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Mormon trail of extremes

Steve Galpern, Special To The News

Published July 11, 2003 at midnight

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Jon Krakauer has changed horses in the middle of the stream.

Not because the best-selling author of Into Thin Air has switched topics from extreme outdoor adventures to the nature of faith and religion. Rather, he is straddling saddles because he shifted the focus of his new book from the broad question of how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) deals with its past to the more narrow, and less critical one, of what motivates America's 30,000 fundamentalist Mormons who still practice polygamy.

Krakauer admits in the "author's remarks" of his new book, Under the Banner of Heaven, A Story of Violent Faith, that he originally set out to write about a different topic, "the uneasy, highly charged relationship between the LDS Church and its past."

Instead, he tells the story of the 1984 murders by fundamentalist Mormon brothers Dan and Ron Lafferty, who believed that they were following a divine revelation to kill their sister-in-law Brenda and her 15-month-old daughter, Erica.

Dan and Ron Lafferty were two of five brothers born into a conservative Mormon family. Dan was the first to move into a more extreme version of the religion that promotes polygamy. His brothers eventually followed his lead, including Ron, who became the leader of the group.

The real trouble began when Ron told his wife that he wanted their teenage daughters to become other men's plural wives. Fearful, she took the children and left, with the help of her sister-in-law, Brenda. Brenda, married to Allen, had been the only wife to take a stand against the brothers' increasing fundamentalism.

Despondent over the loss of his family, Ron slipped deeper into extremism. Along with the other brothers, he joined a group called "The School of the Prophets," who studied to receive divine revelations. After receiving 20 messages, some of which he typed out on a computer as he felt the hand of God commanding him, he received a message to kill Brenda and Erica and two other people in the community who had helped his wife.

In a passage that will turn readers' stomachs, Krakauer describes the crime in excruciating detail. He writes of the violent struggle as the brothers entered the house and Dan used a butcher's knife to cut his victims' throats.

As gruesome as the Lafferty murders were, they aren't enough to carry an entire book, and the author spends a great deal of time profiling fundamentalist Mormons, the communities in which they live, and the origins of the LDS faith from which they believe the current church has strayed.

Intertwined among chapters about the Laffertys, he writes about well-known polygamists such as Tom Green, recently prosecuted by the State of Utah for welfare fraud after appearing on Dateline to advocate for "plural marriage," and Brian David Mitchell, kidnapper of Elizabeth Smart.

The author also chronicles the lesser-known world of Colorado City, Utah, a fundamentalist Mormon stronghold, which until recently was controlled by "Uncle Rulon (Jeffs) who . . . three months shy of his ninety-third birthday when he passed on, left behind an estimated seventy-five bereft wives and at least sixty-five children."

Krakauer paints a disturbing picture of Mormon fundamentalists, chronicling a trail of sexual and physical abuse, plural wives who are sometimes married as young as 13 and dictatorial religious leaders who control every economic, political and social dimension of the lives of the members of their flocks.

According to Under the Banner of Heaven, "life in Colorado City under Rulon Jeffs bears more than a passing resemblance to life in Kabul under the Taliban."

Krakauer's straightforward style and excellent storytelling ability make the book interesting, but not as interesting as the one that he didn't write.

The problem is that it isn't clear which part of the book is the dog and which is the tail. He spends as much or more ink describing fundamentalist Mormonism as he does on the Laffertys. Does Colorado City explain the Lafferty brothers (who lived in a different part of the state) or do the Lafferty brothers explain Colorado City?

Krakauer hints at the more interesting question when he discusses the history of Mormonism, from its origins in upstate New York in the 1830s to the controversy over polygamy and its subsequent rejection by the mainstream church in the 1920s.

For non-Mormon readers, this may be the first time that they learn about Joseph Smith Jr. who founded the religion after receiving a revelation from the angel Moroni in 1823 that 1,400 year-old gold plates were buried under a hill near his Palmyra, N.Y., home.

According to Krakauer, the plates, which Smith transcribed into the Book of Mormon, told the story of how "Jesus Christ pays a special visit to the New World immediately after His resurrection to tell his chosen people - residents of what would become America - the good news," that "the Son of Man will be making His glorious arrival in that same corner of America."

Krakauer points out that "those who would assail the Book of Mormon should bear in mind that its veracity is no more dubious than the veracity of the Bible, say, or the Quran, or the sacred texts of most other religions." (In other words, what is the difference between believing that Jesus appeared on the North American continent or that God parted the Red Sea?)

The real distinction between the Book of Mormon and its ancient predecessors, however, is the time period during which the LDS church was born.

The author notes ". . . the utterly unique circumstances in which their religion was born: the Mormon Church was founded a mere 173 years ago, in a literate society, in the age of the printing press. As a consequence, the creation of what became a worldwide faith was abundantly documented in firsthand accounts."

On the one hand, this means that unlike the followers of the ancient religions, it is possible to learn a great deal about the lives and motivations of Mormonism's early adherents.

On the other hand, it also means that there is ample documentation about the darker sides of the faith's early years, from polygamy to the Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857, in which more than 100 non-Mormon members of a wagon train were murdered on their way through Utah.

Anyone can be an extremist. Add a couple of fanatics and you have a fundamentalist movement. But the real trick is converting millions in the shadow of the industrial and subsequent technological revolutions into a movement that resembles the ancient religions and yet continues to grow into the 21st century.

We can only hope that Krakauer writes his original book sometime in the future.



Steve Galpern is a freelance writer living in Denver.

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