Native American Angels & Mormon "Influence" (The Chosen Season 6 Controversies)
The Chosen Season 6 doesn't premiere until November 15, but it has already generated its first controversy. Dallas Jenkins posted a short clip from the Garden of Gethsemane with the caption, "So yeah…I did something a little different this season." He wasn't kidding.
As the soldiers move in to arrest Jesus, a band of glowing, blue-skinned warriors races toward them, scaling walls and climbing trees, armed with a bow, a sword, and a spear. They're about to strike when Jesus gives them a simple nod, and they stand down. It's a visual depiction of Jesus' words to Peter in Matthew 26:53: "Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?"
The scene isn't what's controversial. The angels are. The warriors appear to draw on Asian, tribal African, and Native American cultures, and the Native American–styled angel in particular has set social media on fire. Conservative commentator Jon Root asked, "Angels are Native American warriors according to The Chosen?" Others dismissed it as "forced diversity." And a growing number of critics have revived an old accusation: that this is Mormon theology leaking into the show. After all, the Book of Mormon teaches that Israelites traveled to the Americas centuries before Christ, and the angel Moroni who appeared to Joseph Smith was believed to be one of their prophets.
I've written about the Mormon accusation before, and I'm sure we'll have plenty to discuss once the full episode drops. But I want to push back on this one now, for three reasons.
1) We're Judging a Season by a 22-Second Clip
If you've followed my Chosen Controversies series, you know I've been here before. When the Season 3 trailer had Jesus say "I am the Law of Moses," critics accused the show of quoting the Book of Mormon. In I Am the Law of Moses, I argued that context is everything, and once the episode came out, the controversy turned out to be way overblown. The line made sense in its scene, and it made sense in light of the Gospels.
The same principle applies here. We don't yet know how Season 6 frames this moment. Are we seeing what angels "really" look like? Is this a vision of the heavenly host as it might appear to human eyes, drawn from every nation and age? Is the scene shot from someone's point of view? Most viewers can't know yet, because they haven't seen the episode. A teaser is designed to provoke curiosity, not to give us the full context, and treating it as a theological statement is a recipe for misreading.
In Should Nicodemus Kneel?, I argued that in moments of ambiguity we should give the work of other Christians the most charitable reading possible. That's not naïveté. It's simply loving our neighbor, including the neighbor who makes TV shows.
It's also worth noticing what the clip actually shows. This isn't one Native American angel. It's a multi-ethnic band of warriors: African, Asian, and Native American, all glowing with the same otherworldly light. Whatever Jenkins is doing, he's not singling out one people group. He seems to be suggesting that the legions of heaven aren't bound to any single human culture.
And Scripture gives him a lot of room to work with. Matthew 26:53 tells us nothing about what those twelve legions look like. When angels do appear in the Bible, they take wildly different forms: ordinary-looking men eating with Abraham (Genesis 18), a figure whose appearance was like lightning at the empty tomb (Matthew 28:3), cherubim with four faces (Ezekiel 1), and seraphim with six wings (Isaiah 6). Nowhere does the Bible say angels look Middle Eastern, much less like the pale, robed Europeans of Renaissance paintings. Western Christians have dressed angels in our own cultural clothing for centuries without anyone calling it heresy.
For what it's worth, I'm not a huge fan of the gray-blue skin aesthetic myself. It reminds me more of Avatar than of anything I picture when I read the Gospels. But that's okay. Not every difference in taste is a difference in theology. You may find the depiction strange, distracting, or too fantastical for The Chosen's grounded style. Those are fair aesthetic critiques, and Jenkins himself has said he resisted depicting the Transfiguration because it felt too spectacular. But "I don't like this artistic choice" is a very different claim from "this is a secret Mormon message."
My co-host Victor and I dug into the clip from a storytelling and aesthetic angle on our latest livestream, and he actually loved the look I'm lukewarm on. To him, the angels are just alien enough that you can tell at a glance they aren't ordinary humans. I can see that. They're human enough to explain why people in Scripture sometimes mistook angels for men, and strange enough to explain why others fell on their faces in terror. Our bigger questions were about story, not theology. The clip suggests Jesus may be the only one who can see these warriors, a bit like Elisha seeing the heavenly army surrounding Dothan before his servant's eyes were opened (2 Kings 6:17). If so, it's a real shift for a show built on seeing Jesus through the eyes of his followers. And for Jesus' nod to land emotionally, we'll probably need more context about who these angels are and why they arrive seemingly caught off guard. Those are the kinds of questions viewers will be able to weigh for themselves once the episode is out.
2) The Mormon Accusation Is Old, Debunked, and Out of Date
The accusation that The Chosen is Mormon has followed the show since its early seasons. The reasoning has always been circumstantial: The Chosen's original distribution partner, Angel Studios, was co-founded by the Harmon brothers, who are Latter-day Saints. From there, critics have treated every line or image that resembles something in LDS culture as proof of hidden influence.
But Dallas Jenkins is an evangelical Christian (and the son of Jerry B. Jenkins, co-author of the Left Behind series). He has repeatedly and explicitly denied that The Chosen is a Mormon work, and has stated that people of other theological backgrounds don't have creative control over the show. Angel Studios was a distribution partner. It never controlled the show's content.
More importantly, that relationship is over. In 2023, The Chosen entered private arbitration with Angel Studios over what Jenkins called multiple, significant contract violations. In 2024, the arbitrator ruled in The Chosen's favor and the relationship was terminated, and in 2025 Jenkins announced that ties had been fully severed. The show is now produced by Jenkins' own 5&2 Studios and distributed by Amazon MGM Studios on Prime Video.
In other words, Season 6 was made after The Chosen parted ways with Angel Studios. Even if you believed the old theory that Angel's founders were slipping LDS ideas into the show, it can't explain a creative choice made years after they were gone. As one commenter put it, we're blaming Latter-day Saints for a decision spearheaded by an evangelical showrunner.
And as I argued in the Law of Moses post, resemblance isn't the same as borrowing. When something in The Chosen sounds like the Book of Mormon, it's usually because both are drawing on the Bible. Finding a parallel doesn't prove a conspiracy.
3) If Anything, This Scene Pushes Back Against Book of Mormon Theology
Here's what I find most ironic about the accusation. If you actually know what the Book of Mormon teaches about ancient America, the idea that this scene reflects Mormon theology gets things almost exactly backward.
The Book of Mormon tells the story of two peoples descended from the Israelite prophet Lehi: the Nephites, who were generally faithful to God, and the Lamanites, who rebelled. And it describes the difference between them in terms of skin color. According to 2 Nephi 5:21, because the Lamanites hardened their hearts, "as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them." Later, when a group of Lamanites repents, the text says "their curse was taken from them, and their skin became white like unto the Nephites" (3 Nephi 2:15). For generations, LDS teaching identified Native Americans as descendants of the Lamanites.
That makes the Moroni connection especially odd. Moroni was a Nephite prophet. In the Book of Mormon's own framework, he belongs to the light-skinned, faithful people, not to the darker-skinned people whose skin was described as a mark of God's curse.
To be fair to our Latter-day Saint neighbors, the LDS Church has since moved away from this. In 2013 it formally disavowed past teachings that dark skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, and many LDS scholars now read these passages symbolically. But the text of the Book of Mormon still says what it says.
Now look again at The Chosen's angels. Faithful servants of God, sent from the Father's presence, ready to defend the Son, and they come in different ethnicities and skin tones. The implication is that skin color is no sign of God's favor or God's curse. (As I wondered aloud on the livestream, maybe the angels God sends reflect the very peoples they're sent to serve.) That message doesn't come from the Book of Mormon. It comes from the Bible: God "made from one man every nation of mankind" (Acts 17:26), "God shows no partiality" (Acts 10:34), in Christ "there is neither Jew nor Greek" (Galatians 3:28), and around the throne stand worshipers "from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages" (Revelation 7:9).
It's also worth looking at how Latter-day Saints actually picture angels. The angel Moroni, the most famous angel in LDS art, is almost always depicted in long, flowing white robes, usually with a trumpet, atop temple spires and in paintings of his visit to Joseph Smith. There is one notable exception, and I want to be upfront about it: the Moroni statue on the Los Angeles Temple, sculpted by Millard Malin in 1953, wears a Mayan-style robe, a headband, and sandals, and has Native American facial features. But notice the differences. That statue is a herald holding a trumpet and the golden plates, not a warrior charging into battle with a bow and spear. Its styling is Mesoamerican, reflecting the common LDS belief that the Book of Mormon took place in Central America, while the angel in The Chosen's clip looks distinctly North American. And it's still a Nephite, given Native features because of the long-standing LDS habit of reading Native peoples into the Book of Mormon story. A multi-ethnic band of African, Asian, and Native warrior angels doesn't fit that framework at all. If The Chosen were really nodding to Mormon angelology, this is a strange way to do it.
Let's Wait for the Episode
Since recording that livestream, I've seen an early screener of the premiere. I can't share anything more about it yet, but I can say this: nothing else in it suggests a Mormon influence. Whether this particular scene works for you will probably come down to taste. Either way, the most important thing in the clip isn't what the angels look like. It's that Jesus tells them to stand down. With all the power of heaven at his disposal, he chose the cross.
That's the story Season 6 is telling. Let's at least watch it before we decide what it means.
What did you think of the clip? Let me know in the comments.
Read more in my Chosen Controversies series: I Am the Law of Moses · Should Nicodemus Kneel? · All Chosen Controversies posts
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