Alma 3:7–8 expands on the reason given in 2 Nephi 5:21–22 for the dark skin (Alma 3:6) or the “skin of blackness” (2 Ne. 5:21). In 2 Nephi, the mark creates a barrier between the Nephites and the Lamanites to prevent intermarriage. (See commentary accompanying 2 Nephi 5:21.) Alma adds that the reason for preventing intermarriage was to preserve the Nephites (v. 8), not from ethnic contamination, but from believing in the “incorrect traditions which would prove their destruction.” Zeniff gives us the best picture of these “incorrect traditions” in Mosiah 10:12–18. He recounts the struggle between the brothers and couches the outcome in the perspective of Laman and Lemuel, who resented what they felt was the loss of their rightful rulership in the family.
How could these “incorrect traditions” cause the Nephites to cease to be Nephites? Each people has what anthropologists call a “foundational myth,” meaning the story that explains their origin as a people. In this context, Nephites renounce their foundational myth and adopt that of their enemies. What may have started as a simple difference between the original brothers (although I argue that these were religious differences, more than personal differences), their five hundred years in the New World has gone beyond the right of rule. The danger that the Book of Mormon prophets preach against is not the problem of origins, but the attractiveness of culture. Adopting what have become Lamanite lifestyles would destroy Nephite cultural ideals. Indeed, the values represented by involving kings, social stratification, and fine clothing could easily destroy the egalitarian Nephite culture. (See commentary accompanying Alma 2:3–4.) The Lamanite values were supported by their own foundational myths, which would be accepted as part of the package because they gave conceptual meaning, structure, and reality to the complex of ideas.