Explaining the Book of Mormon to Ross

Three weeks away from blogging, I finally get some free time to blog on stuff that, as usual, has piled up...and then my plans are thrown for a loop by a request from one of the big names of the blogosphere, Ross Douthat, to say something smart about the "seemingly fantastic beliefs about the prehistory of the Americas" which are presented with the Book of Mormon, a text which we Mormons take to be scripture. What can I say? Thanks for the compliment, Ross; I'll try to help you out.

I'm a philosophy and political theory guy myself (and a long-winded one at that; as evidence, consider my long blog-essay on Mitt Romney and Mormonism from a while back), and so I won't pretend to pose as an expert on how completely the Book of Mormon's narrative does or does not contradict settled interpretations of Mesoamerican history. That it seems perfectly outrageous to many is indisputably true...but I think that, if you actually take the time to do some reading, and are open-minded about the hermeneutical and theological issues involved in the sort of interpretative claims which Joseph Smith originally made (is it a literal translation? an expansion of an ancient source? how are we supposed to think about the idea of something being revealed in modern times by God, anyway?), what you'll find is that most of what seems outrageous to historians of the ancient Americas is not, for the most part, what's actually in the book itself, but what people say about the book (and here I include Mormons and non-believers alike).

That's why you need, when looking for a "smart" defense of the Book of Mormon, to look also for an author who can set those defenses into a historical context, thus showing how Mormon readings of their own scripture have changed over the decades. Pretty much the standard book to read on what Mormons today make of the claims about ancient America presented in the Book of Mormon is John Sorenson's An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon. The book itself is over twenty years old (though a new edition came out in 1996), but it permanently changed the way the Book of Mormon is read by Mormons, and so that's the place to start. For example: Matt Yglesias claims in the Bloggingheads video that the Mormon church teaches that "the New World, in pre-Columbian times, was dominated by two vast rvial empires." (Those would be "the Nephites," the people who carried on the family name and traditions of an early prophet named Nephi, and "the Lamanites," a group named after his brother and enemy, Laman.) While the history of Book of Mormon interpretation over the past 180 years is actually pretty complicated, the basic facts are that Matt here is correctly describing what most Mormons who read the book believed...up until about 20-30 years ago, that is. The Book of Mormon itself never suggests the existence of massive, continent-wide, roaming empires; rather, serious readers have come to recognize that in fact the book talks about a couple (or actually more than a couple) pretty densely populated yet nonetheless localized tribes, and nearly everything presented in the book as fact takes place, according to its own narrative, within an area that a person on foot could cross within week, if not less. This is what we Mormons called the "limited geography" thesis: specifically, that the book isn't telling us the whole history of the Native Americans (which many Mormons admittedly thought the primary purpose of the book was for decades), but rather telling the story of some relatively restricted groups, whose story God thought important enough to make certain it would be preserved and brought forth in our day. The introduction of this thesis, and the conceptual changes it has wrought in how the text as a history of (a small part of) Mesoameria is read by Mormons, has had a huge impact in Mormon thought; probably the best synthesis of these changes, combined with the latest scholarship on the origin and details of the book, can be found in Terryl Givens's By the Hand of Mormon, which I've written a bit about (again, from the perspective of philosophy and political theory) here.

Now, if you're looking for a stone with someone's name from the Book of Mormon carved on it ("look, it says 'Nephi'!"), providing indisputable evidence of the truth of the BoM, then you're not going to be satisfied (at least, not yet; people interested in the subject know that Mesoamerican studies is actually filled with plenty of fluid, always contested, not-yet-proven claims: it's not nearly as clear-cut as Matt makes it out to be). But even the absence of definite proof doesn't mean there isn't at least a fair amount of circumstantial evidence out there (both in the text itself and in the ground around Mesoamerica) to make the Book of Mormon's claims--or at least certain interpretations of them and of Joseph Smith's actions in production of the text--quite plausible. I would recommend checking out Book of Mormon Authorship, as well as its much better (and 15 years more recent) sequel, Book of Mormon Authorship Revisited. Of course, there are plenty of books, articles, and websites out there which challenge most everything said in the BoM's defense in these and other studies, and there are those which take pretty unique approaches to explaining the material as well. But you said you wanted some smart, mainstream Mormon defenses of the Book of Mormon; these will give you plenty of places to start.