Professor Peter Coviello

Yeah.

And it also helped to foment the dream of a nation apart from the United States.

The fallen and doomed United States, which is again, you can, it's very easy to read the Book of Mormon as prophesying the fall of the Americans whom the Mormons will call the Gentiles.

And it's very easy to think that the native people will have a role in that destruction.

Yeah, eschatology is a really, really tempting option at all points.

Don, I also appreciate that we're having this conversation on whatever day today is, April 7th, under the tweeted threat of the annihilation of an entire civilization.

Like eschatologies don't really go away.

And eschatology is a real, real part of the Book of Mormon.

The Book of Mormon is like, strangely, the account of a righteous people, the Nephites, who are annihilated.

It's the remaining account of people who backslide and are fallen, and so God sees fit to them being annihilated.

The Mormons read out into that a fate of backsliding America.

How do they know they're backsliding?

Because they've so persecuted us.

Because they have so cast out their most righteous people, the Mormons, the saints.

We've been cast out into the West.

That for us prophesies, and now I just sound like Brigham Young in the 1850s, this prophesies the doom.

of the nation.

You would say that repeatedly.

That's perfectly said.

That's exactly right.