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.”

And not to be petty, but the fact that we’re still talking about this book/soon-to-be Hulu miniseries adds further weight to my initial word choice. (I’d merely add that it’s now Doctor Goodwin to any and all white men who want to tell me I’m wrong on the internet.) Ron Howard acquired the adaptation rights to Banner in 2012, but we’re only just now getting that adaptation. Why is this happening, and why is it happening now? 

This is happening because Americans cannot get enough of captivity narratives, a genre that combines cishet white supremacist hysteria about the purity of “our” women, anxieties about religio-sexual outsiders taking advantage of “our” freedoms, and reassurances that victims who suffer abuse at the hands of racialized religious outsiders are ultimately to blame for their own circumstances, because after all, why didn’t they just run away? 

(It should go without saying–but obviously too often does not–that abuse is never the fault of the abused. As Elizabeth Smart Gilmour said nearly a decade ago, “We don’t know why they didn’t run.  We don’t know the circumstances.  And we’re all so different.  We really don’t have a right to ask that question.”)

This is happening now because so-called “cult” media has been enjoying explosive popularity for the last several years – in part, I suspect, in response to Qanon, COVID, and Americans’ pernicious preference for blaming confusing-to-them behaviors on “brainwashing” (which is not a thing). But Anti-Mormon captivity narratives have been a booming business for nearly  two hundred years, from Boadicea; the Mormon Wife (1855) and A Mormon Maid (1917)to “I Escaped a Cult” (2012) and the impending “Under the Banner of Heaven” series. For centuries, such narratives have titillated and terrified consumers with tales of Religion Gone Wrong. And every one presents the practice of polygyny as the defining characteristic and paradigmatic threat of Mormonism(s).

It should also go without saying–but again, too often does not–that the practice of polygyny does not now, nor has it ever defined Mormon theology or practice. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has not sanctioned “The Principle” since 1890; even within fundamentalist sects that do permit plural marriage, the practice is relatively rare. 

In my first book, Abusing Religion, I show that mainstream Americans (including the Texas State House of Representatives, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, Oprah, and Anderson Cooper 360, to name but a few) point to polygyny as evidence that Mormon fundamentalism is inherently abusive. I’ve argued that Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven draws a straight line from the murders of Brenda and Erica Lafferty through Mormon fundamentalism and Mormonism to religion itself as essentially violent, irrational, and sexually exploitative. Krakauer’s testimony in support of a 2005 Texas bill directly targeting an FLDS community in Eldorado was even more stark: he called polygyny “the bedrock of their religion” and insisted that “abuses seem to be part and parcel of every polygamous culture.  Or almost every polygamous culture.”

I seldom agree with Jon Krakauer on anything, but on this particular point we are in complete accord. Abuse absolutely happens in every polygamous culture, including that of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Because abuse happens everywhere. Sexual difference does not cause abuse. Systems that protect abusers facilitate and perpetuate abuse.

We might best understand Under the Banner of Heaven as Krakauer’s attempt to save Mormon fundamentalist women from being abused and held hostage by their religion (irrational, as per Banner) and their menfolk (violent and exploitative). Krakauer went to great lengths to save these women, including spending “thousands and thousands of dollars of [his] own money” on flying over the FLDS-owned Yearning for Zion ranch and conducting surveillance operations with private investigator Sam Brower to hunt down Warren Jeffs. But despite fixating “obsessively” on saving Mormon fundamentalist women, Krakauer never seems to let them speak for themselves. Instead, he presented the practice of polygyny as evidence of abuse before the Texas House of Representatives and helped provoke the largest custodial seizure of children in American history.

After the raid on Yearning for Zion, however, Mormon fundamentalist mothers stepped forward and spoke out. Marie J. Musser is one of dozens of women whose children were seized by Texas Child and Protective Services. Soft-spoken and sobbing, Musser stared directly into the Salt Lake Tribune’s camera: “They think we are brainwashed or whatever. How can you tell? Who will believe that they’re really happy? The children are so happy. They are being abused from this experience. They haven’t known abuse until this experience… I just want my children back.” 

Musser also published her firsthand account of the raid and the events that followed on the FLDS-owned domain TruthWillPrevail .org.“We have been a persecuted and driven people,” she wrote. “Why are we not accepted by the world? Because we are different,and that scares the world.” After being taken from Yearning for Zion, Musser frequently asked why she, her children,and somany other members of her community had been removed. “I just wanted someone to tell me what I did wrong, what law I had broken for them to want to take my children.” She was insistent that no children had been abused by community members. “That kind of grossness has no place in our religion. . . . If anyone treated another person like that in our religion, we would not put up with it and would turn the offender in. . . . Child abuse is far from the teachings we are taught.” After being lied to by CPS workers and forced to leave her three sons in state protective custody, she lamented, “Oh, does anyone in this America know what has happened to our children? Does anyone care? . . . I have done no harm to any creature, yet hereI am, not allowed back to my home and my children taken. Where can I go to a land like I thought America was?” Again and again, Musser denied abuse within FLDS and called the state’s seizure of FLDS children abusive.

The most challenging aspect of Banner and its aftermath is that abuse was happening at Yearning for Zion and in other FLDS communities – because abuse happens everywhere; because families are often unsafe places for women and children; because many Mormon fundamentalist families are isolated, impoverished, rigidly patriarchal, and lack equitable access to education; because Warren Jeffs is a sexual predator who exploited his religious and material advantages over a community that trusted him to lead them; because those closest to him dismissed sexual abuse allegations against Jeffs as the latest in centuries of Gentile attempts to discredit Mormon fundamentalism and its prophets.

But Musser is also right: the practice of polygyny is not evidence of abuse; children seized by the state and forcibly separated by their parents are abused by that experience – to say nothing of the abuses they are likely to experience within the foster system charged to care for those children in their parents’ stead. 

A slick semi-prestige limited series on Hulu can and will do little to confront or disrupt the complexities of abuse within and beyond FLDS. (Even Andrew Garfield’s charisma can only do so much.) I was encouraged to learn that Lindsay Hansen Park consulted on the television adaptation of Banner and hope the series reflects the nuance of Park’s previous work on plural marriage. It remains to be seen whether Krakauer’s work will maintain its primacy after the series’ release, but two centuries of successful and profitable anti-Mormon anti-polygamy media suggest that Banner will continue to hold the American religious imagination captive for some time to come. 

If we cannot escape Under the Banner of Heaven–if it is, in fact, inexorable–I can only hope we will use its most recent irruption as an occasion to confront and reject its premise: that religion is violent, irrational, and exploitative; that practices of sexual difference are evidence of abuse; that children are acceptable casualties in America’s ongoing definitional wars of religion. Let this television series provoke us to ask what work is done by media that revels in depictions of abuse within minority religious communities but fails to depict members of those communities in their full humanity or create viable means of exit for those made religiously and materially unsafe in their own homes. Let us consider how media that further marginalizes vulnerable religious outsiders creates the conditions of possibility for abuse to flourish.