Nephites ≠ Mayans

The July 2020 issue of The Friend magazine is out, and Jonathan Neville is having a conniption fit over its cover art:

This isn’t the first time, of course, that Mesoamerican-style Book of Mormon art has appeared on the cover of Church magazines. Just last month, the June 2020 issue of The Friend depicted Abish and other Lamanites in Mesoamerican feathered attire:

And the cover art on the February 2016 issue of the Ensign shows Nephites in Bountiful at the time of Christ’s appearance with Mesoamerican styles of dress and hair:

As Neville correctly notes—without understanding the implications behind his statement—the July 2020 cover “is only the latest in a long line of M2C* images that Church magazines have featured over the years.”

“We love our Church magazines,” he declares (without explaining who the we is), “but sometimes we wonder if the right hand knows what the left hand is doing because of the mixed messages.” According to him, the “mixed messages” are, “Some of us thought the entry on Gospel Topics about Book of Mormon geography” (the same one he has tried to downplay and dismiss over 120 times) “meant what it said; i.e., the position of the Church [on Book of Mormon geography] was neutral.”

He wants to have it both ways: When any hint of Mesoamerican geography, architecture, clothing, or culture finds its way into Church magazines, he protests that the position of the Church is supposed to be neutral. At the same time, he insists, “No children or youth in the Church today know what the prophets have taught about the New York Cumorah.” The Church must be neutral, but yet it must also teach Heartlander dogmas!

And, most bizarre of all, he insists that affirming a historial Mesoamerican setting for the Book of Mormon somehow leads people to reject the historicity of the book:

Only 50% of LDS Millennials are confident that the Book of Mormon is a literal, historical account, and the percentage is declining.

[M2C] will insure that this percentage will continue to decline.

How those two things are connected, he doesn’t say.

Finally, in his latest blog post Neville continues to mislead his readers about the arguments his opponents are making. (In other words, he lies.) He tells us:

The same M2C message has been taught for many years by CES and BYU. Despite the Gospel Topics entry, CES and BYU still teach the Nephites = Mayans message through the fantasy maps and references to the M2C citation cartel.

Nephites = Mayans is still being taught by Book of Mormon Central, Fair Mormon, the Interpreter, and the rest of the M2C citation cartel.

This is a distortion of what these groups actually argue, but Neville either hasn’t read their arguments carefully or he’s simply inventing what he wants his readers to believe. Here’s what Book of Mormon Central has directly stated in their own video on this subject:

It would be a mistake to assume that the Jaredites were the Olmec and the Nephites were the Maya. Instead, it is much more likely that the Nephites and Jaredites were groups living within these larger civilizations, with their story unfolding within the broader context of Mesoamerican history.

Skip to 1:37:

Neville’s latest blog post, as usual, is simply yet another criticism of the Church and its leaders and a fallacious distortion of the views of his “M2C” opponents.

—Peter Pan

* “M2C” is Jonathan Neville’s acronym for the theory that the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica and that the hill Cumorah in the Book of Mormon is not the same hill in New York where Joseph Smith received the plates of Mormon.