Reaction to "Under the Banner of Heaven" (about Mormons)

This is a 2003 book by Jon Krakauer about the Mormon Church, focusing in the present on the breakaway fundamentalist sects that consider polygamy a key part of the religion, but it also described the early history of the church, which I found to be the most interesting part.

Joseph Smith was a sort of con artist before he became a prophet. It's impressive that he could make up the entire Book of Mormon while staring into a hat with a special stone at the bottom (someone else writing down his thoughts). He must have had a fabulous imagination.

Joseph received direct revelation from God, and told those who followed him that they too would directly experience God's presence -- a popular aspect of the religion. The problem was that if God could give revelations to Joseph, it could give them to anyone else too. So within a couple years Smith had a revelation that God only gave revelations to him, not the other folks, but it was too late. And it set in motion the Mormon history of splintering into factions, because pretty often some man listening to the voice of God will hear that they are destined to be the leader "mighty and strong" who will reveal God's plan on earth, which is mostly incompatible with a faction where someone else has already claimed that role.

The history of polygamy fascinated me. As best I can tell, it arose from the fact that Joseph Smith was surrounded by lots of very attractive women, many of whom idolized him. It couldn't really be that he was not intended to enjoy them sexually, could it? You can imagine some prophets might just figure they could sleep with them but not marry them, but not Smith. Thus he had a revelation that plural marriage was a great thing. As such, he didn't just enjoy them sexually, he got to own them. The next fascinating part is that he floated a trial balloon to his followers about plural marriage, and the reaction was swift and very negative. So he had another private revelation that while plural marriage was great, the time was not right to reveal it publicly. He did take several wives during this period, but apparently it was known only to an inner circle. It caused some consternation. It was only after Smith's death, as the Mormons were on their way to Utah that the doctrine of plural marriage was revealed to the entire community.

Mormonism is historically a very hierarchical religion, to say the least. Only in 1978 did the head of the LDS church have the revelation that black men might be full human beings and thus be eligible for the priesthood. Women are never allowed into the priesthood -- they are spiritually inferior beings. If church elders tell someone what to do, they are expected to obey unquestioningly (at least traditionally).

Much of the book that is set in the present describes a pair of gruesome murders carried out by Ron and Dan Lafferty. That didn't interest me all that much, since there are wackos all over and I don't like to focus on some particular heinous crime unless it's a symbol of a bigger pattern. The Mormon traditions of violence and direct revelation may have made that crime more likely, but it did not strike me as a dramatic effect

But also in the present Krakauer maps out the sizable fundamentalist sects that continue to believe in plural marriage as a key component of the faith. It's not unreasonable, since only with the prospect of the LDS religion being forcibly dissolved by the US government did the leaders finally receive the revelation in 1890 that polygamy was wrong -- and they continued to carry on plural marriages secretly for many years afterwards. In the fundamentalist sects today, girls are told who they will marry, often at age 14. They are also told that if they refuse or disobey their husbands in any way, they are going straight to hell. Some seem content with this reality but naturally some do not. I find little to admire in the LDS, and find this form of the religion even more repugnant.

What did surprise me about the book is that there was not a single mention of how the other men feel who never get to have any wives at all. That is the inescapable result of the leaders taking multiple wives, but somehow it is never addressed at all. I would be interested in some statistics on just how many of the women end up in plural marriages, how many in monogamous marriages, and what percentage of men ever marry.

I have heard it suggested that worldwide, polygamous societies are associated with greater violence. An oversimplified view is that the large numbers of unmarried men lack the stabilizing influence of a wife and family.