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.
Last week, people flocked to Layton, UT, for the 29th annual Book of Mormon Evidence conference, hosted by the FIRM Foundation. Headline speakers included Heartland apologist Rod Meldrum, Wayne May, publisher of Ancient American Magazine (a publication with historic connections to the American Nazi Party), Eric Moutsos, an activist who became known in the state for his stance against pandemic restrictions, Hannah Stoddard of the Joseph Smith Foundation, and Tim Ballard, the Executive Director of OUR Rescue.
The list of speakers represented a particular Mormon identity: politically and theologically conservative, orthodox, and traditional in their approach to apologetics. In her self-published apologetics videos on faith crises and Mormon apologetics, Hannah Stoddard noted that there are progressive and traditional approaches to understanding the history and doctrine of the LDS Church. In her words, she takes a traditional approach and finds the growing movement toward secular scholarship concerning. According to the Joseph Smith Foundation, for example, secular approaches to Mormon history and doctrine have expedited faith crises and caused young members of the Church to question core doctrines. Contrary to the scholarship ushered into the Church by Leonard Arrington and his sucessors, attendees of the FIRM foundation argue that traditionalism and adherence to a perceived past are the ways to retain the youth.
More than just a location of the Book of Mormon, Hearltanderism argues that their position is the historic position of the LDS Church and that the United States is the promised land foretold in the Book of Mormon and spoken about by the Church’s earliest leaders.
Because of their apologetic approach, the FIRM Foundation is also home to a second segment of Mormonism. The first time I traveled to the Expo was to meet up with friends who traveled from Nevada for the conference. Prior to the start of the conference, we met at Joe Vera’s Mexican Restaurant. I sipped a Diet Coke as they had horchata and chatted about their most anticipated presentations. They had horchata because caffeine is against their Word of Wisdom.
They are Mormon fundamentalists and represent a growing segment of FIRM’s fanbase. For clarity, “fundamentalism” in this context does not refer to a more conservative or orthodox way of being Mormon, akin to the Christian fundamentalism that emerged in the early twentieth century. It refers to the historic LDS way of designating Mormons who are not part of the LDS Church and practice polygamy with living partners.
This year, in addition to the usual speakers who have participated in the conference for years, FIRM hosted a large number of Mormon fundamentalists. Their religious affiliation is not listed nor advertised by either the individual speakers or the foundation’s website. But, their presence reinforces the stark reality that the formation of the fundamentalist movement in the 1920s did not create the clear boundaries that the LDS Church anticipated.
The FIRM Foundation is a space where Mormon fundamentalism is familiar and mundane. It is not the religious tradition associated with sensationalist reporting or compound raids but simply another way to be Mormon.
There are Heartlanders and participants in FIRM who are faithful members of the LDS Church and sustain President Nelson as both President of the Church and President of the Priesthood. But, because those are not the only Mormons present, the FIRM foundation is a stark example of why it is worth questioning what we’re talking about when we talk about Mormonism.
Jennifer Champoux is a scholar of Latter-day Saint visual art and a co-editor of Approaching the Tree: Interpreting 1 Nephi 8, forthcoming from the Neal A. Maxwell Institute. Her current projects include directing the Book of Mormon Art Catalog (a digital database launching soon) and writing a book on artist C. C. A. Christensen for the Introductions to Mormon Thought series published by the University of Illinois Press.
I write this from 40,000 feet over the Atlantic, returning home after the Mormon Scholars in the Humanities (MSH) conference at Pembroke College, Oxford. This year’s theme of “aesthetics” fostered a lively discussion about the meaning and function of art within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Among the presenters was Mark Wrathall, who, drawing on Nietzsche, postulated that the experience of true beauty (encompassing the lovely and agreeable as well as the challenging and painful) creates a new reality and teaches us to feel differently.[1] His remarks made me wonder, does Latter-day Saint religious art allow for true beauty understood this way? Can it initiate an emotional response that opens a space for discovery and revelation? Does it make us uncomfortable in a way that reorients us? Or does it sanitize our experience of discipleship and keep us at arm’s length from the messiness of life?
These are the kinds of questions asked in Gary Ettari’s new Mormonism, Empathy, and Aesthetics: Beholding the Body (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), which makes a significant contribution to the growing field of art scholarship in the Latter-day Saint tradition. Ettari is an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. His fascinating book fruitfully draws from early Christian thinkers, Latter-day Saint rhetoric and scripture, and contemporary neurological and aesthetic theories to examine religious art.
The Utah State Historical Society and Utah Division of State History invite proposals for papers, sessions, panels, or multi-media presentations for the 70th annual history conference this fall. Scholars, researchers, educators, students, and members of the public are encouraged to submit proposals that explore the connection of water to our collective past and future.
Date: Wednesday, October 26, 2022
Location: Provo Marriott Hotel and Convention Center, 101 West 100 North, Provo, Utah
The Book of Mormon Studies Association (BoMSA) is pleased to announce its sixth annual meeting, to be held in person on October 6–8, 2022, at Utah State University. The event is sponsored by USU’s Department of Religious Studies and with thanks to Patrick Mason, the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture.
This annual event gathers a variety of scholars invested in serious academic study of the Book of Mormon. It has no particular theme but instead invites papers on any subject related to the Book of Mormon from any viable academic angle. This year’s two plenary guests will be Ann Taves (University of California Santa Barbara) and David Holland (Harvard Divinity School).
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.”