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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Parley Pratt’s Puritan ancestry prefigured his own life of religious conflict and independence, with Anne Hutchinson and John Lathrop among his forbears. His immediate background was impoverished and itinerant, as his father Jared Pratt traversed the state of New York trying to secure a living. He left home at a young age, first boarding out, then unsuccessfully seeking his fortune on the frontier. He fell in love with Thankful Halsey, began a religious quest, joined the Baptists, and built a cabin in the Ohio wilderness. Pratt then married, and joined the Reformed Baptists or Campbellite movement, under Sidney Rigdon’s influence, attracted to its millennialism and Primitivism. Forsaking his farm, he embarked on a freelance mission, happened upon a Book of Mormon, and was converted to the Latter-day Saints, or Mormons. Almost immediately, he was called by Joseph Smith as a missionary to the “Lamanites” (Native Americans) in the Indian Territory.

Joseph Smith saw himself as a seer called to rescue the Bible from Protestantism. Smith’s first scripture, his Book of Mormon, repaired, expanded, and revised the Protestant Bible in order to tell America’s primeval history. This Mormon scripture pointed out and exploited the Bible’s weaknesses even as it relied on the infrastructure of that very Bible. The Book of Mormon demonstrated strength where the Bible showed weakness—access to original manuscripts, plain language, canonization, transmission, ecclesiastical direction, and translation itself. The Book of Mormon wasn’t ever intended to be an independent scripture, but instead to be integrated with the Bible it had transformed. Through the Book of Mormon, Smith translated the Bible from one world and vision of scripture to another, in a way that obliterated the temporal separation of the generations of human history. He became thereby a time traveler, with scripture as his time machine.

This chapter places the 2011 Broadway sensation Book of Mormon within the context of Correlation. The musical Book of Mormon demonstrates that interrupting ancient mythologies with current popular mythologies may help strengthen people facing unimaginable hardships, and that the singular message of American fundamentalism--one built upon obedience and narrow views of piety--will ultimately fail. Book of Mormon, along with other musical satires emerging in recent years from within Mormonism, represent musical theater affronts to the Mormon Church that have become more prominent in the last decades of the twentieth century as the Church removes dissenting members, including those espousing feminist or intellectual ideologies seemingly at odds with current Church policies. This chapter situates the concept of excommunication within musicologist Nina Eidsheim’s vibrational theory and Levinas’s ethics of communication, and suggests that Mormonism can be a powerful vehicle for improving lives if it returns to its original principle where multiple voices are seen as an asset, not a liability.

Scripture is a function of the ways in which texts become sacred through their employment or status in a religious community. To understand a scripture, one must understand the ways in which that work has exerted its authority over the lives of believers. The Book of Mormon has served in a variety of roles, for both detractors and believers, which have shifted over the years. Four principal roles have been: 1) sacred sign of the last days, and of Joseph Smith's divine calling; 2) a factual account of the pre‐Columbian peopling of the Western hemisphere by Israelite migrations around 600 bc; 3) the imaginative creation of a nineteenth‐century religion maker; and 4) a new American Bible. The unprecedented growth of this potentially new world religion is making an understanding of its core scripture increasingly imperative.

This chapter introduces the book’s main argument: that the three original American races, “black,” “red,” and, “white,” were constructed first in the written archive before they were read onto human bodies. It argues that because of America’s uniquely religious history, the racial construction sites of Americans of Native, African, and European descent were religious archives. The Mormon people’s relationship with race serves as a case unto itself and a case study of the larger relationship between religious writings and race. During the nineteenth century early Mormons taught a theology of “white universalism,” which held that even non-whites, whom the Bible and the Book of Mormon taught were cursed with dark skin because of their ancestors’ sin against their families, could become “white” through dedication to the restored Mormon gospel. But Mormons eventually abandoned this “white universalism,” and instead taught and practiced a theology of white supremacy.

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.

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.