Search Results

Mormon Scholar Hugh Nibley ushered in a new era of Book of Mormon studies that emphasized congruencies between the record and the world of the Middle East. Focus shifted to textual, linguistic, and cultural evidences for its authenticity. John Sorenson argued for geography and anthropology‐based approaches. In escalating debates, topics of dispute would include biblical plagiarism, the Isaiah problem, population numbers, Book of Mormon language and names, and anachronisms. In spite of a growing and impressive body of Book of Mormon apologetics, evangelicals and scholars remain largely dismissive, though with significant exceptions.

In the context of 19th‐century American millennialism, many early converts to Mormonism heralded the Book of Mormon as a sign of the end times. In an era of many prophets and visionaries, the Book of Mormon was offered as tangible proof that Joseph was an authentic prophet. Joseph Smith's emphatic literalism and appeal to physical and historical evidence made him both more threatening and more attractive than a Jacob Boehme or an Emanuel Swedenborg. The story of angels, seer stones, and gold plates, thus displaced a focus on the Book of Mormon's content, for both critics and believers.

This chapter considers the foundational text of Mormonism, The Book of Mormon, and scrutinizes the place of race and indigeneity in its singular narrative form. Taking up the lineaments of anti-imperial critique to be found in the work--specifically, its glancing vision of the putative heroes, the Nephites, as self-blinded imperialists--the chapter examines how precisely such an anti-imperial reading of the moral of The Book of Mormon played out in the Mormons’ ventures into the West, where it came to be routed through the Saints’ fractured identifications and disidentifications with Native peoples, the imperial United States, and their own scriptural forebears.

The Book of Mormon narrates how Lehi, a Jewish prophet, migrated to the Western Hemisphere with his clan and established a colony there, whose leaders maintained a history of their religious, political, and military history for the next thousand years. Eventually the followers of Christ, Nephites, were exterminated by their apostate brethren the Lamanites, while being led by Mormon and Moroni, great generals and final record keepers of the gold plates. The Book is structurally complex, and suffused with references to and teachings about Jesus Christ, even recording his visit to the Americas after his Jerusalem resurrection. Initial reception of the Book of Mormon was tepid.

The Book of Mormon appeared in American history at a time of religious turmoil. As it attempted to answer questions posed by Christians and skeptics alike, it did so through narrative rather than direct exegetical commentary or doctrinal exposition (though such genres were at times incorporated into its narrative). Moreover, Joseph Smith’s book was presented as a newly revealed ancient scripture, equal in authority to the Bible. Consequently, while it shared many characteristics with the emerging genre of biblical fiction and reflected shifts in political culture from Old Testament inflected nationalism to a New Testament emphasis on individual salvation, The Book of Mormon was nevertheless an unusual literary and religious work. From a theological perspective, it affirmed many elements of conservative Christianity, including angels, prophecy, divine providence, and spiritual gifts, yet its very existence as extra-biblical scripture challenged notions of the uniqueness and sufficiency of the Bible. The Book of Mormon was clearly intended to be a companion to the Bible, and the connections between the two include not only thematic elements, but also archaic diction, shared phrasing, allusions, and subtle modifications of familiar biblical expressions that recontextualize and explain theological concepts and ambiguities.

This volume brings together a diverse range of scholars in American literary studies and related fields to definitively establish The Book of Mormon as an indispensable object of Americanist inquiry. The book has generated controversy since its initial publication in 1830, as readers have deemed it everything from a sacred scripture to a dangerous fraud. As this collection shows, though, The Book of Mormon’s intricate literary forms and radical historical vision make it a worthwhile object of scholarly inquiry. Drawing on formalist criticism, literary and cultural theory, book history, religious studies, and even anthropological field work, Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon captures as never before the full dimensions and resonances of this “American Bible.”

By the time 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 eighteenth-century Britain, Americans began producing pseudo-biblical texts during the Revolution. This essay demonstrates how the prism of pseudo-biblicism allows us to view The Book of Mormon as emerging from a larger biblico-American world. The genre demonstrates how pervasive the Bible was in the cultural landscape of the Republic and the ease with which Americans lapsed into biblical language. As this essay points out, however, pseudo-biblical discourse also sheds new light on The Book of Mormon. The similarities between The Book of Mormon and other pseudo-biblical texts provide a significant context to understanding the creation and reception of Smith’s text, the culture of biblicism in the nineteenth century, and the intellectual history of the early American Republic.

This chapter considers the doctrinal implications of Benson’s LDS church presidency, specifically his emphasis on the Book of Mormon and how it transformed and shaped the contemporary Mormon Church. The essay further explores the challenges and controversies of Benson’s presidency: his teachings on gender roles in the family, the fallout of the Mark Hoffman forgery scandal, the “September Six” excommunications, Steve Benson’s publicized disaffection from the Mormon Church, Benson’s oversight of the new church public affairs department, and many other issues that defined and shaped his presidency.

This chapter examines the Book of Mormon's racial theology of “white universalism.” It explores the supposed pre-Columbian history that the Book of Mormon contains, notably the origins of Native Americans as a remnant of Israelites called the “Lamanites.” It also explores the future that the Book of Mormon prophesies in which the Lamanites unify with believing “Gentiles” to become one “white and a delightsome” people and together build a New Jerusalem in America before Christ’s return. The chapter also includes an examination of the Book of Mormon prophet, “Samuel, the Lamanite.” Samuel’s case, along with other marginalized early American religious leaders like William Apess and Jerana Lee, shows that non-white Americans have a “privileged sight” onto America and America’s religious communities that fail to live up to their own ideals of inclusion and equality. The views of marginalized figures are thus essential for an accurate accounting of America’s past.

As is often noted, The Book of Mormon attaches normative value to whiteness and generally ignores women’s spirituality. This essay insists, however, that the book’s presentation of gender and race should be read with an eye to characters who, from within the volume’s own narrative, identify and critique the racial and sexual presuppositions of the narrative. Focused on the racialized prophet Samuel and the countercultural prophet Jacob, the authors thus read The Book of Mormon as aware of and critical toward its own apparent racial and sexual problems. They argue that The Book of Mormon would in this way likely have struck its earliest readers as in step with the then-nascent genre of domestic fiction, represented in the 1820s by Lydia Maria Child (Hobomok) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick (Hope Leslie). Yet, unlike such novels, The Book of Mormon does its work through inventive (but subtle) reimaginings of key biblical texts.

This chapter traces the different ways the Book of Mormon was marketed to “red,” “white,” and “black” Americans during the first three years after the church was founded in 1830. Because Native Americans (“Lamanites”) were seen as the Book of Mormon’s true heirs and the prophesied leaders of New Jerusalem, and because most American Indians did not belong to America’s English-language based print culture, Joseph Smith sent Mormonism’s first official mission to Delaware Indians on the frontier, west of Missouri where the Mormons hoped to build their New Jerusalem. Because most were literate in English, early Mormons attempted to reach white “Gentile” Americans of European descent through newspapers and other media produced and published through their own printing operations. Though the Book of Mormon’s past or future does not include people of African descent, early Mormons did allow, and even encouraged, some free black Americans to join the church.

The Book of Mormon joined a conversation of American manhood in flux. While American literature gave rise to a new model of manhood, the American Adam, self-help literature offered male passions freer rein, heralding self-reliance, self-interest, and self-improvement. Within popular print, autonomy and individualism were becoming the bedrock of American masculinity. Into this print culture came The Book of Mormon, a text intended, at least in part, to instruct its readers how God-fearing men should behave. This essay argues that the performance of masculinity supported by the text can best be understood within the context not only of ideals for men, but also of prescribed ideals for women and their religious concerns. While The Book of Mormon’s narrative shored up the importance of fatherhood and patriarchal authority, it simultaneously emphasized the centrality of female concerns and traits.

Readers of The Book of Mormon have long identified Christopher Columbus as the “man among the Gentiles” whose divinely prompted journey to the Americas is foretold therein; Columbus thus became a model for the prophetic leadership of Joseph Smith. But if Columbus was inspired to discover the New World, that inspiration was imprecise, as the admiral sailed for China, suggesting that revelation is necessarily an ambiguous, messy process whose conclusions are uncertain and provisional, subject to correction or revision. Because his arrival in the Americas precipitated the genocide of Native peoples, identifying Columbus as a prophetic figure has forced faithful readers of The Book of Mormon to grapple with the question of theodicy. Some, like the novelist Orson Scott Card, have suggested that the Amerindian genocide is compatible with the justice of a loving God, while others have argued that The Book of Mormon celebrates prophetic weakness and promotes hermeneutic humility.

For years, scholars have identified elements of Hebraic poetry in the words of Book of Mormon prophets as evidence of the book’s ancient origins. This effort to make poetic forms proof of the book’s truth claims finds a parallel in the hundreds of poems that have been written about The Book of Mormon, a topic to which scholars have paid little attention. This essay shows how the logic behind Book of Mormon poetry runs counter to Lawrence Buell’s formulation of “American literary scripturism,” which argues that “the erosion of the Bible’s privileged status acted as a literary stimulus” for American writers. But poetry about The Book of Mormon does not rise from the ashes of a discredited sacred text. Rather, Latter-day Saint poets treat the book as generative of poetic genres such as epic and elegy, genres that provide their own commentary on The Book of Mormon and its relationship to US nationalism, indigenous peoples, and the nature of history in the Americas.

This chapter comes to Mormonism as something only tangentially related to this chapter's author's own work in radically reformulating our understanding of ancient Jewish religion. The author of this chapter has elsewhere assessed the Book of Mormon in the context of pre-exilic Israelite religion. Here, that interest is extended here by considering the temple world view of early Israel before the reforms of King Josiah. Noting the primacy of this same temple-dominated vision in the prophetic career of Joseph Smith, the first part of this chapter concentrates on that subject. From his translation of the Book of Mormon through the corpus of his own visions, Joseph established continuity with the Bible as text and Jerusalem as sacred space. Equally important is the pattern in Joseph Smith of both chronicling sacred theophanies and urging their possibility in contemporary religious practice. That is why it has been argued that Joseph Smith's restoration converges on the key time, place, institutions, and issues involved in this chapter's reconstruction.

This chapter furthers the project of an intellectually richer account of Mormonism by offering a critique of the centrality of sympathy in the polemics that have engulfed Mormon historical studies from their inception, and proposing an alternative. The critique is situated in a largely postmodern, anti-essentialist conception of identity as a malleable and fluid concept. At the same time, it notes in Smith's own turn to ritual a validation of appearances over essence, doing over being. A focus on the epic of Mormonism's narrative rather than its characters, on popular rather than elite Mormon history, and on the geographical varieties with their correspondingly different accounts of Mormonism—all are presented here as powerful antidotes to the snares of an approach that links, and therefore reduces Joseph Smith and the religion he founded to an irresolvable debate over human motives.

Reading is a cultural activity, meaning that we read from a particular space and cultural positionality. An ethnography of reading, then, takes into account how one’s positionality affects one’s reading, and, concomitantly, how that reading reflects (and affects) one’s position in the world. As I argue and hope to subsequently demonstrate, Indigenous peoples read The Book of Mormon from a particular space that places them in a special, and potentially fraught, relationship to the text. Since The Book of Mormon claims to be a history of the peopling of the Americas, the stakes of interpretation are particularly high for Indigenous Americans, because, for those who accept the historicity and sacred status of The Book of Mormon as scripture, it has significant bearing on articulations of ancestry, identity, and Indigeneity. In this chapter I provide an ethnographic reading of an Indigenous woman’s reading of The Book of Mormon from the Catawba Indian Nation.

Although it has frequently been acknowledged that first-person narration is a crucial component of The Book of Mormon’s structure, no critic has fully analyzed the nature of narrative voice in The Book of Mormon or placed its prophetic voice in historical context. This essay shows how the centrality of first-person prophet–narrators in The Book of Mormon fundamentally changed the standard narrative practice of scripture. The piece situates the text’s prophetic voice in the context of early nineteenth-century religious culture: a world of evangelical preachers, self-proclaimed prophets, historicist biblical scholars, literary Transcendentalism, and popular spiritualist mediumship—all of which produce texts that collapse narrative categories and transform the relationship between human and divine. In doing so, it moves beyond the commonplace that personal revelation is the primary distinction of LDS and Second Great Awakening–era scriptural and spiritual practice; instead, its key characteristic is the always-mediated nature of that revelation.