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I find it hard to disagree with Mark Twain's assessment of the Book of Mormon. He acquired it on a trip to Utah and described it in Roughing It as "chloroform in print." Most people may think Twain the cynic is guilty of a comic exaggeration here but few people have actually read its pages.

The one thing that always seemed strange to me is that the style in the Book of Mormon is consistent throughout. Unlike the Bible where the styles very widely even in translation, the book feels like it was written by the same author. The next striking feature of the book to any literary critic is that the book is not written well. Mormons often point out that an uneducated farm boy could not have written this book, but it is of the quality that could exactly be produced by an uneducated farm boy with a good imagine. It holds even more true if you manage to get a hold of an older copy. (A copy from the 1830s is available for sale on Amazon.com.)

It seems almost impossible that such a poor piece of literature can inspire anyone and yet it does, if writers like Orson Scott Card are any example. I do not think it is the book itself that they find inspiring, but what it represents. Even when the parts of Mormon history are taken into account that complete fail to promote one's faith, the Mormon experience in the early years is that of triumphing over adversity, and it becomes even more so when the mythologized version of the trek the pioneers took gets taken into account. So while we must discount the book as history until we find something like Zarahemla's ruins, we can say that people find value in the story of the people of a uniquely American religion.

Learn more about this author, Lara Tacita.
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