Latter-day sinners?

Three new books -- including Jon Krakauer's latest -- take a look at some dark moments in the history of Mormonism and the violent effects of sexually rooted religious hysteria.

By Laura Miller

Jul 26, 2003 | It hasn't been a good year for Mormon public relations. In March, Elizabeth Smart, a 14-year-old Salt Lake City girl who had been abducted nine months earlier, turned up in the custody of a man calling himself Immanuel David Isaiah, an itinerant Mormon fundamentalist who had kidnapped her to make her his second "wife." Although the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) is adamant that isolated fanatics like Brian David Mitchell (Isaiah's real name) and the more established but often equally bizarre fundamentalist communities scattered throughout the Southwest, Canada and Mexico are not encouraged by Mormon officialdom, to many the distinction seems only a matter of degree. When police first discovered the girl with Mitchell and his legal wife, she denied being Elizabeth Smart for nearly an hour, and more than one commentator observed that her Mormon upbringing made her a ripe candidate for the brainwashing Mitchell subjected her to. Despite the church's squeaky-clean image, polygamy and violence are deeply entwined in the roots of the Mormon religion, as no less than three books published this summer attest.

The most prominent of the three, "Under the Banner of Heaven," is the work of Jon Krakauer, whose account of the disastrous 1996 Everest expedition, "Into Thin Air," became a huge bestseller five years ago. "Banner" seems unlikely to repeat that success -- it lacks the breathless, minute-by-minute chronology of hubris, error and icy death that made his earlier book a stay-up-all-night read -- but the author's reputation should win it a large enough readership to dismay the official LDS, whose leadership has already issued a rebuttal. "Banner" is a mixture of true-crime reporting and history, centered on the grisly knife murder of 24-year-old Brenda Lafferty and her 15-month-old daughter Erica in American Fork, Utah, in 1984. The culprits were her two brothers-in-law, Ron and Dan Lafferty.

The Lafferty brothers had been excommunicated from the Church of the LDS for advocating a return to the ideal of "plural" or "celestial" marriage (polygamy) -- officially banned by the church in 1890 -- and then kicked out of a fundamentalist sect for presenting a divine revelation ordering that their sister-in-law and her baby (along with two other adults) be "removed." The sect, run by a 74-year-old man calling himself the Prophet Onias, had in turn splintered off from another group of zealots, the United Effort Plan or UEP, when Onias received a revelation that the men running the UEP had "gone astray." The leaders of the UEP also claimed to be operating their authoritarian polygamous community according to God's hand-delivered instructions, as did the original founder of the LDS, the prophet Joseph Smith, who received regular directives from above, including the proclamation known as Section 132, which declared that "If any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another ... then he is justified; he cannot commit adultery for they are given unto him." (In fact, the right to multiple wives didn't accrue to "any man," but only to leaders of the church and a favored few on whom they bestowed that particular blessing.)

As Krakauer points out, the problem with a religion founded on the idea that its leaders get their marching orders straight from the Almighty is that members who quarrel with how things are being run have a tendency to start receiving their own contradictory commandments. That's why there are around 200 Mormon splinter groups throughout North America -- impressive in a religion that's not even 200 years old. Polygamy is the main point of contention between fundamentalist Mormons who wish to return to "the principle" and the U.S. government; it also makes for the most deliciously lurid headlines, especially when a camera hog like the "independent" (i.e., unaffiliated with any sect) Utah polygamist Tom Green comes along. Green had a penchant for going on national television to tout his multiple marriages, some to underage girls, and as a result provoked the authorities to convict him of child rape, bigamy and criminal non-support of his family. (The extensive Green household was largely bankrolled by state and federal welfare agencies.)

But as Krakauer's book, Dorothy Allred Solomon's memoir of growing up rebellious in a polygamist clan, "Predators, Prey and Other Kinfolk," and journalist Sally Denton's "American Massacre" -- a historical account of the darkest moment in Mormon history, the Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857 -- indicate, polygamy may not be the most troubling aspect of the religion. There's also the doctrine of "blood atonement," which holds that when a person is in a state of grievous sin, any Mormon in good standing who kills that sinner according to the proper protocol is actually doing the victim a service, cleansing the sin with blood. Of course, blood atonement has fallen into even greater disfavor with official Mormondom than polygamy has, but fundamentalists looking to terminate their enemies with extreme prejudice can find sufficient Old-Testament-style justification in the church's scriptural bedrock. Hence, the Lafferty brothers believed that they were cutting the throats of their sister-in-law and niece at God's command, and Solomon's father was murdered by an adherent of a rival sect leader.

The Lafferty brothers targeted their brother's wife because she'd been an obstacle to their efforts to "live the principle." Ron, the eldest brother and previously a loving husband and father and exemplary member of the LDS, became caught up in ideas detailed in a 19th century polygamist tract that he and Dan believed had been penned by Joseph Smith himself. Ron began to impose all sorts of onerous strictures on his wife, demanding subservience and a return to such frontier activities as churning all the family's butter by hand; he also talked about marrying off the couple's daughters as plural wives. Dan's wife, writes Krakauer, "was no longer allowed to drive, handle money, or talk to anyone outside the family when Dan wasn't present, and she had to wear a dress at all times." Their sister-in-law, Brenda, successfully encouraged Ron's wife to divorce him, thereby provoking Ron's homicidal wrath. (Why the baby needed to die as well has never been particularly clear.)

Krakauer doesn't hesitate to call renegade Mormons like the Laffertys "American Taliban." It's true that, like fundamentalists of all stripes, they're lashing out at a modern society that has left them feeling increasingly powerless, overwhelmed and sidelined. In the words of author Karen Armstrong, they want to "resacralize an increasingly skeptical world." But those are lofty terms for what, on the ground, often looks like a garden-variety crisis of sexual confidence. Ron Lafferty's slip into fanaticism followed some serious financial setbacks that ate away at his sense of his own manhood by impairing his ability to provide for his family. And when the demands of Islamists in the Middle East and Central Asia are boiled down to essentials, they largely amount to anxieties about women, wanting to keep them locked up at home and their bodies shrouded, entirely dependent on and subject to their husbands and fathers, their chastity strictly and often brutally enforced.

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