Open Canons: Sacred History and American History in The Book of Mormon

Abstract

This essay examines Joseph Smith's 1830 publication, The Book of Mormon , within the context of early nineteenth-century efforts to produce and preserve documents relating to the history of the United States. The essay argues that Smith's book poses a challenge to contemporary notions of history by destabilizing the idea of an ur-text through its manipulations of biblical stories and depictions of its own, fraught manuscript history. Ultimately, the essay concludes the Book of Mormon 's presentation of textual inadequacy, redundancy, and confusion serve its larger goal of revising Anglo-Protestant accounts of American history. Smith's work presents readers with an image of Puritan settlers as destroyers rather than builders of "a city on a hill," complicating nineteenth-century understandings of providential history and subsuming Protestantism into an alternate story of American Christianity.

“All the Precious Trees of the Earth”: Trees in Restoration Scripture

“…See also Hardy (2010) andGutjahr (2012). For insight on how the Book of Mormon disrupted American Protestantism, see Fenton (2013), Hickman (2019), andCoviello (2019). 9…”

A New “Mormon Moment”? The Book of Mormon in Literary Studies

“…But until quite recently, the text between the covers has been largely ignored by non‐LDS scholars. As Elizabeth Fenton has argued, The Book of Mormon receives slight attention in part because “a bible published in the era of Enlightenment seems at best a quaint anachronism and at worst a direct challenge to progressive theories of US history” (342). Yet the “turn to religion” in literary studies over the past 15 years has invited renewed interest in the nation's diverse religious practices, and has incited many critiques of the academy's bias toward liberal rationality .…”