Well, personal events in my life have conspired to prevent me from accomplishing one of my reading goals. If you look at the first week of this month, I reviewed a book a day. My goal was to read a book a day for the entire month. I was already a bit behind, though I had some catch-up plans, when I made two trips to the emergency room over the weekend accompanying other people (I was not ill myself). I was not able to devote enough time to reading, and even my catch-up plans probably aren’t going to suffice to return me to the proper pace. I’m also a weasel for not writing of the goal publicly until now so that this blog’s readers could keep me honest. But I have finished a book, and so I shall review …
I spent twelve years living and working in Idaho, a state very heavily populated by Mormons. The rumor I heard while living there was that the state actually had a higher percentage of Mormons than Utah did. I knew (and know) a lot of Mormons. My acquaintances ran the gamut in personal qualities, much like any other group. I can’t say I ever met a truly unlikable Mormon.
My earliest knowledge of Mormonism centered on their strict dietary proscription against caffeine and alcohol, and my Jack Mormon friends’ failure to adhere to that rule. I was also aware that nearly every Mormon was expected to go on a two year mission, and that most would marry shortly after completing the mission. Beyond that, I knew very little. Many Idaho non-Mormons held an intense dislike for Mormons, which seemed to be mostly about the Mormon mono-culture and near exclusive control Mormons had in the small towns from which my friends came. If you weren’t a Mormon, you didn’t get to be a cheerleader.
That kind of thing.
I’ve never been anti-Mormon. I had too many nice Mormon friends for me to fall for that. On the other hand, I was pretty atheist when I first encountered practicing Mormons. It always boggled my mind that anyone would believe a religion whose tenets were supposedly inscribed on gold plates that disappeared shortly afterward, when they supposedly were transcribed in a period where such things are easily verifiable if true. In other words, the L.D.S. Church was started in the mid-1800s, pro-claimed some things that are easily disprovable by the records of the time, and yet people still believe. That’s the atheist and skeptic in me talking. Mind you, I hold all religions to such standards, which is one of the reasons why it’s unlikely I will every become traditionally religious.
According to Jon Krakauer’s afterward, the work that became Under the Banner of Heaven was originally inspired by the same question. How does a rational mind believe this? Along the way, he became entranced and sidetracked by Mormon fundamentalism and a particular murder of a woman and her child by two possibly insane Mormon fundamentalists.
While he gave up on the original focus, that question still seems to get asked multiple times in this true crime story. Krakauer devotes one late chapter entirely to Deloy Bateman, a former fundamentalist polygamist who not only apostatized from the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints sect, he became an atheist. I thought his story of being educated and that education slowly eating away his belief was extremely compelling. (Then again, perhaps I that’s just my own bias.)
Krakauer also devotes a chapter to question of the sanity of Ron and Dan Lafferty, the fundamentalist polygamists who killed their sister-in-law Brenda Lafferty and her daughter in a bloody attack that by its very nature raises the possibility of insanity. The question explored is this: what differentiates the actions of a Christian who helps someone after receiving the command in prayer from the Laffertys who believe God commanded them to kill? The legal answer in the chapter doesn’t suffice, but the question of belief obviously plagues Krakauer for him to even include the chapter.
Just for exploration of belief alone I have to recommend the book.
In addition, there’s quite a bit of history about the L.D.S. church that is utterly fascinating and which I did not know: the trail of Mormons from Palmyra to Ohio to Missouri to Navoo to Utah, the birth and death of Joseph Smith, persecution the church received, the disdain the church held for Gentiles, details of the Mountain Meadows massacre. Other items I knew more about, but still the book provided me with new insight: the Mormon story of Nephi and Laban, the polygamy doctrine, and the splintering of polygamist sects.
Two criticisms though: I think Krakauer focuses too much on too many fundamentalist L.D.S. sects. I’m not sure why this was done. The stories are lurid, and they do form some of the background of the Lafferty brothers. But the stories of communities in Bountiful, B.C. and in Mexico didn’t seem to add a lot of insight. The intertwined family trees were confusing while being horrifying, and I kept getting lost as to who was who. Perhaps if he had included a diagram.
The second criticism isn’t so much a criticism as a question about which I’ve wondered (and received only bits of information from other sources). What about all the boys in these communities? If you marry all the girls to the older generation, and marry them at a ratio of multiple women to one man, your community is going to have a surplus of boys with no marriage or romantic prospects. Are these boys just killed off? Abandoned? Do they become disillusioned and become mainline Mormons or just wander off the religious road altogether? Krakauer chronicles the horrors the girls undergo as well as their peculiar Stockholm Syndrome adherence to their malefactors, but there’s nary a word about the boys. I wish he had at least given a paragraph or two to the question, but I don’t recall it.
Obviously I think this book is a fascinating and engrossing read that has a lot more depth than most true crime books.
Title: Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
Author: Jon Krakauer
Cover creators: John Fontana (designer) / Will Funk (photographer)
Imprint / publisher: Anchor / Random House
Format: Paperback
Length: 399 p. (includes extensive supplemental material)
Publication date: 2003
ISBN-10: 1-4000-3280-6
Subject: Mormon fundamentalism
LC classification: BX8680.M54K73 2003
