I set out on this project as a gift for my dad. Growing up there was nothing he and I bonded over more than our mutual love for The Book of Mormon. I have since left the faith in which he raised me, so he has a difficult time understanding me these days. With monumental recent additions to the literary scholarship surrounding The Book of Mormon, I thought it would round some edges between us if I could advocate for the book to be taken seriously within academia. This seemed like it would be easy to do. As a believer I read it many times and had positive experiences with the text, which I think have made me a better person. Also, instead of literary reviews coming out of Brigham Young University exclusively, serious Mormon Studies scholarship is now published in the presses of Oxford, University of North Carolina, and Yale. So, I caught up on the best and most current secondary scholarship and began a fresh read of the text. Let me show you what I found. Since few...
Secular and religious students spend a lot of time evaluating the rightness of The Book of Mormon. Believers seek to establish the truth of the empirical claims made in and about the book, which are fundamental to their belief. Nonbelievers seek to disestablish these claims. It is a lot of great, scholarly, fun. But, it seems to me, that more time could be spent evaluating the goodness of The Book of Mormon . Suppose we grant that it is an ancient work, recovered in the nineteenth century, and translated by supernatural means. This would make it right, but the enlightened reader must still grant an even more obvious case against the book: it is not good. It is not good in a literary sense, to be sure, and we can look into that later, but it is not good in an ethical sense. I could cite its misogyny[1], brutality [2] , or injustice [3] , but for me, the glaring ethical failing in The Book of Mormon is its racism [4] . Early in the text, we pick up a thread of ...