3 Nephi 2

Year 95: A continuing loss of communal and cultural memory. Even the spectacles of the past drifted from the collective mind. Skepticism about everything. Contempt for kindness. Plucking out ones spiritual eyes.

Imagination stayed strong but always an imagination of crudity and deception. Good people could detect a brooding, loathsome evil—Satan taking a nap on the nation’s front porch. Then in its master bedroom.

Belief in Christ, such as it ever was, ebbed down to a tidepool of ostracized believers.

Magic, the occult, a windy mysticism at best—those were the supernatural de jour. It seemed Satan himself was walking around with a prod and the people were his docile cattle. Bulls in particular.

Years 96-99: The countdown to perdition continued. Which takes us to 100 years since Mosiah, 609 since Lehi’s exodus, nine years since the Ultimate Nightlight sign had occurred. Nephites had, to their credit, revised their calendar to make this the starting point. So it was now Year 9 (or 10, people couldn’t agree on how to count it).

The whereabouts of Nephi Sr. remained unknown. If he’d have been around, maybe people would have been less resistant to preaching. But resistant they were, all through Years 10-12.

Year 13 brought fresh Gadianton insurgencies. These terrorists, as they became known, rode into towns and cities, burglarizing for the thrill of it, killing for sport. Their targets seemed random. So Nephites and Lamanites united in the pursuit of vengeance against the Gadianton Group. The old vows of non-violence slid from view as the Lamanites realized the need to arm themselves defensively. Threats to houses were way down the list; threats to individual lives, slightly higher; but threats to principle and implicit rights headed the list of rationales for buying or making swords and slings, bows and arrows.

They were so out of shape, the Gadiantons picked them off easily. The weird sidebar is this: dead or alive, these Lamanites had become honorary Nephites. And so their skin lightened, a spontaneous genetic mutation that they passed to their children and further generations. Or maybe it was just a sudden change in perspective among the people alongside whom they had fought and died.

Year 14: Ad hoc warfare continued, back and forth across borders, wins and losses, reversals of fortune, with a slight edge to the Nephites over the Gadiantons, who kept retreating to their mountain forts.

Year 15: Gadianton resurgence, which we always blamed on Nephite misbehavior, not on Gadianton military superiority. Either way, it seemed as though God or fate or the devil or something was holding a cosmic knife against the collective throat of Nephite civilization.