The current state of America may be the most compelling argument for the truth of the Book of Mormon. Perhaps one of the reasons God gave us this book was so that we might still save our nation. The Book of Mormon is, before anything else, a thousand year case study of how covenant peoples die. The mechanism is the same every time. Prosperity. Forgetting. Stratification between rich and poor. The hardening of the heart that turns the poor into background noise. The rise of secret combinations inside the formal institutions, men bound to each other by mutual benefit rather than to the people they were sworn to serve. Lawyers and the elite who use their skill to extract from the weak rather than defend them. A political class that loves the republic only as long as the republic delivers what it wants. Family destroyed at the root, fathers absent, mothers exhausted, children who have lost the confidence to trust what their parents told them about God. And underneath all of it, the slow collapse of the capacity to be moved. The Spirit ceases to strive with them, Mormon says, and the line should freeze any honest reader, because every one of those conditions is present in the United States now, and the book is unsubtle about the fact that they do not appear in this combination by accident. America is recognizably late in that cycle. Not at the end, but getting close past the inflection point at which any of the prior civilizations on this hemisphere could have saved themselves from the inside. Mormon ends his book in grief. He has watched his civilization die. He knows it could have been otherwise. He writes a lament that any reader who has finished his book remembers: O ye fair ones, how could ye have fallen. The lament is offered after the catastrophe. We are not Mormon yet. We may not become Mormon. But we are being asked, in the time we have, to do what his people did not do, and the book is unsentimental about how much time may remain.