Book of Mormon thoughts for the 200th anniversary of the angel Moroni

 Today marks the 200th anniversary of the first visit of the angel Moroni to the prophet Joseph Smith, during which he directed Joseph to the location of gold plates which would be used as a medium through which to reveal the Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ. 

When 2024 starts in a few months, I’ll start a year long study of the Book of Mormon with my church following 2 years of study through the Holy Bible. I see 2024’s planned study as the next phase in a long path through seeing the scriptures and religion and faith and spirituality and history through new eyes. To mark this anniversary, and in preparation for next year’s Book of Mormon study, I thought I’d try to write through my history with the Book of Mormon and my current thoughts. Kind of the point of my whole plan to study the book next year is to do so for new understanding, so I’m not married to any of my thoughts past, present, or future, so don’t try to argue with me about any of this. I’ll likely just respond, “That’s interesting. I’ll keep that in mind as I study next year.” 

Boredom by exposure

As a teenager and young adult, I became quite zealous about the Book of Mormon. In high school in a town saturated in Book of Mormondom, there were plenty of challenges to read the book, and I fully devoted myself to these. As a senior in high school, I took on a challenge to read the Book of Mormon in a single month. Then I did so again the next month. Then the next. I viewed this as important preparation for my mission. I had read the Book of Mormon cover-to-cover before, but never in such a short amount of time. I found that reading the Book of Mormon in different lengths of time lended itself to new kinds of perspectives on the text. You don’t forget the big picture when you read the book in 30 days like you might if you just read a little bit every day. 

On my mission, I read more slowly through the Book of Mormon alongside distributing it door-to-door and friend to friend, testifying to its truth. A friend of mine on the mission once said that the Book of Mormon is like brownies: you only have to eat one slice to know it’s good. That was a convenient and useful aphorism for getting people psyched about the Book of Mormon enough to commit to its church without waiting for them to read the whole thing and then take Moroni’s challenge. I did sometimes worry that when assigned the Moroni 10 slice out of context, they would be curious enough to read Moroni 9 out of context as well, which is one of the more bitter edges on the sheet pan. But that never happened. 

My second mission president really emphasized the Book of Mormon. He had us add an extra 30 minutes to our morning pre-proselytizing routine for dedicated study of the keystone of our religion, despite the focus of our other studies. In my exit interview, that president committed me to continuing this practice of studying the Book of Mormon after my release, a practice that, at least for a while, I did keep up. 

In the singles branch that I attended after returning from my mission, I continued my zeal for the Book of Mormon. I started a small “book club” where I invited members of the branch to study the Book of Mormon and meet with me for fun to discuss what we had read. I was baffled at the inability of some members of the book club’s inability to keep commitments to study! I’d send them reminders and encouragement at frequent intervals and still, they would come to our club meetings having not read a single verse of scripture the entire week. 

But eventually, I came to empathize. Just before going to college, I hit a wall of sorts in my Book of Mormon study. At this point I had read the entire book straight through dozens and dozens of times, not to mention how many times I had scoured individual passages for wisdom. I got bored. Around this time, I read the book Christ and the New Covenant by Jeffery R. Holland, which is about the Book of Mormon. I enjoyed the book, but something about my reading habits through it I think was telling: when Elder Holland quoted passages from the Book of Mormon itself, I would notice the reference, remember briefly what it said, and then skip to Holland’s commentary. I didn’t have all the words memorized, but I had all the ideas down enough that I could recall them at any moment. And reading the Book of Mormon became something I no longer enjoyed, as committed as I was to the idea of it. 

I didn’t read the Book of Mormon much in college, except when occasionally assigned to do so for a religion class. Even then, I could basically fudge my way through reading requirements. I kind of gave up on it. My last semester, I read an article by a literary scholar who was a member of the church who talked about the literary richness of the text. I went to the office of one of my favorite professors and asked how on earth someone could say that. The Book of Mormon, for me, had lost its magic. Some elements of that discussion, though, did reignite my interest in the Book of Mormon and reframed how I saw it as a text. 

A Bible! A Bible!

A formative series of events in my faith thingy started in a Sunday School class in a ward I’m no longer in, where debates raged over what the Bible really teaches. Someone would offer an insight on a New Testament verse. Then someone else would argue that a word in the original greek invalidated that reading. Then someone else would chime in with the Joseph Smith translation. A Book of Mormon passage which contradicts the JST would then be produced. Then someone would counter that the verse doesn’t even appear in many of our earliest biblical manuscripts. I’ve since come to appreciate these kinds of back-and-forth discussions about the Bible, but at the time they annoyed me endlessly and devalued the Bible in my personal spiritual canon. “Why should I study the Bible,” I lamented, “ when the text is such a complicated mess it is impossible to really know what it actually says much less what it actually means?” And all that, especially contrasted to the Book of Mormon! 

The Book of Mormon, I reasoned, has a transmission history so much less complex than the Bible. Each author in the Book of Mormon is exactly who they claim to be. The text was abridged once. It was translated once. Each word in English was translated by the gift and power of God, not the scholarly wisdom of men. The gold plates were taken back by Moroni, which to me was a feature, not a bug, of the story because it precludes the kind of manuscript-oriented debates that rage about the Bible. And it “contains the fullness of the everlasting gospel” (See the Introduction of the Book of Mormon). Why would I need the Bible for anything if the fullness is right there in this simple blue book? The answers to those questions about the need for the Bible have guided me into my current fascination with the Bible and arguably my ability to find meaning in theism as a whole and my religious tradition specifically. 

But this post isn’t about the Bible!

So let me tell you another story about the relation to the Bible and the Book of Mormon (Actually let me be brief about it because I told this story in more detail in another blog post here: https://jchandle.blogspot.com/2022/05/how-to-read-book-of-mormona-fragment.html) 

I started following a tiktok account called @readingbom which was an evangelical Christian reading the Book of Mormon for the first time. I was hooked by this concept, and I’ve never felt such a desire to share the Book of Mormon with others than when I was watching this play out. But ultimately, I think that @readingbom had the wrong framework for what the Book of Mormon is. I don’t think it’s his fault, because the church sometimes seems to do a lot to put the argument forward that the Book of Mormon is simply a compliment to the Bible, rather than what I think it actually is. Christians should not be surprised when they read the Book of Mormon only to find that it “contradicts” the Bible. The Book of Mormon actively reconfigures Biblical theology. It offers a theology that has many parallels with many parts of the Bible, but it actively rejects some parts of the Bible. You can call these corrections to the Bible as it has come to us in modern times, if you have a strict view of scripture. Or you can understand that the Bible itself contradicts itself because the Bible is not a univocal text. Anything written theology will likely align with parts of the Bible and misaligned with others. And the Book of Mormon makes many theological points. 

Long claim short, if you read the Book of Mormon, read it as something new that adds to and sometimes takes away from parts of the Bible (I know some christians will be even more critical of this, lol, but). It does this on purpose. Maybe that’s because it is correcting what is wrong in the currently available Bible. Maybe it does this as its own individual holy text which–like the Quran, the Vedas, the Tao Te Ching, and perhaps most closely in these examples, the Talmud–presents its own case for a metaphysical reality and how that ought to affect human behavior. 

The Book of Trump

In 2016, Donald Trump was elected with the support of thousands of American mormons. This shook me. I know that most members of my church identify with conservative values, and I know that Trump was the nominee for the mainstream conservative party. But the conservatism I was raised on, fueled by Latter-day Saint scripture, demands virtuous leadership, and to me, Trump represented the exact opposite. I don’t want to be too dramatic on this point, but going to church after the 2016 election was the first time I really considered that I might not actually belong here. I always thought that the gospel of Jesus Christ aligned well with my liberal/progressive sensibilities–at least as well as with the other side. But in a world of enthusiastic Mormon Trump supporters, can liberal Mormons exist? 

I’ve since come to the conclusion that they can, don’t worry everyone. But the Book of Mormon itself didn’t help much with that ultimate conclusion. 

Around this time, I decided to re-read the Book of Mormon slowly. I decided to study each verse and not move on from a verse until I felt like I fully understood it. What I expected to find in this reading was peace and understanding that the God of the Book of Mormon was no respecter of persons, that he was universally loving, anti-racist, and accepting while still holding people to his high standards. Remember what I said about arguing with me earlier in this post when I say that that’s not what I found. Instead I found a God that promotes American exceptionalism, exclusivity, white supremacy, Trumpian nationalism. I especially found these themes in the teachings of Lehi. I actually found myself grateful that the 115 pages were lost where presumably we got more of the first prophet of the book. I didn’t make it through 2 Nephi. 

If I come to the same conclusions about Lehi and the first 3rd of the Book of Mormon next year, I might write to outline why I came to these conclusions about the Book of Mormon God. But here’s the takeaway I’ve since tentatively landed on. The Book of Mormon is, at least in part, a product of Joseph Smith and the 19th century. There are certainly going to be parts of it that don’t align with modern sensibilities or, I’d say, universal ethical truth. The 19th century is not a place where perfect saints just did everything perfectly. Joseph Smith was kind of messed up. 

It’s complicated 

I plan to go into a study of the Book of Mormon with kind of a blank slate, armed only with the influences on my thinking that are not totally in my control. Ask me to get into the origin of the Book of Mormon or its oddities, problems, and triumphs, and I’ll tell you I don’t know in most cases. 

I do think that it’s more complex than I’ve given it credit for in the past. One way to describe it is that it is a frame tale: A story within a story within a story within a story. 

Consider the dream of the Tree of Life in 1 Nephi. We receive that story within the story of Joseph Smith and the discovery and translation of the gold plates. Within that story is a story of Moroni, who's father abridging the record of his people, just before Moroni witnessed their tragic end. Within that story is the story of Nephi, and with that story is the story of Lehi leaving Jerusalem. That’s a lot of stories within stories. And I think each story frame has got to have an effect on each story within it. What is perhaps the true miracle of the Book of Mormon is that, after all that transmission, individual modern readers get anything of value from the text. But they do! I have! I still do find value all the time from the Book of Mormon. 

I’m not sure if it’s really a historical record of actual people in the ancient Americas. I’m not sure at what level Joseph Smith was inspired by God in his bringing it to us. But I currently read 3-5 verses of it every night with my family without fail. And I’m grateful for its influence in my life and in my home. 

And I’m super excited to study it more fully than ever next year.