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'."