Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

by Jon Krakauer

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.

Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion.

Uncle Rulon likes to remind his followers of Brigham's warning that for those who commit such unspeakable sins as homosexuality, or having sexual intercourse with a member of the African race, “the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so.”

And because he happened to be the father of Debbie's own stepmother, Mem, she unwittingly became a stepmother to her stepmother, and thus a stepgrandmother to herself.

But then I sigh and, with a piece of scripture, Tell them that God bids us do good for evil; And thus I clothe my naked villainy With odd old ends stol'n forth of Holy Writ, And seem a saint when most I play the devil. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, RICHARD III

But such criticism and mockery are largely beside the point. 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 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.

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 belief system, which they proclaim as “the truth,” is incompatible with the beliefs of other people. One man's faith is another man's delusion. . . .

How, for example, does one distinguish an unorthodox or bizarre faith from delusion? . . .

“But some things in life are more important than being happy. Like being free to think for yourself.”