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There Is No Curse, Part 3: The Human Race

Never has any passage of scripture come with more scrupulosity to the heart of man than Mosiah 3:19 has to me:

For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever…

It’s a passage which seemed to enter with great shame into every feeling of my heart. I heard this passage mentioned and quoted again and again - it appears in General Conference addresses a total of 347 times, over half of which occurring in my lifetime (according to the LDS General Conference Corpus). It’s a passage that implies a divine curse on not just one people group, not on one continent, but on the whole of the human species - an original sin, as it were.

Mosiah 3:19 would have you believe that you and I are God’s personal enemies, because we are the posterity of Adam and Eve. Depending on how you read LDS theology, I either did or didn’t have a choice here, a subject too dense to get into just yet; and either way, an omniscient God supposedly laid the groundwork for my birth. According elsewhere in the Book of Mormon (specifically, 2 Nephi 2), God actually created those preconditions precisely because he intended for me to be born of Adam and Eve…only to be immediately assigned a status as enemy of the sovereign god of the universe.

If I were making a model plane and needed to use glue, how could I also accuse that glue of being my enemy? I could only get mad if it were my own incompetence that got my fingers stuck together, but it’s not the glue’s fault - that’s just what it does. God, if he is not incompetent but omniscient and omnipotent, would hardly see our fallen nature as a threat, and LDS doctrine repeatedly echoes Paul’s sentiments that “[God’s] power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9; compare with Jacob 4:7, Alma 26:12, Ether 12:27, D&C 35:13). That’s not the language someone uses about their enemy.

Growing up in the LDS church, this scripture paralyzed me with fear. I wanted to love God, and I thought he loved me, and yet he saw me as his enemy? I knew that Jesus taught to love our enemies, but the existence of an enemy is the result of flawed human nature, not the product of a loving Heavenly Father. In fact, it brought me immense solace to read in Matthew that God was so good that He would give good things to His children who sought Him out. What good man gives a stone when his children ask for bread (see Matthew 7:9-12)?

Now you may be asking, what’s so wrong with recognizing that there is a tremendous gap between our imperfect and fallible states and the perfect and infallible state of God? Because, dear reader, that is not the only implication of these passages. To be separated from God is not the same as being exiled from God - exiled for something for which I bear no responsibility, because of a nature that I did not choose, nor can I choose to put off without God in the first place.

Some faithful LDS members will attempt to rationalize the sober implications of Mosiah 3:19 by appealing to the second half of the verse, which at first glance does imply that man’s fallen nature is not necessarily inevitable:

…unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.

First of all, the word “inflict” seems at direct odds to Jesus’s assurance in Matthew 7 that God is too good to return evil for good, and yet that is what the God of Mosiah 3:19 intends for his children, even when they become saints. Of course, no Mormon will say that being God’s chosen people makes them exempt from suffering, but if our fallen state were merely a separation, there would be no need for God to cause suffering, and any parent caught acting this way with their children in real life would be immediately castigated and possibly even arrested for child abuse.

More astonishing, though, is that the author reasons that “little children” are automatically covered by Christ’s atonement because of - get this - their fallen nature. That is to say, in spite of the fallen nature of little children, they are automatically spared; but that same fallen nature condemns us as adults. The LDS myth of the “age of accountability” does nothing to assuage this contradiction - in spite of sharing a fallen nature, little children are exempt from condemnation (to say nothing of the author’s complete lack of awareness that toddlers are, in fact, not submissive, humble, or patient!).

Once again, there is a much simpler explanation: Mosiah 3:19 exists in contradiction to the other frequent invocations of the fall of Adam in LDS doctrine, and any attempt to harmonize them inevitably results in prioritizing one passage over another via special pleading, such that neither is read for what they say, but instead transformed into something none of them say. In short, Mosiah 3:19 is an inaccurate depiction of humanity even in the LDS church, and in no way demonstrates that humanity is cursed for having fallen.

Our human nature is not a curse, it's just who we are.


Keep Reading: Part 1    Part 2    Part 4    Part 5

Check Your Understanding:

Test how well you understand the critique of Mosiah 3:19 and the LDS doctrine of the “natural man.”

1. What emotional impact did Mosiah 3:19 have on the author while growing up?




2. What central contradiction does the author highlight about being an “enemy to God”?




3. How does the author contrast Mosiah 3:19 with the teachings of Jesus in Matthew 7?




4. What issue does the author raise about the verse’s assumption that children are submissive and meek?




5. Why does the “age of accountability” fail to resolve the doctrinal tension?




6. What broader conclusion does the author reach about Mosiah 3:19?




7. What message does the author leave readers with?




8. What rhetorical point does the author make with the image of Adam and Eve being cast out?




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