Recently, Peggy Fletcher Stack, religion editor of the Salt Lake Tribune, noted that
the LDS Church changed a single word — only one word — that shows once again that the church will do anything to try to teflon-coat itself against criticism.
The Book of Mormon recounts the “history” of two Israelite civilizations living in the New World, the Nephites and the Lamanites. When I was a Mormon, everyone “knew” that the Lamanites were the ancestors of the modern-day American Indian. Even after I left Mormonism, the LDS apostle and doctrine-codifier Bruce R. McConkie added an introduction to the BofM that said, “After thousands of years, all were destroyed except the Lamanites, and they are theprincipal ancestors of the American Indians.”
But now we all — including Mormons — know that's not the case. So how does the new edition of the BofM solve this problem? According to the Salt Lake Tribune, a new version of the BofM's introduction now reads….
“After thousands of years, all were destroyed except the Lamanites, and
they are among the ancestors of the American Indians.”
Here's what Stack's article said:
“Many Mormons, including several church presidents, have taught that
the Americas were largely inhabited by Book of Mormon peoples. In 1971,
Church President Spencer W. Kimball said that Lehi, the family
patriarch, was “the ancestor of all of the Indian and Mestizo tribes in
North and South and Central America and in the islands of the sea.”
“After testing the DNA of more than 12,000 Indians, though, most
researchers have concluded that the continent's early inhabitants came
from Asia across the Bering Strait.
“With this change, the LDS Church is ‘conceding that mainstream
scientific theories about the colonization of the Americas have
significant elements of truth in them,' said Simon Southerton, a former
Mormon and author of Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA and the
Mormon Church.
“‘DNA has revealed very clearly how closely related American Indians
are to their Siberian ancestors,' Southerton said in an e-mail from his
home in Canberra, Australia. ‘The Lamanites are invisible, not principal
ancestors.'”
So– what is the LDS church's “dodge” on this issue? Actually, two dodges. The first is their theory that the BofM events took place in a very small geographical area, which would “explain” why Israelite ancestry among Native Americans as a whole is statistically insignificant. The other dodge is that even though the church is supposedly supervised by constant, ongoing, personal revelation to church leaders by God, the introduction which McConkie (an apostle and spokesperson for the church) wrote isn't doctrinally binding.
Right. So when I was a Mormon, my bishop could receive definitive revelation about individuals in his ward, but an apostle could be wrong about a major point of doctrine that was inherent to church teachings for 150 years. Right.
For more information, see The Mormon Mirage 3rd Edition: A Former Member Looks at the Mormon Church Today (Zondervan, 2009). Also available as an audiobook and as an expanded-text E-book for Nook, Kindle and other reading devices.
