Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith | Jon Krakauer

Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith | Jon Krakauer | A

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Under the Banner o...

	Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith Jon Krakauer Anchor, 2004 - 432 pages average customer review:based on 726 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Jon Krakauer?s literary reputation rests on insightful chronicles of lives conducted at the outer limits. He now shifts his focus from extremes of physical adventure to extremes of religious belief within our own borders, taking readers inside isolated American communities where some 40,000 Mormon Fundamentalists still practice polygamy. Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the renegade leaders of these Taliban-like theocracies are zealots who answer only to God.

At the core of Krakauer?s book are brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a commandment from God to kill a blameless woman and her baby girl. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this appalling double murder, Krakauer constructs a multi-layered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, polygamy, savage violence, and unyielding faith. Along the way he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America?s fastest growing religion, and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.

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Spot on, Krakauer.

This is a story of extremism. Two Fundamentalist Mormons murder their sister-in-law and her two-year old child for her bad influence on their brother. Extreme, right? Yes. But the importance and genius of this book is how Krakauer connects extremism to its foundation - mainstream Mormonism. His reporting of the Mormon culture was spot on, in fact, so precise and accurate that many mainstream members resented the intrusion. He got it absolutely right and made the connection with extreme behavior undeniable. Well done, Krakauer.

A

Asserting that America's "homegrown religion" is one steeped in and ultimately defined by persecution and violence, Krakauer's extensively researched book about Mormon fundamentalism is an informative look at an aspect of life that people are not always willing to see. Centering around a double murder in 1984, Krakauer deftly blends the beginnings of Mormonism, and the eventual splitting of the religion into Mainstream Mormonism and FLDS (the fundamentalist sect) with character portraits of those affected by the faith. The threads all merge into an outstanding picture that is not even close to boring - the entire narrative is endlessly interesting, and no one chapter brings down the whole. Each compliments the other and the flow is brilliant. Some may be bothered by the noticeable slant the author takes, but otherwise the tome that winningly combines the thriller with the non-fiction genres raises essential ethical and moral questions that every person should at least ponder - even if they themselves cannot answer them.

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Saints March on in America

"Every day people are straying from the church and going back to God." (Lenny Bruce, 1972)

Jon Krakauer began this book with the murder of Brenda Lafferty, a Mormon wife and her 15 month old daughter, Erica, in American Fork, Utah in 1984. It was quickly established that Brenda and her daughter were killed by her brothers-in-law, Ron and Dan Lafferty. Ron was a mainstream Mormon but was converted to Fundamentalist Mormonism by Dan shortly before the murder. From this story, Krakauer traces the origin and development of the Mormon Church and the splinter fundamentalist wing. This is a book with two stories connected to each other by religion. It is an informative book about one of America's home spun religions, Mormonism; the others include the Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Science, Southern Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists, Pentecostalism (Sarah Palin's Christianity), and various others (see: Harold Bloom, The American Religion, 2006 Chu Harley Publishers). Many of them, including the Mormons, arose in the mid 19th century. They seem to have a fascinating history. The Seventh-Day Adventist Church sprang from the early movement started by William Miller, who might have had a greater reputation had his prediction that Christ's second coming was due on 22 October 1844 come to pass.

Joseph Smith was a charismatic young man who started his career as a crystal gazer using "peep stones" to tell fortunes. In 1823, when he was 17 years old, an angel called Moroni visited him and told him that a sacred text written on gold plates and in an ancient Egyptian language would be revealed to him. The plates had been buried for more than a hundred years. Smith enlisted the help of his (future) wife Emma (whom he persuaded to elope with him because her father didn't trust him) to get the plates from Moroni. After several attempts and much praying, Smith was finally given the plates which he duly translated with the help of the "divinely endowed spectacles" called "interpreters", given to him by Moroni. Smith lent the transcribed text to his neighbour Martin Harris (to show his family). Harris, who worked on this project as Smith's scribe lost the entire transcript so Smith had to re-transcribe the plates which Moroni handed him again after much praying and pleading by Smith. The plates were returned to Moroni after the second transcription was completed. The local press approached by Smith to print the completed book demanded $3,000. It was too large a sum for Smith to raise. He prayed and received a direction from God that Harris had to sell his farm and use the money to print the book. Harris found himself unable to reject this direction from God did as directed and the book was published. Soon after that, on 6 April 1830, Smith incorporated the Church of the Latter Day Saints - and Mormonism was created. Harris, meanwhile, was divorced by his wife.

This book contains the major practices and beliefs peculiar to Mormonism. Polygamy is one of them. The Mormons, however, refer to it as "plural marriages". This practice among the early Mormons and still practiced surreptitiously by present day fundamentalists created a great deal of bizarre relationships. One of these was exemplified by the case of Debbie Palmer who, by her being married to a Blackmore as his sixth wife, established her as a stepmother to her stepmother. The entanglements proved too much even for Krakauer who admitted that many of the relationships can't be explained without a flow-chart. Mormons also believed that there should be no sex with the wives if unless they were ovulating; and there must be no sexual intercourse with a pregnant woman. The head of the Mormon Church is called "Prophet", and God revealed many of his intentions and directions through them. Joseph Smith the original prophet had no less than 133 revelations which were canonized as "doctrines and covenants" ("D & C"). D & C #132 was the covenant revealed by God concerning plural marriages - it has not been abrogated, and has become the springboard for fundamentalist Mormons. Another interesting belief was that an ancient Hebrew tribe emigrated to America and subsequently gave rise to two branches - the dark skinned Nephi (who descended into native American Indians) and the light skinned Laban. Eventually, the Nephites slaughtered the Labanites and that explained why Columbus met no Caucasians when he landed in America. It was also believed that prior to the extermination of the Labanites, Jesus visited America and tried to get the two warring tribes to cease hostility.

Plural marriage was one of the practices that gave rise to much hatred by "gentiles" against the Mormons. Krakauer described vividly the persecution the Mormons faced at the hands of the "gentiles". It was a horrifying account of the way the Mormons were driven out, first, from Missouri, than Illinois. The eventual arrest and assassination of Joseph Smith during his incarceration pending trial (notwithstanding an undertaking from harm) had an air of excitement more commonly found in works of fiction. The murder of Brenda Lafferty was linked to the practice of plural marriage. Brenda was a bright and stubborn woman who prevented her husband, Allen Lafferty from following his brothers' fundamentalist inclination to plural marriage. One day, Dan and Ron Lafferty received the word from God that Brenda had to be killed. Her baby daughter had to go too because, as Ron declared, she might otherwise grow up to be "a bitch like her mother." Her throat was slashed so deeply she was virtually decapitated.

One interesting facet which would not have escaped the reader is just how many such "special ones" God had anointed in the history of the Judeo-Christian faiths; the prophets that God had chosen to reveal Himself and his intentions. More importantly, how does one reconcile the contradictory revelations? The followers of each group will, no doubt, declare that the others were false prophets. How one tells a true prophet from a false one is not entirely clear. Perhaps God works in mischievous ways.

The Mormon Church, through its senior officer Richard Turley issued a long rebuttal two weeks before Krakauer's book was first published, citing a list of errors. Krakauer reviewed his sources and admitted five of them which he explained in his 2004 edition. Turley's complaints and Krakauer's reply are included in this edition. One of these being the reference to the Laban in the Old Testament as the same Laban referred to in the Book of Mormons when they were not the same person.

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Parsing Mormon/American faith

Perhaps the only thing stranger than what Mormons believe is how little Americans understand what Mormons believe.

Much to the chagrin of this uniquely-American sect, Mormons only bubble to the surface of public consciousness when they're doing something weird: killing people, having sex with little kids, threatening to secede from the Union, etc.

Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (Doubleday, 2003) could be fairly criticized as contributing to such a skewed perception of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS). Krakauer starts off with the 1984 murders of Brenda and Erica Lafferty by two Mormon fundamentalists who claimed to have received a revelation from Heavenly Father to kill their brother's wife and infant daughter.

Krakauer then jumps back to the history of the Church's charismatic prophet, Joseph Smith, and intersperses a more-or-less chronological Mormon history in and around the case histories of individual Mormon nutballs.

The Church's reaction was swift and predictable. As soon as the book hit the streets, the LDS Office of Media Relations (who usually maintain a policy of silence in response to non-Mormon scholarship or pop culture references to Mormonism) issued an immediate press release denouncing Krakauer as "no historian...a storyteller who cuts corners to make the story sound good."

Which might be understandable (no group likes to be associated with its members who go off the rails), except the Church's denunciation - often followed by brisk excommunication - of even its own historians and intellectuals is doing far more to keep Mormons in the kook fringe than the rich history of the Saints themselves. This doth-protest-too-much secrecy is bound to appear to outsiders like insularity, rigidity, and fundamentalism.

Krakauer's admiration for LDS culture and its influence on American history is evident to anyone who doesn't approach the book defensively from the start and he adequately justifies the need to understand high-profile anomalies like the Laffertys through the lens of Mormon history. The Church's insistence upon mainstream ignorance of everything from their formation to their temple rituals has been backfiring on the Saints since 1830.

More importantly, Under the Banner of Heaven is far more interesting when considered in reverse of the way it's usually interpreted: as a vehicle for understanding America through the Mormons rather than examining the Mormons under the microscope of their own highly readable narrative.

Americans already fetishize religion only in terms of the devout - whether the devoutly mainstream or the devoutly fundamentalist. This may be somewhat more true of Mormons. The Church itself extends the mantle of Mormondom solely to its mainstream devotees, the late LDS Prophet Gordon B. Hinckley once declaring, "There are actually no Mormon fundamentalists."

But if Krakauer is guilty of overemphasis on Mormonism's craziest adherents, it only reflects the degree to which Americans already minimize or ignore the many shades of grey that exist among the culturally religious or among non-practicing believers. We Yanks so admire the doctrinaire purity of belief that it's perhaps surprising we don't have more practitioners of "violent faith" well beyond the mountain-ringed Zion of Salt Lake City. (Incidentally, according to federal crime statistics, Utah is on the lower end of violent crime rates per capita, though they have an unusually high rate of stolen vehicles. But "Under the Banner of Car Theft" wouldn't be nearly as interesting.)

The tension in Mormonism between obedience and anarchy (begun when Smith encouraged his followers to receive their own revelations from Heavenly Father, only to find that such a policy usurped his own authority) Krakauer identifies as the source of a constant fundamentalist undertow that tugs at mainstream Mormons. But that same tension exists throughout American culture and trying to determine which preceded the other may be a chicken-egg question.

Mormon culture values obedience to authority while Mormon theology is a freewheeling blend of revelation and "faith-promoting" folklore - a combination Krakauer suggests leaves disillusioned Saints with little option but to abandon the official Church and seek their own revelations for restoring Smith's original vision, sometimes with dangerously blood-soaked results.

However, this same cycle of conformity and rebellion reveals itself throughout American history, as the Union swerves between seeking a unifying culture and staunchly - sometimes neurotically - maintaining the right of its individual citizens to do more or less whatever they please, seeking to live their lives free of federal intrusion, even if doing so involves living outside the law whose supremacy is embodied in the Constitution itself.

For those disinclined to regard Joseph Smith as an emissary of God, he fits right in with America's long history of traveling charlatans and charismatic hucksters, convincing hundreds of the earliest Mormons that he had discovered a set of golden plates on New York's Hill Cumorah - which he alone could translate, which he alone had ever seen, and which could not be reproduced when his assistant, Martin Harris, lost 116 pages of the original manuscript.

(It's widely believed, though unconfirmed, that Harris' wife hid the missing pages in frustration over her husband's obsession with Smith and his visions. Lucy Harris eventually left him when Martin sold their farm and gave Smith every penny they had to print the first translations.)

The golden plates became The Book of Mormon, the bedrock of LDS scripture. Criticized for its shoddy attempt at archaic language (the phrase "and it came to pass" is repeated over 2,000 times), its story is extraordinarily complex and purports to be a history of Jesus and the Israelites in North America.

To non-Mormons, the story is startling for its unapologetic racism. Six hundred years before the birth of Christ, Lehi left Jerusalem for the Americas. His two sons, Nephi and Laman, split the Hebrew tribe into two warring factions and the Lamanites were cursed by God with dark skin as punishment for their disobedience.

After his resurrection, Jesus visited North America to share the gospel with these tribes, uniting them for 400 years, until the Lamanites rebelled and slaughtered all the Nephites (except Mormon, whose son, Moroni, returned to tell Smith of the existence of the golden plates).

The Lamanites, now the dark-skinned American Indians, forgot their Jewish heritage and this, according to Mormonism, is why European settlers found no white people when they arrived in the New World a thousand years later.

To non-Mormons, this story is not only viciously racist (until the 1970s, it was used to prohibit all but white men from holding the Mormon priesthood), but clearly insane - referring to inventions that didn't yet exist at the time these events supposedly transpired and DNA research has conclusively dismissed that American Indians are descendants of the Jews.

But setting aside that all scripture is a matter of faith by definition (nothing in The Book of Mormon is any crazier than talking snakes, virgin births, or ritualistic bathing before 5-times daily prayers facing Mecca), Krakauer's history forces an anthropological question that he never quite addresses head-on.

To be fair, it's outside the scope of his project in Banner, but all religions could be fairly described as merely giving a divine stamp of approval on the battles between ethic tribes over the course of world history. Mormonism only seems uniquely racist because the tribes in question (European settlers versus the indigenous people of North America) are still races we recognize and whose tensions are still felt in contemporary society.

Whatever animosity may exist among them now, the battles that originally shaped Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism are lost to the mists of ancient history. Mormonism is no more racist than any of these; it suffers this reputation simply for being modern enough that the effects of its early history are still visible in America today.

The point here isn't that Mormons aren't kooks; it's that they're no kookier than the deepest elements of American culture itself. The apocalyptic streak of LDS theology perfectly mirrors our historical flirtation with scientism, our spasms of religious revival (from which Mormonism itself was born), and our current fascination with the disaster scenarios of Y2K or global warming.

Mormon obedience to authority is a microcosm of our security in conformity; their fierce protection of freedom from government intrusion little different than the "Wild West" mentality that has shaped American identity since before the Declaration of Independence.

Mormon "revelations" are nothing more than the logical extension of Protestantism's democratic ideals of removing intermediaries between God and man; Smith's Doctrines and Covenants are Luther's 99 Theses for a new era. Their love of gurus, reflected in the anticipation of "the one mighty and strong," is simply a more earnest incarnation of America's love of PT Barnum, traveling faith healers, and The Power of Positive Thinking.

The book's title isn't misleading, only perhaps incomplete. The "banner of heaven" is the star-spangled banner itself and the "story of violent faith" is the story of our own national history. For, in America, as in Mormonism, if we act upon what we say we truly believe, anything is possible - from the Revolutionary War to the murders of Brenda and Erica Lafferty in the name of God.

From "All About Mormons," South Park, Episode 7.12 (which, despite its clearly satirical spin and some relatively minor inaccuracies, contains a remarkably good summary of Smith's story, when Gary - a preternaturally friendly and talented Mormon boy - moves to South Park and is regarded as a freak by the local townspeople):

Gary: Look, maybe us Mormons do believe in crazy stories that make absolutely no sense. And maybe Joseph Smith did make it all up. But I have a great life and a great family and I have The Book of Mormon to thank for that. The truth is, I don't care if Joseph Smith made it all up. Because what the church teaches now is loving your family, being nice, and helping people. And even though people in this town might think that's stupid, I still choose to believe in it. All I ever did was try to be your friend, Stan, but you're so high and mighty you couldn't look past my religion and just be my friend back. You got a lot of growing up to do, buddy. Suck my balls.

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At times it needs a little more focus

A very well intentioned book with one main problem Krakauer can never decide where exactly to place the Lafferty Murders in the narrative therefore whatever issue about the nature of Mormonism is being discussed is always cut short and refocused to some kind of vague tie in that relates to these gruesome murders at least in the mind of the author.

So the narrative will be clipping along and you will be very interested in a particular aspect the Golden Plates, The Sons of Ham, plural marriage or the fact that in spite of the LDS's claim to the contrary there have always been competing factions within Mormonism and all of the sudden you will be back on the murders with no idea of how exactly the author bought you to that point. This is at times tragic because while it is a very well researched book at times its subject matter was so broad it felt like it was two or three books in one. This leads on my part to both feelings of confusion and a desire to hear more.

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