Why are Mormons so defensive about Under the Banner of Heaven?

John Hatch is an editor for Signature Books. He is currently writing “What Do You Mean, Murder?” Clue and the Making of a Cult Classic to be published in 2023.

Banner of Heaven is frequently criticized—not unfairly, it must be said—by historians of Mormonism for its inaccurate history and its willingness to engage in guilt-by-association. Author Jon Krakauer’s thesis seems that if extremists like the Lafferty brothers are murdering people, we ought to be suspicious of John and Jane Mormon, whose roots can be traced back to the same violent origins. The line between mainstream and fundamentalist, Krakauer not-so-subtly suggests, is mighty thin. While these criticisms of the book’s questionable history and shaky thesis are valid, I believe they are also used to mask a defensiveness that many Mormons feel about Under the Banner of Heaven. It is difficult not to detect a more visceral reaction to the book than just, “This gets our history wrong.” Inaccuracies aside, most Latter-day Saints dislike it because they don’t recognize themselves in it. They feel like it is not an authentic portrayal of their lived experience in the LDS faith, and no one wants to be told “this is who you are,” when it sure doesn’t feel like that is who I am. Some of this is because the book is, in fact, not authentic to the Mormon experience with its clumsy attempt to link violent extremists with the average LDS churchgoer. But some of this feeling that the book is not accurate is because Latter-day Saints are notoriously bad at understanding how they come across to outsiders. Many people think Mormons are weird and Mormons neither understand that nor particularly like it.

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Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven: Critical Responses

In 2003, John Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven hit bookshelves and became an overnight sensation. The story is a is the true-crime bestseller about two men who made headlines after a double murder shook a suburban Utah town. The men, Dan and Ron Lafferty, were raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but joined the School of the Prophets, a small Mormon fundamentalist group that understood themselves to be the most authentic remnant of the nineteenth-century faith. 

Since its publication, the discussion around Banner never stopped. It consistently ranks among the five best-selling books on Mormonism on Amazon. It’s often the first book that non-Mormons will turn to in order to understand their Mormon (usually Latter-day Saint) neighbors). While it’s foolhardy to judge an entire population by a single book, much less one written nearly twenty years ago, it doesn’t stop well-meaning people from recommending it as an authoritative text on Mormonism or Mormon history.

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I was raised FLDS. Banner isn’t my story-but it changed my community’s lives.

Shirlee Draper was born and raised in Colorado City, Arizona, within the fundamentalist polygamous sect now known as FLDS. She was “placed” in an arranged marriage and had four children. She holds an MA in Public Administration and is currently the Director of Operations for Cherish Families and the Board President for the United Effort Plan Trust.

My Dad died last month. His health had been steadily degrading along with his mental faculties for a couple of years, so it was not unexpected. In writing his eulogy, I reflected at length on what a wretched life he lived—not of his making. You see, Dad had the misfortune to be born into what society has deemed a “Deviant” community, and culture. He was born of goodly parents—who practiced polygamy. Their goodly parents had, too, and on and on back about a century.

The week Dad turned 12, he and all the other children in his community (that would come to be known as “the FLDS”) were rounded up in the 1953 Raid on Short Creek. The history of this raid has been told so I won’t do it here. But I will draw attention to the CDC-Kaiser ACE Study[i] which demonstrates the very poor life outcomes of children who suffer trauma in their youth. Dad exhibited nearly every one of the poor outcomes on the list of projected issues created by ACEs. One of the manifestations of his trauma was his unswerving belief that his children would be taken from him if he accepted help, if we participated in extracurricular activities, or if we ventured outside our community. These fears directly impacted his children’s life opportunities. Dealing with my dad’s death and the way he raised his children because of his early trauma really sharpened the sense of injustice I harbor regarding the way “cults” are treated. 

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Fundamentalist Mormonism is Modern Mormonism

Cristina Rosetti is an Assistant Professor of Humanities at Dixie State University. Her research focuses on the history and lived experience of Mormon fundamentalists in the Intermountain West. Her book St. Joseph W. Musser: A Mormon Prophet will be published by the University of Illinois Press in 2023.

In the first episode of Under the Banner of Heaven, an Idaho mother looks at her son and tells him, “It’s you. You’re the fulfillment of Heavenly Father’s promise that he would send One Mighty and Strong to set things in order. And he sent me six mighty and strong, but you’re my one.” The One Mighty and Strong is a term that comes from Doctrine and Covenants 85 and is most often associated with Joseph Smith. However, in some families, like the one depicted in Banner, this is a title and claim that transforms a man into a prophet. Notorious men like Bryan David Mitchell, Ron and Dan Lafferty, and Evril LeBaron all claimed the title. But, beyond the notorious, I know a man who was given the title in his patriarchal blessing. I know former Latter-day Saint men who believe they are called to set the house of God in order. Even now, as portrayed by Dustin Lance Black, mothers tell their sons they are the One.

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Inescapable Under the Banner of Heaven

Megan Goodwin is a scholar of gender, race, sexuality, politics, and American religions. She is the author of Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions (Rutgers 2020). With Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, she cohosts Keeping It 101: A Killjoy’s Introduction to Religion Podcast. Her next book is tentatively titled Cults Incorporated.

In my first piece for Juvenile Instructor, published nearly nine years ago, I called Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven “inexorable.” A white man on the internet popped up–as white men often seem to do–to tell me I meant “execrable.” 

To be sure, Banner is also detestable for many reasons, but I meant what I said and I said what I meant. Banner is unstoppable, terrible, fear-inspiring, and inescapable. At the time I was writing, a full decade after its initial publication, no one commenting on Mormonism(s) in public could escape being asked about Krakauer’s devilishly well written, disastrously ill considered treatise on “violent faith.”

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A Banner Book—The Publishing History Context for Under the Banner of Heaven

Bryan Buchanan works at Benchmark Books in Salt Lake City and is the co-host of the Sunstone Mormon History Podcast. He edited Continuing Revelation: Essays on Doctrine (2021) and is working on several forthcoming projects that illuminate the history of post-Manifesto polygamy.

When copies of Jon Krakauer’s fourth book—Under the Banner of Heaven (published by Doubleday) started hitting bookshelves in mid-July 2003, it was a noteworthy event, particularly in the Mormon world. Sales here at Benchmark Books in Salt Lake City were modest—only about twenty copies in the first month—but part of the problem was that the first printing was gone quickly. The general response to the book, both then and now, has been robust and consistent. For many non-Mormon readers, this is their first (and perhaps only) exposure to Mormon culture, theology and—importantly—history. Now, nearly twenty years after publication, the original context in which the book was introduced is frequently overlooked.

The current swirl of Mormon Studies publications, both print and digital, is dizzying. Various projects have brought a wealth of resources to the fingers of researchers. In 2003, though, writer Jon Krakauer faced a very different landscape. Within his envisioned scope for the book was a challenging array of topics: Joseph Smith, Mountain Meadows, the rise of fundamentalist Mormons, violence, and, finally, the specific story of the Lafferty family. To properly assess the place and impact of Krakauer’s work, it is worth looking at where Banner landed within this larger publishing history.

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Clannishness, Communitarianism, and Krakauer

Erik Freeman is the Draper Dissertation Fellow at the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute and a doctoral candidate in UConn’s Department of History. He will defend his dissertation on nineteenth-century transnational Mormon communitarianism in July 2022. Erik’s article “‘True Christianity’: The Flowering and Fading of Mormonism and Romantic Socialism in Nineteenth-Century France,” won the Best Article Award at the Communal Studies Association’s annual conference in 2018, and the Best International Article Award from the Mormon Historical Association in 2019.

On September 11, 2001, religious zealots flew airplanes into New York City’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. These events led many Americans to ask questions about how religion and violence converge, particularly through visceral events with clear perpetrators. Krakauer wrote Under the Banner of Heaven (2003) in the wake of these violent events. Krakauer engages readers with a true-crime story from the 1980s about two Mormon fundamentalist brothers who murdered their sister-in-law and niece, claiming it was the will of God. Yet Krakauer’s book is far more than a work of true-crime journalism; it explores big questions about the intersection between religion, violence, and politics, both past and present. It is also a sweeping and controversial work of history that portrays Mormonism as fundamentally American, politicly conservative, religiously fanatical, and violent. When Krakauer looks at Mormonism’s past and present in the American West, he sees blood everywhere. 

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Under the Banner of Heaven Revisited

Craig L. Foster holds a MA and MLIS from Brigham Young University. He is an accredited genealogist and works as a research consultant at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. He is widely published on subjects related to the history of Mormonism, broadly defined, and along with Marianne Watson is the author of American Polygamy: A History of Fundamentalist Mormon Faith.

            In 2003, Jon Krakauer published his book Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith. Krakauer’s work became an instant sensation. After almost twenty years, it continues to be, in the words of Max Perry Mueller, “the bestselling book on Mormon history in recent memory.”[i] Unfortunately, “best-selling” does not make a book “best.” That’s why in 2004, I published a review of Krakauer’s book titled, “Doing Violence to Journalistic Integrity.”[ii]

            The title of my review was a simple, and perhaps unsuccessful, attempt at being witty. As I stated there, Jon Krakauer is “a gifted writer [whose] text flows seamlessly, creating a literary picture that touches a reader to the very core.” But his book is seriously flawed through a combination of ignorance about the subject and his blatant bias, for which I not only took him to task in the review, but which also inspired the title.

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Fundamentalism’s Modernist Backdrop

Thomas Tubbs received a BA in English from Western Washington University in 2017 and a MA in Religious Studies from the Vrije University Amsterdam in 2020. His research focuses on religion in America, and the intersection between religion and popular culture.

John Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith is one of the most popular works about Mormonism, and religion in general. The book, as far as I can tell, is not well-regarded in academia. In terms of academic writing on Mormonism, Krakauer seems unlikely to ever be regarded with the likes of Richard L. Bushman. However, the book remains very popular among general audiences. At the time of writing, Under the Banner of Heaven is the second best-selling book in the category “Religious Groups & Communities Studies” and the 3rd bestselling book in the categories “History of Christianity” and “Sociology & Religion” on Amazon.com.

Parts of the book are exceptional examples of the true crime genre, telling the story of brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, Mormon fundamentalists who committed a gruesome double murder in 1983. This section is in line with Krakauer’s other best-known works, Into Thin Air, an account of a disastrous Mount Everest expedition, and Into the Wild the story of ill-fated adventurer Christopher McCandlass. Krakauer’s background as a journalist made him fairly well suited to cover the Lafferty brothers.

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The Many Mormonisms of Under the Banner of Heaven

Stephanie Griswold is a PhD student in History and Religious Studies at Claremont Graduate University and the research assistant for the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies. Her research focuses on new religious movements in the Americas, including the Fundamentalist Mormonism in the southwestern United States and indigenous and mestizo communities in the Mormon Colonies.

With the continued popularity of Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (UBH), Mormonism’s vast range of expressions brings into question an author’s responsibility to nuance and accuracy. Being a journalist and not a historian nor a religion scholar, Jon Krakauer set out to write a story about gruesome killings to understand “Lafferty and his ilk,” but what does he mean by Lafferty’s ilk? (xxiii) Among many other things, Ron and Dan Lafferty were brothers, excommunicated mainstream Latter-Day Saints, husbands, fathers, Utahns, co-conspirators, etc. Krakauer’s focus is on the Laffertys’ identities as “Fundamentalist Mormons.” In UBH, the many expressions of Joseph’s Restoration become conflated, at least apparently for Krakauer.[i] There are many valid criticisms of UBH. In this essay, I address the problem of painting all Mormons with the same brush.

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