Others have argued that the Book
of Mormon was a nineteenth-century work of Christian doctrine masquerading as
an ancient document. For instance, Alexander Campbell argued in 1831 that the
Book of Mormon (and, one might add, the Doctrine and Covenants) dealt “with
every error and almost every truth discussed in New York for the last ten years
and was best seen as a response to religious and theological pluralism.” For
him, the Book of Mormon was written by Joseph Smith to provide authoritative answers
to every theological dispute then current in the United States including “infant
baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the
fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, penance, church government,
religious experience, the call to the ministry, the general resurrection,
eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the question of free masonry,
republican government, and the rights of man” (Alexander Campbell, “Delusions,”
Millennial Harbinger, 7 February 1831)
While Campbell had a valid point,
it must not be forgotten that virtually every one of the doctrinal debates he
noted was not novel to nineteenth-century New York. They had been disputed by
Christians for hundreds of years. For instance, Anabaptists, since their birth,
had opposed the baptism of infants and, by cutting the ties between church and
state, undermined Christian theocratism.
Regardless of whether the Book of
Mormon is a nineteenth-century document or an ancient one, . . . it is clear that
not all of the cultural scripts or ideologies found in the Book of Mormon are
peculiar to nineteenth-century America. . . (Ronald Helfrich, Jr., Mormon
Studies: A Critical History [Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, Inc.,
Publishers, 2022], 110-11)
