beaconchurches

Under The Banner Of Heaven: The Story of Violent Faith

by Jon Krakauer

c. 2003

This is the second book I’ve read by Jon Krakauer and I have enjoyed both of them. Krakauer is a journalist and an outdoorsman. This book is not about the outdoors but about a religious movement among which he grew up. Krakauer is not Mormon but he grew up in a large Mormon community. He started out to explore the Mormon faith by writing a history of that faith. He ended up writing a book about not only this history of the Latter Day Saints church but also a history and psychological study of how the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints church developed out of the LDS.

This book is thoroughly researched and is complete with multiple interviews of the people involved in the various Mormon sects. I learned more about Mormonism in this few pages than I had ever known about it before. He explores the various FLDS colonies in Mexico, US and Canada. He exposes various leaders (including Joseph Smith) as sociopaths, pedophiles, adulterers, or a combination of the three.

He is honest about the beliefs, heirarchies and history of the LDS church and off-shoot sects. He notes several people who have been excommunicated by the mainstream Mormon church and even one who has been excommunicated by both the LDS and FLDS movements. He presents an honest look into the migration of the Mormons and the violence that followed them from New York to Utah and continues to dog them today.

He gives chapter and verse of the evolution of polygamy in the LDS and FLDS churches. And he tells all these stories under the backdrop of the murder of a woman and her baby daughter by her husband’s brother.

This book should be read by everyone in order to understand that just because a group calls themselves a church and says they believe in God, they may be dangerous–to themselves and others. In addition to being a false religion, Mormonism is dangerous to the people who practice it and to many who don’t. And it’s off-shoot–FLDS, is criminal in the behavior of its adherents.