Pangea is the name given to the large unified landmass on earth before it split into the continents that we know today. It started to break about about 200 million years ago, and the movement is still happening today.

While the LDS Church does not have an official position on the age of the earth, BYU (owned by the Church) teaches the mainstream scientific consensus that the earth is billions of years old. But every once in awhile, Mormons got to be Mormon, and say things a little out there.

A recent example is Elder Rasband speaking at the BYU Patriotic Festival as part of the Freedom 250 festive, said the following as reported in the Church News

In the Garden of Eden — “in what today we consider the heartland of America” — God the Father and His Beloved Son visited Adam and Eve and taught them the gospel, said Elder Rasband.

Their posterity eventually became so wicked that the Lord cleansed the earth with water. The surface ”fractured into great continents separated by oceans, all to protect what was destined to be the promised land, ‘which the Lord God had preserved for a righteous people’ 

There is a lot to unpack just in this short paragraph. It has been awhile since I’ve heard over the pulpit that the Garden of Eden was the heartland of America. We all know Joseph Smith taught that, but as the Church tries to become more mainstream Christen, it has kind of taken a backseat to some of our other goofy doctrines. But then he talks about a literal flood, which again has been taught by modern prophets since the beginning of the Church. But the part that was new to me was that when Adam and Eve where in the garden, there was only one landmass, and it didn’t separate until after the flood, plate tectonics be dammed.

Trying to figure out a timeline for this really gets confusing. If we believe in a lateral flood, which the Book of Mormon reinforces, then that flood happened about 6000 years ago. So according to Elder Rasband, Pangea split apart 6000 years ago, with the main reason being so that the Americas could be preserved for a righteous people (us!)

Maybe Rasband was just speaking as a man, but I don’t think he was speaking off the cuff at such an important event. Do you think the talk was reviewed by the correlation department? Could the Church News publish something that was not in harmony with what the Church believes? It might be significant that the Church has not published a transcript, or the full video of the talk. Are we just getting the less controversial excerpts? What did we miss?

What are your thoughts when a members the of Q15 says something like this? Is he playing to very unique audience?

Would he be allowed to say these same words in a General Conference address, which is a much wider and diverse audience?