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. 

Mormonism, for Krakauer, serves as a poignant example of how home-grown American religion can quickly turn into fanaticism and violence. This religious fanaticism, for Krakauer, is linked to politics. Krakauer describes Mormon politics—both past and present— as “archconservative.” Krakauer aptly sees fundamentalists and mainstream Latter-day Saints as one extensive cultural tradition with roots in the violent tumult of the 1830s. He argues that polygamy, divine revelation, and patriarchal authority are the most significant doctrines and practices to understand Mormonism and shows how these practices have led people to do unthinkable acts in the name of religion. 

However, Krakauer sidesteps the foundational Mormon doctrine of communitarianism which dominated adherents’ and onlookers’ understanding of Mormonism before the Latter-day Saints’ founder Joseph Smith began to practice polygamy in the 1840s. Communitarianism, therefore, deserves attention if one hopes to understand the roots and ethos of Smith’s religious tradition, as does Krakauer. Communitarianism also helps explain why the Mormon faith had a violent birth during the 1830s. This essay critiques Krakauer’s historical portrayal of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a violent and politicly conservative American religion by focusing on the ubiquity of Latter-day Saint communitarian politics during the 1830s.

Violence enacted against Mormonism during the 1830s was often a reaction to their political radicalism. In 1831, Mormonism’s founder Joseph Smith announced that Jackson County, Missouri, was to be the communal gathering place for all the Latter-day Saints to “assemble themselves together” (96). Thousands of Mormons converts, mostly poor farmers and laborers, flooded into the new Mormon enclave. Krakauer claims that “the people in Jackson County were not very happy about the monumental influx” of Mormons, mainly because of the Latter-day Saints’ “impenetrable clannishness” (96). However, the Mormon’s reputation of clannishness during the 1830s was due to their similarities with other radical communities, such as the Shakers, Harmonists, and Owenites. These communitarians who thrived in America during the 1830s led Fredrich Engels to claim that “communism” could be “entirely successful.”^[1] As part of this tradition, Mormon leaders in Missouri built planned communities and administered largescale procedures of property redistribution. Smith called his plans of property redistribution the Law of Consecration and Stewardship and his community organization the United Order of Enoch. It was Mormonism’s social radicalism that made them “clannish.” 

Krakauer correctly asserts that Mormon clannishness led to violence in Missouri, but he does not satisfactorily explain why. Instead of exploring reasons for violence toward Mormons, Krakauer emphasizes the Mormon’s reaction to violent aggression. He writes about how theMormons “began raiding Gentile towns and plundering food, livestock, and valuables, burning approximately fifty non-Mormon homes in the process” (100). Krakauer emphasizes the violence perpetrated by Mormons to fit with his understanding of Mormonism as a violent faith.

Historians largely agree, though, that the core of the Mormon and Missourian conflict was political. During the 1830s, most non-Mormon white settlers in Missouri promoted frontier-style market capitalism and slavery. Missourians disliked the Mormons’ communal economics and social practices from the start. They were, however, most infuriated when rumors spread that Mormons encouraged freed people of color to immigrate to Jackson County. Krakauer quickly admits that Missourians believed that Mormons were abolitionists because many hailed from the northern states. However, the Mormons’ mostly unfounded reputation as abolitionists was also due to their communitarian ethos. Many nineteenth-century communitarian socialist groups embraced abolition—a phenomenon Manisha Sinha and Christopher Clark have shown in their scholarship.[i] During the 1830s, the most famous female communitarian socialist, Fanny Wright, an adherent of Owenite Socialism, built a communal utopia for freed people of color in Nashoba, Tennessee. One newspaper wrote that as “Fanny Wright operates among the infidels,” referring to the communalism in her interracial Nashoba colony, “Joe Smith, the Mormon, operates among the Mormons.”[ii] Onlookers often viewed the Mormons as too radical for frontier American democracy. 

Some newspapers during the 1800s compared Smith to Mohammed, as Krakauer does throughout his book. Comparing the Mormon and Muslim prophets creates a conceptual link between the Lafferty brothers’ murder and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which help’s Krakauer’s overall argument about violent faith. But the comparison between Mormons and Muslims was one among many during the nineteenth century.[iii] Onlookers and journalists worldwide considered the Mormons to be part of the communitarian socialist movement, and many early Mormon converts had been communitarians. For example, throughout Britain, detractors called the Latter-day Saints “socialist infidels” because many Chartists and Owenites were attracted to the Mormon message. In nineteenth-century France and Switzerland, Mormons were seen as akin to the Icarian communists because prominent Icarians in both countries embraced Mormonism.[iv] Likewise, the first Mormon converts in Mexico City were promoters of the socialist Charles Fourier before joining the Mormon faith.[v] Scholars and journalists such as Krakauer have mostly overlooked this exciting phenomenon. Still, these stories deserve exploration, mainly because most Mormon converts hailed from outside the United States during the nineteenth century and transnational social politics mattered deeply to many first-generation Mormon converts. However, considering early Mormonism as part of a significant global communitarian socialist movement contradicts Krakauer’s understanding of Mormons as foundationally a conservative, American religious faith.

Indeed, Latter-day Saints veered from communal radicalism during the twentieth century, but their communitarian doctrines have permeated various forms of Mormonism for over one hundred and eighty years. After Smith died in 1844, the followers of James Strang embraced the Law of Consecration. In the 1840s and 1850s, the followers of Lyman Wight lived communally in Texas.[vi] During the 1860s, the Morrisites broke away from the mainstream Latter-day Saints in Utah to live in millenarian communes. Brigham Young encouraged his followers to join United Order communities and share their labor and property until he died in 1877. Twentieth-century fundamentalist Mormons also emphasize Mormon communitarian doctrines such as the United Order and Law of Consecration. For example, Robert Crossfield’s First Book of Commandments and Second Book of Commandments was published by United Order Publications (353). One major Mormon fundamentalist group, United Effort Plan, directly references the United Order of Enoch in its name. In the 1980s, one fundamentalist community in Salem, Oregon, even accepted homosexuality, group marriage, and the use of psychedelic drugs in their commune (152). A deeper exploration of how Mormon communitarianism changed over time might lead to a fuller understanding of the various types of Mormonism today.

It is possible that Mormon communitarianism ethos contributed to the religious violence Krakauer explores in his book. Krakauer, after all, mentions how the Lafferty brothers planned to build a “city of refuge” in Spanish Fork Canyon, awaiting the end of times (177). Indeed, communitarianism provoked external violence in Missouri. However, many early Mormons were part of a transnational non-violent radical movement based on mutual support. Writers such as Krakauer would benefit from seeing Mormonism’s past and present as something other than uniquely American and politicly conservative. Krakauer’s work is ambitious, tragic, riveting, engaging, and entertaining. It, however, misses how communitarianism has shaped Mormonism’s paradoxical, and violent, past and present.

^[1] Friedrich Engels “Description of Recently Founded Communist Colonies Sill in Existence” in Marx and Engels Collected Works 4 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), 214. By 1847, Engels no longer believed that communitarian socialism was the best option for social change, see David Leopold, “‘Socialist Turnips’: The Young Friedrich Engels and the Feasibility of Communism,” Political Theory 40, no. 3 (2012): 347–78.

[i] Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale Univesity Press, 2016), 339-381; Chistopher Clark, The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995) 34-67.

[ii] The Ohio Repository, No. 19. (September 13, 1838). See also other Ohio, Newspaper articles from Ohio that connect Fanny Wright to Joseph Smith see “Van Buren’s Supporters,” Daily Herald and Gazette No. 205 (August 27, 1838); “Van Buren’s Supporters,” Huron Reflector Extra (September 4, 1838).

[iii] J. Spencer Fluhman, A Peculiar People: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Ninteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012) 29-48.

[iv] Erik J. Freeman, ““True Christianity”: The Flowering and Fading of Mormonism and Romantic Socialism in Nineteenth-Century France.” Journal of Mormon History 44, no. 2 (2018): 75-103.

[v] Bill Smith and Jared M. Tamex, “Plotino C. Rhodakanaty: Mormonism’s Greek Austrian Mexican Socialist,” in Jason H. Dormady and Jared M. Tamez, Just South of Zion: Mormoms in Mexico and its Borderlands (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015), 55 -73.

[vi] Melvin C. Johnson, Polygamy on the Pedernales: Lyman Wight’s Mormon Village in Antebellum Texas (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2006).