Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [7]
Over the next millennium, the posterity of these two families warred almost constantly, one side paying the cost for having descended from righteous blood, and the other doomed to living out the disobedient and murderous legacy of their evil forefathers. Later, in the book’s most daring moments, Jesus Christ visits these peoples, following his crucifixion and resurrection, and administers to them the doctrines of salvation and the counsel of peace. But peace does not hold for long. Violence returns, and killing grows rampant. At the book’s close, there is only the voice of one man, Moroni, the last survivor of the Nephites. He ruminates over the history of his fallen people and their last battles, which began in a city called Desolation. At the end of the battles, the bodies of the Nephites lay in thousands, across the bloodied landscape of a dying nation, and the few children who survived were forced to eat the flesh of their fathers. Finally, there is nothing left for Moroni to do except wait for the Lamanites, who are in effect his estranged brothers, to find him and slay him.
Murder and ruin are written across the breadth of Joseph Smith’s pre-American panorama, and because violence always demands an explanation or solution, the Book of Mormon’s unexamined greatest revelation is a truly startling one: As Moroni looks at the blood-reddened land around him, and as he reviews the full reach of the history that led to this mass extinction, it is plain that the force behind all these centuries of destruction is none other than God himself. It is God who brought these wandering people to an empty land, and it is God who established the legacies that could only lead to such awful obliteration. God is the hidden architect of all the killing at the heart of America’s greatest mystery novel, the angry father who demands that countless offspring pay for his rules and honor, even at the cost of generations of endless ruin.
The single strongest instance of blasphemy in the Book of Mormon occurs when a charismatic atheist and Antichrist named Korihor stands before one of God’s judges and kings and proclaims: “Ye say that this people is a guilty and a fallen people, because of the transgression of a parent. Behold, I say that a child is not guilty because of its parents.”
For proclaiming such outrageous words, God strikes Korihor mute, and despite Korihor’s full-hearted repentance, God will not allow him forgiveness. Korihor is left to wander among the people of the nation, begging for mercy and support, and the people take him and stamp upon him, until he lies dead under their feet.
THE BOOK OF MORMON’S VISION OF AMERICA as a land that had always known destruction would in effect become his most haunting work of prophecy. Violence and fear would follow Joseph Smith and his people until his own bloody death years later, and even after that, murder would have a way of staying in the Mormons’ history.
Despite all this, thousands of men and women flocked to Smith and his beliefs. Joseph would eventually name his new religion the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and its followers, the Saints. But his enemies—drawing on their hatred of the Book of Mormon—called them the Mormons.
My mother’s Mormon pedigree stretched back to these early times, along all the paths of her ancestry. Most of these men and women came to the American Mormon community from the poverty of England, on the promise that they were journeying to the new Promised Land. What they found instead was a land full of fear and violence. By the mid 1830s, the Mormons had already been forced from several settlements, including the large communities they had built in Kirtland, Ohio, and Independence, Missouri. Their farms had been burned, their men and children murdered, their women raped—sometimes under