The African-American novelist^[1]and ex-youth pastor James Baldwin shares the following anecdote from his essay collection The Cross of the Redemption. Billie Holiday, the famed singer of the haunting 1939 anti-lynching ballad ”Strange Fruit,”^[2]Once ranked by TIME magazine as the greatest song of the 20th century. was targeted^[3]Make no mistake: the so-called War on Drugs was always about hurting people, not helping them. and prosecuted for drug possession^[4]As dramatized in the 2021 film The United States vs Billie Holiday.. Not helping her situation was the fact that she really was a heroin addict. With legal and medical costs mounting, a young Miles Davis^[5]Who himself was a recovering heroin addict. leant her $100. A mutual friend chided him for the same, saying (as we have all said when confronted with a pan-handler) that she would just blow it all on smack. Per Baldwin, Davis replied simply, “Baby, ain’t you ever been sick before?”

I meditate on this anecdote every time I read Mosiah 4:16-19 nowadays, wherein King Benjamin declares, “ye will not suffer that the beggar putteth up his petition to you in vain, and turn him out to perish.  Perhaps thou shalt say: The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand, and will not give unto him of my food, nor impart unto him of my substance that he may not suffer, for his punishment are just— But O man, whosoever doeth this the same hath great cause to repent; and except he repenteth of that which he hath done he perisheth forever, and hath no interest in the kingdom of God.  For behold, are we not all beggars?  Do we not all depend upon the same Being, even God, for the substance which we have?”  (“Baby, ain’t you ever been sick before?”)^[6]The late Neal A. Maxwell, by the way, always said he wished he could just memorize and deliver that entire sermon at every General Conference.

The cardinal sin of the Nephites, according to the Book of Mormon, is their recurrent failure to show compassion and charity for the poor and the needy. The question of whether or not this or that poor person deserves our help is irrelevant; they no more deserve our help than any of us deserve the Atonement—its not a question of deserve but of need.

Miles Davis understood this. King Benjamin understood this. And we had better understand this too, because any and all attempts to reinterpret this scripture to mean anything other than radical generosity to all is sophistry and sounding brass to our condemnation.