Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

by Jon Krakauer

Whence did he derive the moral justification?

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. When

One has to look no further than individuals who feel compelled to devote their lives to becoming concert pianists, say, or climbing Mount Everest. For some, the province of the extreme holds an allure that’s irresistible. And a certain percentage of such fanatics will inevitably fixate on matters of the spirit.

At last count there were more than eleven million Saints the world over, and Mormonism is the fastest-growing faith in the Western Hemisphere. At present in the United States there are more Mormons than Presbyterians or Episcopalians. On the planet as a whole, there are now more Mormons than Jews.

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.

Green has modestly christened this little kingdom Greenhaven.

Look up

installed them in his own household, and

Install

hoi polloi

The demonstrators, who belong to evangelical Christian denominations, wave hand-lettered placards and shout angrily at the Mormons: “Joseph Smith was a whoremonger!” “There is only one gospel!” “The Book of Mormon is a big fairy tale!” “Mormons are NOT Christians!”

“Mormons are not Christian”

gloaming.

Gloaming

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.

hinterlands,

Ron dutifully followed these rules, for the most part, but he had a rebellious streak that emerged from time to time. Perhaps

Cont.

not surprisingly, given the warped relationship he had with his father, figures of authority provoked a complicated emotional response in Ron. Part of him was desperately eager to please his superiors, while another part raged inwardly against anyone who held power over him. Every now and then Ron felt compelled to let his keepers know that they didn’t own him.

End

According to psychiatrist C. Jess Groesbeck, who examined Ron after the murders, as Ron began to understand that Dianna really was going to take their children and leave forever, it slowly “becomes clear that this man is losing the most important thing he’s ever lost in his life. . . . I can’t stress enough how deep this loss was. . . . He feels low, worthless. And his anger and aggression are almost unbounded. . . . He compensates by creating a new but unreal view of himself and the world. He develops an inflated God-like self-image in an effort to avoid the pain and deny the truth of what he really is.”

All men. Haha

In Feet of Clay, a study of self-proclaimed prophets, English psychiatrist Anthony Storr points out that such gurus often receive momentous revelations and profound insights immediately following a period of mental distress or physical illness, in which the guru has been fruitlessly searching for an answer to his own emotional problems. This change is likely to take place in the subject’s thirties or forties, and may warrant the diagnosis of mid-life crisis. Sometimes the revelatory answer comes gradually; at other times, a new insight strikes like a thunderbolt. . . . 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.*

Book to read

any baby.” Ron