(I did not ask whether he observes the Mormon prohibition on caffeine.) When he moved to Utah from California some years ago, Brower agrees, he noticed “a sense of apathy” around Mormon fundamentalism in the Beehive State. At breakfast in a trendy coffee shop in lower Manhattan (where I met him and Amy Berg, the filmmaker), he orders a Diet Coke amid a veritable forest of lattes and cappuccinos and chai. Brower, who is himself a Mormon, is a sunburned, silver-haired, middle-aged man with the distinctive air of a Westerner who has spent his life outside. This subject makes private investigator Sam Brower a little uneasy when I bring it up. If the public largely viewed Mormons as freakazoids in clip-on ties with kinky underwear, who might well be practicing plural marriage in secret, then any attention paid to the throwbacks would only heighten the confusion. Renegade groups who still practiced polygamy and dressed their flocks of sister-wives in hand-sewn “Little House on the Prairie” dresses and World War I hairdos weren’t helping. For the last 60 or 70 years, Mormons have struggled to reposition their faith as a modern religious institution rather than a kooky artifact of pioneer America and the Second Great Awakening. From the point of view of the LDS Church leadership in Salt Lake City, engaging with the disgruntled offshoots in any way was a no-win situation. There was nothing especially strange or nefarious about the way mainstream Mormons and local law enforcement chose to ignore fundamentalist groups like the FLDS, although we can say in retrospect that it led to dire consequences. Despite his isolation and his precarious mental condition, Jeffs continues to command the devotion and obedience of his 10,000 or so followers from behind bars, like an old-time Mob boss with a direct line to God. But as filmmaker Amy Berg’s new Showtime documentary “Prophet’s Prey” makes clear, the FLDS empire of rape and misogyny and child labor and relentless ideological and psychological domination appears to go on much as before. During Jeffs’ two trials (an earlier conviction in Utah was thrown out), Mormon fundamentalism became an object of cultural fascination, inspiring the HBO series “Big Love.” That has faded, and Jeffs is almost certain to spend the rest of his life in prison. Jeffs made the FBI’s Most Wanted list in the mid-2000s, spent several years as a fugitive, and was ultimately convicted on two counts of sexual assault against children by a Texas jury in 2011. For many years the FLDS Church has been dominated and operated by a man named Warren Steed Jeffs, who “married” more than 60 women and girls, some as young as 12 years old, and has repeatedly been accused of molesting children of both sexes, including his sisters, his daughters and his nieces and nephews. FLDS-owned companies made the O-rings that failed in the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986 (although the failure was likely a result of flawed NASA specifications), have managed and run major construction projects all over the Western states and have installed the lighting in numerous Las Vegas casinos. That group is the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (usually called the FLDS Church), a multi-million-dollar business enterprise that owns large chunks of remote real estate in Utah, Arizona, Colorado, South Dakota, Texas, Oklahoma and northern Mexico. In the larger picture of American society and religion, such fundamentalist Mormon groups have been nothing more than tiny, stagnant backwaters of belief. For the most part these splinter sects have been left alone, even (or especially) in a place like Utah, where the mainstream Mormon Church still dominates the political and cultural landscape. Over the past century or more, there have been quite a few breakaway Mormon sects scattered across rural North America, small groups led by self-appointed prophets who rejected the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ decision to disavow Brigham Young’s famous doctrine of “plural marriage” in the 1890s.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |