Alma 4

In the sixth year, war was over but grief buried the whole nation. They had lost people, animals, fields, and food. It was a new curse, worse than dark skin: it was dark vision, the hole that swallows you when grief takes over. The one way to get free of a curse was to realign ones heart with God.

Obviously, the church benches filled, so much that they bent from the weight. People lined up at the Sidon to have Alma baptize them.

In the seventh year 3,500 people got baptized. In the eighth year, the church caught the same disease that had ruined their enemies: Nehoritis, let’s call it. Pride. Self-satisfaction. The mirror as God. Saints fell in love with, swooned over their own money, fabric, jewelry, food, even their own productivity.

Alma hated it. Smugness cut against his own sense of style, which was rooted in humility and grace. (The same for many of his fellow priests and teachers.)

But what was worse was the rivalry that pride begets. Competition now trumped cooperation. A new theology set in: the idolatry of personal achievement. And if there was any social unity left, it consisted of generalized religious narcissism. By the ninth year of the judges’ reign, everyone had become a judge.

The new religious tradition, if we can call it that, would destroy the country, Alma thought. And it would destroy the church’s power to persuade people of its intrinsic strength. Inequality would spoil it. Outsiders would see “saints” stiffing the local panhandlers, hoarding wealth for some imagined desperate future, and insisting everyone had to tend to his or her own health.

Fortunately, the new tradition hadn’t won. Alma, by his example, kept true religion alive. A core of the church, led by him, suffered hardship to keep the society afloat—like the boats that Lehi and his family had ridden to safety—sharing their food, housing, and even luxuries with people who some felt didn’t deserve it. That, they believed, was the only way to honor their belief in the Anointed One to come. And it was the only way to escape their own sins.

Some miscreants mocked these folks, though. Alma saw their resentment and shed tears. But he never settled for mere sentimentality. He acted according to God’s spirit. In this case, that meant appointing a wise older man to put into law the virtues of the church at its best. Named Nephihah, he took his seat as a judge who could, in fact, legislate from the bench. Alma, meanwhile, would stay on as the society’s ecclesiastical head. That way, Alma could do what he’d always loved and did best: preach. Ultimately, he knew, one had to change people’s hearts before behavioral laws could work. He’d always loved to stir people up. Now he knew he needed to stir them up to their souls’ duty toward one another. And the best method, he found, was a certain spiritual abrasiveness: “bearing down in pure testimony against them,” he called it.