Religion in Greenland

Greenland and the Mormons

Nuuk, Greenland. Visit Greenland.

  1. The history of Mormon activity in Greenland
  2. Greenland’s place in Mormon thought
  3. Early Mormon apologetics and the Greenland Vikings
  4. Norse Greenland in modern apologetics
  5. Apologetics and the Inuit
  6. Ice cores and volcanoes
  7. Notes

And they who are in the north countries shall come in remembrance before the Lord; and their prophets shall hear his voice, and shall no longer stay themselves; and they shall smite the rocks, and the ice shall flow down at their presence.
– Doctrine and Covenants 133:26

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or LDS Church, members of which are often called ‘Mormons’) was founded in 1830 in Fayette, New York and is now based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Mormons boast their own set of scriptures in addition to the Bible, believing that Jesus Christ revealed himself to a Hebrew nation in the Americas sometime after his death and resurrection in Judea (c. 33AD).

While an 1835 hymn book for the Church contained a popular hymn by the Anglican clergyman Reginald Heber titled ‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains’, putting the word ‘Greenland’ into the everyday Mormon vocabulary,1 the LDS Church has made only a few sporadic forays into the namesake country.

The history of Mormon activity in Greenland

The official Church website notes that, beginning in 1953 and continuing for ‘at least five years’, it held meetings for a ‘small congregation’ of servicemen at the US Thule Air Force Base, and that this branch was discontinued in 1989, with some informal presence persisting in Nuuk as of 1998, when ‘a Church group of Danish natives was meeting weekly under the direction of the Denmark Copenhagen Mission president’.2

A more detailed history is laid out by Matt Martinich for Cumorah, a private Mormon research institution. The Church established a branch in Fairbanks, Alaska in 1938 — its first in territories traditionally inhabited by Inuit — and opened branches in areas of Canada with high Inuit populations in the 1960s and 1970s.3 LDS members in Nuuk started meeting sometime in the late 1990s and disbanded in 2014 when the last Danish Mormon family left Greenland, there being ‘few, if any, indigenous Greenlandic members’. The number of LDS members in Greenland peaked at 25 in 2006. As of 2015, member-organised LDS meetings were still being held at the Thule base.

Thule Air Base (now Pituffik Space Base) ca. 2006. US Air Force. 

Martinich relates that there was once a small missionary presence: ‘Members reported that the Church briefly assigned full-time missionaries to Greenland within the past decade [i.e., c. 2005–15]. However, these missionaries [were] withdrawn by international church leadership due to concerns with the Church lacking an official agreement with the Greenlandic government to proselyte.’

At least one Inuit Greenlander has served as an LDS Church missionary, starting his service in Utah in 2010. A Danish Mormon created a Kalaallisut-language Facebook group (Jesusip Kristusip Oqaluffia ulluni kingullerni illernartuliusunit) for outreach to Inuit Greenlanders in 2014/15.4 Due to its status as part of the Kingdom of Denmark, Greenland is included in the Europe North Area for LDS Church mission purposes.5

Greenland’s place in Mormon thought

Though Latter-day Saints have scarcely had a presence in the territory of Greenland, the territory and its people have oft occupied the thoughts of Latter-day Saints, having at various times been of interest to those wishing to prove or disprove the historicity of the Book of Mormon.

First published in 1830, the Book of Mormon is presented as an ancient text recording the history of two groups of Hebrews and Israelites who crossed over to America in c. 2200BCE and 600BCE, and who proceeded in both instances to set up thriving civilizations with walled cities, roads, forts, agriculture, and smelted metal objects.6 The LDS Church teaches that the Book of Mormon was translated by its founding prophet, Joseph Smith, from engravings made on a set of golden plates in a language called ‘Reformed Egyptian’.7

Prior to 2006, the book’s introduction stated that one of the people groups described in the text, the Lamanites, were ‘the principal ancestors of the American Indians’. This was changed in 2006 to say that the Lamanites were ‘among the ancestors of the American Indians’.8 Mainstream archaeologists and anthropologists reject the Latter-day Saint version of American history, with no archaeological trace of ancient Hebrew metalworking civilizations in the Americas ever having been found, and no indication of a pre-Columbus Middle Eastern migration over the Atlantic ever being detected in the DNA of modern Indigenous Americans.9

Mormon apologists have attempted to explain these overarching discrepancies and to elucidate how, in the absence of widely accepted evidence that these animals and objects existed in ancient America at the time of the purported events, the Book of Mormon people had access to metal swords, horses, chariots, elephants, and wheat, as well as to all of the Hebrew scriptures (i.e., the ones now considered canonical) that had been written up to the time of the Babylonian exile — engraved on brass plates.

As the only part of the Americas inhabited for significant period of time by people who travelled west across the Atlantic (Norse Greenland functioned from c.985–1406); as the launching pad for the discovery and brief settlement of North America by the Norse; and as an area with a distinct ethnographic and natural history that until the twentieth century was poorly understood, Greenland has provided unique opportunities for Mormon apologists to cast doubt on the certainty of the scholarly consensus.

Early Mormon apologetics and the Greenland Vikings

In 1840, early church leader Parley P. Pratt wrote an article for the English Latter-day Saint publication Millennial Star hailing some ‘interesting discoveries’. One of these, as reported by the English magazine Athenæum, was uncovered by the Danish-Brazilian archaeologist Peter Wilhelm Lund in Bahia, Brazil.

Lund supposedly found a ‘fragment of a flag-stone covered with engraved Runic characters’, reported to be of an ‘Icelandish tongue’, alongside ‘the foundations of houses in hewn stone, bearing a strong architectural resemblance to the ruins existing in the northern parts of Norway, in Iceland, and in Greenland’. Further excavation turned up an image of ‘the Scandinavian god of thunder, Thor, with all his attributes — the hammer, gauntlets, and magic girdle’.

Together, Athenæum proclaimed, these finds ‘would seem to prove, that the ancients of the North had not only extended their maritime voyages to Southern America, but even formed permanent establishments in that country’.

Parley P. Pratt, early Mormon leader and member of the LDS Church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Wikimedia Commons.

In light of the claims made in Athenæum, Pratt pondered: ‘Is it any more wonderful that the golden records which were hid in the earth by Moroni [a prophet in the Book of Mormon], according to the commandment of God, should be preserved entire, and come forth in the 19th century, than that … a city should be discovered under ground in South America, which is but another proof of Mormon’s history?’10 By describing them as a ‘proof of Mormon’s history’, Pratt presumably meant that the Bahia artefacts showed that ancient transatlantic travel and settlement of the kind described in the Book of Mormon was indeed a real phenomenon.

The idea that the Norse reached South America in the eleventh century is a long-standing conspiracy theory that still persists,11 with the notion of a Viking ‘base’ at Bahia and the alleged Norse finds of Peter Lund appearing in the work of twentieth-century French-Argentine author and former Nazi soldier Jacques de Mahieu.12 Petroglyphs were common in ancient South America but none of them are related to Norse runes.13

Norse Greenland in modern apologetics

Mormon anthropologist E. James Dixon also made use of the Norse Greenlanders and their forays into mainland North America in his 1993 book Quest for the Origins of the First Americans. Dixon argues that the Norse American people — who like the Book of Mormon civilizations left no trace that can be detected in the genetics of modern humans — are proof that ‘various groups of humans could have attempted colonization of the American continents … only to subsequently disappear’.14

To support the idea of additional transatlantic crossings by other people groups, prolific Mormon author Michael J. Preece cites Dixon alongside a news article in Science from the year 2000 reporting on the claims made by Canadian archaeologist Patricia Sutherland. Sutherland suggested that ‘the Norse had frequent and prolonged contact with aboriginal peoples’ in Canada, and that these interactions may have been so routine as to be ‘sufficient to have influenced local technology’ — which could with some exposition be used by a Mormon apologist as proof that metalworking was not so alien to the ancient Indigenous cultures of America, potentially salvaging some credibility for the Book of Mormon.15

In a 1993 article on Norse iron smelting in America, Mormon historian William J. Hamblin argued that the Norse who travelled from Greenland represented another example, besides that of the the Book of Mormon people, of ‘the introduction of iron smelting technology into a new region but the failure of Native Americans to adopt that new technology’.16 Hamblin’s point was that even if the Book of Mormon people utilized their metalworking knowledge upon reaching the New World, this would not necessarily result in a widespread adoption of metalworking among all the inhabitants of the Americas and, by extension, would not necessarily produce a significant diffusion of metal objects that would be uncovered by later archaeologists.

On a slightly different point, in 2017, Mormon geneticist and apologist Ugo Perego stated concerning Viking DNA in North America that he was ‘sure it’s there, but there is not enough time for the post-Columbus DNA to differentiate it from the pre-Columbus DNA’ — implying that one cannot be sure whether the Norse integrated with Indigenous people prior to the time of Columbus. And yet, he continued, ‘whenever we find European, Middle Eastern, or African DNA in the Americas, even among tribes, native tribes, by default, scientists always say, we think this is post-Columbian admixture. But we don’t know, because the rate of mutation of DNA is not as fast as 100 years or 200 years.’17

In these ways, the Norse Greenlanders are deployed as a wrench in the machine of modern scholarship, the aim being to hold the door open for the notion that ancient Hebrews really could have settled in North America at the time claimed by the Book of Mormon and that they really could have possessed technologies and cultural elements not found in any ancient Indigenous nation.

Apologetics and the Inuit

Mormon apologists have made similar use of the Inuit people of Greenland and northern Canada, although the precise emphasis has changed over time. A few have hypothesized direct interactions between the Inuit and the Book of Mormon people, but these are fringe voices.18 In 1993, responding to claims that the provenance of the Inuit from East Asia was further proof of the Book of Mormon’s ahistoricity, Dallin H. Oaks, then a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, the penultimate body in the Mormon chain of authority, argued:

[T]he opponents of historicity must prove that the Book of Mormon has no historical validity for any peoples who lived in the Americas in a particular time frame, a notoriously difficult exercise. One does not prevail on that proposition by proving that a particular Eskimo culture represents migrations from Asia. The opponents of the historicity of the Book of Mormon must prove that the people whose religious life it records did not live anywhere in the Americas.19

Whereas Oaks implied that the derivation of the Inuit people is of little import for the broader historicity of the Book of Mormon, the LDS Church specifically rallied the genetics of an ancient Inuit individual to its defence in a 2014 Gospel Topics essay titled ‘Book of Mormon and DNA Studies’.

Against the claim that the Indigenous Americans of the alleged Book of Mormon lands were descended solely from southeast Asian people groups, the LDS Church cites the sequencing of DNA from a Paleo-Eskimo Saqqaq man in 2010 — the first full sequencing of an ancient human. The Saqqaq occupied southern Greenland from around 2500BCE to 800BCE, the individual in question having lived c. 2000BCE. The DNA showed he was related to the ancient inhabitants of northeastern Siberia, pointing to a previously-unknown migration event that complicates prior perceptions of the history of the American far north.20

The Gospel Topics essay discusses this finding like so:

Scientists do not rule out the possibility of additional, small-scale migrations to the Americas. For example, a 2010 genetic analysis of a well-preserved 4,000-year-old Paleo-Eskimo in Greenland led scientists to hypothesize that a group of people besides those from East Asia had migrated to the Americas. Commenting on this study, population geneticist Marcus Feldman of Stanford University said: “Models that suggest a single one-time migration are generally regarded as idealized systems. … There may have been small amounts of migrations going on for millennia.”21

Again, the purpose of this line of reasoning is to hold the door open for the possibility that the Book of Mormon might have some degree of historical plausibility (on the grounds that we do not have perfect knowledge of all possible American migration events) — and that further DNA research might throw up even more surprising results. This is Greenland’s primary role in Mormon thought — as a doorstop.

Ice cores and volcanoes

One final example of this function can be found in a 2003 article by Mormon geologist Benjamin R. Jordan. In the Book of Mormon, 3 Nephi chapter 8, we read that at the time of Christ’s death in Judea there was a cataclysmic natural disaster involving earthquakes, whirlwinds, and blackened skies such that no light was seen by the Book of Mormon people in America for three days. Jordan argues that geological fallout from this event, which he believes to have stemmed in part from a massive volcanic eruption, is evident in the ice-cores of Greenland and Antarctica.

Concerning the use of such evidence, he points out: ‘This is not the first time that the ice-core records have been applied to naturally occurring events in human history. Ice-core research has already been used to help confirm the climatic changes that forced the Vikings to abandon their colonies in Greenland and the New World.’22

AWI researchers at the EastGRIP ice core site in Greenland, 2017.
Helle Astrid Kjær on Wikimedia Commons.

Jordan goes on to detail the findings of various ice-core studies to support the notion that a volcanic eruption with far-reaching implications may provide a natural explanation for the phenomena described in 3 Nephi. He concludes that ‘it cannot be argued that there is no evidence outside the Book of Mormon for a volcanic eruption during that time period’.23 Jordan’s reasoning is typical of Mormon scholarship on subjects relating to Greenland.

To close with another metaphor, Greenland is a transatlantic stepping-stone or bridge over which the Mormon apologist can convey just enough uncertainty to maintain the Book of Mormon’s plausibility. So, while Mormons currently have no substantial place in Greenland, Greenland and its people certainly have an enduring place in the Mormon imagination.

Notes

  1. E. Smith (ed.), A collection of sacred hymns for the Church of the Latter Day Saints (Kirtland, Ohio: F. G. Williams & co., 1835), pp. 99–100. ↩︎
  2. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints website, ‘Country profile: Greenland’, as of August 2024. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/country/greenland ↩︎
  3. M. Martinich, ‘LDS outreach among the Inuit of North America’, Cumorah, 20 March 2013. https://www.cumorah.com/articles/caseStudies/7/273/lds-outreach-among-the-inuit-of-north-america ↩︎
  4. M. Martinich, ‘Prospective LDS outreach in Greenland and the Faroe Islands’, Cumorah, 29 July 2015. https://www.cumorah.com/articles/caseStudies/6/453/prospective-lds-outreach-in-greenland-and-the-faroe-island ↩︎
  5. H. Lundberg, ‘Church announces 2 new missions + 1 new area in Europe’, LDS Living, 8 April 2022. https://www.ldsliving.com/church-announces-2-new-missions-area-in-europe/s/10582 ↩︎
  6. J. E. Clark, ‘Archaeology, relics, and Book of Mormon belief’, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, 2005, pp. 38–49. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jbms/vol14/iss2/6/ ↩︎
  7. LDS Church, ‘Book of Mormon translation’, 30 December 2013. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/book-of-mormon-translation?lang=eng ; S. B. Sperry, ‘The Book of Mormon as translation English’, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 1995, pp. 209–17. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jbms/vol4/iss1/23 ; S. D. Ricks and J. A. Tvedtnes, ‘Jewish and other Semitic texts written in Egyptian characters’, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 1996, pp. 156–63. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jbms/vol5/iss2/7 ↩︎
  8. C. A. Moore, ‘Debate renewed with change in Book of Mormon introduction’, Deseret News, 8 November 2007. https://www.deseret.com/2007/11/8/20052445/debate-renewed-with-change-in-book-of-mormon-introduction ↩︎
  9. C. M. Cusack, ‘New religious movements and the science of archaeology: Mormons, the goddess, and Atlantis’, in J. R. Lewis and O. Hammer (eds.), Handbook of religion and the authority of science (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 769–78 ; T. W. Murphy, ‘Lamanite genesis, genealogy, and genetics’, in D. Vogel and B. Metcalfe (eds.), American apocrypha: Essays on the Book of Mormon (Salt Lak City: Signature, 2002), pp. 47–77. ↩︎
  10. P. P. Pratt, ‘Interesting discoveries.’, Millennial Star (Manchester, England), vol. 1, no. 4, August 1840. https://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/digital/collection/BOMP/id/2282 ↩︎
  11. G. Brooks, ‘Were Vikings in South America over 400 years before Columbus?’, Ancient Origins, 10 May 2020. https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/vikings-south-america-0013694 ↩︎
  12. J. de Mahieu, El Imperio Vikingo de Tiahuanacu (América antes de Colón) (Barcelona: Casa de Tharsis, 2013), pp. 89–90. ↩︎
  13. L. P. Troiano et al, ‘A remarkable assemblage of petroglyphs and dinosaur footprints in Northeast Brazil’, Scientific Reports, vol. 14, no. 1, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-56479-3 ; J. Z. Woloszyn, L. G. Ruiz, and A. Rozwadowski, ‘The petroglyphs of Toro Muerto: new documentation and discoveries at the largest South American rock art complex’, Antiquity, vol. 93, no. 372, 2019. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2019.200 ↩︎
  14. E. J. Dixon, Quest for the Origins of the First Americans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), pp. 130–1. ↩︎
  15. M. J. Preece, ‘Book of Mormon myths’. https://clearldsdoctrine.neocities.org/ltltbom/supp/bookofmormonmyths ; H. Pringle, ‘Hints of frequent pre-Columbian contacts’, Science, vol 288, no. 5467, May 2000, pp. 783–5. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.288.5467.783b ↩︎
  16. W. J. Hamblin, ‘Vikings, iron, and the Book of Mormon’, in J. W. Welch and M. J. Thorne (eds.), Pressing forward with the Book of Mormon: The FARMS updates of the 1990s (Provo, Utah: FARMS, 1999), p. 260. ↩︎
  17. Gospel Tangents, ‘How do Lemba tribe & Vikings relate to DNA & Book of Mormon?’ 18 September 2017. https://gospeltangents.com/2017/09/lemba-tribe-vikings-dna-book-mormon-part-2/ ↩︎
  18. M. C. Baker, ‘An Indian interpretation of the Book of Mormon’, 2006. https://solomonspalding.com/SRP/saga2/sagawt0i.htm ↩︎
  19. D. H. Oaks, ‘The historicity of the Book of Mormon’, in P. Y. Hoskisson (ed.), Historicity and the Latter-day Saint scriptures (Provo: Religious Studies Center, 2001), p. 239. ↩︎
  20. M. Rasmussen et al, ‘Ancient human genome sequence of an extinct Palaeo-Eskimo’, Nature, vol. 463, 2010, pp. 757–62. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08835 ↩︎
  21. LDS Church, ‘Book of Mormon and DNA studies’, 31 January 2014. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/book-of-mormon-and-dna-studies?lang=eng ↩︎
  22. B. R. Jordan, ‘Volcanic destruction in the Book of Mormon: Possible evidence from ice cores’, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 2003, p. 81. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jbms/vol12/iss1/10 ↩︎
  23. Ibid., p. 87. ↩︎

Rebecca Morgan

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