NOM

I just read "Under the banner of heaven" by Krakauer. It was a fascinating read. He told several complex stories simultaneously, and brought them together in a way that I felt really explained fundamentalism's rise and effects quite well. You had to understand several backstories to really understand what happened with the Lafferty situation and he painted a pretty rich picture in my opinion. There were some obvious takeaway's: polygamy is disgusting, prophets are dangerous, religion can be horrible, the parallels with the LDS faith are shocking, etc...

The fascinating thing to me is the zeal and the happiness expressed by the participants of the religion. I know that mainline Mormons express happiness despite some obvious hardships the LDS church imposes, and even in the 1800's people professed happiness in polygamous situations, but to be happy in a modern fundamentalist group is taking it to a whole new level. At the end of the book Deloy Bateman confessed that the people in Colorado City are truly happy, but some things are more important than being happy he said, "like being free to think for yourself." This really resonated with me. I was perfectly happy with my life before my faith crisis, but I wouldn't change it for anything.

I just read an online review of the book published recently here:
http://religionandpolitics.org/2015/07/ ... -krakauer/

One of the quotes:

"of particular concern is how Krakauer “makes little distinction between [LDS] polygamy past and [FLDS] polygamy present ... Jeffs inherited a great deal of religious power and spent his life exploiting it,” including teaching his young brides that their highest calling was to please him sexually. To be sure, historians continue to debate Joseph Smith’s fundamental motivations behind introducing polygamy to his followers. However, most agree that in the early 1840s, Joseph Smith revealed a theological system that empowered polygamous wives to participate in the civil and religious governance of Mormon communities. In the 2000s, Jeffs delivered prophecies that required that FLDS women submit unconditionally to their husbands."

I do not agree with the above statement. There is a difference between LDS past and FLDS present, (I think that FLDS attitudes are waaay more gross than 1800's era attitudes) but a system that empowered polygamous women? I don't think so. Women submitting unconditionally to their husbands? Sounds an awful lot like LDS present to me.

Another quote:

"Krakauer believes that there are degrees of difference—not distinctions of kind—between the murderous Lafferty Brothers, the Mormon fundamentalists, and the LDS Church. This despite the fact that the Lafferty brothers never belonged to Warren Jeffs’ church. And this despite the fact that the mainstream Mormons are, as Gordon has put it, “the most antipolygamy people you could meet.” Yet Krakauer, like others before him and since, makes the argument that because each group claims to be the true heirs to Joseph Smith’s legacy, whether they recognize each other as such or not, they all belong to Joseph Smith’s Mormon faith. However, while they all might belong to the Mormon movement, Warren Jeffs is not LDS. For that matter, Lafferty brothers aren’t FLDS. In fact, most Mormon polygamists look and live more like TLC’s Sister Wives—consenting adults with jobs and careers, who wear clothes from the Gap instead of long prairie skirts and bonnets, whose children attend public schools in communities far away from Colorado City, and who reject the FLDS as dishonoring the Mormon tradition even more vociferously than the LDS Church."

Really? We have such a weird relationship with polygamy. We look like, on the surface, the most anti-polygamy people on the face of the earth. We are not, however, even a little bit anti-polygamy. We are still very pro-polygamy, however we would like to deny it. It is still our scripture, it is still our practice, even though it is through sealings, and we still try to bill it as a great thing whenever it comes up. The church wants to have it both ways, it was wonderful, but now it is awful. That bugs me to no end.

"At its core, Krakauer’s thesis is that faith corrupts. And absolute faith—like those held by Mormon fundamentalists—corrupts absolutely, to the point that brothers kill another brother’s wife and child; to the point that thousands of parents allow their teenage daughters to become the spiritual brides of church leaders."

Yup, and that's my thesis now too. Faith needs to be reined in at some point to logic, or you could end up like the Lafferty brothers. You certainly will end up a hostage to your faith at some point. The article talks about the benefit of faith as something that sustained Elizabeth Smart through her ordeal. But if there was some logic and common sense attached to that faith, maybe the ordeal would not have been so bad in the first place. Certainly if Brian David Mitchell had had some logic associated with his faith it would never have gotten to that point.

Anyway, it was a good book. I recommend it.

It's a fascinating and disturbing book. A non-Mormon friend saw me reading and chided, "hey, you're not allowed to read things like that!"

Does anybody know what happened to the Ron Howard/Tom Hanks project to turn it into a movie?

That would be sweet if it happened. Looks like it fizzled.

Emower wrote: ↑Mon May 22, 2017 11:10 am

"of particular concern is how Krakauer “makes little distinction between [LDS] polygamy past and [FLDS] polygamy present ... Jeffs inherited a great deal of religious power and spent his life exploiting it,” including teaching his young brides that their highest calling was to please him sexually. To be sure, historians continue to debate Joseph Smith’s fundamental motivations behind introducing polygamy to his followers. However, most agree that in the early 1840s, Joseph Smith revealed a theological system that empowered polygamous wives to participate in the civil and religious governance of Mormon communities. In the 2000s, Jeffs delivered prophecies that required that FLDS women submit unconditionally to their husbands."

I do not agree with the above statement. There is a difference between LDS past and FLDS present, (I think that FLDS attitudes are waaay more gross than 1800's era attitudes) but a system that empowered polygamous women? I don't think so. Women submitting unconditionally to their husbands? Sounds an awful lot like LDS present to me.

It's been a while since I read it and the book was published about thirty years ago, but when I read Lawrence Foster's Religion and Sexuality I came away with the understanding how polygamy in some ways did empower some women and made the Mormon culture as a whole more advantageous secularly for women.

In the book he compares the Shakers, Mormons and Oneida Community - three religious movements sprung about the same time and in the same place and compares their religious sexual practices. The Shakers gave women ecclesiastical authority but had the least amount of secular freedom (very segregated gender roles in work). The Mormons gave women the least amount of ecclesiastical authority but were permitted secular advantages, and the Oneida Community was the most balanced. His idea was, if I remember correctly, that some kind of equilibrium was maintained whatever the religious movement. Also, that Brigham Young realized that he needed people who could could do things if the movement were to survive, and he didn't really care if they were women or men. He couldn't be choosy about who could run businesses, farms, get an education, etc., particularly when the men were on missions (doing ecclesiastical work). From one viewpoint that can be seen as empowerment, from another as an opportunist - so long as he was sustained and kept power, he didn't really care about the day to day concerns of how it got done. I may not be remembering it entirely correctly, but that was my takeaway.

https://www.amazon.com/Religion-Sexuali ... 0252011198

My Dad was a member of the Jury for this (Lafferty) trial. Deeply, disturbing stuff here. Heavy stuff...for Mormons of all varieties.