Naomi Raffensparger is an assistant editor for the Joseph Smith Papers. She has an MA in writing, rhetoric, and media from Clemson University and previously worked as an editor for the South Carolina Review. She also completed an internship with Clemson University Press.
The significance of the Book of the Law of the Lord is tied not only to its history as an artifact, but also to the spiritual value it was given in its time. This book stands as a witness of the early Saints’ sacrifice and devotion, and that testimony can speak volumes to Latter-day Saints today.
This review comes from Makoto Hunter, a graduate student in history at the University of California–Santa Barbara studying American religious life at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and public memory. A former research and editorial assistant for the Intermountain Histories digital history project, she has authored two online public history series, titled “Mapping the Polygamy Underground” and “Confederate Markers in the Intermountain West.”
Reading Caroline Kline’s Mormon Women at the Crossroads: Global Narratives and the Power of Connectedness, published this year by the University of Illinois Press, has been an exercise of discovery, delight, and richly provoking insights. Based primarily on 98 anonymized oral history life interviews conducted with Latter-day Saint women of color (archived at the Claremont Colleges Library), Kline’s interdisciplinary work is part ethnography, part lived religion, and part theology. The book documents the lives of Latter-day Saint women of color, examines their experiences with and perspectives on intersections of religion, gender, race, and class, and argues for understanding their agentive lives through the lens of a shared moral orientation which Kline calls non-oppressive connectedness. Attentive to interviewees’ expressed priorities and values, Kline both shares their stories in their irreducible complexity and highlights key throughlines and contextually specific nuances in what ultimately synthesizes into a lay theology expressed from the margins of the tradition. As such, in addition to gathering personal, textured accounts of what it is like to live as a woman of color in Mormonism, Crossroads also expresses a Mormonism that is interpreted, adapted, and authored by women of color. This book is an indispensable companion for any study of contemporary Mormonism, particularly as expressed in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Crossroads’ denominational focus).
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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 ofAmerican 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.
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.
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.
Women from the Blackmore family in Bountiful BC speak at the 2017 Sunstone Symposium about their lives and experiences as Mormon fundamentalists.
Steve Fleming on Study and Faith, 5:: “The burden of proof is on the claim of there BEING Nephites. From a scholarly point of view, the burden of proof is on the…”
Eric on Study and Faith, 5:: “But that's not what I was saying about the nature of evidence of an unknown civilization. I am talking about linguistics, not ruins. …”
Steve Fleming on Study and Faith, 5:: “Large civilizations leave behind evidence of their existence. For instance, I just read that scholars estimate the kingdom of Judah to have been around 110,000…”
Eric on Study and Faith, 5:: “I have always understood the key to issues with Nephite archeology to be language. Besides the fact that there is vastly more to Mesoamerican…”
Steven Borup on In Memoriam: James B.: “Bro Allen was the lead coordinator in 1980 for the BYU Washington, DC Seminar and added valuable insights into American history as we also toured…”
David G. on In Memoriam: James B.: “Jim was a legend who impacted so many through his scholarship and kind mentoring. He'll be missed.”
Recent Comments
Steve Fleming on Study and Faith, 5:: “The burden of proof is on the claim of there BEING Nephites. From a scholarly point of view, the burden of proof is on the…”
Eric on Study and Faith, 5:: “But that's not what I was saying about the nature of evidence of an unknown civilization. I am talking about linguistics, not ruins. …”
Steve Fleming on Study and Faith, 5:: “Large civilizations leave behind evidence of their existence. For instance, I just read that scholars estimate the kingdom of Judah to have been around 110,000…”
Eric on Study and Faith, 5:: “I have always understood the key to issues with Nephite archeology to be language. Besides the fact that there is vastly more to Mesoamerican…”
Steven Borup on In Memoriam: James B.: “Bro Allen was the lead coordinator in 1980 for the BYU Washington, DC Seminar and added valuable insights into American history as we also toured…”
David G. on In Memoriam: James B.: “Jim was a legend who impacted so many through his scholarship and kind mentoring. He'll be missed.”