Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

by Jon Krakauer

That “cellie,” or cell mate, is Mark Hofmann, a once-devout Mormon who lost his faith while serving as a missionary in England and secretly became an atheist,

Apparently my dad gets asked all the time in Utah if he is this mark Hoffmann

It has been an especially curious, and uncomfortable, coalition: FLDS doctrine proclaims that sodomy and homosexuality are egregious crimes against God and nature, punishable by death—yet gays and polygamists have joined forces to keep the government out of the bedroom.

God explained that northwestern Missouri was among the earth’s holiest places: the Garden of Eden had not been located in the Middle East, as many believed, but rather in Jackson County, Missouri, near what, by the nineteenth century, had become the city of Independence.

Obviously the garden of Eden is in midwestern America

On the morning of the July 24, Pioneer Day, Dan got up, prayed, and felt prompted by the Lord to saw the barrel and stock off a 12-gauge, pump-action shotgun that he had been storing at his mother’s house.

Such a defense would unavoidably raise the same difficult epistemological questions that had come to the fore after the Tenth Circuit Court’s ruling in 1991: if Ron Lafferty were deemed mentally ill because he obeyed the voice of his God, isn’t everyone who believes in God and seeks guidance through prayer mentally ill as well?

He appeared with a cloth sign attached to the seat of his prison jumpsuit that read, EXIT ONLY; his attorneys explained that he wore the sign to ward off the angel Moroni, who Ron believed was an evil homosexual spirit trying to invade his body through his anus. He believed that this same sodomizing spirit had already taken possession of Judge Hansen’s body,

Obsessed with this

Utah has been called the “fraud capital of the world” by the Wall Street Journal, and within the state, no place has more white-collar crime than Utah County.