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.

The scene is uncomfortable, only amplified by the dimly lit barn that sets the scene. However, beyond the setting, the scene is uncomfortable because it shakes the modern sensibilities of viewers. In most people’s imagination, Mormon fundamentalism is a problem of the past, an expression of faith by a “backward” people, and a continuation of the old-time religion of the nineteenth century. Mormon fundamentalism is found in Mountain Meadows and at the hand of John D. Lee. However, this is not always the case, contrary to this popular imagining and Jon Krakauer’s narrative. Mormon fundamentalism is found in suburban Utah homes where ordinary LDS people grow disenfranchised with their Church leaders and seek an alternative. It is found in a twenty-first-century Idaho barn where a mother tells her son that he was sent to set the house of God in order. It is found in the mundane moments of our modern world. As with all things mundane, those who observe fundamentalist Mormonism may miss the import of the beliefs and philosophies that undergird actions as dramatic as murder and as simple as wearing a prairie dress.

The twentieth century was a challenging time for people who saw the rise of modernity as a cause for concern. In the wake of new scientific ideas, innovative ways of interpreting the Bible, and the emergence of the social Gospel, the Christian fundamentalist movement developed as a reactionary response.[i] Mormon fundamentalism emerged in the context of this broader fundamentalist movement in response to what they perceived as an inappropriate response to modernity from the LDS Church. As the LDS Church abandoned polygamy, moved away from communitarianism, and renounced more peculiar theologies on their shift toward American secular ideals, fundamentalists provided the disaffected with an alternative. As with fundamentalism broadly, Fundamentalist Mormons assert themselves as a more authentic or original version of a particular religion. But, in reality, fundamentalism is a modern way of being religious that counters other modern ways of being. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and their fundamentalist cousins across the Restoration are all modern Mormonism.

 Fundamentalist Mormonism similarly emerged as a response to dissatisfaction with modernization. By “modernization,” fundamentalists meant the changes made to Mormon doctrine and practice throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that aligned Mormonism with Protestant norms of “right religion.”[ii] These changes were often connected with American ideas of the family, race, politics, and involvement in the American economy. Unlike their LDS Mormon counterparts, the fundamentalist movement differentiated itself by continued adherence to beliefs and practices that the LDS Church had abandoned.[iii]

This is a jarring reality for modern readers of books like Under the Banner of Heaven. The people in the pages are not from a distant past or a remnant of Joseph Smith’s Mormonism. They are modern people practicing a modern faith that emerged in response to Joseph F. Smith and Heber J. Grant’s policy changes.

During the April 1931 semi-annual General Conference, Heber J. Grant brought attention to “very regrettable and most annoying circumstances.”[iv] The annoyance was the continuation of polygamy after the Church’s 1904 Manifesto. In response, the President of the Church called for individuals perpetuating plural marriage to be “dealt with and excommunicated from the Church.”[v] Later, in April 1933, Heber J. Grant announced that the Church no longer tolerated polygamists and would aid law enforcement in prosecuting practitioners. During his 1933 statement, Grant referenced the fundamentalist claim that LDS Church President John Taylor had received a revelation on September 2, 1886, that affirmed the irrevocable nature of eternal principles, namely polygamy. The Taylor revelation was rarely discussed in any Mormon circle until this point. It was not until 1922 that the men who established the fundamentalist movement began to refer to the revelation as a source of their own authority. In one of history’s ironic turns, the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints handed fundamentalists historical justification for their beliefs, actions, and organizing.

At a 1922 meeting, Lorin C. Woolley, one of the men who claimed to be present when Taylor received the revelation before dying while in hiding from the federal government for practicing polygamy, stood before a crowd sympathetic to the continuation of plural marriage. He declared that he “had been directed to continue teaching the Principle of Plural Marriage and encourage the people who are worthy to practice to same to the end that there shall never be a time when children will not be born under this covenant.”[vi] According to Woolley, John Taylor laid his hands on the heads of six men and ordained them to the office of High Priest Apostle, the highest order of the priesthood, with the power necessary to perform plural sealings outside the bounds of the Church. While there is no contemporary evidence of this account, the narrative struck the disaffected crowd and was reimagined as the foundation of their movement. Six years later, Joseph Musser, another early leader in the movement, penned the official version of Lorin C. Woolley’s 1886 account. A new religion, a modern religion, was born.

This moment in 1922 was forgotten by Krakauer, probably because it was so dull. Krakauer’s readers will assume Mormon fundamentalism is a faith that stemmed from salacious nineteenth-century ideas, such as Brigham Young’s proclamation of blood atonement or Robert Crossfield’s establishment of the School of the Prophets. In reality, Mormon fundamentalism is a faith that began in a suburban Millcreek home owned by Nathanial Baldwin, the inventor of headphones. While mundane, this reality is almost more uncomfortable than Banner’s interpretation of events. The men who listened to Woolley in 1922 and formed a movement were modern people. They were anyone living in Utah in the mid-twentieth century. Fundamentalism is a conundrum to the modern reader because it is a modern problem that we want to pretend belongs in the past.

Under the Banner of Heaven tells the story of religious violence, something that absolutely finds a home in some Mormon fundamentalist movements. However, Banner takes part in a revisionist account of fundamentalist Mormonism and perpetuates the truth claims that fundamentalists promote: they are the heirs of the original Mormonism that began with Joseph Smith. In reality, Mormon fundamentalism is new. It began with Joseph F. Smith and was adopted by people who lived alongside many people’s grandparents.

In his work on Mormon polygamy and secularism, Peter Coviello writes of Mormonism as a “sort of success” story.[vii] Like many religions that emerged in the nineteenth century, it succumbed to the “invisible consensus of American Protestantism.”[viii] Mormon fundamentalists view themselves as above this, having resisted the American call for religion to collapse into a Protestant center. And while this is true, we cannot forget that Mormon fundamentalism is modern Mormonism, just as all Mormonisms are modern Mormonism. In many ways, the modernity and banality of fundamentalism is the most discomforting aspect of Banner for Latter-day Saints and other “modern” religions.

[i] See Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), Seth Dowland, Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right (Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), J. Michael Utzinger, Yet Saints Their Watch are Keeping: Fundamentalist, Modernists, and the Development of Evangelical Ecclesiology, 1887-1937 (Macron: Mercer University Press, 2006), and Joel Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

[ii] See Peter Coviello, Make Yourselves Gods: Mormonism and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

[iii] See Confessions of a Mormon Historian: The Diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, 1971-1997, Volume 2 edited by Gary James Bergera (Salt Lake City: Signature Books), 428.

[iv] Heber J. Grant, “Decries Propaganda” in Conference reports of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1931), 5.

[v] Heber J. Grant, “Punished when Found” in Conference reports of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1931), 5-6.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Peter Coviello, Make Yourselves Gods: Mormonism and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 218.

[viii] John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 74.