude with the sight of Moroni burying the plates.60 In the eight book-​length epic poems written about The Book of Mormon between 1904 and 1996, the overwhelming focus is on the triumphant rise of the Nephite civilization in 600 BCE and its devastating fall in 400 CE; the prophets and warriors who occupy the other 800 years (and 350 pages) of Book of Mormon history go largely overlooked. This pattern is present in Lula Green Richards’s Branches That Run Over the Wall: A Book of Mormon Poem and Other Writings (1904), an epic whose major contribution is to give voices and names to the women who are briefly mentioned in The Book of Mormon itself.61 The Book of Mormon spends little to no time discussing the unnamed women who are married to the four sons of Lehi; Richards, on the other hand, dedicates many pages to the courtships of Laman, Lemuel, Nephi, and Sam with women whom she anagrammatically names after their spouses: Nalma, Luelme, Ephin, and Mas. The romance subplot that Richards foregrounds in her poem is ultimately made to serve The Book of Mormon’s larger story about the rise and fall of a civilization. Richards underscores that, without these women to accompany Lehi’s sons to the Promised Land, there would be no civilization in the Americas at all—​no Israelite “branches” to “run over the wall” that separated the Old World from the New. At the same time, Richards lays at the feet of these women the ultimate downfall of Nephite society. It is “idle” and “listless” Nalma (a woman who feels no shame for having “felt the touch /​Of love’s hot fingers”) who plants in Laman’s mind the idea that he should rule over his brothers in the Promised Land and asks: “Wouldst thou, O Laman! sit idly down, /​Nor win for thyself, a world, a crown?”62 The dramatic irony is clear for readers familiar with The Book of Mormon’s account of a generational conflict between the descendants of Nephi

 



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and Laman: Were it not for the ambition of the licentious Nalma, the Nephites and Lamanites could have established a peaceful and faithful society that would have survived to welcome Columbus to an American Zion in 1492. Instead, Branches That Run Over the Wall concludes with the familiar image of Moroni at the moment when he “hid up those plates” that would serve as a warning to the next civilization that God would rise up in the Americas.63 Only a few of these epics attempt to capture the entire thousand-​year period between the birth of Nephite society and its tragic end. Olive McFate Wilkins’s From Cumorah’s Lonely Hill: An Epic Poem of The Book of Mormon (1950) makes such an effort, as does J. E. Vanderwood’s A Story of the Ancestor of the American Indian: An Epic (1936).64 Vanderwood’s epic adopts the trochaic meter of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha (1855), with its perceived connection to the rhythm of Native American speech patterns.65 The book’s cover also features the profile of a cigar-​store Indian in full headdress. And while all Book of Mormon epics present themselves as windows into the ancient history of the continent, such visual and metrical cues highlight most strikingly the connection between Indian elegies and Book of Mormon poetry. Regardless of how sincere these poets may be in their efforts to create epic histories of once-​great nations or to lament the tragic passing of such civilizations from history, Max Cavitch is right to ask, “Is the aestheticization of someone else’s grief a kind of theft?”66 With very few exceptions, poems about The Book of Mormon have all been written by white British and American poets who are affiliated in one way or another with the Latter Day Saint movement.67 And while believers both white and indigenous take as authentic the ancient American voices who speak from The Book of Mormon, poets who employ the forms of the Indian elegy and the epic to recount the demise of the Jaredite and Nephite civilizations unavoidably partake in the discourses that have been used to justify centuries’ worth of genocide and relocation of Native peoples. (As Stanley J. Thayne demonstrates in Chapter 13 of this volume, indigenous readers of The Book of Mormon have offered a variety of perspectives on how its narrative coincides with their own sense of tribal and national history.) It has been my effort to allow Book of Mormon poets to speak on their own terms as they adapt the message of their sacred text to the poetic forms of the elegy and the epic. Nevertheless, Cavitch’s question remains: “Is the aestheticization of someone else’s grief a kind of theft?” Spokane/​Coeur d’Alene poet Sherman Alexie provides something of an answer to this question in the first stanza of his poem “Crazy Horse Speaks,” which directly addresses the Mormon tradition of claiming Native American history as the foundation for a new American faith. Alexie writes, I discovered the evidence In a vault of The Mormon Church

 

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3,000 skeletons of my cousins in a silence so great I built four walls around it And gave it a name. I called it Custer and he came to me again in a dream. He forgave all my sins.68 The echoes to 180  years’ worth of Book of Mormon poetry in “Crazy Horse Speaks” are uncanny. Alexie exchanges the golden plates in the Hill Cumorah for the millions of microfilmed genealogical records held in the Granite Mountain Records Vault just outside of Salt Lake City, Utah. And while the “Voices from Cumorah’s hill” contained within the golden plates can “Break the silence of the tomb,” as Parley P. Pratt and others attest,69 Alexie’s encounter with the bureaucratic records of his deceased relatives produces a claustrophobic silence with “four walls around it.” This is not the Romantic silence of the Indian elegy—​it is neither the kind of silence that invites an imaginative reverie to recover a mysterious past, nor is it the kind of silence destined to be broken by a new American scripture. Rather, it is a silence that points to a history that has recurred countless times since 1492: a history of deception, betrayal, and slaughter. A history called “Custer.” Endowing this tragic history with the ability to “forgive all my sins” is Alexie’s final ironic gesture toward the power of buried records to heal the wounds of the past. Ultimately, the cyclical, pluralized time of The Book of Mormon will come to a millennial end. Alexi, however, is unable to imagine such a redemptive conclusion and replaces the messianic savior of Mormonism with a figure of senseless destruction drawn from American history that haunts both white and Indian alike. Perhaps, Alexie suggests, the poetry of the American past is best written in silence.

Notes 1.. Anon., “The Golden Bible,” Painesville Telegraph, Painesville, OH (May 26, 1837), 1. 2. Dianne Dugaw, “Ballad,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed., Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman, eds. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 114. My thanks to Christopher N. Phillips for identifying the source of the parody of “The Golden Bible” as the oft-​reprinted “To the Family Bible,” which carried the refrain “The family Bible that lay on the stand. /​The old-​fashion’d Bible; the dear blessed Bible; /​The family Bible that lay on the stand” (“To the Family Bible,” The Christian Baptist, [Dec.1825]: 120). 3. Jared Hickman, “The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse,” American Literature 86.3 (2014): 434. 4. Elizabeth Fenton, “Open Canons:  Sacred History and American History in The Book of Mormon,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-​Century Americanists 1.2 (2013): 341, 355.

 



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5. Lloyd Pratt, Archives of American Time:  Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 5. 6. Frederick Jameson, The Political Unconscious:  Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 106. 7. Max Cavitch, American Elegy:  The Poetry of Mourning From the Puritans to Whitman (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 128–​129. 8. Christopher N. Phillips, Epic in American Culture:  Settlement to Reconstruction (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 9, 190. 9. Ibid., 219, 211. 10. Pratt, Archives of American Time, 5. 11. Ibid.,  5. 12. Svetlana Boym quoted in Pratt, Archives of American Time, 3. 13. Dana Luciano, Arranging Grief:  Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-​Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 2. 14. Sarah Josepha Hale, The Genius of Oblivion and Other Original Poems (Concord, NH: Jacob B. Moore, 1823), 25, 41. 15. William Cullen Bryant, “The Prairies,” in American Poetry:  The Nineteenth Century, John Hollander, ed. (New York: Library of America, 1993), vol. 1, 162–​165. 16. See Andrew Galloway, “William Cullen Bryant’s American Antiquities:  Medievalism, Miscegenation, and Race in ‘The Prairies,’” American Literary History 22.4 (2010): 729; Curtis Dahl, “Mound-​Builders, Mormons, and William Cullen Bryant,” The New England Quarterly 34.2 (1961): 182–​184; Andrew J. Lewis, A Democracy of Facts: Natural History in the Early Republic (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 72–​106. My thanks to Christen Mucher, Desiree Henderson, and Wyn Kelley for their insights on the matter of the mound-​builders and American antiquities. 17. S. Post, “Lines Suggested on Seeing an Ancient Fortification in Wayne County, N. Y.,” Nauvoo Neighbor, Nauvoo, IL 2.8 ( June 19, 1844), 1. 18. Similarly, an 1882 poem asks the American landscape about the origins of its ancient inhabitants (“Reveal if thou canst from this mound where I tread, /​What nation was this, now the dust of the dead?”), and receives an answer directly from the Angel Moroni, himself a citizen of that former nation: “O Earth, from Heaven again come to thee, /​An angel appointed thy truths to restore; /​. . . . /​He brings us the truth of the future and past.” Joseph L. Townsend, “Among the Ancient Indian Mounds,” The Contributor 2.12 (Sep. 1882): 376–​377. 19. R. Paul Cracroft, A Certain Testimony: A Mormon Epic in Twelve Books (Salt Lake City, UT: Epic West, 1979), 399. S. T. Brimhall-​Foley, “The Book of Mormon,” Relief Society Magazine 17.9 (Sep. 1930): 463; Parley P. Pratt, “Now Is the Day of Israel,” Millennial Star, Manchester, UK 9.2 ( Jan. 15, 1847), 31. 20. W. G. Mills, “A Paraphrase,” Millennial Star, Manchester, UK 9.6 (March 15, 1847); “The Book of Mormon,” Millennial Star, Manchester, UK 58.9 (Feb. 27, 1896). See also Philo Dibble, “The Happy Day Has Rolled On,” The Evening and the Morning Star, Independence, MO 2.13 ( June 1833); W. E. Shaw, “Address to The Book of Mormon,” Millennial Star, Manchester, UK 9.3 (Feb. 1, 1847); William Willis, “The Prophet, Joseph Smith,” Millennial Star, Manchester, UK 9.3 ( July 3, 1852). The official LDS hymnbook reveals that Book of Mormon–​related hymns and songs have consistently emphasized both the spiritual origins of the book (“An Angel Came to Joseph Smith,” “An Angel From on High,” “I Saw a Mighty Angel Fly”) and its material connection to the earth (the hymns “A Voice Has Spoken From the Dust” and “Hail, Cumorah! Silent Wonder” focus on the book’s emergence from the ground). See Karen Lynn Davidson, “The Book of Mormon in Latter-​day Saint Hymnody,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 9.1 (2000): 14–​27; Roger L. Miller, “‘Hail, Cumorah! Silent Wonder’: Music Inspired by the Hill Cumorah,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 13.1–​2 (2004): 98–​109. 21. This exact language appears in 2 Ne 33:13. See also 2 Ne 3:19–​20, 2 Ne 26:16, 2 Ne 27:9; Morm 8:23; Ether 8:24; and Moro 10:27. All references are to Royal Skousen, ed., The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 22. Mary Dungee, “The Gospel Restored,” Millennial Star, Manchester, UK (Oct. 29, 1853), 720. 23. Orson F. Whitney, “Lehi,” in The Poetical Writings of Orson F.  Whitney (Salt Lake City, UT: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1889), 177.

 

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24. J. E. Vanderwood, A Story of the Ancestor of the American Indian:  An Epic (Independence, MO: J. E. Vanderwood, 1936), 63. 25. Charles W. Dunn, The Master’s Other Sheep: An Epic of Ancient America and Other Poems (Logan, UT: J.P. Smith & Son, 1929), 87. The image of a “voice from the dust” inspired the titles of two separate collections of poems: Vernon W. Larsen, Out of the Dust: Verse Inspired by The Book of Mormon (Provo, UT: V. W. Larsen, 1980) and Jeannine Campbell Gilligan, Rhymes From the Dust: Poetry of The Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City, UT: Story Magic Publishers, 2005). See also Theodore E. Curtis, “Historic Ramah’s Verdant Slope,” Improvement Era 31.3 ( Jan. 1928): 245; Clinton F. Larson, “Sonnet on The Book of Mormon,” Liahona (Nov. 1940): 262; Theodore E. Curtis, “A Nation Speaks from out the Dust,” Improvement Era 30.11 (Aug. 1927); A. P., “The Book of Mormon; or, A Voice from Cumorah,” The Woman’s Exponent (Feb. 1875): 134. 26. Margery S. Stewart, “Out of the Dust,” Relief Society Magazine 56.12 (Dec. 1969): 957. 27. Whitney, Poetical Writings, 177. 28. Michael Hicks, “Moroni,” BYU Studies 41.2 (2002): 70. 29. S. T. Brimhall-​Foley, “The Book of Mormon,” Relief Society Magazine 17.9 (Sep. 1930): 463. 30. Parley P. Pratt, The Millennium, A Poem (Boston: Parley P. Pratt, 1835), 122. 31. Eliza R. Snow, Eliza R. Snow: The Complete Poetry, Jill Mulvay Derr and Karen Lynn Davidson, eds. (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2009), 1000. 32. Theodore E. Curtis, “Cumorah,” Improvement Era 12.5 (March 1909):  373; Theodore E. Curtis, “Hail, Cumorah! Silent Wonder,” in Latter-​Day Saint Hymns, Melvin J. Ballard, ed. (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book Co., 1927), 110. See also Roger Howey, “Memories of Cumorah,” Improvement Era 30.11 (Sep. 1927): 1025, which has Moroni take the plates to the Hill Cumorah where he “there did bury low /​And hide within thy breast.” 33. Jo Adelaide Stock, “Voice of Cumorah,” Relief Society Magazine 33.4 (Apr. 1946): 253. 34. A number of poets have depicted the ancient inhabitants of the Americas as having touched the plates in ways that bind their lives and experiences to the material record of the golden plates, which are themselves bound intimately to the landscape. In a 1979 poem the plates are described as “gold made rich /​Beyond metallic worth by blood and dreams /​Alloyed within each leaf ” (Cracroft, A Certain Testimony, 416). A 1976 poem goes beyond this image of the plates as alloys of the people to depict the plates themselves as the people: an image of when “Moroni knelt as if in prayer /​And buried his people beneath the trees” does not depict Moroni burying the fallen soldiers who were killed in battle at the base of the Hill Cumorah, but is, instead, an image of Moroni burying the golden plates as if they were the people themselves—​he “Buried them all in one small grave /​Sealed by a stone and crisp, curling leaves” (Dale Bjork, “Those Quiet Rolling Woods,” Ensign 6.3 [March  1976]:  50). Another poet writes in the voice of Moroni that the golden plates contain “all our work—​/​ our lives” (Donnell Hunter, “Moroni,” Ensign 17.6 [ June 1987]: 27). 35. Snow, Eliza R. Snow, 33, 694. See also “O Stop and Tell Me Red Man,” in A Collection of Sacred Hymns, for the Church of the Latter Day Saints, Emma Smith. ed. (Kirtland, OH: F. G. Williams & Company, 1835), 83–​84. 36. Parley P. Pratt, “Moroni’s Lamentation,” The Evening and Morning Star 2.11 ( Jan. 1834): 128. The poem also appeared in Latter Day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate, August 1836, 368 and was reprinted in the 1889 Psalmody. 37. Dunn, Master’s Other Sheep, 85. See also Joseph L. Townsend, “The Miraculous Book of Mormon,” Improvement Era 30 (Sep.  1927):  1027; Betty Ventura, “Seed of Promise,” Improvement Era 62.10 (Oct. 1959): 755. 38. Ruth May Fox, “Cumorah,” The Relief Society Magazine 10.8 (Aug. 1923): 425. 39. Curtis, “Historic Ramah’s Verdant Slope,” 245. 40. See Louis Helps, “Look Once Again at Cumorah’s Hill: The Poet’s View,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 13.1–​2 (2004): 110–​123. 41. Vernon W. Larsen, “Cumorah’s Final Scene,” in Out of the Dust, 76. 42. See Elizabeth Petty Bentley, “Moroni Awaits His End,” Exponent II 24.2 (Winter 2001): 17. 43. Marion Sharp, I Cry, Mormon (Philadelphia:  Dorrance, 1939), 17. See also C. W.  S., “The Remnant,” Millennial Star, Manchester, UK 43.23 ( June 6, 1881); “The Book of Mormon,” Millennial Star, Manchester, UK (Feb. 27, 1896); and Wilkins, From Cumorah’s Lonely Hill, 170. 44. C. W. S., “The Remnant,” Millennial Star, Manchester, UK 43.23 ( June 6, 1881).

 



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45. Frank C. Steele, “The Solitary Scribe,” Improvement Era 12.4 (Feb. 1919): 313. 46. Whitney, Poetical Writings, 177. 47. Aside from incidental mention of The Book of Mormon in Parley P.  Pratt’s early attempt to write an epic of Mormon history in The Millennium and Other Poems (New  York:  W. Molineux, 1840), Book of Mormon epics are a twentieth-​century phenomenon. A  number of epics have been written on the history of nineteenth-​century Mormonism, including Hannah Tapfield King’s An Epic Poem: A Synopsis of the Rise of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints (Salt Lake City, UT: Juvenile Instructor, 1884); Alfred Osmond’s The Exiles (Salt Lake City, UT:  Deseret News, 1926); and Orson F. Whitney’s Elias:  An Epic of the Ages (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1904), as well as the satirical Mormoniad (Boston: A. Williams and Co., 1858). 48. Dunn, The Master’s Other Sheep,  10–​11. 49. Ibid.,  85. 50. Ibid.,  85. 51. Dunn, The Master’s Other Sheep, 84. 52. Curtis, “Cumorah,” 373. 53. Hunter, “Moroni,” 27 54. Clinton F. Larson, Coriantumr and Moroni (Provo, UT:  Brigham Young University Press, 1961), 38, 69. 55. Larson, Coriantumr and Moroni, 71. (Sherrizah is a location mentioned in Moroni 7.) Vernon Larsen similarly depicts a lonely Moroni who is driven to continue on when he thinks of his future interactions with Joseph Smith: “There was still the boy, Joseph—​/​And the book, yet to speak out of the dust” (Out of the Dust, 76). Mark Bennion has Moroni promising Joseph that, “In a coming day I’ll meet you there,” a promise that he makes “From one messenger /​ to another,” in Psalm & Selah: A Poetic Journey Through The Book of Mormon (Woodsboro, MD: Parables, 2009), 100–​101. 56. Wallace B. Shute, Terra Nova (Independence, MO: Herald House, 1988), 13. 57. Ibid.,  114. 58. Cracroft, A Certain Testimony, 408. 59. Michael R. Collings, The Nephiad:  An Epic Poem in Twelve Books (Thousand Oaks, CA: Zarahemla Motets, 1996), 85. 60. Sharp, I Cry, Mormon. 61. Poems that also give names and voices to Book of Mormon women include Linda S. Fletcher, “Faith of the Mothers,” Relief Society Magazine 17.5 (May 1930): 249–​250; Vanderwood, A Story of the Ancestor, 14–​15, 25; Mildred T. Hunt, “The Title of Liberty,” Ensign 3.9 (Sep. 1973): 31; Donnell Hunter, “Abish,” Ensign 7.8 (Aug. 1977): 7; Larsen, Out of the Dust, 12, 51–​53; Mildred T. Hunt, Book of Mormon and Other Poems (Sacramento, CA: Print King, 1981), 19, 27; Shute, Terra Nova, 29, 31; Marni Asplund-​Campbell, “Sariah,” Dialogue 27.1 (Spring 1994): 106–​107; Gilligan, Rhymes from the Dust, 2; Bennion, Psalm & Selah,  53–​54. 62. Lula Green Richards, Branches That Run Over the Wall: A Book of Mormon Poem and Other Writings (Salt Lake City, UT:  The Magazine Printing Company, 1904), 17, 22, italics in original. 63. Ibid.,  63. 64. Olive McFate Wilkins, From Cumorah’s Lonely Hill: An Epic Poem of The Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret News Press, 1950); Vanderwood, A Story of the Ancestor. 65. Other poems that adopt the Kalevala meter of Hiawatha are Book of Mormon, Abridged in Rhyme, Part 1, The Exodus 600 B.C. to 545 B.C. (Mansfield, MO: Herald House, 1972); Curtis, “Cumorah”; Mildred Goodfellow, “Book of Mormon,” Saints Herald, Independence, MO 77 ( July 12, 1930): 815; Linda S. Fletcher, “Faith of the Mothers,” Relief Society Magazine 17.5 (May 1930): 249–​250. 66. Cavitch, American Elegy, 111. 67. Máximo Corte wrote poetic adaptations of the first eight chapters of The Book of Mormon for the official LDS publication in Argentina, El Mensajero, from November 1947 to July 1948. 68. Sherman Alexie, “Crazy Horse Speaks,” in Old Shirts and New Skins (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 1993), 36. 69. Pratt, “Now Is the Day of Israel.”

 

 

INDEX

Adair, James, 279, 281–​83, 286–​87 Adam, 22–​23, 28–​29, 277–​78, 282–​84, 344, 348–​ 49, 354, 396–​97, 408 Alexie, Sherman, 433–​34 Alma the Younger, 120, 122, 126–​27, 166, 175–​76, 177, 218–​19, 379–​81,  413–​14 Ammon (Nephite scout), 202 Ammon (son of Mosiah), 177 Ammoron, 202 Anderson, Benedict, 10–​11, 23–​24, 26–​29, 32–​33,  38–​39 Arminius, Jacob, 343–​45   Babel, 159, 165–​66, 168, 291–​92 Bacon, Francis, 90, 366–​67 ballad,  420–​21 Benjamin, Walter, 9–​10, 26–​27 Berger, Peter, 209, 210, 223–​24 Bible Hebrew Bible, 107, 108, 109, 120–​21, 124, 136, 170, 171–​73, 179, 218–​19, 262, 290, 368–​69,  373–​74 King James Version, 11–​12, 108, 110–​11, 114–​ 16, 117–​25, 129, 137, 138, 140, 142, 143–​44, 148, 149–​51, 284, 298, 315 New Testament, 108–​9, 111–​13, 114–​16, 117, 118–​19, 124, 125, 128, 129, 144–​45, 146–​47, 171, 173, 175, 179, 243–​44, 282–​83, 285–​86, 290, 298, 299, 303, 307, 344, 347–​48, 349, 353–​54,  368–​69 Old Testament, 108, 109, 114, 116, 117, 118–​ 19, 125, 144–​45, 174, 179, 188, 244–​45, 261, 298, 347, 349, 353–​54, 368–​69 biblical fiction, 109–​10 Book of Mormon dictation of, 1–​2, 7–​8, 49, 50–​53, 58–​59, 64–​65, 112–​13, 159, 162, 169–​70, 174–​75, 177–​79, 222–​23,  224

editions 1830 (first American), 96–​97, 116, 124–​25, 162–​63,  224–​25 1837 (second American), 86, 116 1841 (first British), 86–​87 1849 (second British), 86–​87, 96–​97, 101, 102 1869 Deseret Alphabet, 88–​93, 101 1879, 7–​8, 94–​101, 102 1920, 96, 99, 101 1963, 100 1981, 86, 96, 101 historicity of, 2–​10, 45–​48, 125, 159 reception of, 5–​6, 8, 10–​11, 34, 47–​49, 137–​38, 142, 148–​51, 155, 222–​23, 224–​26, 341, 347–​48 (see also print culture) translation of, 1–​3, 4, 49, 50–​53, 58–​59, 64, 112–​13, 116–​17, 120–​21, 122, 125, 144–​47, 162, 163–​66, 169–​70,  178–​79 Boudinot, Elias, 279, 283–​88 brass plates, 33–​34, 57–​58, 68, 107, 122, 172–​73, 177, 223–​25, 373–​74,  400–​1 Braude, Ann, 363, 377–​78 Brodie, Fawn, 3–​4, 24–​25, 34–​35, 147 brother of Jared (or Mahonri Moriancumer), 168, 292–​93, 428, 429 Bryant, William Cullen, 30–​32, 404, 423–​25,  427–​28 Buell, Lawrence, 110–​11 burial mounds, 30–​32, 423–​24, 427–​28 “burned-​over district.” See Second Great Awakening   Campbell, Alexander, 3–​4, 115–​16, 165, 166, 178, 349,  391–​92 canon and canonization, 6, 107–​8, 110–​12, 113, 164–​65, 178, 374 Captain Moroni, 381–​83

439

 

440 I n d e

Card, Orson Scott, 12–​13, 393, 408–​12, 414 Catawba Indian Nation, 12, 322–​23, 327–​29, 330–​31,  332–​34 Catholicism, 57, 210–​11, 216–​17, 342–​43, 363 Cherokee, 327 Child, Lydia Maria, 218, 313 Choctaw, 327 Christianity. See Catholicism; evangelical Protestantism Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-​day Saints, 30, 49, 363, 368, 370–​71, 392, 405, 426 Clinton, De Witt, 239, 240, 241 Collings, Michael R., 431–​32 colonialism, 4, 9–​10, 12, 28–​29, 233–​34, 236, 238–​40, 259, 264, 265–​66, 268–​70, 279, 290, 294–​95, 313, 322, 325, 405 Columbus, Christopher, 12–​13, 153–​54, 333, 351, 391–419 commonsense philosophy, 112–​13 Community of Christ (RLDS), 421 conduct books, 362–​67, 368, 369–​72, 373–​74, 375–​79,  382–​84 conversion, 208–​9, 217–​18, 249–​50, 253, 281, 285–​86, 294–​95, 327–​28, 346, 350, 355, 379–​81,  397–​98 Cooper, James Fenimore, 218, 240, 241–​42, 371 Coriantumr, 292, 430–​31 covenant theology, 12–​13, 108–​9, 165–​66, 243, 249–​50, 321–​22, 325, 329, 341, 368–​69, 402, 403 Cowdery, Oliver, 1–​2, 59, 249–​50, 327–​28, 398 Cuming, F.H., 237–​38, 253–​54 Curtis, Theodore E., 429–​30   death,  21–​28 Deseret Alphabet, 90–​93 Deuteronomistic history, 108–​9 Doctrine and Covenants, 224 Doctrine of Grace, 12–​13, 342, 343–​44, 347–​49 Doctrine of Works, 12–​13, 342, 343–​44, 347–​49 domesticity, 299, 303–​5, 306–​7, 310–​14, 372–​73 Dunn, Charles W., 429–​30   Eden, 22–​23, 25–​26, 136, 165–​66, 168, 348–​49, 395,  396–​98 elegy, 12–​13, 421–​23, 424, 426, 427–​28, 433, 434 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 61–​62, 110–​11, 203–​4 Enlightenment, 62, 89, 111–​12, 236, 242, 357, 411 Enoch, 62–​64,  68–​71 Enos,  355–​56 epic, 395, 404, 408–​9, 421​, 425, 428–​33 Erie Canal, 148, 237, 240, 253–​54 eschatology, 186–​87, 279–​80, 281, 283–​84, 287–​90,  293–​94 (see also messianic time and messianism)

x

Ether, 33–​34, 165–​66, 193–​94, 292–​93, 431 evangelical Protestantism, 32–​33, 62, 64, 109, 165, 167, 169, 178, 187, 189, 195, 208, 251–​52, 253, 379–​80. See also Second Great Awakening Eve, 283–​84, 374, 378–​79, 396–​97 Ezekiel, 184–​85, 188, 302, 349–​50   Faber, George Stanley, 284–​85 fathers, 12–​13, 202, 233–​35, 241, 242, 244–​45, 247–​48, 249–​50, 263–​64, 304, 310–​11, 313, 362–​63, 364, 365–​66, 371–​73,  383–​84 femininity, 365, 366, 380–​81, 383–​84 Finney, Charles, 208, 248 First Vision, 87, 207–​9, 210, 217–​18, 345–​46, 405,  409–​10 free agency, 235, 246, 254–​55 Freemasonry, 62, 64   Garr, Arnold, 407 Gates, Susa, 406–​7 gender, 253, 260, 271–​72, 299, 303, 305, 307–​10, 311–​12, 363–​64, 365–​67, 370–​71, 372–​73, 380,  383–​84 genocide, 9–​10, 234–​35, 250, 251, 321–​22, 393, 402–​3, 404–​6, 408–​9,  411–​12 Gentiles, 36–​37, 108–​9, 193–​94, 224–​25, 250, 251, 259–​60, 265–​66, 268–​70, 324–​26, 350–​ 51, 352–​53, 403, 404–​5 geography, 96, 99–​100, 101, 136, 273–​74, 277–​78, 279, 286, 329–​33, 395, 396–​98, 412–​13 gold plates, 1–​2, 32–​33, 49, 58–​59, 61, 64–​65, 68–​71, 100, 107, 113, 137–​38, 143, 145–​47, 165–​66, 179, 194–​95, 210–​11, 291–​92, 294–​95, 341, 354–​55, 356–​57, 394, 395–​97, 400–​1, 409, 425–​26, 434 Green, Edith, 321–38   Handsome Lake, 234, 236–​37, 252–​54 Hardy, Grant, 4–​5, 6–​7, 45–​46, 47–​48, 58, 185–​86, 198–​99, 201–​2, 220–​21, 262–​63, 353, 369 Harris, Martin, 49, 112–​13, 222–​23 Hasaneanda (or Ely Parker), 249, 252 Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois), 234, 239–​41, 249, 252–​55,  283–​84 Hebraic Indian Theory, 2, 12, 108–​9, 259, 277, 321–​22, 324–​26, 331,  397–​98 Helaman, 176 heresy, 209 hieroglyphics, 58–​64, 146–​47, 164, 188 higher biblical criticism, 188–​90, 193 Hill Cumorah, 420–​21, 425–​27, 434 Howe, E.D., 115–​16 humanism, 211, 216–​17 Humboldt, Alexander von, 89 Hunt, Gilbert, 107–​8, 140

 



Index

imperialism, 31–​32, 247, 259–​60, 264, 265, 267–​ 68, 271–​72, 393, 395, 396–​97, 403 Indians. See Hebraic Indian Theory; indigeneity; Native Americans; and specific Native nations Indian removal, 242, 286–​87, 290, 327–​29, 404,  427–​28 indigeneity, 9–​10, 12, 234, 251, 259, 270, 321–​22,  334 intertextuality, 11–​12, 118–​29, 288, 292–​93, 301 Iroquois Confederacy. See Haudenosaunee Irving, Washington, 394 Isaiah, 57–​58, 114–​15, 118, 119–​20, 126–​27, 173, 174, 175, 177, 188, 195, 224–​25, 281, 283–​85, 287–​88, 326, 341, 350, 353, 392, 394–​95,  414 Israel and Israelites, 2, 4, 12, 34, 57–​58, 107, 108–​ 10, 136–​37, 140–​41, 143–​44, 151–​52, 155, 179, 184–​85, 200–​1, 210–​11, 244–​45, 259, 277, 321–​22, 324–​26, 331, 341, 345, 347–​54, 355–​56, 368–​69, 374, 397–​98, 403, 420. See also Hebraic Indian theory   Jackson, Andrew, 327–​29, 351 Jacob (Bible), 22–​23, 268, 269, 284, 324–​25. See also Israel and Israelites Jacob (Book of Mormon), 35–​36, 38, 120, 123, 128, 177, 184, 195, 197–​98, 245–​47, 305–​8, 309–​12,  413–​14 Jared, 32–​33, 199, 428 Jaredites, 32–​35, 159, 165–​66, 168, 199, 292–​93, 411–​12, 421–​22, 427–​30, 431, 433 Jeremiah, 122, 170, 184–​85, 188, 286, 288, 353, 372, 392 Jesus, 7–​8, 35–​36, 61, 64–​65, 109–​10, 111, 118–​19, 122, 123, 126–​27, 128–​29, 159, 164–​65, 166, 167–​68, 170​, 171–​72, 173–​74, 176, 178, 179, 186–​87, 195, 211, 215–​18, 219–​21, 223–​24, 244, 245, 248, 266–​67, 287–​88, 293–​95, 299, 301–​3, 324, 342–​45, 348–​49, 353–​54, 355–​56, 397–​98, 403, 405, 422–​23 Joshua, 215   Kames, Lord Henry Home, 282–​83 Kanosh,  269–​70 Kinderhook Plates, 400–​1 King Benjamin, 128, 212, 250, 375–​77, 378–​80,  382–​83 King Follett discourse, 21–​25, 207 kinship, 233–​37, 238–​39, 242, 243–​45, 246–​48,  249 Korihor, 215–​20,  225–​26   Laban, 25–​26, 56–​58, 68, 126, 172, 223–​25 Laman, 2, 32–​33, 34–​35, 223–​24, 244–​45, 249–​ 50, 261, 262–​63, 371, 429, 432–​33

441

Lamanites, 2, 7–​8, 34–​36, 37, 38–​39, 109, 177, 193–​94, 199, 221, 235, 246–​47, 249–​51, 259, 261–​64, 266–​68, 269–​70, 271–​72, 273–​74, 289–​91, 294–​95, 299, 300, 305–​6, 308–​11, 321–​22, 324, 326, 327–​29, 331, 332–​33, 349–​50, 352, 353, 356, 406, 425, 432–​33 Larson, Clinton F., 430 Latour, Bruno, 235–​36 Lee, Ann, 186–​87 Lehi, 2, 7, 33–​34, 49–​50, 55–​56, 57–​58, 68, 108–​ 10, 114, 126, 170–​72, 175–​76, 184, 190, 192, 196, 197, 200–​1, 202–​3, 224–​25, 244, 245, 246–​47, 249–​50, 262–​63, 266, 288, 290–​91, 292–​93, 321–​22, 353, 371–​72, 383–​84, 405, 408, 411–​12, 428–​29,  432–​33 Lemuel, 223–​24, 244–​45, 249–​50, 262–​63, 371,  432–​33 literacy, 114, 115, 160–​61 lost tribes of Israel, 12, 108–​9, 259, 278–​87, 288, 290, 292, 293–​95, 397–​98 Luther, Martin, 342–​43, 346, 367–​68   Maine, Henry, 234 manhood, 362–​63, 368, 371, 375–​76, 378–​79,  380–​84 masculinity, 312–​13, 362–​64, 368, 378, 382–​83 materialism, 21–​22,  23–​25 materiality, 10–​11, 211, 357 Matthew, Gospel of, 12, 114–​15, 118–​19, 122, 127, 128, 173, 290, 292–​94, 299, 301–​3,  308 Matthews, Robert (Prophet Matthias), 186–​87, 188–​89,  208 Melville, Herman, 53–​55, 110–​11 messianic time, 23–​24, 26, 30 messianism, 9–​11, 26–​28, 30, 200–​1, 203, 215, 217–​18, 220, 434 millennialism. See eschatology; Jesus; Messianic time; Messianism Miller, William, 186–​87, 189 Moby-​Dick, 53–​55,  110–​11 monogamy, 246, 252 monogenism, 277–​80, 283–​84,  294–​95 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 234–​37 Mormon, 233, 250–​51 Moroni, 233–​34, 242 Moses, 56, 124, 126–​27, 141, 172–​73, 223–​24, 244, 292, 348, 349, 351, 353–​54 Mosiah, 7–​8, 49–​53, 109, 121, 122, 123, 126–​29, 143, 154, 166, 170, 175–​76, 177–​78, 196, 202–​3, 211, 212–​13, 222–​23, 250, 261, 263, 290–​92, 353, 376–​79,  380–​81 mothers, 12–​13, 37, 244–​45, 253, 302–​4, 308–​9, 312–​13, 350–​51, 365–​66,  371–​72 mound builders, 31–​33, 423–​24 (see also burial mounds) Mulekites,  290–​93

 

442 I n d e

narratology, 47–​48,  110–​11 nationalism, 4, 26–​28, 29–​30 Native Americans, 2, 31–​32, 108, 109, 235, 238–​ 40, 241, 249, 250, 253–​54, 270, 281–​82, 286, 313, 314, 324, 325–​26, 333, 351, 356, 407, 423–​24, 426, 427–​28. See also Hebraic Indian Theory; indigeneity; and specific Native nations Nehor, 213–​14, 215 Nephi, 2, 32–​33, 34–​38, 49–​50, 56–​58, 64–​65, 68–​71, 96, 111, 113, 114, 122, 126–​27, 129, 163–​64, 167–​68, 170–​71, 172–​73, 175, 177, 184, 192, 195, 196–​99, 200–​2, 222–​25, 244–​ 45, 246–​47, 262–​63, 264, 288–​90, 294–​95, 305, 351, 355–​56, 369–​70, 371, 373–​76, 379–​80, 381–​82, 391, 392, 393, 396–​97, 399, 402–​3, 405, 413–​14, 429, 432–​33 Nephites, 2, 11–​12, 33–​34, 35–​36, 38–​39, 64, 107, 108–​10, 111, 112–​13, 125, 126–​27, 128, 174–​75, 179, 192, 195, 196, 198–​99, 202, 220–​21, 235, 246–​47, 250–​51, 259, 261, 262–​64, 266–​67, 269, 271–​72, 274, 277–​79, 289–​95, 299, 300, 303, 304–​10, 321–​22, 324, 353–​54, 421–​22, 425, 426–​28, 429–​30, 431,  432–​33 New Testament. See Bible Noah, Mordecai Manuel, 188 Noyes, John Humphrey, 186–​87   Old Testament. See Bible Omahas,  265–​66 Omni, 169, 175, 201–​2, 290–​92 Ong, Walter, 161–​62, 172 Ophir,  394–​95 orality,  160–​61 orthography, 91, 92 Otoes,  265–​66   paratext, 10–​11, 47, 55, 58, 94–​95, 96–​99, 102, 114 Parker, Theodore, 188–​89 plates brass, 33–​34, 57–​58, 68, 107, 122, 172–​73, 177, 223–​25, 373–​74,  400–​1 gold, 1–​2, 32–​33, 49, 58–​59, 61, 64–​65, 68–​71, 100, 107, 113, 137–​38, 143, 145–​47, 165–​66, 179, 194–​95, 210–​11, 291–​92, 294–​95, 341, 354–​55, 356–​57, 394, 395–​97, 400–​1, 409, 425–​26,  434 large, 53–​55, 58–​59, 198–​99, 202, 211, 212, 213, 220–​21, 222–​24, 368, 369–​70 small, 50–​53, 55, 184, 198–​99, 201–​2, 211, 222–​25, 369–​70,  371 stereotype, 65–​71, 94 Plato, 161, 169 poetry, 12–​13, 30–​31, 107–​8, 110–​11, 404,  420–​34

x

polygamy, 245–​46, 247–​48, 252, 268, 272–​74 polygenesis,  282–​83 Pratt, Orson, 10–​11, 83–​102 Pratt, Parley, 226, 351, 354, 393, 398 print culture, 10–​11, 23–​30, 32–​33, 65–​66, 101, 115, 137–​38, 146–​47, 279–​80, 362–​63, 368, 369,  370–​71 prophecy, 9, 11–​13, 23–​27, 35–​36, 38–​39, 107–​8, 120, 129, 149–​50, 163–​64, 170–​71, 174, 177, 184–​204, 212, 217–​18, 224–​25, 233–​34, 242, 250, 253, 283–​84, 285–​86, 287–​89, 290–​91, 294–​95, 323–​24, 326, 350, 358, 392, 393, 394–​95, 396–​99, 421–​22, 429 Prophecy of Tobias, 145 Protestantism, 107–​8, 165, 167, 169, 272–​73, 274, 342–​43, 355, 363, 370–​71, 379–​80 (see also evangelical Protestantism) pseudepigrapha,  146–​47 pseudo-​biblicism, 11–​12, 108–​9, 117, 136–​55, 341,  391–​92 Puritans, 108–​9, 113, 313–​14, 341, 343–​45, 346–​47, 348–​49, 350–​51, 352–​53, 354–​55,  421–​22   race, 12, 31–​32, 35–​36, 234, 246–​47, 259–​ 74, 299, 307–​8, 309–​13, 314–​15, 322, 364,  427–​28 racism, 12, 246–​47, 259–​60, 261, 264, 270, 273–​ 74, 299, 309–​12 reformed Egyptian, 1–​2, 58–​59, 146–​47, 166, 168,  291–​92 religious pluralism, 211 religious voluntarism, 208–​9, 243 restoration, 21–​22, 23, 29, 37, 179, 200–​1, 251, 253–​54, 286, 287–​88, 342, 345–​46, 349–​50, 351–​53, 354–​55, 398–​99, 400, 405 revelation, 2, 11–​13, 22–​24, 25–​26, 28–​29, 30–​31, 33–​34, 36–​39, 55–​56, 111, 112–​13, 114–​15, 122, 123, 126–​28, 136–​38, 147–​48, 171, 172, 178, 184–​204, 207–​8, 210–​11, 218–​19, 221–​ 26, 234, 235–​36, 243, 244–​45, 251–​52, 253, 254–​55, 294–​95, 327–​28, 341, 343, 348, 355, 357, 358, 374, 383–​84, 392, 393, 394–​95, 396–​97, 405, 406–​7, 412 Reynolds, David, 109–​11 Richards, Lula Green, 432–​33 romance, 26, 29–​30, 32–​34, 38–​39, 53–​55, 279–​ 80, 313–​14,  432–​33   salvation, 12–​13, 21–​23, 64, 67–​68, 107, 108–​9, 114, 122, 129, 155, 213–​14, 215, 224–​25, 236–​37, 262, 286, 341–​47, 352, 353, 354–​ 56, 358, 376, 377–​78, 379–​81, 397–​98, 400, 402 Samuel the Lamanite, 12, 101, 167–​68, 174, 263–​ 64, 290, 299–​313, 315, 353 Schoolcraft, Henry, 249–​50

 



Index

scripture, 6, 7, 11–​12, 33–​34, 57–​58, 61, 68, 92, 94, 107–​8, 109–​10, 111–​17, 120–​21, 123, 126, 127–​28, 129, 137–​38, 141–​42, 143, 144, 146–​51, 155, 159–​79, 184–​87, 189–​96, 197–​98, 200, 202, 203–​4, 210–​11, 214, 219, 221, 222–​23, 224–​26, 234–​36, 242, 244–​45, 248, 262, 266, 267–​68, 269–​70, 284–​85, 286, 315, 341, 347, 348, 349, 351, 355, 356–​57, 368, 369–​70, 371–​72, 373–​74, 391–​92, 399, 401–​2, 409–​10, 414, 422–​23, 434 Second Great Awakening, 32–​33, 109, 186, 187, 189, 253, 358, 364. See also evangelical Protestantism secularism, 11–​12, 204, 211, 216, 217–​18, 219, 220–​21, 222, 273 secularity, 12, 209–​11, 216, 226, 235–​37, 243, 249, 260,  273–​74 secularization, 207–​26,  235–​36 Sedgwick, Catherine Maria, 32–​33, 213–​14, 313–​14,  315 Sedgwick, Obadiah, 344, 348 Shakers,  186–​87 Shalev, Eran, 108–​9, 117, 391–​92 Shute, Wallace B., 430–​31 Skousen, Royal, 13–​14, 58–​59 Smith, Ethan, 107–​8, 279, 286–​87 Smith, Joseph, Jr., 21–​26, 30–​31, 32–​33, 34–​36, 37, 38, 46–​47, 49–​55, 57, 58–​59, 61–​62, 64–​ 65, 68–​71, 83–​84, 85, 86, 87, 94–​95, 96–​98, 107–​8, 111, 112–​16, 117, 120–​21, 123, 124–​ 25, 126, 137–​38, 142–​43, 145–​51, 155, 160, 162, 163–​64, 165, 166, 169–​70, 171, 172, 175, 176, 177–​79, 184–​87, 188, 190, 192, 193–​95, 200–​1, 202, 203, 207–​11, 213, 217–​ 18, 222–​25, 233–​36, 242–​43, 248–​50, 251–​ 52, 259, 264, 266, 267, 268, 273–​74, 291–​92, 323–​24, 327–​28, 341, 345, 347, 348–​50, 351–​55, 356–​58, 391, 393–​94, 395–​99, 400–​ 2, 405, 409–​10, 413, 414, 420–​21, 430

443

Snow, Eliza, 426 sola scriptura, 64, 111–​12, 167, 179, 374, 383–​84 Solomon, 62–​64, 245–​46,  394–​95 soteriology, 7–​8, 342 sovereignty, 237, 260, 273–​74, 286–​87, 374 Spaulding, Solomon, 107–​8 stereotype plates, 65–​71, 94 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 218, 372–​73 surface reading, 5–​7, 8–​10 symptomatic reading, 4–​6, 9–​10 systematic theology, 10–​11, 89–​90   Talmage, James, 96, 99, 101, 407–​8 Taylor, Charles, 209–​11, 216–​17 Taylor, John, 400–​1, 409–​10 temporality, 7, 155, 171–​72, 173, 289–​90 textuality, 185 Thompson, Charles, 399 Trail of Tears, 327, 328–​29 Turner, Nat, 188 Twain, Mark, 298–​99 typology, 109, 152, 344   Watt, George, 90–​93 Wesley, John, 345–​47, 400 whiteness, 12, 260–​61, 269–​70, 271–​74 Whitney, Orson F., 399, 428–​29 Wiley, Robert, 400–​1 Winter Quarters, 265–​66 witnessing, 37–​38, 58, 191, 204, 225–​26 Woodruff, Wilford, 268–​69, 400, 406–​7 Wunderli, Earl, 7, 46–​48   Young, Brigham, 86–​87, 90–​93, 94, 259–​60, 265–​ 68, 270, 273–​74, 393, 399   Zarahemla, 116, 212–​13, 250, 290–​91, 292, 301 Zedekiah, 143, 244, 288, 290–​92, 353 Zeniff, 262–​64