Alma 46

Because he’s the only Rich Guy. Pledge allegiance to that hero, not these would-be, well-groomed, charismatic fakes with human faces.

Helaman’s naysayers conspired against his champions. Death plots got hatched. The leader was a huge fellow named Amalickiah. He wanted to be king and had a big constituency, mostly of lower-level judges looking for some mutual political back-scratching. They were hatching deals, no doubt, though I wasn’t there. Typical backroom stuff. Lots of manipulative talk by the arch-flatterer Amalickiah.

Gobs of wrangling and rankling. The society began to teeter from the unrest, despite recent victories on the battlefield. One more case study in the rapidity of onset of amnesia about God. The devil forms alliances so tidily. Especially with a charismatic man in his employ.

In this case, Amalickiah. A cunning beast, the stereotypical “bad boy” women are said to crave. He got people to choke on the teachings of their ancestors, ironically losing the spiritual freedom hyper-secularism was supposed to inculcate. The attacks on faithful church members, though, failed badly.

Meanwhile, when the Nephite General Moroni heard about all this, he was incensed. He threw off his coat, ripped out a patch and wrote on it: “In memory of our God, religion, freedom, peace, wives, children.” He then tied the freshly inked mini-flag to the end of a pole. He strapped and buckled his armor on, took the flag (which some people nicknamed “The Liberty Banner”), knelt down with it and prayed very audibly that Christians— true Christians—would be allowed to be free forever on this vast property. (Christians were all church members; though being a member, while necessary, was not sufficient to be worthy of the name. You had to believe in Jesus Christ, who, of course, was still a long way from arriving on earth. And you had to act like you believed.)

Jazzed up, fervent with the zeal of prayer with armor on, he decided to name the land, north and south, “Chosen and Free.” Two adjectives not always mutually inclusive, as we now know.

He then shouted to anyone who would listen, “It’s inconceivable that anyone will squash us Christians, unless we do it to ourselves.” Then he started marching around, waving the pole, and yelling in the streets: “If you want to truly own this, beyond just living off it, make a deal with God about it: insist on your right to be Christians publicly and expect God to bless you for doing so.”

This seemed like a good deal. And people got so whipped up about it they started tearing up their own clothes, vowing loudly that if they ever veered from their religion God should tear them up the same way. They threw their ripped clothing at Moroni’s feet and said, “We promise God that if we sin flagrantly, God can throw us at our enemies’ feet, just like this. They can use us for rags to mop up our own blood.”

Moroni said, “Get this: you’ve just alluded, probably unwittingly, to our ancestor Joseph, whose clothes were torn up by his brothers in their sham kidnapping plot to make him look like he’d been devoured by wild animals. I’m just sayin’ …

“Anyway, let’s obey God’s rules or plan on going to prison camps, sold as slaves, or having our throats cut. If we stick up for ourselves by keeping God’s commandments—and we can debate about what all those entail—we are saving the genealogical remnant of a God-preferred family. That would fulfill Jacob’s prophecy: when he saw a well-preserved piece of his son Joseph’s coat, he said, ‘I’ll bet, divinely and metaphorically speaking, of course, that at least some sliver of my descendants’ demography will persist even when the rest have died off or chickened out. Understand that I’m not real happy about this tiny fraction being all I have to show for my name. But still, at least they’re not all going to the devil. I try to look on the bright side.’

“I’d like to think the garbagey shreds of Joseph’s posterity are the people who hate us. Which would make us … well, you get the idea.”

He went out and rounded up all the buffest men who craved expansion of freedom and marched toward the Amalickiahites. The latter saw the former and balked. It was clear they couldn’t beat a principled Nephite assault. So they went back to Nephiland.

This wouldn’t wash with Moroni. Only trouble could come from letting them go and regroup, propagandize, and launch new attacks. Cut off the snake’s head: Amalickiah had to die. So he headed with his armies into the wilderness, hoping to thwart the enemy and execute their leader. He called his marching orders “keeping the peace.” That seemed to work, despite the paradox.

Well, Amalickiah and a small entourage managed to escape. Moroni’s troops captured the rest of the Amalickiahites and herded them back to Zarahemla.

Since he was a judge as well as an ace commander, Moroni could make legal deals with his prisoners. The one he set up was this: swear to support freedom or we’ll kill you. Not many didn’t take that bait.

As a bit of showmanship, he had the Liberty Banner sent around the territory and hoisted onto every tower for a time. Everyone got to see it and venerate it. Kind of idolatrous, but people do crazy things in wartime. Especially when they win.

Things went pretty smoothly through most of the nineteenth year of the judges. Helaman and his priest friends ran a tight ship in the church for the next four years. When people died during these years, they died with a smile on their faces (most of the time) at the thought that, of all the people on the earth, they knew about Jesus’ coming and that he’d save them.

(A general comment on these deaths: some died from fevers—frequent in hot weather—though herbal medicine was all the rage and seemed to stave off most fevers. But many actually lived to old age, at least in our terms, and got happier as the days went by. Right up to their last breath, with which they were often thanking Jesus.)