Posted by:
Tevai
(
)
Date: January 03, 2020 05:41PM
Looking at this historically, the Book of Mormon does legitimately occupy a place of significance within American literature and American religious evolution.
Because I grew up in a (non-Mormon) family, with a maternal side family who was, almost to a person, continuously, and often very deeply, involved in this particular American religious evolution, I would definitely place the B of M on the same religious spectrum as the seminal religious/"mystical"/"ancient Egyptian" creative works of the 1800s.
Although these apparently quite different religious groups were often decidedly different from each other in practice, collectively they each contributed to this evolution which continued on, and increasingly, throughout the following century (1900s).
In a specifically, and I think uniquely, American cultural period which included the transcendentalists (my homage to Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the seminal contributors to my life from eleventh grade on), Phineas P. Quimby, Helena Blavatsky (Theosophy), the Rosicrucian Order, everyone involved in seances, "readings" and other kinds of divination, and the "new" discoveries in what is now called "Egyptomania" [Wikipedia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptomania], my personal opinion is that the Book of Mormon definitely deserves its own recognition.
Regardless of what happens in the future, the Book of Mormon has earned its own place among the many varieties of what we can now (in retrospect) see as specifically "American religion" which sprang up during a most fertile religious renaissance in the United States during the nineteenth century.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/03/2020 05:53PM by Tevai.