I am Ryan McKnight.

I'm Kara Santa Maria.

I am Christopher Smith.

Hi, I'm Andrew Torres.

This is Naked Mormonism.

The Serial Mormon History Podcast. I'm proud to be an American.

Why?

Why is being born in a certain time, at a certain place, something to take pride in?

Is it the indoctrination of nationalism that, you know, invades our

culture and our everyday conversations that slowly degrades the foundations of societies across the

world? There's nothing wrong with taking pride in what we do, what we achieve, what we

accomplish, what we create. We take pride in these

because we worked for them. Pride, however, carries a bit of a stigma, so much so that there

are entire lesson manuals in the Mormon Church about what they call the pride cycle. The pride cycle

from the Book of Mormon goes like this.

The chosen people of God are super duper righteous and then God blesses them with wealth and

prosperity for their righteousness. Then they become prideful and forget that God is responsible

for giving them all of their worldly possessions. They fall away from God and then God curses them, thus destroying everything that he gave

them to generate that pride to begin with, killing their friends and families and often

burning their cities to the ground.

This causes the chosen people to be humbled by all of these curses of God.

Therefore, they become righteous again because

...