Mormons believe an off-shoot of the Nephites, the Lamanites, are ancestors of Native Americans. The histories of the Nephites and other civilizations form the basis of The Book of Mormon, which was revealed to the prophet Joseph Smith in 1823.

It has been more than half a century since the last big shift in thinking about where events in The Book of Mormon took place, but a dramatically different—and disputed—theory is gaining traction among some of Mormon faithful.

The theory, popularized on Web sites and at conferences by advocates Rod Meldrum and Bruce H. Porter, suggests that events in The Book of Mormon took place in the heartland of the United States, east of the Mississippi River from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.

“The word is out now. There is a movement going through the church,” says Porter, a former LDS institute teacher who lives in Arizona and leads Mormon-themed tours.

For the first 100-plus years of Mormonism, most believers assumed the ancient civilizations described in The Book of Mormon ranged over the entire Western Hemisphere. The “narrow neck” between “land north” and “land south” described in the sacred text was assumed to be the isthmus of Panama.

But, in the 1950s, careful reading of the text led scholars to propose a more limited geography; since then, most of the dozens of theories have focused on “Mesoamerica,” a region that includes southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and the northwestern part of Honduras and El Salvador in Central America.

(Kristen Moulton writes for The Salt Lake Tribune.)
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