Nephite Modernity
Some people say that the Book of Mormon makes an argument against racism. Others that it makes an argument against military defense (and for pacifism) Not because it really says anything against them as such but because it shows them both turning out badly.
You could make the same case that the Book of Mormon is against democracy and religious freedom. Not that the Book of Mormon is against these things–its not, the text is strongly for them–its just that they don’t work out.
I am against all three arguments. If you are against racism, against war, or against democracy and religious freedom, it shouldn’t be because the Book of Mormon has a secret structural message against those things that the actual writers were not aware of. But it is true that there’s an argument to be made from the Book of Mormon that none of these things work out.
So lets talk about democracy and religious freedom in the Book of Mormon, how they went wrong, and why.
First of all, its not really democracy and religious freedom per se. That’s what it looks like to us but that’s not what the history describes. Deeply engaging with this part of the Book of Mormon this time around has deepened my conviction that it is a historical record. There are parts of the small plates, I don’t mind saying, that feel anachronistic to me, such as the oddly specific prophecies of Columbus and the American Revolution or of Joseph Smith. I feel a certain unease. But Mosiah and the first parts of Alma are either authentic or a work of world historic genius. It is not our world those books describe.
In a nutshell here’s the situation. The Nephites have a kingly religion. The king in in charge of it. He is their prophet, seer, and revelator. He appoints priests, but there is no church with regular church meetings or organization as such. The priests are likely there to administer the law of Moses. And they are probably local dignitaries. Being a priest is not their main job, it’s just something they do as part of their position in the community because the king ordained them to. In fact, they brag about this–the priests don’t rely on their religious work for their maintenance. Further, in the Nephite set up being part of the religion and part of the polity are the same thing.
Then under Alma and Mosiah, the Nephites ultimate make two big changes. They have an organized church with an ultimate church authority who is not the king, and they get rid of the king in favor an elected judge. The result is a huge wave of antichrists who are partially successful, along with big political dissent first by the king-men and next by different factions vying for the judgeship, along with a huge number of wars along with organized internal conspiracies, and it all ends badly. Their civilization has collapsed by the time Christ comes.
A few things to point out. First, religious freedom is not the best description of what’s going on. there is some of that, but its really downstream of the real cange: for the first time, the Nephites have an organized church that is not part of the state. I am not even saying that its independent of the state, though it sorta seems to be. the innovation here isn’t ‘separation of church and state,’ it’s the more basic and primal innovation of ‘church and state.’ That’s so obvious from our perspective that its hard to see. Not so for the Nephites. Its a wrenching change. That’s why you get things like Alma grappling with what to do with dissenters. In the old days being a dissenter meant your were a traitor or a rebel but now you have people who claim to be good Nephites, just opposed to the church … wut? It should be no surprise that there is a huge wave of dissent. First, it wasn’t possible before, now it is–its now possible to channel outright dissatisfaction with the authorities and preach subversion under a plausible cover of ‘just talking about religion,’ Second, Alma has kind of made the activity of claiming religious authority glamorous–he’s a religious entrepeneur and everyone loves him. Third, now that religious authority has been divorced from kingly authority, anybody can do it. Alma is a nobody–if he can claim authority, anyone can. So Nephite society disintegrates.
None of the bad outcomes should be a surprise to us. In basically every society that we know, structural innovation in religious authority led to corpses all over.
Second, the key innovation of the judgeship isn’t the judge being elected. That is again downstream from the real change. The key innovation is that the judgeship isn’t a sacred office and doesn’t have the authority to make new law, unlike the king. Having the judge be elected is a way of underscoring that he lacks the sacred regal authority that the king had. The result is that at first people really want a king back and plausible claimants arise with serious backing, since the judge explicitly is claiming less authority than people like Amaleki are claiming. The next result is that since the judgeship lacks the aura of custom and divinity about it that the kingship had, it starts getting seen in purely machiavellian power terms with a quick race to the bottom of political norms that culminates in assassinations and lethal secret societies, and eventually complete political disintegration. Again, none of this should be particularly surprising. Huge changes in the basis for political legitimacy frequently do lead to stacking bodies.
So why did the change happen? Mosiah gives us two reasons. He’s horrified by King Noah and his sons have all renounced the succession. Fair enough. But whatever his reasons, he probably didn’t have much choice, When Alma showed up as a non-kingly high priest with an already existing church organization and full of fervor and the spirit, what else could Mosiah ultimately do? Long term having a king with priestly authority
and a high priest with priestly authority direct from God is not a tenable situation. Mosiah didn’t have a choice about whether or not there was going to be a new methos of religious organization–it already existed when Alma and his people showed up on the scene–so the only thing he could do was try to compensate by switching from a sacral monarchy to a secular judgeship.
It may be possible to argue that Mosiah’s change to the judgeship was not inspired since in Mosiah 29 where Mosiah announces the change he does not claim revelation. It’s all just argument and reasoning. I haven’t thought about it enough to have an opinion. But the change or something like it was necessary.
The Nephites were called to do something extraordinarily hard–to abruptly transition from a pre-modern society to a society with secular rule and something like religious freedom, without all the supporting structures and long difficult development that allowed these unusual phenomena to exist elsewhere, and unsurprisingly they failed. The consequences of which we will be reading about for the next couple of months.
John Mansfield
June 12, 2024
Everyone who really understands the Book of Mormon agrees that its main purpose is to teach that tax rates should be kept low and government regulation should not interfere with market-based arrangements of society. The modern-day kingmen are blind to that plain priority for which the Nephite record was preserved for our day. They should be rounded up and executed for their treason.
John Mansfield
June 12, 2024
A couple thoughts: The Nephite chief judge is pretty much a king; he is never up for re-election, and the people choose his successor from among his sons. It is like a first attempt at democracy by a people who have no idea what that would be and change as little as possible. The lack of a meaningfully different selection of the head of state supports the idea that the big change was that he was no longer head of church.
Second, considering Mosiah and Alma, my mind wandered to Sidney Rigdon joining the church lead by Joseph Smith. Alma could have been grafted in as an important counselor to Mosiah if Mosiah had been equivalent to Joseph Smith. Mosiah’s choice to put religious matters completely in Alma’s hands is mysterious if I assume that Mosiah was like Benjamin, who was a great prophet and led his people into a born-again experience, but there is not really reason for me to assume that, and the conversion to Christianity at the end of Benjamin’s reign does later seem to have been a one-time event with diminishing valence as the years passed.
G.
June 12, 2024
Great thoughts. There seems to have been some kind of decline or decay in kingship religious authority. Limhi, Ammon (the first one), and King Mosiah all seem to be examples. So is Mosiah’s sons preferring to be missionaries to being kings. It may be that the King Noah and Jaredite records undermined the kingship’s prestige, or it may be that the Benjamin/Abinadi renewed emphasis on Christ undercut the force of the existing Mosaic arrangements even if they still went through the motions.
The Only True and Living Nathan
June 12, 2024
While the judges are (initially) chosen by “the voice of the people,” I think we’re reading into the text too much if we just call it “democracy.” After all, when Alma gave up the Chief Judgeship, it was he who chose his successor; there is some lip service to the voice of the people in ratifying it, but there’s certainly no election mentioned or implied.
I think the single biggest rationale for Mosiah’s change is that it locked the Nephite laws as they were RIGHT THEN, and instituted a system of judges who had no legislative function. The judges were to judge by the law that then existed. Full stop. The system whereby a number of lower judges could remove a higher judge was specifically to keep those higher judges from enacting or ignoring those handed-down laws.
It seems to me that what Mosiah was specifically trying to avoid was another King Noah — one who used the prerogatives of kingship to change the law to his whim. The idea of a constitutional monarchy maybe didn’t come up, or maybe the requisite parliamentary system to hamstring the monarch was too cumbersome or put too much immediate power directly in the hands of the people. In any event, coupled with the separation of religious authority from the monarchy, the change to judgeship was an attempt to thread the needle: Guarantee that the laws would be enforced, while denying anyone the ability to modify them.
The Only True and Living Nathan
June 12, 2024
Sorry: “…enacting *incorrectly* or ignoring…”
E.C.
June 12, 2024
I think the main reason King Mosiah asked his people to try a system of judges was that he saw what happens when you get a bad apple on the kingly family tree fulfilled in King Noah – it’s possible he was already mulling something similar over as his sons were rebellious against Alma’s authority. The innovation was that there was a nonviolent mechanism in place to remove their leader if he turned out to be rotten; the judges were a callback to Israel’s early days without a king. That didn’t change the eventual outcome, but efforts were made to look ahead to possible problems, it just wasn’t enough.
That said, your OP makes some excellent points.
@ John Mansfield,
I think the same every tax day. Gee, how much more would I have in savings if I didn’t have to subsidize all sorts of ridiculous vanity projects and absolute depravity?
Zen
June 12, 2024
Ok, this is really interesting, but it isn’t correct that they couldn’t change laws. That was part of the threat with Amlici – he wanted to change the law. Likewise, in Helaman or 3rd Nephi, the people are forced to realize that their laws have become corrupted.
Am I missing something?
Ben Pratt
June 12, 2024
Just this week I’ve been considering these changes through a totally different lens, that of Barfield’s consciousness stages.
Benjamin’s people made a covenant as a body. Mosiah saw that the next generation was exercising individual agency in entirely new ways. I see this as evidence of a phase transition happening from Original Participation to Consciousness, something like what started happening in the last 30 years or so worldwide. Nehor was an anti-Christ liar, but the streak of individualism in his teachings may have only really become possible to perveive at that time.
As we also see in our day, expanded agency means that individuals can reach new depths of depravity, but this risk is necessary to allow for the possibility of unlimited heights of holiness. Said another way, I suspect that except the sins of Gadianton were possible, Nephi could not have ever reached the point where he was given the sealing power.
Ugly Mahana
June 12, 2024
I think it is possible that Mosiah was intentionally trying to institute his understanding of the system of government that prevailed from Joshua to David. I don’t know enough to know if there are any real or any valid comparisons, but it seems possible to me that Samuel’s warnings about a king would have resonated with Mosiah.
Ugly Mahana
June 12, 2024
Meant Joshua to Saul, not David.
Zen
June 12, 2024
Mahana – there is probably truth to that. When Mosiah mentions Judges, the people knew exactly what he was talking about. It was something they had experience with, just not yet on a national scale.
G.
June 12, 2024
Great insights, all
Zen
June 13, 2024
I have been busy at work studying Isaiah 40-55 and one of the major themes is Idolatry. One of the best Isaianic rants about Idolatry (ch.44) involves a man who cuts a tree down. He burns part to keep warm, part to bake his bread, and part he makes into a god.
But how would we do this, since none of us have statues to bow down to? Perhaps we would devote part of our time thinking to maintaining our house, part of our time to working a job, and part of our time to developing a life philosophy.
Is a philosophy an idol? What do we ultimately trust most? God, or something else?
The reason why I bring this up, is that some of the most pernicious idols, are things that are good, in the proper context. They are good, but they are not things we can put our ultimate trust in. As the Scriptures teach us, all things must fail.
I expect we are going to see every possible thing fail and it will only be constant revelation and the power of God that will get us through the Last Days.
G.
June 18, 2024
The judges are described as “reigning,” which is more evidence that the judge position was supposed to be a quasi-king.
G.
June 28, 2024
The elaborate, formalized system of commercial value intertwined with a ramified and exploited legal system that we see in Nephi 11