More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jon Krakauer
Read between
June 9 - June 12, 2025
We believe in honesty, morality, and purity; but when they enact tyrannical laws, forbidding us the free exercise of our religion, we cannot submit. God is greater than the United States, and when the Government conflicts with heaven, we will be ranged under the banner of heaven and against the Government…. Polygamy is a divine institution. It has been handed down direct from God. The United States cannot abolish it. No nation on earth can prevent it, nor all the nations of the earth combined, . . . I defy the United States; I will obey God.
There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied. As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane—as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout—there may be no more potent force than religion.
But men have been committing heinous acts in the name of God ever since mankind began believing in deities, and extremists exist within all religions.
As a result of his (or her) infatuation, existence overflows with purpose. Ambiguity vanishes from the fanatic’s worldview; a narcissistic sense of self-assurance displaces all doubt. A delicious rage quickens his pulse, fueled by the sins and shortcomings of lesser mortals, who are soiling the world wherever he looks. His perspective narrows until the last remnants of proportion are shed from his life. Through immoderation, he experiences something akin to rapture.
Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off. Anything can happen. Absolutely anything. Common sense is no match for the voice of God—as the actions of Dan Lafferty vividly attest.
The schisms that shattered Mormonism time and again, more critical than inroads from without, only attest its strength. They were signs of the seriousness with which converts and dissenters took their salvation, ready to stake their souls on points of doctrine which a later, less Biblical generation could treat with indifference. WILLIAM MULDER AND A. RUSSELL MORTENSEN, AMONG THE MORMONS
The faith that moved Lafferty to slay his niece and sister-in-law is a brand of religion known as Mormon Fundamentalism; LDS Church authorities bristle visibly when Mormons and Mormon Fundamentalists are even mentioned in the same breath.
Nevertheless, Mormons and those who call themselves Mormon Fundamentalists (or FLDS) believe in the same holy texts and the same sacred history. Both believe that Joseph Smith, who founded Mormonism in 1830, played a vital role in God’s plan for mankind; both LDS and FLDS consider him to be a prophet comparable in stature to Moses and Isaiah.
The revered prophet described plural marriage as part of “the most holy and important doctrine ever revealed to man on earth” and taught that a man needed at least three wives to attain the “fullness of exaltation” in the afterlife.
Having jettisoned polygamy, Mormons gradually ceased to be regarded as a crackpot sect. The LDS Church acquired the trappings of a conventional faith so successfully that it is now widely considered to be the quintessential American religion.
In forsaking Section 132—the sacred principle of plural marriage—the LDS Church has gone badly astray, they warn. Fundamentalist prophets bellow from their pulpits that the modern church has become “the wickedest whore of all the earth.”
“I want to tell you that the greatest freedom you can enjoy is in obedience,” he has preached. “Perfect obedience produces perfect faith.” Like most FLDS prophets, his teachings rely heavily on fiery screeds penned in the nineteenth century by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.
Despite the fact that Uncle Rulon and his followers regard the governments of Arizona, Utah, and the United States as Satanic forces out to destroy the UEP, their polygamous community receives more than $6 million a year in public funds.
According to UEP dogma, wives do not belong to their husbands, nor do children belong to their parents; all are property of the priesthood and may be claimed at any time.
In Colorado City, the faithful are taught that apostates are more wicked than Gentiles, or even mainline Mormons.* In a sermon preached on July 16, 2000, Bishop Warren Jeffs (Uncle Rulon’s son and heir apparent) emphasized that an apostate “is the most dark person on earth.” Apostates, he explained, have “turned traitor on the priesthood and their own existence, and they are led about by their master: Lucifer. . . . Apostates are literally tools of the devil.”
Here is a community—many of the women, sadly, right along with the men—unalterably dedicated to the wicked theory that every maturing girl child should be forced into the bondage of multiple wifehood with men of all ages for the sole purpose of producing more children to be reared to become more chattels of this totally lawless enterprise.
In some polygamist relationships, particularly those involving young girls, there is a bit of brainwashing that goes on both before and after the illegal “marriages.” Girls are led to believe that such a relationship is one way to salvation. Then, they typically are taken as wives by men twice their ages.
“Predicting the end of the world is a win-win situation for Uncle Rulon,” apostate DeLoy Bateman observes. “You can always just blame it on the iniquities of the people if it doesn’t happen, and then use that as a club to hold over their heads and control them in the future.”
The essential principle of Mormonism is not polygamy at all, but the ambition of an ecclesiastical hierarchy to wield sovereignty; to rule the souls and lives of its subjects with absolute authority, unrestrained by any civil power. SALT LAKE TRIBUNE, FEBRUARY 15, 1885
Mormonism is a patriarchal religion, rooted firmly in the traditions of the Old Testament. Dissent isn’t tolerated. Questioning the edicts of religious authorities is viewed as a subversive act that undermines faith.
According to the Law of Chastity, sexual intercourse is officially forbidden even between husband and wife unless the woman is ovulating.
The authority that Mormonism promised rested not on the subtlety of its theology. It rested on an appeal to fresh experience—a set of witnessed golden tablets that had been translated into a book whose language sounded biblical. Joseph Smith instinctively knew what all other founders of new American religions in the nineteenth century instinctively knew. Many Americans of that period, in part because of popular enthusiasm for science, were ready to listen to any claim that appealed to something that could be interpreted as empirical evidence. R. LAURENCE MOORE, RELIGIOUS OUTSIDERS AND THE
...more
The narrative inscribed on the golden plates, translated by Joseph Smith as The Book of Mormon, is the history of an ancient Hebrew tribe, headed by a virtuous man named Lehi.
Lehi had always favored his youngest and most exemplary son, Nephi, so it shouldn’t have surprised anybody when the old man bequeathed leadership of the tribe to him.* But this infuriated Nephi’s miscreant brother Laman, causing the tribe to split into two rival clans after Lehi’s passing: the righteous, fair-skinned Nephites, led by Nephi, and their bitter adversaries, the Lamanites, as the followers of Laman were known. The Lamanites were “an idle people, full of mischief and subtlety,” whose behavior was so annoying to God that He cursed the whole lot of them with dark skin to punish them
...more
Shortly after the resurrection of Christ, according to The Book of Mormon, Jesus visited North America to share His new gospel with the Nephites and Lamanites and to persuade the two clans to quit squabbling.
Tensions continued to build, eventually sparking a full-blown war that culminated, around A.D. 400, with a brutal campaign in which the reprobate Lamanites slaughtered all 230,000 of the Nephites (which explains why Columbus encountered no Caucasians when he landed in the New World in 1492).
The victorious Lamanites survived to become the ancestors of the modern American Indians, although eventually these “red sons of Israel” lost all memory of both the Nephites and their Judaic heritage.
Scholars have observed that no archaeological artifacts with links to the supposedly advanced and widespread Nephite civilization have ever been found in North America or anywhere else.
As history, moreover, The Book of Mormon is riddled with egregious anachronisms and irreconcilable inconsistencies. For instance, it makes many references to horses and wheeled carts, neither of which existed in the Western Hemisphere during the pre-Columbian era.
Modern DNA analysis has conclusively demonstrated that American Indians are not descendants of any Hebraic race, as the Lamanites were purported to be. Mark Twain famously ridiculed The Book of Mormon’s tedious, quasi-biblical prose as “chloroform in print,” observing that the phrase “and it came to pass” is used more than two thousand times.
All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith. And faith, by its very definition, tends to be impervious to intellectual argument or academic criticism.
Those who would assail The Book of Mormon should bear in mind that its veracity is no more dubious than the veracity of the Bible, say, or the Qur’an, or the sacred texts of most other religions. The latter texts simply enjoy the considerable advantage of having made their public debut in the shadowy recesses of the ancient past, and are thus much harder to refute.
The Book of Mormon explained the origins of these ancient tumuli in a way that dovetailed neatly with both Christian scripture and a theory then in wide circulation, which posited that the American Indians were descended from the lost tribes of Israel. Joseph’s book worked both as theology and as a literal history of the New World. To an awful lot of people, the story makes perfect sense.
Calling this blunder the “Great Apostasy,” he divulged that virtually all Christian doctrine that had developed thereafter—Catholic and Protestant alike—was a whopping lie. Fortunately, The Book of Mormon would set the record straight and restore the true Church of Christ.
Joseph taught and encouraged his adherents to receive personal communiqués straight from the Lord. Divine revelation formed the bedrock of the religion.
From its inception, the revelatory tradition in Mormonism engendered strife. The doctrine of modern, continuing revelation, begun by Joseph Smith and accepted by most groups claiming descent, leaves social order open to counterclaims that strike at the heart of ecclesiastical order. If one person may speak for God, why may not another? By claiming an ongoing dialogue with divinity, Joseph Smith opened the door to a social force he could barely control. RICHARD L. SAUNDERS, “THE FRUIT OF THE BRANCH,” DIFFERING VISIONS: DISSENTERS IN MORMON HISTORY
In an age in which economists take for granted that people equate well-being with consumption, increasing numbers of people seem willing to trade certain freedoms and material comforts for a sense of immutable order and the rapture of faith. EUGENE LINDEN, THE FUTURE IN PLAIN SIGHT
It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reasons that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation. WALLACE STEGNER, MORMON COUNTRY
But if one or either of the ten virgins, after she is espoused, shall be with another man, she has committed adultery, and shall be destroyed; for they are given unto him to multiply and replenish the earth, according to my commandment.
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
...more
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.
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.
[Fundamentalist movements] are embattled forms of spirituality, which have emerged as a response to a perceived crisis. They are engaged in a conflict with enemies whose secularist policies and beliefs seem inimical to religion itself. Fundamentalists do not regard this battle as a conventional political struggle, but experience it as a cosmic war between the forces of good and evil. They fear annihilation, and try to fortify their beleaguered identity by means of a selective retrieval of certain doctrines and practices of the past. To avoid contamination, they often withdraw from mainstream
...more
The distress of chaos followed by the establishment of a new order is a typical course of events which takes place in all creative activity, whether in the arts or the sciences. This Eureka pattern is also characteristic of religious revelation and the delusional systems of people we label insane.
They went in bitterness and in hope. The persecutions, the massacres,the martyrdom of the prophet, the bloody flux and the black canker and desolate graves, had cemented them into a unit, and every successive wagon train for many years was like new flight out of Egypt. The Old Testament parallel was like a bugle in the brain; some of them probably even hoped for a pursuing Pharaoh and a dividing of waters. They had found their strength: Mormonism in exodus was a herd, like a herd of buffalo, and its strength was the herd strength and the cunning of the tough old bulls who ran the show. Brigham
...more
The fact that polygamy was a felony everywhere else in the Union did not impress Brigham. In his view the laws of God took precedence over the laws of men—particularly the laws of Gentile men. To this end, in Deseret the Saints installed a legal system of their own singular design, which very cleverly ensured that whenever the two bodies of law clashed, God’s laws would prevail.
Mormons were different because they said they were different and because their claims, frequently advanced in the most obnoxious way possible, prompted others to agree and treat them as such. The notion of Mormon difference, that is, was a deliberate invention elaborated over time. It was both cause and result of a conflict in which all parties discovered reasons to stress not what Mormons had in common with other Americans, which was a great deal, but what they did not have in common. One result of the conflict was an ideology that sought to turn the self-advertised differences of the Mormons
...more
Brigham Young saved his Church when Joseph was lynched, brought it to the Missouri, took it to Great Salt Lake, gave it safety, wealth and power. The state of Utah is his monument. . . . He was a great man, great in whatever was needful for Israel. Great in understanding, in will and fortitude and resolution, in finding the means which others could not find. Great in remembering also, in the command and management of men, the opposition and hostility and hate. A great leader, a great diplomat, a great administrator, and at need a great liar and a great scoundrel. BERNARD DEVOTO, THE YEAR OF
...more
At the conclusion of his book Lee wrote, I was guided in all that I did which is called criminal, by the orders of the leaders in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I have never knowingly disobeyed the orders of the Church since I joined it at Far West, Missouri, until I was deserted by Brigham Young and his slaves.
Both revelation and delusion are attempts at the solution of problems. Artists and scientists realize that no solution is ever final, but that each new creative step points the way to the next artistic or scientific problem. In contrast, those who embrace religious revelations and delusional systems tend to see them as unshakeable and permanent. . . . Religious faith is an answer to the problem of life. . . . The majority of mankind want or need some all-embracing belief system which purports to provide an answer to life’s mysteries, and are not necessarily dismayed by the discovery that their
...more
