“I Lead the Way, Like Columbus”

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.

An American Book of Chronicles

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.

Introduction

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.”

Book of Mormon Poetry

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.

Nephites and Israelites

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.

How the Mormons Became White

This essay scrutinizes the place of race and indigeneity in The Book of Mormon, paying special attention to the ways questions of origins work themselves out in relation to the text’s altogether singular narrative form. Taking up the strains of anti-imperial critique to be found in the work—its glancing vision of the putative heroes, the Nephites, as self-blinded imperialists—the essay examines how precisely this sense of the political morality 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, with the imperial United States, and with their own scriptural forebears.

Nephite Secularization; or, Picking and Choosing in The Book of Mormon

This chapter considers The Book of Mormon as a singular literary reflection on secularization as an effect of religious pluralism. The defining event in Joseph Smith’s early life was a visionary experience occasioned by a crisis over religious choice, wherein conversion is refigured as persuasion. Although published more than a decade later, The Book of Mormon stands as a monumental historical interrogation of the conditions that gave rise to this crisis and an archive of narrative and theological strategies for its resolution. Curiously, the book bypasses European church history entirely to recast standard narratives of secularization—such as those proposed by Charles Taylor and Peter Berger—in distinctly New World terms. Throughout this counterhistory, The Book of Mormon attempts to reconcile tacit commitments to religious choice and an egalitarian attitude toward divine revelation with the need for an orthodox center. It ultimately discovers a resolution not in theology but in narratology.

“To Read the Round of Eternity”

The Book of Mormon is concerned with, among other things, the nature of language. Participating in ancient debates about the relative strengths and weaknesses of oral versus written language, The Book of Mormon points toward a hybrid model of scripture in which oral—brimming with power but limited in space and time—and written—unlimited by space or time but dead and susceptible to multiple interpretations—languages are both necessary to constitute scripture. The Book of Mormon models this behavior extensively, even obsessively, starting with its front matter and extending through multiple narrative threads. Throughout its primary and multiple secondary narrative arcs, The Book of Mormon models a hybrid scripture that depends on both written and oral language. In its narrative of Jaredites—a people protected from the curse of Babel whose sacred history is locked in gold plates until a supernaturally gifted seer can be found—The Book of Mormon provides a key to understanding the entire scriptural text. The Jaredite prophet has powerful oral language and also a written scripture stored in gold plates, liberated by the living voice of the seer. Both a scripture and a seeric figure are required for the Jaredites as well as for the Lehites. This scriptural hybridity is perhaps most striking in two encounters between Christ and the New World worshippers whose story The Book of Mormon tells—in both cases, Christ employs both his own divine speech and written scriptural texts to communicate sacred truths. This scriptural hybridity that appears central to The Book of Mormon argues strongly for the necessity of both ancient and modern voices in this foundational Latter-day Saint scripture.

The Book of Mormon and the Bible

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.

“We’re Going to Take Our Land Back Over”

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.