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.

A Mormon Fundamentalist Review: Under the Banner of Heaven Ep. 1 & 2

 

In 2003, I belonged to a United Order - a type of hippie commune, except that there were no hippies, there were Mormon polygamists.  And I was one of the Mormon polygamists who lived there, having two wives at the time.  (I only have one at the moment.)  

Life was not idyllic in the "Order", the commune.  We didn't sing songs around campfires with flowers in our hair.  We lived in trailers on a windy, dusty stretch of Arizona desert - no neighbors, miles from any town, completely isolated.  We tried to coax vegetables out of inhospitable soil and worked meager jobs, turning over our paychecks at the end of the week to the Order to be re-distributed to those in need.  The Order rules forbade us from having a TV, but that was okay,  We didn't have any electricity to begin with and hauled our own water.  Our children would crowd around the TV at the coin laundry where we washed our clothes every week, huddling around the glimmer of the screen, transfixed and mesmerized.

So, why did we live in this spartan lifestyle?  We were trying to build the Kingdom of God.

Without a TV, I would unwind at nights with a book in my hand, crouching under the dim light of a candle until my eyes hurt.  I would read everything I could get my hands on, and not just religious texts, but history books, sci-fi and fantasy, thrillers, anything.  At our weekly trip to the public library, I would load up with as many books as I was allowed to check out.  By 2003, Jon Krakauer was already one of my favorite authors.  I had previously devoured Into the Wild and Into Thin Air and thoroughly enjoyed them.  So, when I saw that he was publishing Under the Banner of Heaven, an exploration of Mormon fundamentalism, specifically the gruesome murder of Brenda Lafferty in 1984, along with her infant daughter.  I knew that I had to read this book.

As expected, Krakauer's writing style sucked me right in, and I finished the book in a couple of days.  It was completely captivating.  But it left me with a sense of malaise.  I had heard of the Lafferty murders for most of my life - a heinous act committed against a woman and her child.  But I was completely detached from this.  It was just something I had heard mentioned in hushed circles, but always with the sense that this was them.  Not us.  I always felt far removed from this tragic event.  Krakauer brought it forefront.  Krakauer made it real for me.  His sensory depiction as he turned the words of the killer into a horrifying study of violence - it left me sick inside.  Along with his account of the murder, he wove in a narrative of Latter-Day Saint history, specifically points of violence from our past.  By the time I reached the conclusion, I was livid.

Over the years, I have had to qualify my opinion of Banner to others.  "I really like it, but I disagree with his conclusions."

Krakauer concluded that the Mormon faith has had the seeds of violence planted within it since its inception.  That Mormonism is inherently violent.

Looking back, I don't know why this upset me so much.  I mean, I wasn't violent.  Even though I lived off-grid on a Mormon compound, I was happy.  I loved my family and wanted them to be happy, too.  How could my religion inspire, as a character in the first episode expresses, "dangerous men"?  Mormon fundamentalists aren't dangerous!  Aren't they?

Skip forward almost twenty years to 2021, and I am no longer a polygamist, the United Order dissolved, and I have a TV.  (I still live on the same dry patch of desert, though.)   While visiting a polygamous community in Missouri, I got a phone call from my dear friend, Lindsay Hansen Park, director of Sunstone Foundation and the host of Year of Polygamy.  She informed me that she had been brought in by a production team as a consultant for a TV miniseries adaptation for Under the Banner of Heaven for FX and Hulu.  She told me that Andrew Garfield was attached to the project, and she was being brought on to use her wealth of knowledge of Mormon culture to help lend authenticity to the program.  The show creator, Dustin Lance Black, the Academy Award-winning writer of Milk and one of the writers of  Big Love, came from an LDS background but needed someone who understood the minutiae of the weird world of Mormon fundamentalism.  That's where Lindsay came in.

Where I came in, Lindsay fielded some questions to me about Mormon fundamentalism - priesthood ordinances, customs, and history.  It's a bizarre culture I'm in, and I've been a part of it for almost 35 years.  There were other fundamentalists that worked with Lindsay in the same fashion, but I was just thrilled to be a part of this project, even as far-removed from it as I was.  Plus, it gave me huge cred with some of my teenage kids to be working on something involving Andrew Garfield.

It is probably relevant to add that not everyone in the fundamentalist community was thrilled with my ephemeral connection to the project.  I caught some flak for it.  Probably for the same reasons I myself might have hesitated in the past to get involved - Banner comes across as "anti" literature (although that view is shortsighted, as I will soon express.)  The way I justified my involvement to other fundies - hatchet job or not, I'm going to do my damnedest to make sure they get it right.

I was delighted when Lindsay invited me to the premiere two days ago in Salt Lake City.  Getting to the premiere was an adventure in itself that perhaps deserves its own post.  Needless to say, I was able to travel to the premiere with my wife Martha and two of my kids, including my 18-year-old daughter who was hoping to catch a glimpse of Garfield.  (Little does he know that she has staked a claim on him, along with possibly dozens of people of all sexes in the theater.)  I will add that Garfield is intelligent, funny, and affable.  Anyone who casually quotes Rainer Maria Rilke, one of my favorite poets, is okay by me.

The screening started, and the first thing that choked me up was the blood - Brenda Lafferty's blood on the floor.  I had such a visceral reaction that I could almost smell it.  Just like Krakauer's book, it made it real.  Brenda Lafferty was a real person.  And she really died.  She died, because some men had some really fucked up interpretations of my religion.  Daisy Edgar-Jones's heart-wrenching performance made it all the more poignant for me.  Just like Garfield's  Utah detective brought warmth and humanity to the narrative.  I watched the first two episodes of the series, and I have no intention of spoiling the plot.  But I will say that they have scenes interspersed that depict scenes from early church history, just like Krakauer's book, including portrayals of Joseph Smith and Emma Smith (portrayed by the lovely Tyner Rushing).

I do have some minor criticisms about the show, but they are just small items - like I grew up in the early '80s in rural Utah, and no active LDS member dressed like that or wore their hair like that, at least that I knew.  And the dialogue feels a bit stilted sometimes.  I felt the same way about Big Love.  It's like, they are using our vernacular, our buzzwords, but not in any way that anyone I know would use it.  Perhaps it's meant to be expository for the uninitiated, but dude, no plyg I know talks that way.  Even my daughter, who has not chosen the faith, made the same observations.

Beyond those very miniscule criticisms, this series is impressive.  It's definitely top notch and needs to win some Emmys.  It is beautifully shot.  The acting is superb and believable.  The emotional intensity is high.  (Be warned: this is not a "feel good" show.)  It will have you at the edge of your seat.

So, why did I feel my face get hot when I described the series to my Mormon fundamentalist father-in-law this morning?

Because I know how plygs are going to take this.  And that's as a personal attack on our culture.  They will feel - as they have felt before, and with good reason - that all polygamists are being painted with the same broad brush.  And perhaps they are.  I don't know.  I personally heard Dustin Lance Black, the show's creator, state that this is the story of a family's "descent into fundamentalism and darkness".  As if the two are equivalent.  And they're not.  I know they're not.  I'm not sure if he meant it that way, but it felt that way.  I'm not going to lie - it really stung to hear that.  Most fundamentalists I know are nothing like the Laffertys.  But let's be honest - all of us in the plyg world know someone, or many someones, like them.  

So, the question to ask - what is it about our religion and culture that draws some of the smartest, most compassionate people I know, along with some of the most batshit-crazy zealots?  How can this incongruous mix of people exist side by side?  Do you know how many people I have known over my long career who have claimed to regularly speak with God?  Who believe they are the One Mighty and Strong?  Or some reincarnation of some biblical prophet?  I've lost count.  There have been so many.  Generally, I tend to try to stay away from them as much as possible.  I never let fundamentalists get close to me until I've vetted them and know them better.  There is a reason that I love being an Independent, without church or group.  So that I can put distance.

Case in point - I'll never forget the time many years ago that I invited a man I had never met to the house to visit.  He and I sat outside my house on chairs, and one of the first things he said to me was his sexual preference in young girls.  I couldn't get that guy away from my property quick enough, but I remember worrying, "This guy knows where I live."  I'm not so trusting now.

That is the question - what is it in my religion that attracts these types of extreme personalities?  That is the real question.  And the answer?  I don't really know.  As a believer, I have some spiritual explanations, but I don't think I will be casting these pearls before the proverbial swine.  (Not that you're swine.)  But these are the questions we need to ask, because the Laffertys are not an anomaly.  Eventually, there was a Brian David Mitchell.  And then a Chad Daybell.  It keeps happening over and over again.  We need to have a dialogue about it, so that we can understand and so that it doesn't happen again.  Perhaps this TV series will spark that discussion.

Perhaps that's what Jon Krakauer - and Dustin Lance Black - had in mind when they both set out to tell this story.

I feel fortunate and blessed to know that there is also beauty in Mormonism.  I prefer to focus on the light, not the darkness.  But not to the point of denying the existence of the darkness.  And recognizing it in ourselves. We tread on dangerous ground when we think there is nothing left to learn.  I think it was expressed best by Andrew Garfield, in a theater in downtown Salt Lake City two night ago, "A life of faith is not a life of certainty.  A life of faith is a life of doubt."