Mormon withdrew from the battle and stood on the sidelines. His words were resolute. “I utterly refused to go up against mine enemies; and I did even as the Lord had commanded me; and I did stand as an idle witness to manifest unto the world the things which I saw and heard” (Mormon 3:16).
What might it mean for a person to stand as an idle witness? It is someone who chronicles events, but does not become involved. Mormon was not going to be a partisan. He was not going to try to persuade people. He was simply going to record the effects of their choices without being able to alter their course.
Some scholars have written about an interesting psychological phenomenon called the survivor witness. This phenomenon was most pronounced in the holocaust in Germany where people realized the hopelessness of their situation. There was no getting out of those camps, and for the most part, there was no one to whom they could talk. There was no one who would know what had happened to them. They were being eradicated without a voice.
When investigators went into the concentration camps after the war was over, they found that the victims had written notes and buried them under sidewalks where it had washed away, or in cracks of the wood. They had an urge to record what happened to them, and their notes told their story. They had no idea to whom they were speaking, but still desired to leave a record of the fact that they had been there and of what had happened to them. In most cases, they tried not to condemn what was happening, but gave a factual report. It is uncanny how many such statements seemed very dispassionate about the circumstances. They were hoping that someone, someday, would know what had occurred. That whole collection of letters has been studied by psychologists, and they have coined the phrase “survivor witnesses” for these people.
Mormon’s statements and the way in which he dispassionately told the story, matches the model that scholars developed of what these survivor-witnesses wrote. His testimony is the kind that would be expected from a person who had actually watched the horrors that he had to watch, knowing the hopelessness and his lack of power to be able to change the inevitable, inexorable consequences.
Book of Mormon Central, “How Can the Book of Mormon Survivors Give Us Hope? (Mormon 8:3),” KnoWhy 393 (December 26, 2017).
Gordon C. Thomasson, “
Lisa Bolin Hawkins and Gordon Thomasson, “I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee: Survivor Witnesses in the Book of Mormon” FARMS Preliminary Reports (1984): 1–13.