Home-Grown Religion

Harold Bloom argued in his American Religion that Mormonism was the quintessential American religion. Bloom had his own Gnostic reasons for saying that, but his basic point finds confirmation in Eran Shalev’s American Zion.

Shalev presents Mormonism as a convergence of at least two American trends. On the one hand, he recounts the debate about the Israelite origin of Native Americans that caught on during the 18th century and was revived after the War of 1812. James Adair’s History of the American Indians (1775) was a classic of the genre, arguing from the Indians’ form of government, their customs and rituals, their diet and agriculture, and especially their devotion to the one God whom they called “Y-O-H-Wah” that the American Indians must be descended from Israelites. Ezra Stiles and Jefferson both mused on the connection of Indians and Jews, but Jefferson ended as a skeptic toward Adair, who, he said, was “determined to see what he wished to see in every object” (123-125).

After a hiatus, the discussion was rebooted by Elias Boudinot’s 1816 treatise, A Star in the West, who combined Adair’s historical argument with Reformed millennialism to conclude that the presence of these lost Jews demonstrated that “God has raised up these United States in these latter days” (128). The American Indian-Jew connection thus played into American mythologies of the new Israel. 

And that interest flowed smoothly into Joseph Smith’s own attitudes toward the American Indians. Long after the debate faded from American memory, Shalev concludes that “the Book of Mormon remains today the sole testament to a creative discussion of Israelite Indians which was . . . at least as much a discussion about the United State of America” (138).

The other tributary that flowed into the book of Mormon was the American use of the British genre of “pseudo-biblical” history, histories of America written in the style of 1-2 Kings or 1-2 Chronicles. Long forgotten, these were very popular in the early nineteenth century, and some of them include a “narrative of retrieval” that pretend that the text is a translation of an ancient narrative about America’s distant past.

The Book of Mormon adopts both the style and the interests of these books. It extended “prevalent literary conventions toward their logical conclusion: like numerous texts in the pseudobiblical style, the Book of Mormon incorporated the Bible into American circumstances through the use of an idiom well known to Americans accustomed to texts written in a language that consecrated America and its history” (108). Shalev even locates some texts that might have directly inspired Smith’s writing (109).

He concludes that “By including American pseudobiblicism in the intellectual inventory of the Second Great Awakening, Scripture and contemporary newspapers might possibly have been content enough to build the literary and imaginative (or religious and divine) framework for an American bible” (112).