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Under the
Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Quest for Truth What started for Jon Krakauer as a journey
to find out what draws individuals to religion, ended up as a Wild West tale
of murder by religious fanatics in his new book, Under the
Banner of Heaven. Readers who wonder about the formation of religious
fanatics will find reams of material in this well-written book. Krakauer does
a fine job in presenting the history of the Mormons, and the factors that led
to the rise of Mormon Fundamentalists. With that foundation in place, the
horrors that Krakauer describes can be somewhat understood. Here’s an
excerpt, Chapter 13, “The Lafferty Boys,” (pp. 134-41): It should be obvious
to any man who is not one himself
that the land is overrun with messiahs.
. . . It should be a matter
of common observation that this clamour
of voices represents the really vigorous
wing of American religious life. Here is
religion in action, and religion actively
in the making. . . . The truth
is, of course, that the land is
simply teeming with
faith—that marked credulity that accompanies periods of great religious
awakening and seems to be with us
a permanent state of mind. By no
stretch of the vocabulary could our
age be called an age of doubt; it
is rather an age of incredible faith. CHARLES
W. FERGUSON, THE
CONFUSION OE TONGUES After
Dan Lafferty read The Peace Maker and resolved to start
living the principle of plural marriage, he announced to his wife, Matilda,
that he intended to wed her oldest daughter—his stepdaughter. At the last
minute, however, he abandoned that plan and instead married a Romanian immigrant
named Ann Randak, who took care of some of Robert Redford's horses on a ranch
up Spanish Fork Canyon, in the mountains east of the Dream Mine. Ann and Dan
had met when he'd borrowed a horse from her to ride in a local parade. She
wasn't LDS, says Dan, "but she was open to new experiences. Becoming my
plural wife was her idea." Ann, he adds, "was a lovely girl. I
called her my gypsy bride." Living
according to the strictures laid down in The Peace Maker
felt good to Dan—it felt right, as though this really was the way God
intended men and women to live. Inspired, Dan sought out other texts about
Mormonism as it was practiced in the early years of the church. It
didn't take him long to discover that polygamy wasn't the only divine
principle the modern LDS Church had abandoned in its eagerness to be accepted
by American society. Dan learned that in the nineteenth century, both Joseph
Smith and Brigham Young had preached about the righteousness of a sacred
doctrine known as "blood atonement": certain grievous acts
committed against Mormons, as Brigham explained it, could be rectified only
if the "sinners have their blood spilt upon the ground." And Dan
learned that Joseph had taught that the laws of God take precedence over the
laws of men. Legal
theory was a subject of particular interest to Dan. His curiosity had first
been aroused when he was training to be a chiropractor in California,
following a run-in he had with state and county authorities. At
the time, he supported his family primarily by running a small sandwich
business out of their home. Dan, Matilda, and the oldest kids would get out
of bed before dawn every morning in order to make and wrap stacks of
"all-natural" vegetarian sandwiches, which Dan would then sell to
other chiropractic students during the lunch hour. "It
was a very profitable little hustle," Dan says proudly. "Or it was
until the Board of Health closed me down for not following regulations. They
claimed I needed a license, and that I wasn't paying the required
taxes." Just before he was put out of business, Matilda had given birth
to a baby boy. Money was tight. Losing their main source of income was
problematic. It also proved to be a pivotal event in Dan’s passage to
fundamentalism. "After
they shut me down," Dan recalls, "I didn't know quite what to do.
It didn't seem right to me that the government would penalize me just for
being ambitious and trying to support my family—that they would actually
force me to go on welfare instead of simply letting me run my little
business. It seemed so stupid—the worst kind of government intrusion. In The
Book of Mormon, Moroni talks about how all of us have an
obligation to make sure we have a good and just government, and when I read
that, it really got me going. It made me realize that I needed to start
getting involved in political issues. And I saw that when it comes right down
to it, you can't really separate political issues from religious issues.
They're all tied up together." Upon
completing his chiropractic training and returning to Utah, Dan went to work
as a chiropractor for his father. By then the Lafferty parents had sold their
farm and bought a house in the old part of downtown Provo; Dan’s father ran
his practice out of a basement office in this home. In 1981, shortly after
Dan started working for Watson Sr., the LDS Church sent both of the elder
Laffertys abroad on a two-year mission, at which point Dan and his younger
brother Mark (who had graduated the Los Angeles College of Chiropractic six
months after Dan), agreed to take over the practice in their father's
absence. Dan
and Mark had always enjoyed each others company. "As children,"
says Dan, "we were inseparable." Every morning and evening of their
childhood they sat together across a milk pail to milk the family cow. They
spent their summer vacations practically joined at the hip, "playing in
the barns, jumping in the hay, throwing the football, playing in our tree
hut," he recalls. "It's funny to remember how hard it was to stop
playing even long enough to get a drink or take a pee. Nothing tasted so good
as cold water from the faucet that filled the watering trough, and nothing
felt so good as taking a pee when the pressure got so bad we had to stop
playing because you couldn't hold it any longer." When
their younger brothers—Tim, Watson Jr., and Alien—were old enough, the
smaller boys eagerly joined in Dan and Marks escapades. Then, says Dan,
"we'd all line up along the fence, oldest to youngest, and have a group
pee. The little guys loved to do what Mark and I did, especially lining up to
pee on a fence." When
Dan and Mark started working together in their father's office, the special
closeness they had shared in their youth was rekindled. During breaks between
patients they engaged in heartfelt discussions about everything that was most
important to them—and increasingly what seemed most important concerned
religious doctrine and its power to remedy the insidious evils inflicted by
the government on its citizens. Regarding
the timing of these heart-to-heart talks, Dan reports, "I began to
observe a fascinating phenomenon." Dan and Mark were usually so busy
seeing patients that often several days would pass between their
religious-political discourses. But on those days when they would
unexpectedly have gaps in the schedule in which to talk at length, says Dan,
"rather mysteriously, my younger brothers would show up, unannounced.
And we would have some very, very valuable time discussing issues."
These impromptu get-togethers happened often enough, says Dan, "that it
seemed like it had to be more than just a coincidence." Five of the six
Lafferty brothers—Dan, Mark, Watson, Tim, and Alien—were usually present for
these ad hoc conferences; the only brother who failed to attend was Ron, the
eldest of the Lafferty offspring, who was six years older than Dan, and had
always acted less like a sibling than a father figure to his brothers. Dan
usually led the discussions, which inevitably described how the government
had far exceeded its constitutionally mandated reach and was dangerously out
of control. Buttressing his arguments by quoting scripture from The Book
of Mormon, he patiently explained to his brothers that the
government had no right to require American citizens to obtain any kind of
license, or pay taxes, or submit to the oppressive burden of a Social
Security number. "I had come to realize," Dan says, "that a
license was simply an agreement with the government to let them have control
of your life. And I decided I didn't want them to have control of my life. .
. . I already had a basic right to enjoy all of the basic activities of a
human being, without their permission." Although
Dan had not yet allied himself with any established fundamentalist church or
prophet, his self-directed studies had transformed him into a de facto Mormon
Fundamentalist—and an exceedingly ardent one. The impetus for most
fundamentalist movements—whether Mormon, Catholic, Evangelical Christian,
Muslim, or Jewish—is a yearning to return to the mythical order and
perfection of the original church. Dan Lafferty was moved by this same
desire. The
more he studied historical Mormon documents, the more certain Dan became that
the LDS Church had blundered off course around 1890, when then-president and
prophet Wilford Woodruff was coerced into doing away with the doctrine of
plural marriage by the godless government in Washington, D.C. The modern LDS
Church, Dan had become convinced, was an elaborate fraud. Like
fundamentalists in other faiths, he was intent on adhering unfailingly to
God's "true" commandments, as determined by a rigorously literal
interpretation of his church's earliest and most sacred texts. And he was no
less intent on adhering to the "true" commandments of his country's
earliest and most sacred texts, as well. To Dan, such documents as the Book
of Mormon, The Peace Maker, the United
States Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence are all of a piece:
they are holy scriptures that provide a direct link to the Almighty. The
authority that flows from their divinely inspired sentences is absolute and
immutable. And it is the duty of righteous men and women to conduct their
lives according to a stringently literal reading of those sentences. For
people like Dan who view existence through the narrow lens of literalism, the
language in certain select documents is assumed to possess extraordinary
power. Such language is to be taken assiduously at face value, according to a
single incontrovertible interpretation that makes no allowance for nuance,
ambiguity, or situational contingencies. As Vincent Crapanzano observes in
his book Serving the Word, Dan Lafferty's brand of
literalism encourages a closed, usually (though not necessarily)
politically conservative view of the world: one with a stop-time notion of
history and a we-and-they approach to people, in which we are
possessed of truth, virtue, and goodness and they of falsehood,
depravity, and evil. It looks askance at figurative language, which, so long
as its symbols and metaphors are vital, can open—promiscuously in the eyes of
the strict literalist—the world and its imaginative possibilities. For
his part, Dan scoffs at this sort of pointy-headed exegesis. "I was just
on a quest," he insists. "A quest to find the truth." After
seeking guidance through prayer and receiving confirmation that he was acting
in accordance with the Lord's wishes, Dan sent his driver's license back to
the state of Utah, revoked his marriage license, and returned his Social
Security card. He ignored posted speed limits, which he believed were
illegal, and simply drove "wisely and carefully" instead. And
he quit paying taxes of any kind—including the sales tax when he shopped in
local stores, which provoked frequent confrontations with cashiers. Energized
by the self-evident righteousness of his crusade, in the summer of 1982 Dan
declared himself a candidate for sheriff of Utah County and embarked on a
lively political campaign, speaking at public forums, writing letters to the
Provo newspaper, doing radio interviews, and riding in small-town parades. He
promised, if elected, to enforce the laws according to a scrupulously literal
interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. As he explained, "My motive in
running was to restore the primacy of Common Law juries, and to restore the
fundamentals of the Constitution." On
October 4, 1982, Dan was driving home after meeting with another candidate
for sheriff (the American Fork police chief, with whom Dan had hoped to
engage in a public debate), when he was stopped on Interstate 15 by a Utah
state trooper for speeding and not having a vehicle inspection sticker.
"I had already had some confrontations with the officer who pulled me
over," Dan allows. "He knew I would be driving home from this
debate meeting, and he had set a trap for me. They wanted to get a felony against
me so I couldn't run for office, and they swarmed me on the freeway. I had
just published an important article in the paper—a very important
article—which had really unnerved a lot of people, about how the powers of
government were being improperly used through improper warrants of arrest—how
it was unconstitutional to stop a person on the freeway and arrest them. "When
the officer pulled me over, he told me he had read my article—I've got it
right here in my car,' he said. So I told him, 'Well, if you've read the article,
you understand why you can't arrest me right now. If you want to arrest me,
go get a warrant from a judge, bring it to my home, and I'll conform to the
proper procedures.' " Dan had by now locked the car doors and rolled up
all the windows, leaving only a one-inch gap at the top of the driver's
window, which, he says, "I figured was narrow enough to keep a hand from
reaching in and grabbing me, but would allow me to talk to the officer." The
trooper wasn't amused. He ordered Dan out of the car. "When I refused to
get out," says Dan, "the cop did something I hadn't anticipated: he
grabbed the top of the window with both hands and pulled hard, pulling the
window out of its tracks, and then he tried to reach in and grab me. So I
said, 'Well, I gotta go now! See you later!' and took off." The
state troopers gave chase and apprehended Dan a short while later. He was
charged with five crimes (including second-degree felony escape, third-degree
felony assault by a prisoner, and evading an officer) and locked up in the
county jail. At his justice court trial, Dan served as his own attorney and
attempted to mount a defense based on several arcane points of constitutional
law. The judge repeatedly pointed out, however, that justice courts in Utah
are not empowered to hear constitutional matters, which infuriated Dan. He
was further angered when the judge overruled his objection to the makeup of
the four-woman jury (Dan argued that he was entitled to have at least one
male on the jury). When
Dan ignored the judges instructions and continued to argue his case on
constitutional grounds, the exasperated judge declared him in contempt of
court—at which point Dan's brothers and several other supporters staged a
riot in the courtroom, shouting that they were placing the judge, prosecutor,
and court clerk under "citizen's arrest." In the middle of this
melee, Dan stood up and loudly admonished the judge, "In the name of
Christ, do justice or be struck down!" In
the end, the theatrics didn't do anything to help his case. Dan was sent to
the state prison for a forty-five-day psychiatric evaluation, then
transferred to the county jail to serve a thirty-day sentence. His
stay behind bars only hardened his resolve. As a matter of principle, he
stopped paying the property taxes on his father's home and business. His
father's property, Dan explains, was "owned free and clear. By paying
property taxes, you are basically telling the government that they're the
ones who really own the property, because you give them the right to take it from
you if you don't pay your taxes. And I was willing to force a standoff to
determine who actually owned that property." When
that inevitable standoff occurred, Dan did not prevail. The Utah County
assessor notified him that the county was taking possession of the Lafferty
home for nonpayment of taxes, as well as seizing all of Watson Lafferty's
office equipment. At which point Dan politely informed the assessors office
"that I intended to defend myself against any invasion of my
constitutional God-given rights." Dan's
four younger brothers fully supported him in his ongoing battles with the
state. But when Dans father—who was still out of the country on his LDS
mission—learned that his home and business equipment were about to be
auctioned off for nonpayment of taxes, he was furious. Watson Sr. called Dan
from abroad to express his profound displeasure, and to accuse Dan of
"hypnotizing" his brothers; the Lafferty patriarch even suggested
that Dan was trying to hypnotize him and Claudine from afar, over the
telephone line. Watson
managed to save his home from the auction block by cutting short his mission
and rushing back to Provo with Claudine, but he remained furious at Dan.
Although his fathers wrath saddened Dan, it did not dissuade him from his
crusade. During
the last months of 1982 through early 1983, that crusade became more overtly
religious, and Dan's four younger brothers became increasingly infected with
his fundamentalist zeal. The Lafferty boys started meeting on a more regular
basis to discuss the merits of polygamy and other principles advocated in The
Peace Maker. When three of Dan’s brothers attempted to impose
these principles in their own homes, however, their wives refused and began
to complain to Dianna—the wife of Ron, the eldest Lafferty brother—about the
disturbing changes in their husbands' personalities. Each day’s news stories in recent months
and years has offered something disturbing at what individuals around the
world are willing to do in the name of their faith and to follow their image
of God and an interpretation of God’s will for them. In the modern Wild West
in America, there are individuals and groups who are relentless in their
attempt to create and preserve a religious faith, even to the extent of committing
acts of violence, including murder, in the name of their faith. Under the
Banner of Heaven takes readers inside one such segment of American
society, and what we learn is frightening. Steve Hopkins, August 22, 2003 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the September
2003 issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Under
the Banner of Heaven.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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