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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 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.

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.

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.

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.

This essay reads The Book of Mormon within the context of a popular early American discourse: the Hebraic Indian theory. Theories about the origins of Native peoples emerged as soon as Europeans realized that Columbus had not made port in Southeast Asia, and one hypothesis held that indigenous Americans descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel. This theory possessed an elegance that others lacked, as it explained the origin of Americans and solved the riddle of the location of the tribes. For two centuries, English and Anglo-American writers sought to prove that Europeans had located Israel in the Americas. Although it posits a biblical origin for America, The Book of Mormon rejects the lost tribes theory. This essay contends that, through its revisions of the Hebraic Indian theory, The Book of Mormon disrupts its own chronology and resists the collapsing of sacred and national histories into a uniform line.

First published in 1830, over the next half-century The Book of Mormon appeared in some dozen new editions. Perhaps the most important edition of the nineteenth century appeared in 1879 and was edited by Orson Pratt. When this edition appeared, Pratt had served as a member of the original Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, a mission president in Britain, and was a member of Brigham Young’s “Vanguard Company” that crossed the Western plains to select a site for Mormon colonization. More important, he was one of early Mormonism’s premier educators and theologians. His edition bore all the marks of a lifetime of study, presenting the book in a highly systematized format and including footnotes that incorporated theological glosses on Mormon history, archaeology, and geology. This essay explores the origin of many of the textual changes found in the 1879 edition and the enduring influence of these changes.

What relations do modern Americans have to dead ancestors? In the first half of the nineteenth century, this question preoccupied authors of many stripes, from ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan, to Iroquois prophet Handsome Lake. Both from rural New York, Morgan and Handsome Lake each grappled with the effects of white settlers’ occupation of indigenous homelands by turning to questions of kinship. When The Book of Mormon was published in 1830, it too turned to the deep history of human kinship forms to define how red and white Americans were bound together by vexed ties of violence and habitation of the same land. This ancient Amerindian history told a story of how personal agency and private families could transform “backward” tribes into free people. It reconnected secular doctrines of free agency with Christian theology, disclosing the theological origins of secular thought about kinship. But while this “American Bible” shared key assumptions with Morgan’s secular kinship theory, its status as modern revelation left the Mormon faithful vulnerable to being dismissed and displaced.

The Book of Mormon can be situated within the context of a tradition of covenantal rhetoric. The book is introduced by its editor as assurance to an American remnant of Israel of “the covenants of the Lord, that they are not cast off.” The term covenant occurs almost 200 times in the text—but it undergoes particular permutations that endow the concept with new shades of meaning. First, against the book’s stark apocalypticism, the gold plates themselves embody the durability of covenant and secure a bridge from ancient to restoration forms of relation to the divine. Second, The Book of Mormon hints at a soteriological reconstruction of covenant that emerges in the context of Smith’s radical theism and his reconstitution of heaven into an anthropocentric rather than theocentric heaven. Covenant, in this light, becomes constitutive of, rather than preparatory for, the celestial society that itself comprises the Mormon heaven.

Can evidence for miracles meet the especially good standard required to have justified beliefs about them? Historians make use of various strategies to justify their claims about past events. The miracles purported in The Book of Mormon provide a nice case study for examining whether historical study can provide us with enough evidence to be justified in believing that they actually occurred. But, in this case, the evidence doesn't meet historical standards of adequacy, and is thus well-short of what's required for justified belief.