A Mormon Fundamentalist Review: Under the Banner of Heaven Ep. 5 & 6

 So, I knew a guy...

Let's call him "Clyde", even though that's not really his name.  I knew him through the internet in the 2000s, on the Yahoo! discussion groups, specifically groups with Mormon topics.  Back in those days, I was hotheaded and ready to debate controversial points of Mormon doctrine.  Nowadays, I'm not so much like that, but back then I would debate with guys like Clyde on a regular basis.  Clyde was LDS and not Mormon fundamentalist, like me.  But he was the type of of Latter-Day Saint who was not afraid to "delve into the mysteries", or discuss matters that were forbidden to bring up in church settings.  I found Clyde to be a bit arrogant and a bit of a know-it-all, but I didn't think much on him after that.

About seven years later, I got a message from Clyde one evening.  He stated that he was sitting with the missionaries in my Arizona hometown, and they mentioned my name to him.  I asked him if he lived in the area, and he said that he had just moved here.  So, I invited Clyde and his family over for dinner one Friday night, along with other Mormon fundamentalist friends from the area.  Clyde was clean-cut and friendly.  He was very intelligent and well-spoken, but he was always self-assured and intense.  But I liked him right away.  He had a large family, and his teens hit it off right away with my teens.  His wife was timid and quiet and didn't  have much to say.

Friday dinners with Clyde, his family, and my fundie friends soon became a weekly tradition.  We bonded over good food and gospel talk.  Clyde would eventually argue his ideas, and the discussion usually turned into a heated argument.  Usually between Clyde and my fundamentalist friends.  When the discussion started getting vehement, I would sit on the couch and tune it out.  Twenty years of circular debates on same topics over and over had burned me out.  I am interested in a free exchange of ideas between people, but I have zero interest in trying to convince anyone that I am right or being pressed upon by anyone to believe a certain way.  For instance, Clyde believed that plural marriage was not an essential to exaltation, only an option, and fundamentalists, of course, believe that plural marriage must be lived to attain the highest level of the Celestial Kingdom.  Ideas like this would be bantered back and forth until late in the night, and I would sit, quiet and bored, until everyone left. Still, I loved the good company, and I really, really liked Clyde.

One thing I noticed about Clyde - a need to always be right.  He was not open to any new ideas and didn't want to consider anything that you might tell him, but he was gonna tell you how things were.  As I got to know him better, he shared with me some of his personal history.  He wasn't always just LDS, but he had belonged to the Second Book of Commandments (2BC) people, once known as the School of the Prophets.  The 2BC is a book of modern day revelations written by Robert Crossfield, also known as the Prophet Onias.  (I always laughed at that name.  I suppose "The Prophet Onias" sounds more prophet-like than "The Prophet Bob".)  I knew that this was the group that the Lafferty brothers had belonged to, and I balked when he told me that he had been involved with this same organization.  But Clyde quickly disavowed and distanced himself from the Laffertys.  He assured me that he did not sanction what they had done, but condemned it.  Still, it sounded a bit weird to me. The Lafferty murders carry a huge stigma with fundamentalists.

Clyde described their version of scripture study, which were really guided meditations on how to get your own revelations.  He described a process of emptying your mind with a pen and paper in front of you and writing the first thing that comes to your mind, kind of like automatic writing.  This is how they received their revelations, and this is the same way the Laffertys received their "revelations".  Then they would share them with each other.

As all things tend to do, the Friday dinners came to an end after a few months when Clyde and his family returned to Utah.  I was sad to see him go and still miss those dinners as all my friends have moved, and I'm all alone now.  I kept in touch with Clyde via social media, and so it was that I saw photos of him with a pretty woman.  I contacted him and guessed that he had entered plural marriage, and he confirmed to me that, indeed, this was his plural wife - a woman he had known in the 2BC days.  I was really surprised that he had taken such a drastic step outside of the mainstream church, but I was very happy for him.

After a while, I noticed his posts become more erratic and vehement, almost belligerent.  He would post long rants about the gospel and about the government, and he would get quite upset when anyone would disagree with him publicly.  This isn't my first rodeo.  I could see where this was headed.  So, I really wasn't surprised when he emailed me a list of "revelations" he had received, and he wanted to know my thoughts.  Truthfully, I never read them.  I scanned them to know that he adopted a "prophet name" other than his own.  Frankly, I was too sad to see him go down this path to read them.  After a week or two, he wrote me again, demanding to know if I had read them or not.  I offered a lame reply that I would get around to it, but I never did.  I never really heard anymore from Clyde after that.

I did hear whispers in fundamentalist circles that he had named himself the "One Mighty and Strong", but he posted on social media that this claim was false.  But it was evident to me that he was making some sort of claim.

The concept of One Mighty and Strong figures prominently in both Episodes 5 and 6 of Under the Banner of Heaven, just as it figures strongly in Mormon fundamentalist cosmology.  The reference comes from a letter written by Joseph Smith to W.W. Phelps in 1832 where he makes some cryptic prophecies similar to passages in Isaiah:

"It shall come to pass, that I, the Lord God, will send one mighty and strong, holding the scepter of power in his hand, clothed with light for a covering, whose mouth shall utter words, eternal words; while his bowels shall be a fountain of truth, to set in order the house of God, and to arrange by lot the inheritances of the Saints, whose names are found, and the names of their fathers, and of their children enrolled in the book of the law of God: while that man, who was called of God and appointed, that putteth forth his hand to steady the ark of God, shall fall by the vivid shaft of lightning."

This verse is canonized in LDS scripture still as part of Section 85 of Doctrine & Covenants.  The LDS Church hates this scripture, because Mormon fundamentalists love it so much.  The LDS Church hates it, because it implies that "the house of God" - or the church - must be "set in order".  To be set in order suggests that the church must first be out of order, and that is problematic for a worldwide church that claims to be infallible and unable to lead the Saints astray.  And so they have established an elaborate explanation that One Mighty and Strong refers to Edward Partridge, an early Mormon bishop, thereby making the setting in order a thing of the past and not a future event.

Mormon fundamentalists love Section 85, because it gives them justification for being separate from the Mother Church and gives them hope that everything will be set right by some individual foretold by prophecy.  The result is a horde of men over the last two centuries who have proclaimed themselves to be the One Mighty and Strong.  For instance, Ben LeBaron, in the early 1960s, was arrested for holding up traffic on 3300 South and State Street in Salt Lake City for doing one-armed push-ups - fifty of them - to prove that he was One Mighty and Strong.  It always seems to be the unhinged element of Mormon fundamentalism that makes these grandiose claims.

And it becomes a joke to those of us fundies on the more normal spectrum.  (How many "Ones" can there be?) ("No, you can't be the One Mighty and Strong, because I'm One Mighty and Strong!")  Most fundamentalists believe that One Mighty and Strong will be Joseph Smith returned in his glory, because this being is described as having "light for a covering", or a resurrected being.  Both Joseph Musser and Ogden Kraut taught this.  But in 1867, W.W. Phelps wrote to  Brigham Young about the letter sent to him by the Prophet Joseph:

"Now this revelation was sent to me in Zion, and has reference to the time when Adam our Father & God, comes at the beginning of our Eternal Lot of inheritance."

So, the One Mighty and Strong was always Adam, returning at the end of the world to assign inheritances at Adam-Ondi-Ahman.  I wish that all of these claimants, heretics, and false prophets would have understood this passage.  It might have spared a lot of heartache and grief.  But maybe not.  Our religion seems to draw out the fringe element.  In my 32 years as a fundamentalist, I can't tell you how many Ones Mighty and Strong I have come across, how many reincarnated Joseph Smiths, how many Holy Ghosts in the flesh.  I have learned to identify them quickly and give them a wide berth.

Me & Stone

Here is another story of a man I knew - I will call him by his nickname, Stone.  Stone passed away many years ago, but he was a dear friend of mine.  When he came back from Vietnam in the mid 1970s, he was walking through downtown Salt Lake City one Sunday when he passed a storefront and heard someone speaking in tongues.  He recognized it as the Japanese language, so he entered the building to find a church meeting going on.  It was John Bryant's congregation - recently broken off from the AUB.  Stone took a seat and wound up joining that church.  This was how he came into fundamentalism.

John Bryant had spirited away members of the AUB and founded a United Order in the Nevada desert.  (They later relocated to Oregon.)  But many people left - including Stone - when it was revealed that Bryant was creating a sex cult tinged with Mormonism.  He turned the endowment into something kinky.  Some of those who left went back to the AUB, and I heard about it there.  A funny story - when the AUB was preparing to do the endowment for the first time in 1982, they had some temple prep classes, and one woman who had only experienced the Bryant version of the temple ceremony told the unendowed candidates, "Don't be surprised when you hear the F-word in the endowment.  It's the most sacred of words."  Apparently, Bryant was liberal with the word "fuck" in his version of the temple ritual.

I had no idea that Ron Lafferty had received baptism from John Bryant until Lindsay Hansen Park called me to ask questions about Bryant.  I got to hear some of the script from this episode while they were filming.

Watching this show has made me realize that I have known a lot of - forgive the expression - kooks during my career as a fundamentalist.  Has this become so commonplace for me that I have become lackadaisical about it?  Instead of giving these types a wide berth is there something more I could be doing about it?  These are the types of questions that I, as a Mormon fundamentalist, ask myself as I watch this program.

The program places the blame squarely on personal revelation, and they may be right.  Yet personal revelation is one of most vital tenets of the Mormon faith.  Personal revelation is one of  the most important tenets to me, and I have had special experiences in my life.  However, I have a litmus test that I have in my own life - I don't accept anyone else's testimony unless I have a witness for myself.  This has helped me to test all topics.  It doesn't matter how much priesthood a man holds.  His revelations don't mean anything to me unless I have had the same revelation.  This has helped me call into question many doctrines in the LDS Church and Mormon fundamentalism that I don't accept at face value anymore.  I have been taught that revelation comes from three sources - from God, from Satan, and from yourself.  My experience is that most "revelations" come from the latter two.  With personal revelation, there is the threat of deception, even self-deception.  If your revelation is suggesting harm to someone else, or taking away someone's liberty or happiness, it's not from God.

I'm reminded of something a hippie friend of mine suggested when I was in college, "Maybe Abraham failed the test when God told him to kill his son, Isaac, and he listened."

A Mormon Fundamentalist Review: Under the Banner of Heaven Ep. 4

  As a child, we used to drive from Utah to Arizona quite often.  My family lived in the central Utah town of Richfield, but my mother was from South Phoenix.  A few times a year, we would make the trek to visit my mother's family.  However, on the way, we would stop by Colorado City, home of the FLDS, to visit my dad's Jessop relatives.  As the car drew nearer to those red cliffs. my dad would get agitated with us.  Why was our hair so long?  Never mind that it was the '70s - everyone wore their hair a little long.  But too "long" for my dad was covering the ears.  Nobody wore their hair like that in Short Creek.  They had short, '50s conservative haircuts.  My dad also urged us to roll our sleeves down and button our shirts up all the way.  Just like the boys in Colorado City.  Soon, we rolled down the red dirt road in front of the house of the elderly kin my dad used to like to visit - Uncle Vergel or Uncle Fred.

The thing is - even though we were Jessops, we weren't FLDS or Mormon fundamentalists.  Yet.  We were LDS.  My dad was raised by his mother in southern California, away from his polygamous Jessop relatives.  He knew nothing about them except what he was told - they were evil, dirty men.  He did everything a good Mormon is supposed to do - paid his tithing, went to the temple, served a mission, married a good Mormon girl.   But when he moved to Utah to attend BYU, he came across his polygamous relatives and found that they were nothing like he was told.  They were decent and hard-working.  And very moral.  Being the super ex-missionary, he set out to prove them wrong.  Much of his time was spent in the BYU Special Collections Section, reading books like Women of Mormondom.  He read about controversial topics like the Adam-God Doctrine.  He became obsessed with his studies.  He skipped classes to pore over old books.  And my mom started to worry.

My dad and me, 1970

One night, she wrote a letter of concern to Harold B. Lee, the president of the LDS Church back then.  She expressed concern about his studies.  Soon, they were called in to see Apostle Mark E. Petersen, the general authority in charge of handling members investigating fundamentalism.  My dad assumed that Petersen would say something like, "Brother Jessop, the general membership of the church is not ready for the things you have been studying.  Can we ask you to keep this information under your hat?"  Instead, Petersen lied to him, said that the early brethren never taught the things that he had read.  My father was scolded and threatened with excommunication.  My father left Petersen's office dejected.  An apostle of the Lord had just lied to him. 

Petersen referred him over to Stake President Richards, a prominent member of the church, the owner of Granite Furniture, and assigned by the church to address fundamentalist cases.  Richards was kinder to my parents, and said to my father, "Can't you put these things on a shelf?  Can't you believe what you do and still remain in the church?"  This satisfied me dad, and he returned to church,  He didn't become a fundamentalist for another twenty years.  But he persisted in studying.  And occasionally opening his mouth, which frequently got him in trouble with the stake Seventies leader or the bishop.  And he stopped by Colorado City as often as possible...

To this day, I don't know if he had intention of joining the FLDS, but he would sit in the living room with Uncle Vergel and talk gospel.  Sometimes, we would spend the night.  Uncle Vergel's elderly wife (one of them) would serve us meals with steaming homemade bread, fresh peaches, and canned jam, but I didn't think they were Mormon because they drank coffee every morning.  My dad and Uncle Vergel would talk for hours about things like Lorin Woolley, the Eight-Hour Meeting, and the 1953 Short Creek Raid.  While they talked, I was a darker-skinned Mexican kid ("Are you a Lamanite?") playing outside with my blonde Jessop cousins - the boys in button-up shirts and the girls wearing prairie dresses over their jeans and sneakers.  There were a row of trailers behind Uncle Vergel's brick house, and I remember younger women with swooping hairdos hanging out wet laundry, the dusty wind catching their long dresses.  It wasn't until I examined this memory later in life that I realized that those women were Uncle Vergel's other wives.  The kids would regale me with stories of finding Indian pottery and arrowheads, of lost treasure buried somewhere in the red canyons, and one boy even bragged to me that he had been to Fredonia before - all of forty miles away.

My parents circa 1999

So, why am I telling a story about my father and his experiences in a review of the FX/ Hulu limited series, Under the Banner of Heaven?  Because my dad's journey closely mirrors Dan Lafferty's. (Dan is played beautifully by Wyatt Russell.)  Roughly around the same age, they both were studying controversial Mormon doctrines.  They both studied in BYU's tight-security library (you could only look at the books in the company of a professor) and were both dissatisfied with the answers they found there.  Both visited the FLDS and other Mormon fundamentalist groups, hoping to find answers that the LDS Church couldn't or wouldn't provide.  Both perused books that were considered forbidden.  Both were ultimately excommunicated from the church where they grew up, being charged of apostasy.  They both married women from other countries.  Dan's wife was from Ireland, and my mother was born in Mexico.

But there were some marked differences between them.  For instance, my dad distrusted the government, sure, but he wasn't a tax-evading zealot.  He was a civil servant all of his life.  But my dad was definitely a maverick in somewhat the same way.  Next, and rather obviously, my dad never murdered anyone.  My dad was a self-described jovial "fat man".  He was kind, compassionate, and raised us to treat people with dignity and respect.

So, whereas there are many comparisons that can be drawn between my dad and Dan Lafferty, somewhere there is a vast difference.  Somewhere their stories diverged greatly from each other.  Dan Lafferty murdered people.  My dad never did.  Dan Lafferty claimed to be the reincarnated Prophet Elijah.  My dad refused to let people thrust him into positions of leadership, to place him on a pedestal.  But he could have, if he wanted.  And people tried.  He used to claim that he had an A-type personality.  He had the priesthood authority to assume some sort of mantle; he had received his second anointing.  But he was self-effacing to a fault.  He never claimed superiority over people and tried to treat others as equals.  Oh, he had his faults.  Many, many faults.  But he was no Dan Lafferty.  In fact, the Lafferty brothers made him sick.  So, how did two men who started on such similar paths become so wildly different?  Even I struggle to understand.

Me & my dad, 1975, photo credit K. Reid

My dad spoke often about an experience that perhaps illustrates the difference.  My dad went to the funeral of his Aunt Kay Jeffs in Colorado City in 1989.  He entered the FLDS chapel and took a seat near a man and all of his wives.  This man with all of his brides took up all of one pew.  But it was this man's face that drew my dad's attention.  The man sat surrounded by his wives, but he wore a hard countenance, his mouth drawn into a taut line as if daring his wives to step out of line.  He used his sheer will to extract obedience and meekness out of his wives.  This man exuded a billigerence, and my dad knew immediately that he could never be like him.  

For many years, my dad was lucky to have bishops and stake presidents who overlooked his fundamentalist leanings until he was "blessed with one who didn't", as my dad said.  The bishop in our ward had a father who came back from the South Pacific where he was the mission president.  This man was appalled to find quasi-fundamentalists in his ward.  He called in a favor, and soon my dad, and the whole family, were excommunicated, on the order of Salt Lake.  Even my thirteen-year old sister.  In September, 1990, I was called into the bishop's office where he asked me two questions: "Do you believe that plural marriage should be lived today?" ("Yes.") and "Do you sustain Ezra Taft Benson as Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, and the only man on the earth to hold the keys?" ("No.") That was it; that was the extent of my interview.  I went off to college, and I received the invitation to my priesthood court and the results of my trial after the fact, on the same day.  (I was, however, encouraged to keep paying tithing through someone else.)

The scene in Under the Banner where Detective Pyre and his family go to church and have fellow ward members look at them askance and turn their faces away was very poignant to me.  I have experienced that very thing.  Shortly after our excommunication, it was announced over the pulpit to have no more association with us.  How do I know?  I wasn't there, but a dear friend of mine who was investigating the church was there the day of the announcement, and she told me about it.  She told me that they could not make her end her friendship with me.  To this day, I am occasionally treated like a pariah.  People who know me will pretend they don't know me, walk the other way.  Why?  Because I am the devil.  I am worse than an apostate.  I am a reminder of that part of the Mormon past that they are desperate to forget.  (I have to add a caveat - the branch in our little Arizona town treats us very well.  Here is an interview I did with Salt Lake Tribune that illustrates this fact.)  I can count one one hand the number of LDS friends who have come up to me and asked me why I got excommunicated.  I cherish my true LDS friends very deeply.

So, my dad, Ted Jessop, was cut off from the church he loved and worked his whole life to build up.  He spent the last fourteen years of his life as a Mormon fundamentalist, putting in as much effort into that as he did in the church.  He was a mover and a shaker, a bull in a china shop.  He questioned the status quo of the AUB, shaking them to their core before being thrown out of there as well.  He died on June 29, 2002.  He was a man of principle.

And he was no Dan Lafferty...

One final testimony about my dad.  He loved his food, especially Mexican food.  At his funeral, we rented a school auditorium, and many people from the community and his work life attended.  A man we knew volunteered to cook the meal for the family, not especially a religious man.  While he was cooking, stirring a big pot of carne asada, he approached us, very abashed.

"I don't know how to say this," he said.  "But while I was stirring the meat, I felt the presence of your dad standing right next to me.  And he was saying, 'Mmmmm'."

A Mormon Fundamentalist Review: Under the Banner of Heaven Ep. 3

 In March 2015, I went to Haun's Mill in Caldwell County, Missouri...

Haun's Mill is a place of significance in Mormon history.  On October 30, 1838, an armed mob led by the sheriff of nearby Livingston County rode their horses into the peaceful settlement of Mormon farmers and gunned down the men, women, and children.  The Mormons attempted to hide in a barn, but the mob aimed their guns between the slats and fired indiscriminately.  Seventeen died, fifteen were wounded.  The dead were dumped into a deep well and buried.  Their bodies remain there to this day.

This scene was depicted on the recent episode (#3) of the limited FX/ Hulu series, Under the Banner of Heaven.

Haun's Mill, Missouri in 2015

As I rolled onto the Haun's Mill property, I was surprised.  The LDS Church had just purchased the property from the Community of Christ a few years earlier in 2012.  I had made the pilgrimage  to several LDS sites over the years - the St. George Tabernacle, the Lion House, Liberty Jail, Joseph Smith's birthplace in Sharon, Vermont, Nauvoo - and all of the church history sites were set up the same way.  Parking lots.  Visitor's centers.  An elderly couple giving rehearsed tours and answering questions.  Not Haun's Mill.  It was bare and unadorned.  I don't know what it's like now, but in 2015, it was a lonely stretch of dirt road, a set of tire tracks though the grass.  The utter silence and lack of visitors was deafening.  The road leads to an unremarkable copse of trees with a creek running through it.  A solitary marker was the only evidence that you were standing on a site of historical significance.  (The official monument and millstone are miles away in nearby Breckenridge.)  But the haunted, desolate feeling of Haun's Mill was palpable.  A heavy feeling clung to the air like a pall hanging over the place, and I could feel it.  This location of massacre has a hold on the collective Mormon memory, and yet it is a place that seems to want to be forgotten.

The visit to Haun's Mill was part of a personal tour being given to me by local historian and former mayor of nearby Chillicothe, Jeffrey Foli, taking us to various sites in Daviess, Caldwell, and Livingston Counties that pertained to the 1838 Mormon War, a series of conflicts between Mormon settlers and local Missourians that led to a state-sanctioned Extermination Order and the forced expulsion of the Latter-Day Saints out of Missouri.  As we stood on the grassy clearing of Haun's Mill, Jeff reverently recounted to our small group the details of the gruesome massacre, including how a young Missouri man named Ira Glaze, who may have had mental issues, pressed the barrel of his shotgun against the forehead of a 10-year-old Mormon boy named Sardius Smith and pulled the trigger.  A Missouri onlooker coldly remarked, "Nits breed lice."  This scene was also portrayed on Under the Banner of Heaven.

Me at Haun's Mill in 2015

Jeff told us that, a few days earlier, Ira Glaze was captured by the Mormon militia in the vicinity of a buried cannon, abandoned by the Missouri mob.  The Mormons took the poor boy, stripped him naked, tied him to the cannon, and marched the cannon with Glaze strapped to it for miles in the hot sun to their encampment at Adam-Ondi-Ahman.  There, Joseph Smith rallied his brothers-in-arms by personally discharging the cannon, with shouts of "Hosanna" before they released Ira Glaze, who returned, skulking and seething, back to his Missouri comrades.

The question I ask myself - if my Mormon forebearers had not humiliated and assaulted Ira Glaze by stripping him naked and strapping him to a cannon, would he have thought twice about raising a rifle to the head of a little boy?  Who caused that anger within him, that murderous rage?  We did.  And violence always begets violence.

In Mormon culture, we tend to see ourselves as the victims at the hands of the Missouri mobs.  But rarely do we try to understand how we provoked the attacks or where our own fault lies.  Jeff's tour helped me to see this.  We took land, made unfair business trades, voted in bloc.  They burned our homes, plundered our farms, and drove us from our lands.  But we Mormons also burned their homes, plundered their farms, and drove them from their lands.  They murdered us.  We murdered them.

Missouri changed us.  Years of persecution and perpetual hounding marked our culture permanently.  In The Kingdom Or Nothing, author Samuel Taylor recounts the history of his grandfather, John Taylor, who would eventually go on to become the third president of the LDS Church.  John Taylor had been a Methodist preacher in Toronto when he converted to the Mormon Church.  He had been with the Saints in Kirtland, Ohio and had known the peace, love, and glad tidings of the restored gospel.  He moved to Far West, Missouri in the midst of the Mormon War and found a marked difference in the Saints compared to in Ohio.  More militant.  Ready for violence.  In Ohio, leaders like Brigham Young and Joseph Smith had been affable and good-natured.  In Missouri, hardship, persecution, and loss had hardened them.  They walked around the encampment armed with rifles.  It was then that John Taylor realized that he wasn't just a minister.  He was a soldier in a real war.  This realization changed him for the rest of his life.  And it changed all of the Mormon population.  Our beloved prophet murdered.  Blood oaths.  The Oath of Vengeance.  Danites.  Destroying Angels.  Frontier justice.  Mountain Meadows. Blood atonement.  Murder.

We have a dark past...

And Under the Banner has brought some of that past under scrutiny.  It has been interesting to be online and see the visceral reactions of Mormons to both the book and the television program which illustrates violent episodes from our history, culminating to the transition of the Laffertys from faithful Latter-Day Saints to violent zealots who used their religion as an excuse to murder Brenda Wright Lafferty and her baby daughter, Erica.  It has been interesting to feel my own reaction, my own defensiveness.  This discomfort at looking at our past being elucidated by a TV show is proof to me that we have some owning-up to do, some true soul-searching.  For years, we have swept our past under the proverbial rug.  Perhaps it's time to confront it, discuss it, come to terms with it.  Only then can we truly move forward.

Don't get me wrong - I think that neither the book nor TV series are pristine.  Jon Krakauer's narrative is lurid, too sweeping.  Dustin Lance Black's dialogue is too hokey and feels stilted.  And yet they got so many things right.  The worthiness interview with the bishop.  Anyone who has been in the LDS Church knows how uncomfortable they are.  I can't think of anything more humiliating than being a gawky preteen in an office alone with a grown-ass man and being asked by the bishop whether or not you masturbate.  And the ensuing discussion between Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield) and his wife was beautifully acted out and rang so true to the Mormon experience.

And then the temple endowment.  The endowment...  I have always disliked when TV shows or movies portray the temple ceremony.  I didn't like it in Big Love, and I don't like it in Under the Banner of Heaven.  It's too sacred to me.  However, I understand how this portrayal drives the plot forward.  Although, I have to admit - it was beautifully executed.  They did a fantastic job stylistically.  They didn't quite get everything right about the particulars of the ceremony.  (Neither did Big Love.)  It has given me quite a bit of opportunity to talk about our temple ceremonies online.  Not many Latter-Day Saints are very well-versed in the symbolism and meaning in such an esoteric ritual, because they are not given proper instruction.  Conversely, Mormon fundamentalists - like me - were given instructions to help us understand the endowment, and thus probably know more about it than our LDS counterparts.

But the topic that has been discussed the most online following this episode is that of blood atonement, the idea taught by Brigham Young, and others, that some sins are so pernicious that they can only be remedied by the spilling of your blood.  There are rumors of the early days of Utah, blood atonements being carried out all throughout the desert.  Over the course of this week, I have seen some weird attempts at trying to justify the concept.  On the flip side, I have heard some ex-Mormons imply that, if you retain your belief and faith in this religion, you are condoning blood atonement.  I reject both points of view.

In a recent panel discussion last week for Sunstone Foundation, I stated quite adamantly that, as a Mormon fundamentalist, I totally reject the concept of blood atonement.  I don't care if Brigham Young taught it.  I don't believe in it.  At all.  First of all, because it negates the saving power of Christ's atonement.  Next, because it usurps God's authority to decide who lives and who dies.  I would never want the power to decide someone's fate, nor would I want anyone to have that power over me.  That is treading on dangerous ground - the very same ground tread upon by the Laffertys!  No, thank you!  If that makes me some sort of liberal or progressive Mormon, so be it!  Blood atonement - I'm not here for it!  Our religion ought to be a religion of peace.

To quote Jiddu Krisnamurti:

"When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent.  Do you see why it is violent?  Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind.  When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence.  So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind."

Or better yet, read the words of Joseph Smith:

"But meddle not with any man for his religion: all governments ought to permit every man to enjoy his religion unmolested.  No man is authorized to take away life in consequence of difference of religion, which all laws and governments ought to tolerate and protect, right or wrong.  Every man has a natural, and, in our country, a constitutional right to be a false prophet, as well as a true prophet.  If I show, verily, that I have the truth of God, and show that ninety-nine out of every hundred professing religious ministers are false teachers, having no authority, while they pretend to hold the keys of God's kingdom on earth, and was to kill them because they are false teachers, it would deluge the whole world with blood."

You can listen to more about Mormon history in Missouri on my recent podcast discussion with Lindsay Hansen Park on Year of Polygamy.