I always look forward to Elaine Frei’s well-written, thought-provoking comments. Now she has graced us with her review and reflections of Under the Banner of Heaven, John Krakauer’s controversial expos?© of the murders of a mother and her infant daughter by Fundamentalist Mormons. What makes Krakauer’s coverage of these killings especially relevant for discussion here is that the murderers claimed that they followed divine revelation. This is the first part of two; the second half will go up tomorrow.
I’ve always been interested in the things people believe and why they believe them. I even studied the subject at university, when I focused my Intercultural Studies work on the anthropology of religion. Then, a few years ago, but after I finished school, I encountered a book that stirred my curiosity further, renewed my determination to look at belief more closely. It also opened up a new dimension of that interest that I had not really thought much about before. That was the question of what belief leads people – as individuals and as groups – to do. That book wasn’t the only thing that emphasized this practical aspect of belief in my mind. Certainly, the events of September 11, 2001, made me aware that beliefs have practical consequences in the real world in a way that I had not thought about that issue before. But 9/11 was such an overwhelming event that I had tried not to plunge too deeply into its implications, including the particular issue of belief and action.
When I read Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (Random House, 2003), by Jon Krakauer, however, I realized that I could not ignore that aspect of belief. The actions individuals and groups undertake in the name of what they believe are an integral part of the examination of belief, belief systems, and the people that hold to them. Belief isn’t only, or even mostly, internal. Not in its formation and certainly not in its practice. Everyone’s actions, every day, depend on what they believe, how strongly they believe, and how they think others feel about the beliefs they hold. And, like it or not, our actions affect the lives of others, and others’ actions affect our lives every single day.
In Under the Banner of Heaven, Krakauer looks at the story of how belief impacted the lives of Brenda and Erica Lafferty, a young mother and her infant daughter, when two of her brothers-in-law came to believe that God was sending them revelations, including the instructions to kill Brenda and Erica. Admittedly, this is an extreme example of the impact of belief on individuals, but it is an example that cannot and should not be ignored. That horrible 1984 case is, in turn, really just a jumping-off point for Krakauer‚Äôs examination of various offshoots of the Mormon faith which have not abandoned the early beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints as introduced by the faith‚Äôs founder, Joseph Smith. These doctrines include plural marriage and blood atonement, doctrines that the official Mormon church, headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, has long since officially abandoned and proscribed. Included in the offshoots which accept one or another or more of the doctrines in question are the so-called “Mormon fundamentalist” sects such as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also known as the United Effort Plan (UEP). There are also individual fundamentalist believers such as Brian David Mitchell, aka Immanuel David Isaiah, who was accused of the widely-reported kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart in Utah in 2002. Besides modern examples of the acceptance of these doctrines, Krakauer also looks at some of the events that such beliefs led to during the early years of what grew into the mainstream Mormon church, when those beliefs were still openly held and practiced. Krakauer‚Äôs main examples of this aspect of the story are the events surrounding the introduction of plural marriage by Joseph Smith and the issues and events surrounding the Mountain Meadows Massacre and its aftermath.
Ron and Dan Lafferty, Brenda and Erica Lafferty’s murderers, were adherents of some of those earlier, now mostly abandoned doctrines of early Mormonism. Raised in orthodox Mormonism, the Lafferty brothers came to accept the idea that the mainstream church had been wrong in abandoning plural marriage, blood atonement, and other doctrines and practices that the orthodox church currently denies. Theirs is a story of what deeply held faith can lead people to do. Krakauer’s account of this story is a fascinating, meticulously researched, and well-written account that reads like a novel.
Ron and Dan Lafferty had both been excommunicated from the mainstream Mormon church for their fundamentalist beliefs. At the same time, a man named Bob Crossfield, a convert to mainstream Mormonism who ultimately styled himself as “The Prophet Onias” had begun a School of the Prophets modeled on an organization of the same name started by Joseph Smith in 1832. One of his aims as the leader of a fundamentalist Mormon sect was to “restore the gift of revelation” to modern Mormons by teaching them “how to hear the ‚Äòstill small voice‚Äô of God”, basically how to receive and interpret revelation. One of Onias‚Äô followers, Bernard Brady, met one of the Lafferty brothers and as a result first Dan and then the rest of the brothers were invited to join the school. The only brother who didn‚Äôt attend was Allen, whose wife Brenda would not allow him to do so. The school began to meet every week, and eventually Ron was called by Onias as bishop to the school‚Äôs Provo, Utah chapter.
Ron was the first of the brothers to receive a revelation under Onias‚Äô tutelage, and he received around 20 of them in February and March of 1984. In late March, he received what came to be known as the “removal revelation”, which said that Brenda Lafferty and her daughter Erica, along with Chloe Low, and Richard Stowe were to be killed. Stowe was the stake president who excommunicated Ron in 1983 and had extended financial aid to Ron‚Äôs wife Dianna while she was in the process of divorcing Ron. Low took Dianna, along with Ron‚Äôs children, into her home on more than one occasion while her marriage was breaking up. Brenda Lafferty, besides not allowing her husband to participate in the School of the Prophets, encouraged Dianna to divorce Ron after his excommunication.
At first, Ron only told Dan about the removal revelation, and then only because he had received another revelation that seemed to indicate that Dan was to do the actual killing. Ron was apparently disturbed by what the revelation said, and Dan didn’t disabuse him of that concern. He told Ron that it was important to make sure that the revelation was from God. If it wasn’t, it would be wrong to act on it, but if it was from God it would offend God if he didn’t act on it. Finally, Ron showed the revelation to Bernard Brady, who said flat out that he thought it was wrong and that he didn’t want to have anything to do with it. Brady was concerned enough that he prepared an affidavit stating that he believed the lives of the individuals named in the revelation, as well as the lives of several others, were in danger. However, after he signed the affidavit and had it notarized he took it home and put it in a drawer. He didn’t call the police, and neither did any of the other members of the school when they found out about the revelation. In addition, when Dan told Allen about the revelation, Allen said that he did not accept it as from God and would defend his wife and baby with his life. But Allen never told Brenda that Ron and Dan intended to kill her and Erica.
And there the matter remained until July 24, when Ron and Dan Lafferty entered Brenda and Ron Lafferty’s apartment and killed Brenda and Erica. They set out to kill Chloe Low and Richard Stowe as well, but no one was home at the Low home and they couldn’t figure out how to get to Stowe’s home. By then accompanied by two other men, they set out for Reno, where they were eventually apprehended by the police.
In reality, some might argue, the Laffertys‚Äô story is really just one of religious belief used as a tool for rationalizing what they chose to do in pursuit of their goals. These critics might say the murders were simple revenge for the frustration of Ron Lafferty‚Äôs goals, with Dan as his executioner, and that they knew their actions would violate the most deeply-held mores of the culture in which they were living. Indeed, one way of interpreting this story is that when they were faced with someone who was standing in the way of their desires to practice polygamy, Ron and Dan simply used archaic religious doctrines from their own religious upbringing to justify the murder of their sister-in-law and others, whom they saw as frustrating their wishes. In this explanation Erica might just be seen as “collateral damage”. After all, it was Brenda Lafferty who urged Ron‚Äôs wife to leave him over his desire to practice polygamy. Further, she was the one wife, out of all the brothers‚Äô spouses, who would not submit to any extent to their excursions into polygamous practice.
In truth, however, that seems a bit too Byzantine an explanation to be the whole truth. Every single day, people get angry at others who stand in the way of their desires. And every single day, people commit violent acts to remove those obstacles. Most of these people do not feel the need to fall back on some sort of religious belief system to justify their actions, to themselves or to others. That sort of long way around seems to me to be just too much work. The Lafferty brothers, as pointed out in Krakauer‚Äôs book, had a history of serious study of the doctrines they claimed as the reason for their crimes. It isn‚Äôt as if they killed Brenda and Erica and then belatedly added: “Oh, by the way, God told us to do it.”
Another way to look at this story, one that Krakauer specifically brings up in the course of his book, is that Ron Lafferty, in claiming to receive revelations and, to a lesser extent Dan in helping him to carry those revelations out, were victims of a delusion. Ron’s defense tried to use that argument in an insanity defense. However, one of the witnesses in Ron’s trial, Dr. Noel Gardner, a psychiatrist, testified that holding unusual religious beliefs does not necessarily mean that the person holding those beliefs is delusional. Gardner also testified that while Ron Lafferty might well fit the profile for one suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, most self-proclaimed prophets – including the founders of most major world religions – could be classed this way, and that very few of them were murderers. Consequently, it seems to me that one must finally conclude, at least on the basis of the information presented in Krakauer’s book, that Ron and Dan Lafferty were not mentally ill in a clinical sense. They believed that they were receiving revelations from God and came to those beliefs through rational study. Those with whom they had made common cause, while not accepting the removal revelation, believed just as fervently as the Laffertys did that revelation could, indeed, come from God. The Lafferty brothers’ actions in killing Brenda and Erica stemmed directly from, and were justified in their minds by, the beliefs they held.
The Laffertys’ story is a fascinating one, even if only in the same sense that any disaster is fascinating. The wider story Krakauer tells, of the birth, growth, and schism of a new religious movement and its offshoots is equally interesting. I would be willing to wager that, at least before the Warren Jeffs saga hit the media, most Americans had no idea that there is an entire town in the Arizona desert, north of the Grand Canyon and near the Utah border, that lives a strictly religious, polygamous lifestyle, led by a prophet (Jeffs) who wields near-total control over the lives of the town‚Äôs citizens, to the extent of reassigning the wives of apostates to other men. Even though I pay attention to such things, I did not know about this particular group until I read Krakauer‚Äôs book. Likewise, I did not realize until reading Under the Banner of Heaven that experts estimate of the number of fundamentalist Mormon polygamists at between thirty and one hundred thousand. Krakauer‚Äôs inclusion of the information about such groups serve as an illustration of the sort of schisms that have split believers in Joseph Smith‚Äôs teachings into widely diverse groups. This information also shows one of the sources of encouragement the Lafferty brothers might have had in their own split from the orthodox Mormonism of their upbringing.
Besides the story of the Lafferty murders, Krakauer covers a number of other issues related to Mormonism past and present. I’ll share some reflections on those issues, and the mainstream Mormon church’s critique of them, next time.
