Review
======
Title: The Book of Mormon: For the Least of These, Vol 3 (Helaman – Moroni)
Author: Margaret Olsen Hemming with Rev Dr Fatimah S. Salleh
Publisher: BCC Press
Genre: Scriptural Commentary
Year Published: 2023
Number of Pages: 221+index
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1948218993
Price: $12.95
Reviewed by Christian Anderson for the Association for Mormon Letters
Despite the title, “For the Least of These” is in fact “for” the privileged majority who have the power to do something about the problems faced by “the least”: i.e., those people marginalized by racism, sexism, ageism, immigration, and/or poverty. Olsen Hemming and Salleh argue powerfully that the Book of Mormon recognizes that our treatment of “the least” is in fact the primary concern to Jesus, delivering a stinging indictment to the soft prosperity gospel that is increasingly being tolerated in local and even general sermons along the Jell-O Belt. One might think this would limit the audience to the vanishingly small population of left-leaning SJW-yet-still-practicing Mormons, but in fact, it does the opposite. For the orthodox, it provides a welcome alternative to the rote Sunday School responses to a text well-read and curated with smooth preset interpretations, raising consciousness and calling to action by appealing to values the orthodox already hold. For the mostly-out and ex-Mormons who still resonate with scripture, it provides a path back to mining the text for inspiration and daily application in the quest for a meaningful and moral life. Whether you believe the Book of Mormon was most likely written in South America or North America, 2000 or 200 years ago, this volume will radically transform the way you understand it and the ways it applies to your life. In fact, I take back how I started; this series is “for” everyone.
For those who haven’t read excellent reviews by Denice Mouncé of Volume 1 and Heather Harris Bergevin of Volume 2 here is an overview. The three-volume series is meant to accompany readers in their own scripture study, with each paragraph of commentary tied directly to scriptural passages and laid out in strict scriptural order. Most sections end with questions for further reflection or invitations to take action to make the world a more just place. This reflects their guiding belief that scriptures “cannot and should not keep silent or neutral on issues of social injustice” (pg xi). While this structure means that similar issues are raised each time the pride cycle rolls by in the text, it also transforms the Book of Mormon into a handbook for reformers. The Volume 3 commentary itself (just under 70,000 words) is about 5/6ths the length of the last six books of the Book of Mormon it covers (~83,000 words), with particular emphasis placed on the perfect society of 4 Nephi and its decline. These brief comment paragraphs manage to be \both scholarly and readable by introducing advanced concepts like Texts of Terror, Violence as Meaning, Emmett Till, militant non-violence, or sociological studies of genocide, but then leaving footnotes and suggestions for interested readers to pursue the primary literature themselves.
There are numerous fascinating parallels to be drawn between Book of Mormon events and contemporary politics. Nephi’s sermon in Helaman is used to criticize capitalist preoccupations; the authors contrast Nephi’s definition of prosperity as increasing wealth and better clothing with Alma 36’s definition as experiencing the presence of God; a society that thinks righteousness is signalized by wealth is spiritually broken. The Gadianton leader Zeremnihah, whose name I didn’t immediately place despite having read the Book of Mormon dozens of times, is lynched by a mob so bloodthirsty they then destroy the hanging tree (3 Ne 4); this demonstrates problems with racism, eco-consciousness, and vengeance that the Nephites and their “one true church” never truly overcame. Samuel the Lamanite’s teachings provide numerous lessons: there are both physical and political walls available for Samuel to climb for his preaching, and even those who are convinced of his calling make no attempt to follow him to a place where his body is safe to learn more. The authors point out multiple times that converts dissolve their Lamanite/Zoramite/Jaredite identities to join with the church culture; the only group that refuses to do this are the presumptuously righteous Nephites; it takes Jesus himself talking to them face to face to get them to abandon their exclusivist pretensions and stop arguing about the name of the Church.
Jesus also chastises the Nephite church leaders for not including the words of Samuel the Prophet (3 Ne 19), contrasting the title Jesus gives him with the racial Samuel the Lamanite label given him by the Nephite prophets. The authors further critique Nephite sensitivities by arguing that before Christ descends, he needs to announce himself three times before they can recognize Him: first in their “native language” of violence and destruction, then in terms of love, and finally associating himself with female imagery and asking His audience to become like children. Despite Jesus’ good example (and Mormon himself being called as a child), women and children have been and continue to be deeply marginalized in the text, appearing mostly as collateral damage in war.
These critiques bring us to Olsen Hemming and Salleh’s most radical innovation: Mormon and Moroni are unreliable narrators. They are limited by their own culture in ways that are only now becoming obvious to readers. This is most painfully visible in their implicit racism of suggesting Jesus calling white disciples made them become whiter, and the explicit racism of Mormon 5 and nationalism of Moroni 7. This perspective of prophetic fallibility, in addition to opening huge swaths of truly fascinating hermeneutical ground, also allows readers to “take this third path” between rejecting the prejudiced text outright or choosing to accept the bias of the prophets as God’s will. Given those alternatives, allowing the Book of Mormon to contain “the mistakes of men,” as it claims for itself on its own title page, looks far less revolutionary than at first glance.
Taken together, the three volumes of “For the Least of These” create a robust, progressive theology that interfaces favorably with mainstream postcolonial and intercultural theological work by writers like Lartey, Segovia, Sugirtharajab, Reuther, and others. Our world is simultaneously more just and nonviolent than at any time in history, but also more aware of what violence and injustice remain and profoundly divided over what to do about it. Those who have ears to hear can consider this series their call to the work. Though I have focused on interpretations I found interesting and novel, the authors themselves emphasize that “The Book of Mormon is a text for our time—not because it happily confirms our own choices and beliefs, but because it warns us of the forces and temptations that continue to threaten our world, [forces that can even] transform a Zion-like community into something resembling hell” (p 218). As we lurch into the metacrisis, there is real urgency in finding inspiration in the formative texts of our childhood, but not setting our own morality aside as we sift them. This series is an excellent tool in that critical task.