Under The Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

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After learning of Ron’s passing Brenda’s older sister Sharon Wright Weeks told the Deseret News, “It’s over. I just feel a huge amount of relief.” However, she did express sympathy for the Lafferty family. “I don’t forget for one minute that they lost a family member today,” she said. “It’s hard for them, too. It’s hard for everybody.” In his bestselling books Into Thin Air and Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer explored the extreme ambitions of men who tested themselves against Mount Everest and the Alaskan wilderness. In Under the Banner of Heaven, he turns to a different kind of extremism: religious fanaticism and the violence it spawns. Spiritual insight is a virtue/skill/capacity for all those who are bona fide members of the Mormon priesthood, which includes all Mormon men. This patriarchal egalitarianism appears almost Roman in its presumption that the boundaries of the state end where the household begins. The state has no right to intrude upon family matters, even if these involve questions of statutory rape, child abuse or paedophilia. The paterfamilias is sovereign in his sphere. Read More: 14 Book-to-Screen Adaptations to Catch in 2022 Why did Ron and Dan Lafferty kill Brenda Wright Lafferty? It’s an elegant and even topical adaptation that dares to ask big questions. What in this fallen world can make a believer doubt their faith? Should the godly render unto Caesar? Or should they hole up in a log cabin to do battle against his diabolical forces?

The second, confusingly jumbled timeline follows Brenda’s uncomfortable fit into the Lafferty family – she’s an aspiring journalist from less conservative Idaho, they’re Utah Mormon stalwarts with an ugly history of abuse by terrifying patriarch Ammon (Christopher Heyerdahl). The brunt of his violent anger falls on eldest sons Ron (Sam Worthington, with the wobbliest accent in a cast of primarily non-American actors) and Dan (an unnerving Wyatt Russell), whose repeated humiliations seem to undergird a vague slide into anti-tax libertarianism, spousal abuse and eventually polygamy. The book was adapted as a limited series of the same name that began airing in April 2022 on FX on Hulu.

The Killing of Brenda and Erica Lafferty

Ron, like Dan, turned toward fundamentalism while under economic pressure. The bank was about to foreclose on his home -- he would sometimes break into tears over his family's plight -when Dan convinced him that God wanted him to forsake material goals and become a fundamentalist missionary. Dan also drew his four other brothers into the fold, but there was one problem: Brenda, the wife of his brother Allen. As the Lafferty boys started espousing polygamy and other strange things, Brenda urged the other wives to resist. And Ron's wife took Brenda's advice in spades. She divorced Ron and took the children to Florida. So when Ron's divine revelation about Brenda's ''removal'' arrived, he was in a receptive frame of mind.

After the Manifesto, some members broke away from the mainstream church to form what eventually became the FLDS Church, the most popular group of fundamentalist Mormonism. The FLDS Church continues to encourage polygamy, as do some other breakaway groups.An incisive look inside isolated Mormon Fundamentalist communities in America, this gripping work of non-fiction illuminates an otherwise confounding realm of human behaviour. The slayings had been committed by Allen Lafferty’s older brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who engaged in a more extreme, but small sect of Mormonism called School of the Prophets. The two joined the group after they were both excommunicated from the LDS Church for their fundamentalist views, which included their embrace of polygamy. (The School of the Prophets has been referred to as a “polygamist cult” by the Associated Press.) I've seen, here in the West Indies, how a cult can gain both the practice and the legitimacy of an established religion within a few generations. There are two routes to this. The first is the government is willing to recognise it and allow it tax-exempt status in which case it becomes part of the establishment The second is that it becomes an issue of political-correctness and people and the media must appear to pay the cult at least the lip-service of respect whether or not it deserves it. I'm talking about Rastafarianism of course. And I've read it here in this book as a cult developed into what would become the FLDS (still a cult) and the mainstream Mormons.