My Book of Mormon study this year is centered on Fatimah Salleh and Margaret Olsen Hemming’s The Book of Mormon for the Least of These series and Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon edited by Elizabeth Fenton and Jered Hickman.   

I like to set aside a little time each Sunday to dip into an essay or a bite sized thought for reflection. Whether I go to church or not (we have chosen a messy middle with an intentional 50% attendance rate), the Sunday reading strategy is my way of striving with and reflecting on scripture, because Sunday School is very often improved with a book in hand.

January and February were swallowed up in one particular essay from Americanist Approaches to the Book of Mormon and so, since my neurodivergent brain hyper focused anyway, I offer some half-baked thoughts and welcome your insights.

Like most Mormons raised in the faith, I was taught the quintessential story of religious fervor sweeping the country and inspiring Joseph Smith to ask a world shifting question. It’s the one connective point in history where we freely admit or even emphasize that larger world influences had a hand in the shaping of our early church.

Can I tell you then how my brain expanded and exploded when I read Jillian Sayre’s “Books Buried in the Earth: The Book of Mormon, Revelation, and the Humic Foundations of the Nation?” As it turns out, in addition to that well known religious fervor, Americans of the time were also hungry for national origin stories, driven to “identify themselves as more than simply displaced Europeans, but the recorded history of their colonial experience stood in the way of this project” (Sayre 29).

The Book of Mormon, as another story of a family leaving their homeland and finding their heritage in a new land, takes on new meaning with this knowledge. It’s easy to see why the story would have appealed to immigrants living in an atmosphere not only of religious fervor, but a hunger for heritage and connection to the land.

But, of course, a hunger for an ancient heritage in America led those early “displaced Europeans” to look around and decide to appropriate a historical origin point on the American continent. Sayre gives as an example the mounds of Ohio, where white excavators and explorers constructed a narrative ascribing the mound building to an ancient white civilization destroyed by Native Americans (conveniently also setting up a reason to persecute the truly indigenous population and position them as the actual usurpers of the land).  

Sayre continues, “Like the burial mound narratives, The Book of Mormon presents its reader with familiar bodies but pushes this identification even further by making these bodies not only not Indian but white and not only advanced but Christian” (35).  

While I’m not interested in historicity of the Book of Mormon debates, I do want to sit with this act of appropriation, of stealing and subverting a heritage, of white people looking for a heritage and constructing a false narrative to get it. Given the complicated, often tragic, history of the church and indigenous peoples, teasing out the thread of historical national trends having some influence on the Book of Mormon’s inception seems like a small drop in a large bucket, but still I want to uplift this, yet another, moment where racial prejudice has wormed its way in. To say, yes, it’s here too.    

Sayre concludes her piece (read it – there’s so much more to chew on than I’m sharing here!) with a powerful statement:

“The perdurance of the voice of the dead, manifest in the material of the text, imagines the space of the reader for her, and her responsibility to that voice requires her to fulfill that promise laid out for her in the advance by the text, the land, her body” (39).

In this, the year of our Lord 2024, I am studying a religious text that has appropriation narratives baked into it, a narrative that, perhaps influenced by a larger national trend of historical appropriation, would have strongly appealed to early readers who felt drawn to Smith’s burgeoning movement, including my own ancestors. What is my responsibility to this text as a reader and a member of this sprawling, multi-branch faith tradition today? How should I let this text shape my identity as a white American of 2024, descendant of European immigrants, grappling with the impacts of racial prejudice?

I’m grateful for a wider understanding of the national trends that shaped Joseph Smith’s world view. While I don’t have any real answers, only questions, it feels right to complicate the simplistic religious fervor story with an understanding that a desire for ancient inheritances and attendant racial prejudices were also playing a role. It’s only then that we can do the hard work of deconstructing and reconstructing and laying some “voices of the dead” that have spoken too loudly for too long to rest for good.

Sayre, Jillian. “Books Buried in the Earth: The Book of Mormon, Revelation, and the Humic Foundations of the Nation.” Americanist Approaches to the Book of Mormon, edited by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman, Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 21-44

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