From Punk To Polygamy, Part 1

Me in 1988, age 18

In my recent interview on the "Year of Polygamy" podcast, Lindsay Hansen Park asked me briefly my history as a teen in the punk movement, as she thought it was an interesting aside about me.  She asked me if I thought that this interest in counter-culture movements might have contributed in any way to my embracing such an unconventional lifestyle like Mormon fundamentalism.  I mentioned that it indeed has.  There was a time when I tried to re-write myself, but, the older I get, the more I realize that punk - and other movements - helped to shape me and have made me who I am today.  I am grateful for that and have learned to embrace that part of me.  She has asked me to give a presentation at the Arizona Sunstone Symposium this March called "From Punk To Polygamy: The Story of a Mormon Fundamentalist".  I am sure that she will want me to focus more on the "Mormon fundamentalist" part than the "punk", but I thought I would write a little about that part of my life.

I grew up in Southern Utah in the late '70s.  Back then, the only thing that they played on the radio was country music.  In the home, my dad had a huge record collection he had amassed on his mission in Mexico, so we listened to rancheras and mariachi music.  Around 1979, at the age of 9, I started listening every Sunday to Casey Kasem's "American Top 40" on a portable radio.  It changed my world.  The first time I heard "Back in Black" by AC/DC, I sat transfixed, staring at the radio,  I had never heard anything like it.  It seemed almost forbidden.  From then on, I was listening to everything I could from that era - The Police, Blondie, Rod Stewart, Styx.  This was the stuff that I listened to.

In 1982, our family moved from Utah to Casa Grande, Arizona, a small town on the outskirts of Phoenix.  For a kid from rural Utah, this was a huge change.  It was '82, and I was the only kid in school still wearing bell bottoms.  I had older brothers in high school, and they made friends in the local LDS ward.  I remember, after Mutual, going to my parents' shop after hours with my older brothers and their friends to listen to heavy metal music on a record player - Rush, Ozzy, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest.  And so I became a metalhead.

Me in the center with friends from Texas, 1986

My older brother, like my dad, had a huge record collection.  His tastes became diverse, and he ranged from the conventional into more obscure bands - Motorhead, Testament, Voivod, Venom, Slayer, and Metallica.  We were listening to "Kill 'Em All" before anyone really even knew who Metallica was.  I remember some conflict between my dad and brother over the record collection and my dad throwing out some of the records that he perceived to be satanic.

And because these bands were influenced by hardcore punk, we started exploring that music - or rather, my brother started exploring, and I listened to whatever he listened to - Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, JFA, Junior Acheivment, Reagan Youth, Fear, Crass.  My brother moved on with metal, but I stuck to punk.  I was in junior high at the time, and the only other kid in the school who listened to punk was a kid named Matt who had just moved from Chicago.  I started going to his house, and we developed a love for horror films and art, fantasy fiction like H.P. Lovecraft, obscure metal and punk.  He introduced me to music like 45 Grave, Christian Death, The Effigies, and SNFU - pretty heavy stuff for some junior high kids.

The summer before I started high school, my oldest brother came home from college with a bag full of cassettes that I raided when he wasn't around.  That bag of cassettes - filled with what was then called "college music" also changed my life - XTC, INXS, R.E.M., The Cure, Depeche Mode, and New Order.  I started adding this music to my repertoire.

The Baron, me, & Matt in Round Rock, Texas, 1986

Once I got to high school, I learned that the people who listened to this kind of music were a minority.  Yes, we were close to metropolitan Phoenix, but this was still Arizona.  We were in a town dominated by cowboys and ranchers.  Anything underground was foreign and weird to them.  They made fun of us and our music.  In reaction, we changed our appearance and looked more garish - shaved our heads, used lots of hairspray, wore lipstick and eyeliner, tore our jeans, wore tees that reflected our musical tastes, wore combat boots, wore black.  One of the things that marked my generation that still persists today - we hate anything mainstream, and we embrace anything artistic, obscure, or indie.  We couldn't even drink Bud or smoke Marlboros like our cowboy counterparts - it had to be foreign beers and clove cigarettes.  Not only was our taste in music off the mainstream, but our choice in movies - "Eraserhead", "Blue Velvet", "A Clockwork Orange". This clique in Casa Grande, Arizona became very close and tight knit.  The cowboys called us "mods", albeit incorrectly.  Many of us to this day still maintain close contact through social media.  We have that shared experience of living in a small cow town, but bonding over our love of underground music.

Me & Melissa before a rave, 1990

For instance, there was Melisa, someone who made a great impact on me.  She was so cosmopolitan and "with it" that she was ahead of the times before anyone else.  For instance, she liked Madonna before anyone had even heard of her.  My youngest brother nicknamed her the "Black Widow" because of her affinity for wearing black.  We met because, at the beginning of my sophomore year, I was wearing a DIY, homemade Exploited shirt, and it drew her attention.  We started talking about music, and her knowledge was considerable.  She turned me on to Arizona's first alternative radio program coming out of Tucson on Sunday nights in 1985.  She introduced me to the music of The Smiths, The Jam, Style Council, and Siouxsie and the Banshees.  My friend from junior high, Matt, had moved outside of Austin, Texas, and continued to be instrumental in introducing new music to me, mostly gothic stuff, like Cocteau Twins, who remains to this day my all-time favorite band, as well as Dead Can Dance, This Mortal Coil, Bauhaus, and Clan of Xymox, stuff that I am still very much into.

The Domes

So, what did we do for fun?  These usually included forays into Phoenix where there was a readily available nightlife.  My older brother played in thrash metal band called Pedifile that was fairly well known locally.  While attending his shows, I got to see and meet members of the underground metal scene like members of Metallica, King Diamond, Fates Warning, and Sacred Reich, as well as honing my skills in the mosh pit (chipped my tooth).  There were a few alternative clubs that we would attend in Phoenix and Tempe - Prisms, Out of Water, Six Feet Under.  But mostly, we hung around town, throwing parties at homes or in the desert, blasting our music into the desert sky,  One of our favorite locations were a set of abandoned domes in the middle of the desert.  We simply called them "The Domes", and they were an eerie set of buildings with concrete floors, our laughter echoing off the walls.  They are heavily tagged now, but I was one of the first people to spray-paint graffiti on the walls - poetry about vampires.  The Domes are still in the desert and occasionally make online lists about haunted places in the U.S., although one has collapsed in recent weeks.

By the end of the '80s, people like us had banded into a cohesive movement.  120 Minutes was the show we all watched on MTV every Sunday night to watch videos from Husker Du or Peter Murphy to keep up on the latest music.  Arizona had its own alternative station with its smooth-voiced host, Jonathan L, who organized Q-Fest, the first alternative festival in the nation, before Lollapalooza.  (I attended the second Q-Fest). I feel lucky to have been part of this scene before it got big.

Me & my Valentine, Andi in 1987

So how did  my parents view all of this?  With remarkable tolerance.  My parents always knew that I marched to the beat of my own proverbial drum, and they did little to suppress my creative side.  The most "oppression" that I got was my dad making me cut my hair a couple of times.  Remember: all of this time, I was an active LDS kid, passing sacrament every Sunday.  In fact, some of the kids in my ward were in my "clique".  I was very careful about not getting too out of hand.  I was good at wiping off the eyeliner or lipstick or eyeliner before I got home from school, or taming my hair.  I was kind of a wild kid, and I am lucky I didn't get thrown into jail.  I remember being called a "punk kid" by a Chandler police officer and thrown down onto the hood of a car, being threatened with arrest.  The officer didn't arrest me, but let me go, and I went home shaken, my parents not even aware of the details.  By all accounts, I should either be in jail, rehab, or dead by now.  I can't account for having turned out okay.

So, why did I do it?  I moved from Southern Utah to a town with a lot of money, a lot of rich ranchers.  My family was never well-off.  We wore clothes from K-Mart.  We didn't have name brands - Polo, Reebok, Izod.  Everything in the '80s was about the brand.  If you couldn't afford to wear the brand, if you wore the imitation, you were made fun of.  I tried really hard to fit in my freshman year.  They never accepted me, and so I rebelled.  I started wearing combat boots and ripped jeans.  I would save my lunch money and buy the ugliest shirts from the '60s that I could find  from the thrift stores.  Then something surprising happened - in purposefully trying not to fit in, I became somewhat popular.  People knew me for having a unique style, and I guess it resonated with some.

I also started learning to think for myself at this time.  I became very interested in Marxist philosophy and read "The Communist Manifesto".  I became interested in the punk DIY ethic and anarchy.  I read underground, poltical 'zines, and even published one issue for our school, which was a lot of work before word processors.  I spoke like a revolutionary.  My girlfriend Andi and I got nominated for king and queen of the Christmas Ball.  I refused to participate, because I rejected popularity contests only to find Andi kind of mad at me.  I didn't take into account what she wanted.

So, all of this prepared me for life as a Mormon polygamist.  During this time, my dad was making an active effort to teach us more about the old Mormon doctrines of plural marriage and United Order.  I will continue the story tomorrow about my journey into Mormon fundamentalism and how music was a part of this.

Our Living Conditions - Conclusion

In the summer of 2001, I was still working as a social worker for the state of Arizona in St. Johns. My dad came by one day and picked me up for lunch. We went to Corky’s – the one and only burger joint in this small town. He had retired from his government job, and I think he sensed that the end was near for him.

“When I die, the responsibility of seeing that the Family United Order continues is going to fall on your shoulders,” he told me.

I didn’t want to think about it. Who wants to ponder the death of a loved one?

Still, a year later he was gone. He had asked that he be buried on the “Land”, and so we set aside a family cemetery plot within yards of my house and buried my father there.

Scarcely had we lowered his body into the earth that my dad’s “friends” let their true faces show. There were some that said that we were not a “real” United Order, because the only people that belonged were family members – never mind that the Order now had almost 20 people.

There were others that said that – with the death of my father – our Order was left without any who held the “fullness of priesthood”. My father had received his “second anointing” – or he had attained the highest degree of the Mormon hierarchy. Thus he was qualified to preside over a United Order. But now that he was dead, there was no one “qualified” to lead our United Order. Or so it was pointed out to our family.

So the obvious solution to me was, “Fix this then.” My suggestion was to administer the second anointing to me, or one of my brothers, so that our United Order could continue. But that wasn’t the point of other men demonstrating out that our family was leaderless. They pointed out that our family was leaderless… so that they could step in and become the leader.

My father was not a wealthy man, ever in his life. And yet I was amazed that other men coveted what he had – his land, his family, his priesthood calling, etc.

One man brought us a “master plan” that subdivided the Land into streets and plots for houses. This man also proposed to my mother on several occasions. He tried to take us under his wing and mentor us, but became frustrated when my brothers and I resisted his efforts. His words to a couple of my friends were, “The death of Ted Jessop was the best thing to happen to this people. I’m going to go down to Arizona and take the bull by the horns.” The “bull” in this instance being me and my brothers.

People have always done me and my brothers a disservice. My father was a charismatic figure, and so they assumed that my father had such an influence over us that we had no minds of our own. So with my father gone, they thought they could swoop in and replace my dad. They were wrong. My father taught me to think for myself. I shot off a strong letter, telling these men to back off and leave our United Order alone.

But without my father there, the United Order did start to wither. Part of it is my fault. My dad asked me to make sure that it continued. But I got bitter. I got angry that I had bit back my own needs, and what did I have to show for my effort? I was in my thirties with nothing but a rundown trailer, a bunch of broken cars, and ubiquitous credit card debt accompanied by accrued interest.

The United Order came to an end…

Since, I have recognized that I have failed. I realize that it is a part of Mormonism that I am not living, and I would like to live it again. But I always feel constrained, because I know that – because of misconceptions – I lived it incorrectly.

I have a small circle of friends – young men like me in our late thirties or early forties who have been studying United Order. In our studies, we have read authors like Frédéric Bastiat who has shown the purpose of law – to protect us in our freedoms. Nothing more. We realize that the abuse of power has not consumed only our nation’s political leaders, but the leaders of Mormonism as well. The mainstream Church’s leaders are corrupt. But so are the leaders of Mormon fundamentalism who have used their priesthood callings to lord over the lay members, using priesthood ordinances and wives as an incentive to control men. They use the United Order to suck people’s money and land from them. Look at the United Effort of the FLDS – what a joke it was. Look at all the people in Pinesdale, Montana – and other places – who are forced from their homes on priesthood properties because they don’t tow the proverbial party line.

We have also studied Ayn Rand in great detail – particularly her book “Atlas Shrugged” that shows the follies of socialism and the parasitic mentalities it develops. I like Ayn Rand’s philosophies, but I think that the pendulum swung a bit the other way with her. There is no room for charity in her paradigm, and I think that we can all agree that Christ was the perfect example of charity.

So we have come to a conclusion of what the United Order isn’t – it isn’t communism. It isn’t socialism. Freedom – in all of its aspects is tantamount to a prosperous society, and that includes free enterprise. There must be no force, no compulsion, and there must be private ownership.

I still am working on what United Order is. I believe in the Law of Consecration. But how do you implement this without creating a sort of religious fascism? When I have these answers, then I will be ready to live it again. But until then…

So anyway, I draw this little tale to a close about how the reporters found a man with his two wives and many children living in a rundown little trailer out in the middle of nowhere.

Our Living Conditions, Part 6

Sorry about the delay. I will continue my story about my experience with United Order…

So for most of the years that Martha and I spent in the United Order, we shared a small single-wide trailer with my older brother and his wife. It was mostly alright, but it can be a little trying to share a home with someone else.

For instance, Martha’s cleaning standards were not up to my sister-in-law Sarine’s standards. I now believe that Sarine was obsessive-compulsive. When Martha would clean, Sarine would go behind it and re-clean everything, and then complain to her husband that Martha was not cleaning things well enough. This was the cause of a few arguments that I can think of. But Sarine was so demanding that Martha and I wound up spending most of our free-time away from home.

Martha’s parents had just moved to Arizona to join up with us, and we wound up spending the night on their living room floor as often as we could. Anything to be away from Sarine. Now, in saying this, I should say that Sarine could complain about a lot of things about Martha and I; I’m sure that we were not the best of roommates, either. But it got so bad that we spent most of our time at my in-laws.

After several days of sleeping on the floor at my in-laws, we returned home to find that our bedroom was covered with a layer of mold spores. Sarine, in her neurotic behavior, thought that there was not enough moisture in the house. So while we were gone, she kept a big pot of water on the stove, boiling constantly.

While we lived there, I had an ongoing and silent fight with Sarine. She kept the water going constantly. I thought it was a waste of propane and water. When I would walk by in the kitchen, I would switch off the water. She would walk by and switch it back on.

With us gone, Sarine and the boiling water won out, and we came home to find our room – our blankets, the walls, the closet - covered with mold. We tried to sleep there, but it was too bad. Little Sophie started to get sick.

So we moved back out into the living room of Martha’s parents.

Martha’s family originally had planned on moving out to the “Land”. They financed an old 1973 doublewide and moved it out onto our property. But when they got out to Arizona, the no-electricity thing was too much for them. So they rented a house in town. As a result, the double-wide sat on our property – the two halves exposed to the weather – for over a year.

After the whole mold incident, my father-in-law decided to give us the trailer. We just needed to pay off the loan. The first step was to get an appraiser to look at the trailer. It was so old and in such bad condition that it appraised at “zero”.

Nevertheless, we were gleeful to have a place of our own. We paid off the loan, hired a crew to set up the trailer and, in 1999, we moved in. Our whole married life, Martha and I had never unpacked. We had kept most of our belongings in boxes in storage units. I can’t tell you what a feeling it was to unpack for the first time, to have a room just for the kids.

The trailer was a piece of crap. But I loved it, because it was mine. And I shared it with no one. For a couple of weeks, anyway…

A polygamist man I knew had a young wife that needed a place to stay. So we moved some mattresses into our living room (that had no furniture anyway) and that’s where our kids slept. The young plural wife moved into the spare bedroom, and we got to listen to them giggling and tickling each other every other night. I was promised rent that I never got.

In June, 1999, a young lady named Temple decided to live with us for a couple of weeks to see if she was interested in “coming into my family”, as we say. The mattress on the floor in the living room became hers while she stayed there.

While there, she got to experience the whole family meeting together and eating together at my parents’ house.

A few months later, Temple married me and moved in permanently. Between the time she visited me and the time she married me, there had been a schism in our United Order. The after-dinner dishes became an issue. Typically, since we were eating at my mother’s house, all of the ladies (on a rare occasion the men) would pitch in to clean up and wash the dishes.

But on quite often, there were some of the moms who would feed their kids and then clear out without lifting a finger to help with the after-dinner chores. (Guess who?) So my mother got upset and prevailed on my dad to change it so that every family ate dinner at their own house.

I disagreed with the decision. But the complaints of the women won out, and by the time Temple joined the family, we were eating separately. We still traded “cooking days” – that is, we still rotated a cooking schedule where dinner was cooked for everyone. But now, it was distributed like some “Meals-on-Wheels” program and everyone ate at their own home.

Temple observed what I feared. She told me, “You were more united when you were all eating together. I could sense it. Now I sense that you are all less close.”

That was the decline of our United Order. I will explain more in the next post…

Our Living Conditions, Part 5

So how did it work living in a United Order?

Well, first of all, my father gave me a couple of responsibilities.

I must say about my dad, he had your typical A-type personality. He was a very charismatic, driven person. But much to his credit, he was always self-effacing. People were always trying to thrust him into positions of leadership. There were even a couple of people who tried to make him their “prophet”. But my father always resisted such notions. When we moved out into the wilderness of Arizona, we made a conscious decision not to govern ourselves by the “one-man rule”, but by common consent and council.

My father, given his innate sense of leadership and priesthood calling – not to mention his position of family patriarch - could have easily asserted himself as “bishop” of our United Order, the agent in charge of collecting the consecrations. He would have naturally fit that role. But my father was afraid of the power that this role would give him in our family. He was more afraid that other people would perceive that everyone would view it that he was “taking everyone’s money”. Ironically, many people still said that about him.

So he appointed someone to act as a sort of treasurer for our Order. That person was me. I was supposed to occupy this office for a year, after which the position would rotate to someone else.

I was mortified to have this position. So you create a United Order, and the person you pick to run it… is a spendthrift. I had never been good with money. I’m still not. Even though I have made a living doing accounting and handling other people’s money with success and care, when it comes to my own money, I suck. My wives are better at budgeting that I am.

I went to my father privately and expressed my objections.

“I think it will provide you with an opportunity to learn something,” my dad told me. “You’ll be able to become strong in an area where you are weak.”

The next thing – I am a people pleaser. It is a challenge to have someone who is a people pleaser in a position like that, because I do not like to say no. People would come to me for money for certain needs, and invariably I would say yes. Even if the funds were not available.

After a year of handling everyone’s money very poorly, I gladly handed the reins of the office of “treasurer” back to my dad. And he handed them right back to me. I acted in the capacity of treasurer for nine years. (And I don’t think I ever got better at it.)

“I don’t think you’ve learned what you need to yet,” my father said.

The way we would work things – we would get paid weekly, and every pay day (before we had a chance to spend our money) we would all come together for a meeting we simply called “Financial Meeting”. Present were all the wives and all the husbands. Everyone would have an equal voice.

The main thing accomplished at Financial Meeting was to place all of the earned wages into the “pot” and then to disperse them according to everyone’s needs. This means specifically that my pay check went every week to the extended family. At this meeting, everyone was supposed to bring their bills to the table, we were supposed to review them, and the funds were supposed to be redistributed according to those needs, and according to the priority.

And this worked most of the time except for two different kinds of personalities. First of all, you had people pleasers, like me, who thoughtlessly gave all of their income and bit back their own needs for the sake of others. At each meeting, I would watch the sum grow smaller and smaller as more and more needs were brought up. My heart would sink, and I would think, “I guess I can try and pay that bill next week.”

The consequence is – I am still trying to pay off bills that I put off back then. This is no one’s fault but my own. I can’t blame anyone nor can I blame United Order. I should have spoken up. One thing I learned from all of that was that no one can benefit anyone if they are in debt. And it was not fair to my children that ignored my own debt.

On the other hand, there were people like my former sister-in-law Sarine. If people like me bit back their needs, Sarine was always needy. Having grown up in a family that lived off of the dole in the Allred Group, she had no concept of self-sacrifice. There were several occasions when my father would say to her, “Sarine, your needs exceed the amount of money we have brought in this week. If we meet all of your needs, there won’t be anything left for anyone else.”

And she would blink with incomprehension.

For almost four years, Martha and I shared a trailer with Sarine and her husband. At one Financial Meeting, Sarine actually brought up that it was not fair that Martha and I kept our bedroom door open during the winter, because the heat was going into our room and thereby not giving her enough heat. My dad answered, “They have just as much right to the heat as you do.”

When we moved out into our own place, Sarine made constant upgrades (threatening to leave if she did not get them.) In a system where we were all supposed to be equal, Sarine had a washer and drier. (The rest of us went to the laundromat once a week.) Sarine had a water heater. (The rest of us heated water on the stove.) Sarine had water pressure. (The rest of us hauled water.) Sarine had solar power. (The rest of us used candles at night.) It was the quintessential case of the squeaky wheel.

But this is an inevitable fact about a communistic lifestyle. There will always be idealists who will believe and try to make it work. And then there will be parasites who will take advantage of the hard work and sacrifice of others.

The Financial Meeting was a place where other issues were brought up. For instance, it was in this way that we eventually arranged for all of us to have septic tanks. (After one year, no more buckets.) I brought up in a previous post the relevance of personal property in the United Order. When I married Temple, she brought her personal belongings with her. She owned a llama. She had owned this llama long before she met me, and when we got married, she brought her llama and we put him in a pen we built on our property.

Now, what does a llama do? I asked this question of many people before. A llama eats. That is the answer. A llama eats. So we had a weekly expense of purchasing hay. There were some in our Order who complained about this expense and insisted that we sell the llama, get rid of it and thereby rid ourselves of what they deemed as a luxury.

And I always insisted that the Order had no right to make that decision for Temple. It was her personal property, and the Order had no right to step over that boundary and make that decision for her. I agreed to take care of that expense myself, but I would allow no one to make that decision for us. My father always did joke with Temple that, if times got lean, we would eat the llama. Temple always sensed that this was a half-joke.

When we first moved out to the Land, my dad wanted a set of rules made. He wanted to pattern this set of rules after the Orderville Charter. He assigned my oldest brother to create this set of rules. Each week, my father would ask my brother how this was progressing, and each week my brother would say that he had not got around to it yet. My brother admitted to me later that he was reluctant to create a set of rules that would be too binding. I was very grateful for this.

One rule that did my dad did create, though, was the “No TV” rule. A man my dad respected once told him that TV would ultimately destroy a United Order. The story of my dad hearing this would grow and grow with each telling to the point that my dad decided that no one would have a TV on the Land. We all made an agreement about it. I never agreed with the decision, but I made it because I respected my dad. And since we had no power, I didn’t think it would matter anyway.

I have since gone back on that agreement years ago. The way I look at it – no man should tell another man what he can or can’t do in his own home. I love my dad, but in this instance I think he was wrong. Maybe God will hold me accountable for making an agreement and then going back on it. But there is nothing to fear about technology. We are not Amish. A TV itself is not good or evil. It is how we use it.

I am not saying that it was all bad in our United Order. There was much that was good. For one thing, we all ate together.

Each Financial Meeting, someone was assigned to do the grocery shopping for the whole Order. That person would go out each week and but the food for everyone. Sometimes, it was slim. You would work all week, and then someone would bring you back only a few bags of groceries.

But then we would all eat dinner together. The women would divide up cooking days between themselves. For instance, you would not have to cook for most of the week. But once or twice a week, you would have to cook for everyone. It worked out pretty good, and everyone ate well. (Except for the nights that Sarine would cook. On her nights she only ever made lentil soup. Yuck.)

We would all meet at my father’s house and eat. Since we had no TV, we would sit around and talk. I look back at those times as some of the best of my life. As the years go by, I wish that I could go back to that time of my life. Everything was simple then, and we were all united.

But there were complaints about some of the women not helping with the dishes after dinner. So the decision was made that we would still cook dinner for each other, but everyone would eat at their own homes.

When I was courting Temple, she came and visited for a couple of weeks while we were all still eating together. By the time we got married and she moved in, the Order was eating dinner in their own homes. Temple told me that she could feel the difference. We were less united.

For a while, we still cooked dinners together. There were even other families who moved into the area that participated in this for a couple of years. But this went by the wayside as well, eventually.

In fact, in my mind, the ending of the meals marked the decline of our United Order. But I will talk about that in the next installment.

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Our Living Conditions, Part 4

In 1994, my family pointed out some injustices that we observed in the congregation that we belonged to – the Allred Group (AUB). Suddenly we found ourselves excommunicated… again… only a few years after having been cut off from the LDS Church. Disillusioned, my parents moved back to Arizona.

Martha and I stayed in Utah, trying to make a go at it by ourselves. We were basically still a newlywed couple with a little baby – Sophie. We found ourselves experiencing the worst bout of bad luck ever. I was working construction, piece meal, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week and barely making enough to make ends meet. (I have learned that money is relative.) We were trying to get into a house, but we were having no success everywhere we turned. One house had structural problems. Another had a cloud on the title. After some serious praying, we felt that we needed to move to Arizona.

So in our prayer, we told God, “You need to make this happen. We need money if we are going to move.” That day, our tax return arrived in the mail. We paid all of our bills, loaded as much of our belongings as we could into our Mercury Topaz, and gave away the rest of our belongings and drove to Arizona.

This is where our real venture into United Order began. Martha and I lived in my parents’ house in Mesa, along with my brother and his wife. The day I arrived in Arizona, I found a job hunting for natural gas leaks for the gas company. My dad worked as a social worker. My brother worked in the lab. Every week, when we got paid, the three of us put our paychecks into the proverbial “common pot”. From that pot, we paid all of our bills together, bought our gas and groceries, and if there was anything left, we took care of entertainment, or put it into a surplus fund. (There was rarely anything left.)

We got up every morning at 4AM for prayers. The wives cooked and cleaned together. We ate together. Although there were some drawbacks of being 25 and living with your parents – and there were a few minor disputes among the women about the chores – this was a happy time. We all felt united and that our needs were met.

But there was a general feeling that this lifestyle would work better out of the city and in a more rural setting. Our small neighborhood was nice – mostly Mormon – but we were surrounded by bad neighborhoods with a lot of gang activity. Any given evening, one could step onto the front porch and listen to gunfire coming from nearby neighborhoods. Someone tried to break into our house once, and on another occasion someone stole all of my tools out of my truck.

On the weekends, we would drive around Arizona, looking for land. Prescott, Cottonwood, Flagstaff, Tucson – anywhere outside of the Phoenix area. After one such excursion, my parents found a 40 acre ranchette outside of the Show Low area, in eastern Arizona. I knew this area, because as a Boy Scout, many of our outdoor activities took place here. It was high elevation, pine trees, lakes – and a lot cooler weather than Phoenix. It was a place that you would not soon forget, and I felt good about it.

So one February afternoon, the whole Jessop clan drove up from Phoenix to look at this land. It was located about five miles off of the highway down a bumpy stretch of dirt road. The property was a piece of windy rangeland with only a few juniper trees – a perfect circle of earth surrounded by rolling mountains and a huge expanse of blue sky. The only trace of civilization was the jet contrails high in the sky. It felt safe. I loved it immediately.

We bought the place with cash that the United Order had set aside, and the next project was to put a well on it. My dad asked me to put a stake down where we wanted the well and the tank. I walked around the empty property, and it was the only time I ever “witched” a well. Looking around the sagebrush, I searched until I found a place that “felt” right. We hit water 100 feet before most of our neighbors did, and it was sweet water. Our property sits on top of a lava bed that serves as a natural filtration system, and you can taste it.

My father put his home up for sale, and my brother put his home in Utah on the market. With the proceeds, we purchased two double-wide trailers to set up on our new property. But between the sale of the homes and the set up of the mobile homes there was a period of about two weeks when we were homeless.

In December, 1995, Martha and I again loaded up all of our belongings into our car, along with our two babies and headed into the wilderness. We lived out of a motel, and I drove down the snow-covered dirt every day to oversee the set up of the trailers. We spent Christmas in the motel, and by New Year’s Eve, we were in our new home.

There was no electricity. The nearest power source was over four miles away. Back in Mesa, I was an avid Trekkie. My day finished out regularly with an episode of “The Next Generation”, and suddenly here I was without a TV. Entertainment consisted of reading a book by candlelight in a drafty trailer, hoping the flame would not blow out.

And there was no plumbing. We had a well and water. But no septic tank. The toilet was a toilet seat set on top of a bucket. You would take the contents of the bucket somewhere on the large expanse of the property, dig a hole with a shovel and bury it.

The first day there, I refused to do this. In the mud and muck, I drove my car up the hill and sloshed through the mud until I found a nice juniper tree to do my business. But the car got stuck in the mire, and I had to walk home with the awful clay mud you find here caking to my shoes. The mud froze in the night, and when I finally got my car out the next day I had to chip the mud away from the wheel wells with a chisel and hammer. My next visit to town, the frozen mud caused my wheel bearings to drop and bounce merrily away, leaving me stranded.

And it was cold. We bought propane heaters and set them up in the kitchen, but they barely did the trick. The heat barely reached the bedrooms.

My first night there, the wind swept up over the Mogollon Rim and rushed across the plateau and blasted into the side of our trailer. The walls shook, and Sophie started to cry. She wouldn’t stop, and Martha asked me to go get my father so that we could administer a blessing to her. I stepped out into the cold to walk over to my father’s trailer. The ice crunched beneath my shoes, and the stars – unobsctructed by any city lights – were brighter than any I had ever seen. I looked at my watch and saw that it was midnight – the New Year. As the wind howled over this cold place, I wondered, “What the hell am I doing here?”

In the next installment, I will discuss how I adjusted to life on “The Land”, and how we continued living the United Order there.

Our Living Conditions, Part 3

So when I was a kid, my father explained to me a little bit about the United Order.

This can be a bit overwhelming to a nine year-old. In the ultimate sacrifice, I imagined consecrating all of my belongings to God, and men from the Church coming into my room to cart away all of my most cherished possessions. I pictured them boxing up the Conan and Tarzan books that I loved so much and taking them away to serve the greater good. What a sacrifice that would be. God would then know that I was willing to give up everything in His honor.

Even though I may not have understood everything my father taught me, the teachings did make an impression on me. Growing up as a teen in the decadent 80s, there was a lot of pressure to conform. Wearing Polo, Reeboks, designer clothing was an imperative. I reacted by going as “non-conformist” as possible. I used my lunch money to buy used clothes from the thrift store – the uglier, the better. Loud paisley shirts from the 60s, mustard yellows, puke greens. I spiked my hair with egg whites and wore guyliner. Why? Because, in my overdeveloped sense of idealism, everything that bucked the system was good. (Ironically I became well-known in my high school as someone with a high fashion sense.)

More importantly, I became aware of social issues. I read many of the underground punk/ anarchist “’zines” that preached dropping out of society by scavenging – eating only cast-away food and wearing only used clothes. I decided on my own to read “The Communist Manifesto”, and the idea of redistributing the wealth to the masses resembled what I had been taught about the United Order. So, there at the tail end of the Cold War, I decided that I was a communist.

When I was old enough to register to vote, our high school set up a booth where students could register. The lady behind the desk asked me if I would register as Republican or Democrat. Can you imagine the shock on her face when I said, “Neither. I want to register with the Communist Party.”

Sure, it was mostly the shock factor.

I remember my junior year, being interviewed by a panel from the American Legion for entry into Boy’s State. I cringe now (and laugh a little) as I remember telling these old veterans of the Korean War that I was a communist. Needless to say, I was NOT selected for Boy’s State. When I was a student in Belgium, I met many communists. One of them sat across from me and blew cigarette smoke in my face.

"You know, I really hate your country,” he said (in his thick French accent). Then I started to speak of the proletariat, dialectical materialism and the “bourgeoisie”, and he wound up later telling me, “You know, you are the first nice American I have ever met!”

This phase was short-lived. I quickly rejected Marxism, but this whole experience left me with a great distrust of wealth and the people who have it. I remember arguing in college with a friend, insisting that people only became rich by somehow enslaving others. (Sorry about that, Poppy.) I saw no purpose or meaning in spending my time in the pursuit of money. As long as I had “sufficient for my needs”, that was all I needed. Having anything else would be sinful, and, deep down, I felt that I didn’t deserve anything else. I was already placing myself in a poverty mindset that I even now am trying to break.

In 1988, while I was away studying in Belgium, I received news that my father had been called into the stake president’s office to be reprimanded for his belief in plural marriage. Within a year, he was excommunicated, and a year later, so was I, along with the rest of my family. My father found a book on United Order, and, in it, there was a special baptismal ceremony that was used for bringing people into the order. Since we were alone in Arizona and knew no one else who believed the same as we did, my father decided to initiate the United Order with his own family.

So we set up a portable swimming pool in the back yard, and early one summer morning in 1990, my father baptized us all into a United Order. For me, a college student working my way through school at an auto parts store, it meant that I gave half of my money to my dad and kept the other half for my education and entertainment. It didn’t feel any different than paying rent and helping with the bills.

The whole family eventually moved to Utah and joined the Allred Group (AUB), where I soon married Martha. There were several quasi-United Orders set up. One in Southern Utah, and one in Santaquin. My father set out immediately to try and join one of them. But one of the members of the Council, Bill Baird, cautioned my father against this, pointing out that many of these orders already had built in problems.

“You have everything you need within your own family to live the United Order,” Bill told my father.

So for the next ten years, I practiced living the United Order with my father and my brothers. There were some good experiences and some bad ones. I will tell you in the next installment what I learned.

Our Living Conditions, Part Deux

(Once again, Sophie took all the photos in this segment.)

There was a scene in the 1986 movie “The Mission” where the visiting Catholic cardinal visits a plantation run by indigenous people on a Spanish mission in disputed territory in Paraguay in the mid-1700s. The cardinal asks what is done with the profits from the plantation, and the priest – an Indian – answers that the profits are divided between the workers.

“Ah,” observes the cardinal. “There is a French radical group that practices that doctrine.”

“Your eminence,” answers the Indian priest innocently. “It was a doctrine of the Early Church.”

This utopian idea that the early Christians shared all things in common and “had no poor among them” appealed to my dad as a young man – in particular how this applied to Mormonism in the 19th Century.

As early as Kirtland, Ohio in the 1830s, the founder of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith, was experimenting with communal living – called the United Order, with its accompanying principle, the Law of Consecration.

The Law of Consecration is supposed to work this way – everything that you have you “consecrate” to the Church. Of course, people’s definitions of what it means to “consecrate” your belongings can vary from person to person. United Order is supposed to work in the following manner – you consecrate everything you have to an agent of the Church – usually a bishop. This means that you give your property, holdings and equity over to this person, and they are supposed to deed back to you what you need to make a living. The rest of your property is then supposed to be common property of the Saints. From that point on, you are supposed to yearly consecrate your surplus to the bishop as well.

That is all fine and dandy, except that there was not one United Order in the Mormon Church that was handled the same way. Each one was different – from the one in Ohio, to those in Missouri and Illinois, and finally to those under Brigham Young in Utah.

Joseph Smith intended the United Order to be the reintroduction of Mosaic economic law in these latter-days. However, some have said that Sidney Rigdon influenced Joseph Smith when he brought some of his ideas of French communism that he had practiced in some of the Protestant sects he had belonged to previously. And in Utah, there is evidence that suggests that some of the Utah United Orders were Brigham Young’s experiments in Marxism after he read “The Communist Manifesto”. Orderville was one such United Order.

Just a word about Orderville. I could not have lived there. Even though it was one of the longest lived orders – and one of the most successful – it was one of the most strict. The Jewish kibbutzim in Israel have nothing on Orderville. They decided when and what you ate. There was a dress code, and the rules of conduct were so rigid that you could get kicked out of the order for practically anything.

The thing about United Order in Utah – it did not last. By the turn of the century, practically no one in the Church was living United Order anymore. It became an outlawed practice, like plural marriage. And in the minds of many, plural marriage and United Order were indelibly connected. In fact, it was Brigham Young who said, “The fullness of the gospel is plural marriage and United Order.”

So when Mormon fundamentalists organized themselves in the late 1920s, it is no coincidence that – not only did they begin to practice plural marriage again – but they began to practice a form of United Order.

I think it is interesting to note that many of the prominent figures in the early Mormon fundamentalist movement in the 1930s and 40s were also members of the Communist Party. Lyman Jessop considered himself a communist, and Joseph Musser campaigned for the Communist Party. In our post-Cold War era, this may seem shocking, un-American or plain silly. But I must point out that this was in the days before the follies of Soviet Marxism or Communist China were made manifest. And as far as being un-American, these were people whose fathers and grandfathers had been imprisoned and persecuted by the American government, and many of these men were imprisoned themselves by the FBI, many while there sons were fighting in the South Pacific. If you take this in consideration with the fact that United Order seemed on the surface to resemble communism, it is not that shocking that many of them belonged to the Communist Party.

Around 1935, the Barlow brothers joined up with the Johnson family to buy some land right on the Utah-Arizona border – and area called Short Creek (now the location of Colorado City/ Hildale, seat of the FLDS Church.) They intended to live United Order, and they invited any who wished to live with them to relocate. Many men did.

One of those men who went to investigate was Lyman Jessop (mentioned above). He read the charter for the order, called the United Effort Trust. He was disturbed. As I mentioned earlier, you consecrate to the Church, and then you are deeded back your stewardship, or inheritance. And you are supposed to hold title to this. But in Short Creek, the leaders held title to ALL land, and no one could own any property. You could build your home on a piece of property leased to you by the leaders. But the land was owned by the hierarchy. This disturbed Lyman Jessop, and this issue was one the problems that eventually led to “The Spilt” – the division of the FLDS and the AUB.

One man who lived in Short Creek in he 1940s told me a story. While he was up on the Kaibab plateau, working on lumber, the priesthood leadership barged into his home while his horrified wife looked on. They collected all of his food and redistributed it to people in need, leaving him with only a couple of jars of canned peaches.

“I had no freedom to make any of my own decisions,” he said. “About the only thing I could decide for myself was whether or not to get my wife pregnant.”

As I write this, I know of at least a dozen United Orders in Utah, Arizona and surrounding states. Communism is alive and well in America. LOL

But back to my dad. A young BYU student sits in the restricted section of library circa 1969. In order to read the forbidden books, he has had to arrange to have a professor sit across from him while he reads. He is not allowed to copy from the books, or to take them out of the library. They are controversial books on Mormon history and doctrine, filled with teachings no longer allowed by the Church. He read about plural marriage, the Adam-God Doctrine and about United Order.

He looks up at the bored professor sitting across from him and asks an incredulous question.

“Is this true? Did the early brethren really teach these things?”

The professor gives him a knowing smirk. “Yes. They did.”

The young man goes home and ponders these things for years, dreaming about how to live these things again. He talks to wife about them. He gets reprimanded by his bishop and by the church general authorities for talking about these things openly. He is threatened with excommunication. He teaches his children about them.

Now it is circa 1979, and this young man now has his nine year-old son with him. They are driving a green cargo van through the hot Mojave Desert, outside of Barstow, California on one of many business trips. The young man speaks for hours with his son about Mormon doctrines – including United Order. The boy hardly understands any of it. But he listens anyway.

Next time, I will talk about my father and his teachings of United Order, and how I decided to practice it.

Our Living Conditions, Part 1

So, the White Mountains has been assaulted by snow for the last several days, and I haven’t had much chance to get online. I have been meaning to make a series of posts that deal with my “Living Conditions”. I put that in capital letters, because this seems to be the main criticism that I have drawn. Even Dawn Porter, as her van withdrew from my humble abode, seemed to be gasping – not so much at the polygamy – but at our living conditions.

Take the following selection from one blog as an example:

http://kelley-penonpaper.blogspot.com/2008/11/tube-review-forbidden-love-polygamy.html

“Dawn then goes out into the wilderness of Arizona to meet with a Polygamist man who agrees to meet with her on camera. None of the more "Respectable" men were willing to go on camera. Moroni is a man who's made his life in literally the middle of no where. They live in a trailer that Dawn describes as being like the Tardis, (surprisingly spacious for it's outward appearance) which cracked me up. When she speaks with this family, the differences are quite obvious, this man is indeed in love with these women and he does provide a life life for them and his children as well. But living in isolation as they do, where they have removed their oldest children from mainstream education, opens them to further probing questions. Dawn asks Moroni if he were in a monogamous relationship with Martha, his first wife, that he would indeed have committed adultery, that he is a polygamist at heart. But aside from that, he admits to the hardship of being a polygamist husband, and that it was so difficult the first year, that both women were alternately angry with with him, and one day they were all ok. He also admits to being afraid that he won't be able to satisfy the sexual demands of his wives, but they are still on the market for a third wife, in their tiny hovel that has no electricity or plumbing.”

This post was pretty typical. The first thing I wondered was – what the heck is a TARDIS?? Then I Googled it. It is an acronym that stands for TIME AND RELATIVE DIMENSIONS IN SPACE. This refers to a structure that is smaller on the outside, but much larger on the inside. Kind of like tents in Harry Potter. The term originated on the TV show Dr. Who (remember the elevator?), and I loved Dr. Who.

The term fits so well. It really does look smaller on the outside than it is on the inside. It is small, but it feels like home.

The question is – how did we wind up in such a small space? Was it by design? I hope to answer that.

First of all, I must say – even though I am a “dirt poor construction worker”, I am certainly not Mr. Fix-it. My wives have been cursed by the fact that they married a man who couldn’t lift up a hammer to save his life. I was the quintessential suburban kid. I wasn’t raised on a farm. I spent my early years in retail. I never built anything. I would rather read a book than chalk a line. My part in the construction industry has always been administrative. I am the paperwork guy on the jobsite.

As I said, this has been the curse of my wives. They would have had a better life if I was Mr. Fix-it. This is something that any man considering to homestead it should consider before he goes into the wild.

When Incubator TV first approached me, I had no trepidation about speaking publically about plural marriage. The first thing that I thought about was people seeing where (and how) we live. We rarely have guests, because we don’t have an adequate living room space. We have nowhere for guests to stay the night, because every available bed space is being used in our home. We usually put guests up at my mom’s more comfortable accommodations nearby.

We nearly said no to the whole thing, mainly because of our living conditions. So when a stranger comments on our “hovel”, we feel it very keenly. We are not forcing ourselves to live in this way due to some ascetic practice – it has been all circumstantial.

In my next post, I will have to take you all the way back. I will discuss United Order, the Law of Consecration, communism, Marxism and how these relate to Mormonism and my lifestyle.

By the way, the photos in this segment were all taken by my daughter Sophie.