Redaction:Mormon’s main interest in this narrative has been to show the miracle of repentance, but he has little interest in establishing and maintaining the church. Possibly, given Mormon’s violent and chaotic world in which his people were, for all practical purposes, exterminated, the details of living the gospel were only a distant hope. In his world, the gospel had been rejected; the competing religion was dominant both socially and militarily. In his world, the most important message was the life-and-death necessity of turning to God, not the intricacies of developing priestly bureaucracies to maintain a church.
The emphasis on repentance rather than endurance is also linked to a different assumption of what it meant to live the gospel. For the Nephites, the gospel presumed a way of life that included both religion and politics. The enormous change required by conversion can explain the necessity of converted Lamanites to physically relocate to the Nephite polity. Even with the capability of having citizens who espouse different religious systems, Nephite political dominance creates the norm and all other systems are considered apostate from it.