Mormon's letter against baptizing little children (Moroni 8) strikes critics as a 19th-century pulpit fight in ancient dress. The first chroniclers of Mesoamerica met that very debate — already old — in the New World.
Within a year of the Book of Mormon's publication, reformer Alexander Campbell dismissed it as a mirror of Joseph Smith's own decade:
It "decides all the great controversies — infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration…" — Alexander Campbell, Millennial Harbinger, Feb. 7, 1831
Infant baptism heads his list. The charge has been repeated ever since: this debate belongs to frontier America, not to the ancient New World.
Mormon writes his son Moroni about a practice spreading among Nephite congregations — baptizing infants — common enough to demand an urgent prophetic letter. He rejects the rite (Moroni 8:9) and the two assumptions beneath it:
Three independent witnesses — two Spanish friars recording native practice at contact, one painted book that predates contact entirely.
Midwives bathed each newborn in the name of the water goddess Chalchiuhtlicue:
"Perhaps he cometh laden with evil… the evil burdens of his mother, of his father… Receive him, cleanse him, wash him… May the filth be washed away!"
And when the washing ended: "Now the baby liveth again; he is born again… he becometh pure again."
A painted scene shows a woman under water, emerging from a tortoise shell — read by scholars as ritual immersion, an iconographic statement of rebirth.
Painted before any European reached Mexico, it is a native witness to water-rebirth ritual with no Catholic filter — the image cannot be a missionary import.
A water purification rite whose name means "to be born anew or again." No one could marry or enter the priesthood without it; children received it as young as age three. Of the Maya near Mérida, Landa recorded:
"If anyone died without baptism, they believed he would have to suffer more torments in hell than a baptized person."
The two assumptions Mormon condemned are the two the chroniclers met at contact: infants arriving "laden" with inherited filth, and worse torments in hell for those dying unwashed. Even the vocabulary converges — the Maya rite's name means born anew; the Aztec prayer ends "he is born again… he becometh pure again"; the Nuttall page paints rebirth out of water.
Roper's conclusion: the idea that unbaptized children suffer for inherited impurity "was not peculiar to American discourse in the early 19th century, as some detractors of the Book of Mormon have claimed. Rather, apparently it was current in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica as well."