The Hill Cumorah Cemetery

The keystone of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a book that is said to contain ancient records of the inhabitants of the Americas.¹ Members of the faith believe that the prophet and founder of their religion - Joseph Smith, Jr. - was directed by an angel in 1827 to the place where these records had been buried. This angel, whose name was Moroni, had supposedly hidden his people’s records in the earth about 400 AD during his mortal life. Smith, using two stones known as the Urim and Thummim that had been buried together with the records, claimed to have translated “reformed Egyptian,”² which the peoples of the Americas supposedly used, by the power of God. According to church doctrine, the records - which were engraved on plates of gold - were taken up into heaven after the translation process was completed, and the finished product was titled “The Book of Mormon.”³ The above is a condensed version of the church’s explanation of how the current English version of this book came about; the next several paragraphs will touch on the actual content of the purportedly ancient records.

The Book of Mormon tells the story of a man named Lehi, who takes his family and several others out of Jerusalem and travels across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. Where exactly they landed is not known, and the Church refuses to make any official statements regarding geographical specificities of the book,⁴ but it is said that Lehi and those who traveled with him ended up somewhere on one of the American continents around 600 BC. Lehi had many sons, but the two that perhaps receive the most attention throughout the book are the eldest son, Laman, and his younger brother, Nephi. Laman was a worldly individual that did not hearken unto the words of his father - who just so happened to be a prophet of God - and despised Nephi, whom his father adored because of his obedience and righteousness. The enmity between these two brothers continued for generations, and the book ends with the seed of Laman, or “Lamanites,” utterly destroying the seed of Nephi, or “Nephites.” Moroni, the last of the Nephites, buries the sacred (and abridged) record of his people in the Hill Cumorah - the same place that Smith claimed to have found them over a millennium later.

The Lamanites, who lived on after the “great and tremendous battle at the Hill Cumorah,”⁵ are supposedly the ancestors of the Native Americans. There is a verse in the Book of Mormon that offers an explanation of the non-Semitic appearance that the native inhabitants of the Americas possess despite their supposed roots in Jerusalem. Nephi wrote that on account of the Lamanite’s wickedness, “as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them.”⁶ Accordingly, it is Mormon belief that the differences in skin color around the world came about not as a result of human melanin levels naturally changing to adapt to varying amounts of absorbed sunlight, but rather because of God cursing groups of people according to their level of wickedness. This has been an extremely controversial issue for the church in more recent times, especially with doctrines that teach things such as those of African descent are the seed of Cain, who was cursed with “the flat nose and black skin”⁷ because he lied directly to God after killing his brother.

Explaining away doctrines that are now considered bigoted or racist is not the only problem the church currently faces; as DNA research has become more advanced, increasing amounts of evidence suggest that the ancestors of the Native Americans are not of Jewish descent like the Book of Mormon purports, but rather of Asian lineage. Furthermore, carbon dating has led to a widely-accepted theory in which the Native Americans came by foot to the American continent via the frozen Bering Straight thousands of years ago - and not by boat⁸ or ancient submarine⁹ like Joseph Smith claimed. Realizing that such scientific evidence could damage the veracity of the Book of Mormon, the church made a change in the introduction of the book in 2006¹⁰: Before this change, it stated that the Lamanites “are the principal ancestors of the American Indians”; however, it now claims that they are only “among the ancestors of the American Indians.”¹¹ This one-word change allows them to dismiss over a century of teachings which claimed that the Lamanites were “the ancestors of all of the Indian and Mestizo tribes in North and South and Central America and in the islands of the sea.”¹²

The continued lack of scientific and archeological evidence for the Book of Mormon is causing the church to retract many of its previous statements. Unfortunately, members of the church around the world have regarded the teachings of their leaders to be the divine and inspired word of the Lord’s anointed, and to retract such statements causes great disappointment and doubt amongst the faithful who believed in their words. A particularly deplorable example of this can be seen in way that the church has dealt with the issue of the Hill Cumorah. As mentioned previously, this was supposedly the place where the great and tremendous battle took place between the Nephites and the Lamanites around 400 AD. According to the Book of Mormon, over 230,000 Nephites were killed during the fight on the Hill Cumorah,¹³ and their bodies were “left by the hands of those who slew them to molder upon the land, and to crumble and to return to their mother earth.”¹⁴ Something important to note here is the fact that this battle consisted not only of bodies, but also of swords, bows, arrows, axes, and all other kinds of weapons.¹⁵ Accordingly, if archeologists were to excavate the site of this battle today, one would expect that remnants of this great and final battle - where more people reportedly died in combat than in the American Civil War¹⁶ - would be found.

Those who became aware of this fact were not just critics of the church; leaders and scholars within the organization also began to realize that an utter lack of archeological evidence posed huge problems for what their doctrine claimed. Accordingly, a change in the church’s geographical claims that would dismiss the mounting criticism became necessary. This change in stance becomes very apparent if one looks at the communication between leaders of the church during the early 1990s. One member, Ronnie Sparks, sent a letter to President Gordon B. Hinckley around this time which contained an inquiry about the geographic location of the Hill Cumorah. In response to his question, F. Michael Watson, the Secretary to the First Presidency at the time, sent a letter to the bishop of Sparks’ ward, Darrell L. Brooks, dated October 16, 1990. In this response, Watson told Brooks to relay the following stance of the church to Sparks: “Brother Sparks inquired about the location of the Hill Cumorah mentioned in the Book of Mormon, where the last battle between the Nephites and Lamanites took place. The Church has long maintained, as attested to by references in the writings of General Authorities, that the Hill Cumorah in western New York state is the same as referenced in the Book of Mormon.”¹⁷ As can be seen here, the church maintained the view that the Hill Cumorah in New York state was the location of the great and tremendous battle between the sons of Lehi until 1990.

However, in 1991, John L. Sorenson - an emeritus professor of anthropology at Brigham Young University - released a book titled “The Geography of Book of Mormon Events: A Source Book”¹⁸ that summarized many of the problems regarding the hemispheric geography theory¹⁹ of Book of Mormon events that church leaders had taught up until that point. Around this point in time, the church began to retreat from their claims that the Hill Cumorah in New York was the same hill mentioned in the Book of Mormon. Since then, apologists have concocted theories which claim that Moroni carried the gold plates (which would have weighed about 200 pounds²⁰) all the way from the battlegrounds in South America to western New York, where upon his arrival he named the drumlin there after the Hill Cumorah where his people had been destroyed.²¹ The church itself went back on what it stated in its letter to Brooks in 1990 in a fax to a different individual in 1993. In this more recent document from the Office of the First Presidency, the church’s stance just two years later is strikingly different: “The Church emphasizes the doctrinal and historical value of the Book of Mormon, not its geography. While some Latter-day Saints have looked for possible locations and explanations because the New York Hill Cumorah does not readily fit the Book of Mormon description of Cumorah, there are no conclusive connections between the Book of Mormon text and any specific site that has been suggested.”²²

One of the saddest parts of the shifting view of the Hill Cumorah is what the church has done to its members in Japan. Yoshihiko Kikuchi, who was called as the first Japanese General Authority of the church in 1977, is an important figure that deserves a brief introduction before discussing this matter any further. Kikuchi was a sales manager for the multi-level marketing company Rena Ware,²³ and is said to have pressured members into buying products from him around the time he became a leader within the church. He is also the infamous leader who pushed Delbert H. Groberg to use unethical methods to attain astronomical results in the Tokyo South Mission during the early 1980s.²⁴ Because his connection with the Hill Cumorah is not known to members outside of Japan, it is one of the purposes of this study to make such ties clear to English speakers around the world. By doing so, the recent claims of apologists “that the Book of Mormon does not state that the plates of Mormon were buried in the Cumorah; in fact, it says exactly the opposite”²⁵ are exposed as the misleading cover-ups that they are.

Although the LDS Church “doesn’t usually operate cemeteries, the First Presidency gave special permission at the time of the initial purchase in light of the country’s circumstances. Accordingly, this will be the only time that the church manages a cemetery.”²⁶ Most members outside of Japan who read this probably wonder, “Since when has the Church owned a cemetery?” They are unaware that their church dedicated a cemetery in Saitama Prefecture in Japan called the “Hill Cumorah Cemetery” on September 19, 1982.²⁷ In response to the apologetic argument mentioned above that claims that the Hill Cumorah is not actually where the church has taught that Moroni buried the gold plates, I offer the following quote from the church’s official magazine: “The land was named ‘Hill Cumorah Cemetery’ by the cemetery committee (Representative: Elder Yoshihiko Kikuchi) after the Hill Cumorah where the gold plates were buried by Moroni, who closes his account in the Book of Moroni 10:34 by saying he will ‘rest in the paradise of God, until my spirit and body shall again reunite.’”²⁸ If the church renounces their previous statements about the Hill Cumorah being the resting spot of the gold plates, hundreds of Japanese members who purchased plots at this cemetery - which was named after the hill where the plates were supposedly buried - will have been betrayed by their own religion.

Another interesting fact worth mentioning is the frequency and content of articles in the church’s Japanese version of their official magazine regarding the Hill Cumorah Cemetery. In 1990, the cemetery was mentioned in five of the twelve annual volumes; one of these contained a two-page article about the gravesite.²⁹ This was also the last year that an article about the Hill Cumorah Cemetery would appear in the church’s magazine. All subsequent issues that mention the cemetery contain at most a short half-page advertisement for grave plots. The gravesite was not mentioned in the magazine for almost a decade after December 2001 - just a few years after the Australian geneticist Simon G. Southerton left the church because of DNA-related issues; and around the same time that such problems began to assail long-held church beliefs regarding the ancestry of American Indians. Not only did the content of related articles become extremely sparse after 1990, but the frequency decreased as well, with a maximum of two advertisements appearing during a year.

The LDS church claims to be a family-oriented church. In their “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” the church firmly calls upon “responsible citizens and officers of government everywhere to promote those measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society.”³⁰ They also advocate genealogical work and talk of the importance of caring for one’s ancestors. As written in the Doctrine and Covenants, part of the LDS canon, we are to “turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the children to the fathers, lest the whole earth be smitten with a curse.”³¹ In other words, the church teaches that our ancestors are watching over us, so we need to respect them. For most members of the LDS faith, this simply means performing the temple ordinances for their deceased relatives. However, in Japan - where respecting one’s ancestors entails a much greater amount of effort - simply completing one-time temple ordinances for the deceased is hardly commendable. While the Hill Cumorah Cemetery, which is located about an hour by train from Ikebukuro in Tokyo, might be easily accessible for members who live in and near the country's capital, it is hard to believe that members would make regular trips to the gravesite of their loved ones if they lived anywhere outside of that region. Even so, the church blatantly states that “because there are 1,481 gravestones at the cemetery, we ask for the concerted efforts of everyone to help quickly fill the remaining plots.”³² “Although there are some who feel that it is too far away,” the church still makes sure to mention that “there are members who pay visits to the cemetery when they come to attend the Tokyo Temple from places such as Kyushu and Hokkaido.”³³ However, to look at such claims in more relative terms, how many people would honestly visit their family’s gravesite in Alabama if they lived in New York? Accordingly, one can hardly say that members are thinking of their ancestors when they buy a plot at the distant Hill Cumorah Cemetery just because it is affordable and “not someplace where one must worry about the complex issues of dealing with Buddhists temples.”³⁴

Last of all, the LDS church states that the “Presiding Area Authority has directed that the sales promotion of plots be conducted via line of priesthood authority … and not by means of showy commercial-based methods.”³⁵ Despite their claims, the exhaustive list of articles and advertisements from past decades that are available here tell quite a different story. The church regularly included graphs in their official magazine which compared the price of plots at the Hill Cumorah Cemetery to other gravesites throughout Japan, not to mention promoted this gravesite in articles as one of the cheapest cemeteries in the country. After looking at the sales techniques that are visible in the church’s magazine, one must wonder how their advertisements differ from those found in a secular magazine. Furthermore, one must wonder if the church is truly "making absolutely no profit off the sale of these plots"³⁶ like they claim. The land for the cemetery was originally obtained by a member named Tatsui Satou on December 19, 1950, but it wasn't turned over to the church until 1960. It is needless to say that the land was likely very inexpensive when Satou purchased it, and chances are that he either donated it to the church or sold it to them for an extremely low price. Even so, plots originally went on sale for 230,000 yen, and have since risen to 340,000-yen-per-plot in 2010; an average 285,000 yen. At that price, the 1,481 plots are worth 422,085,000 yen - roughly $4 million.

However, the church hasn't stopped there. In 2010 it began advertising communal burial plots where any number of unrelated people can be buried together. Unfortunately, the price for these plots is the same as that of regular plots, and thus each person ends up paying the same 340,000 yen to add their name to one of such communal gravestones. By doing this, the church is able make many times the profit off of one small plot of land that it would have normally received a mere 340,000 yen for. As a result of such communal graves, the church's revenue from the Hill Cumorah Cemetery could easily increase multi-fold as more and more members register there.

Below is a list of articles related to the cemetery; feel free to look over the translations to see what the church has said about their one-and-only cemetery.