Culture: The Lamanites’ rapid expansion into the captured territories suggests overpopulation in already held Lamanite lands—pressure that is relieved by expansion into the newly acquired Nephite territory. However, natural increase seems unlikely as a complete explanation. I read the situation as many merely nominal Nephites remaining behind as passive defectors, while Nephites who had previously moved to Lamanite territory returned to their former homes. Probably many farmers simply stayed with their fields and became “Lamanites” as their rulers changed.
The ancient world shows tight connections between a people’s religion and its rulers. Change in one signaled a change in the other. If a new god was powerful enough to conquer, it was powerful enough to worship. Mesoamerican conquerors had a long tradition of placing localized deities under the symbolic overseership of the conqueror’s god. Mary Miller, a professor of art history at Yale, and Karl Taube, archaeologist at the University of California-Riverside, describe the later Aztec relationship with foreign gods: “The Aztecs adopted new gods—Xipe Totec, for example, had flourished along the Gulf and in Oaxaca before gaining a major role among the Aztecs—and elevated old ones, while some others they humiliated by placing their idols in a dark temple designed to be their prison.”