Come, Follow Me September 2-8: Helaman 7-12
In 2024, the Maxwell Institute will offer a weekly series of short essays on the Book of Mormon, in support of the Church-wide Come, Follow Me study curriculum. Each week, the Maxwell Institute blog will feature a post by a member of the Institute faculty exploring an aspect of the week’s reading block. We hope these explorations will enrich your study and teaching of the Book of Mormon throughout the coming year.
Pride is More Than We Might Assume
By Philip L. Barlow
Pride is a danger oft targeted by Latter-day Saints: in our scriptures, our lesson manuals, and our general conference addresses. We did not, of course, invent this orientation. Nor did our Christian cousins, though among them the threat of pride is ranked extremely high. Historically, Christianity has held pride to be the primal sin. It reigns as “the queen of all vices,” the worst––even the root––of the other deadly sins. So said Augustine and Aquinas, so said Luther and Jonathan Edwards. C.S. Lewis gauged pride to be the ultimate "anti-God" condition, wherein the ego and the self are directly opposed to God. So pride is not a neglected idea among us.
Such familiarity, however, carries a meta-risk, a risk beyond the threat of pride itself. The peril is conceptual nonchalance, as though, having given a range of attitudes, behaviors, or phenomena the name “pride,” we therefore necessarily understand its nature and causes, as though we are sure to recognize it in ourselves and know how to spurn it. However, sometimes labels can be deceiving compressions of wider, perhaps complex, traits and dynamics. “Love,” “truth,” and “time,” like “pride,” seem as simple or as deep as we choose to understand.
Strands within the Book of Helaman might induce a healthy caution toward our limited understanding. Among the several themes we might consider in chapters 7–12, let us pause a moment on pride. A reconsideration of it may prove relevant for us individually… and as a people and civilization.
....
At one level, the portion of Mormon’s abridgement of the ancient “large plates” that we know as the Book of Helaman is discouraging: a tale of intrigue, internal contention and external war. The book laments the impulse toward societal self-destruction in the decades prior to Christ’s appearance in the new world. Helaman’s depressing portrait, in turn, forebodes the eventual degradation, at larger scale, of the Lamanite and Nephite peoples as a whole, including the latter’s annihilation, which editor Mormon, centuries later, personally witnessed. It is through this bleak end-of-civilization lens that Mormon views the previous distressing patterns that comprise the Book of Helaman. As he selects what to include or summarize from the reigns of Helaman (grandson of Alma the Younger) and Helaman’s son Nephi, and as he adds his own commentary (especially chapter 12), Mormon has ample motivation for pondering recipes for spiritual and social calamity.
Prominent in his diagnosis is what he calls “pride,” along with cognate terms such as “boasting,” mentioned repeatedly in Helaman. We all know what to expect when chapter 6, verse 9 tells us the Lamanites and Nephites both became “exceedingly rich.” This launches us on the familiar “pride cycle,” perhaps the most prominent narrative refrain in the Book of Mormon. The cycle frames the volume as a whole as well as at smaller scale in recurrent generations: a blessed people grows wealthy and proud, then decadent, and is brought low. Compelled to be humble, the people repent. A merciful God forgives and prospers them, which eventually spawns pride and the cycle repeats. Mormon explicitly sketches the pattern in Helaman 12:1–6. He typically portrays God as acting directly in pouring out destruction upon an unrepentant people, though this raises questions and it is not always possible to distinguish literal direct causation from prophetic metaphor. Perhaps in some instances and respects destruction is a natural consequence of God withdrawing protection, leaving flagrant sin to run its natural course. Helaman 4:13 suggests as much: “And because of this their great wickedness, and their boastings in their own strength, they were left in their own strength; therefore they did not prosper, but were afflicted and smitten.” [1]
What is the nature of pride? What are its sources and character as we see them enacted in Helaman, in our modern world, and in ourselves? Let us for a moment put “pride” under a microscope. Here are a few questions to get us started:
- When we are put off by pride in others or discover it in ourselves, could it be that something deeper is sponsoring what appears as pride? Insecurity, for instance? Some lack or fear for which we are attempting to compensate? Might pride in other instances be a disguised anger? Something else?
- Pride does not always present itself in purebred form; often it breeds with other maladies to form a hybrid. Our pride-laden chapters under consideration, for example, are also preoccupied with forgetting (7:20) and distraction (7:21, 12:2), and the need to remember (5:4–12). Is there something about “pride” that harbors an amnesiac quality and fosters attention deficit? Could it make us disproportionately attentive to the wrong things, vain things? “Where your treasure lies, there will your heart be also.”
In other cases pride’s connections to concurrent symptoms of spiritual and social unhealth may be less apparent. Helaman 7 laments the conditions that Nephi, son of Helaman, discovered in Zarahemla upon his return from unsuccessful preaching in the lands northward. In Zarahemla he found corrupt persons had been installed in the judgment-seats. They condemned the righteous because of their very righteousness–perhaps a threat to the deference in which the people held them. They let “the guilty and the wicked go unpunished because of their money” and retained them in governmental office “to rule…that they might get gain and glory of the world, …that they might the more easily commit adultery…and do according to their own wills” (v. 5)
- Amid this state of affairs, might we find connections to pride?
- One antonym for pride is humility–a word whose root, like “human,” means “of the earth”; literally “grounded”). How might focusing on humility and its origins illuminate the character of pride and the problem of forgetting where we came from, forgetting our attachment to God, our “groundedness” in God?
Helaman 6:17 reads: “For behold, the Lord had blessed them so long with the riches of the world that they had not been stirred up to anger, to wars, nor to bloodshed; therefore they began to set their hearts upon their riches; yea, they began to seek to get gain that they might be lifted up one above another….”
- What shift in the status or role of riches has occurred before and after that “began” in the last clause quoted above?
- Experiment with putting into your own words the first two lines of verse 17 in a way that makes clear the “therefore” that follows. That is, X [the first two lines] was the situation, therefore the people began to behave in a new way. When cast in your own words, does the link between what comes before and what comes after that “therefore” make sense? What are the implications?
Helaman proclaims that the Lord may bless the righteous with wealth. Our term “wealth,” before it came to mean “abundance,” is rooted in the concept of “well being.” Yet Helaman and the Book of Mormon as a whole teach that wealth, spawning pride, can be treacherous to our well-being. Similarly, Jesus taught that it is difficult for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of heaven. In Doctrine & Covenants 19:26, the Lord warned Martin Harris not to “covet thine own property.”
- In light of such teaching, what exactly ought to be our relationship with wealth?
- When does “good pride” (say, in one’s work well done) become “bad pride”? When does confidence become arrogance?
- Our contemporary civilization and form of government seems strained, even imperiled. Do you see pride as among the culprits? If so, in what ways? What practical remedies might you propose?
As we read Helaman 7–12, as with any passage, we might do well at times to slow down, to inquire of the text, of the Lord, of one another, and of ourselves. Short of that, we may be tardy in discovering our own numbing pride in presuming we understand our pride: its sources, its varieties, and its perils.
[1] Elder D. Todd Christofferson similarly allowed space for metaphor when referring to the storm and wrath that, in the last days, “shall be poured out … upon the whole earth” (D&C 115:6). “Wrath” in this context, he said, may be construed as “the natural consequences of widespread disobedience to the laws and commandments of God.” “The Sealing Power,” general conference address, October 29, 2023. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2023/10/15christofferson?lang=eng
IMAGES
Lilia Vargas Mendez, Nefi hijo de Helamán, derrama su alma a Dios en la torre, 2019. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [bookofmormonartcatalog.org/catalog/nefi-hijo-de-helaman-derrama-su-alma-a-dios-en-la-torre/].
Yongsung Kim, Greatest Among You.
Albert Bierstadt, A Storm in the Rocky Mountains Mt. Rosalie, 1866.
