More Mormon Murder and Mayhem
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith -- Jon Krakauer
genre: investigative journalism
recommended by: my aunt
By their fruits ye shall know them. -- Matthew 7:16, 20
The scariest thing about this book is: unlike many people, author Krakauer has no particular axe to grind against the Mormon Church. In a disclosure statement he acknowledges that he's happily lived and worked among Latter-day Saints (LDS) for much of his life.
Yet the facts and philosophies and course of history he dispassionately, unbiasedly uncovers here are damning. And he pretty much lets the facts speak for themselves -- facts that indict the LDS Church as a tribal organization with a penchant for paranoia, secrecy, deceit, manipulation, indoctrination, control, and racism. Not to mention violence toward outsiders, as well as toward inquisitive or challenging persons within.
In other words, the mainstream LDS Church is a cult -- a charge that could be leveled at many churches centered on a charismatic figure to whom, alone of all Church members, truth is revealed as eternal points of doctrine. It compulsively orders and supervises the lives of its members; it demands heavy, unquestioning financial sacrifice; its leader's words are divinely inspired; it would dominate government and public life if given the chance.
Mormonism's officially-condemned "fundamentalist" offshoots are likewise cults -- but because they have chosen remote geographical isolation that allows them to operate largely out of the eye of the mainstream, they are dangerous, extremist fringe cults. Largely but not entirely because of this isolation, (there are fundamentalist Mormons living polygamously in Salt Lake City and Provo UT, too) these small groups manage to operate largely outside U.S. and Canadian federal and state/provincial laws, their "patriarchs" governing their communities autocratically (and megalomaniacally), while their men practice polygyny, incest and child "marriage", enforce their own brand of male-supremacist law, and indoctrinating their children while stifling education and imposing censorship on all outside ideas and media. Their doctrine notably includes the notion of "blood atonement" -- that some sins against God's one, true church (sins judged by men, naturally) can only be properly addressed with deadly violence.
These groups are creepy in the extreme. And I have to wonder, with all the public uproar over Catholic priests' molesting children, why there hasn't been more outrage over the outcome of the Elizabeth Smart case. Or over the case of disappeared teenage "bride" Ruby Jessop -- or of all the other underage Mormon "brides" in Arizona, in Utah, in Idaho and Oregon, in Alberta and British Columbia.
Is it because they're little girls?
Or is it because we honor the notion of "religious freedom" without any thought to protecting society's most vulnerable members from more powerful individuals (or classes of individuals) who frame exploiting their own children as religious observance, and who consider any idea of empowering them or educating them to be heresy?
I like to think of myself as tolerant, but my tolerance stops where child abuse, institutionalized murder, religiously-ordained sexism, or even the dangerous belief that one group is "chosen" begin. It stops where facts are suppressed and research squelched in the interest of propagating faith. Therefore I am not as tolerant as Jon Krakauer, and I am astonished at the evenness with which he was able to write this book.
rating: &&&&
~~~~~~~
From Housewife to Heretic: One Woman's Struggle for Equal Rights and Her Excommunication from the Mormon Church -- Sonia Johnson
genre: memoir
Johnson, excommunicated for being an Equal Rights Amendment proponent in the late1970s-early 1980s, tells the story of her feminist awakening and her rebellion against institutionalized sexism and rigid gender roles in the LDS Church. Written while ERA was still viable as a proposed Constitutional amendment, this book has a dated feel, as does the jargon Johnson relies on. She insists that the politicization of the ERA is the only issue that divorced her -- against her will -- from the church she grew up in and whose beliefs she still held when the book was written, and indeed she does not seem to question or rebel against other Mormon dogma that seems equally outrageous or biased a quarter century later. The cynic in me wonders how much her path has veered since, and whether her "feminist awakening" yielded other awakenings against not just patriarchy, but against an elitist, tribalist culture based on belief in the divinely-ordained entitlement of the "chosen" (Church members) to exploit and exclude non-believers.
rating: &&
2004 book count: 56
genre: investigative journalism
recommended by: my aunt
By their fruits ye shall know them. -- Matthew 7:16, 20
The scariest thing about this book is: unlike many people, author Krakauer has no particular axe to grind against the Mormon Church. In a disclosure statement he acknowledges that he's happily lived and worked among Latter-day Saints (LDS) for much of his life.
Yet the facts and philosophies and course of history he dispassionately, unbiasedly uncovers here are damning. And he pretty much lets the facts speak for themselves -- facts that indict the LDS Church as a tribal organization with a penchant for paranoia, secrecy, deceit, manipulation, indoctrination, control, and racism. Not to mention violence toward outsiders, as well as toward inquisitive or challenging persons within.
In other words, the mainstream LDS Church is a cult -- a charge that could be leveled at many churches centered on a charismatic figure to whom, alone of all Church members, truth is revealed as eternal points of doctrine. It compulsively orders and supervises the lives of its members; it demands heavy, unquestioning financial sacrifice; its leader's words are divinely inspired; it would dominate government and public life if given the chance.
Mormonism's officially-condemned "fundamentalist" offshoots are likewise cults -- but because they have chosen remote geographical isolation that allows them to operate largely out of the eye of the mainstream, they are dangerous, extremist fringe cults. Largely but not entirely because of this isolation, (there are fundamentalist Mormons living polygamously in Salt Lake City and Provo UT, too) these small groups manage to operate largely outside U.S. and Canadian federal and state/provincial laws, their "patriarchs" governing their communities autocratically (and megalomaniacally), while their men practice polygyny, incest and child "marriage", enforce their own brand of male-supremacist law, and indoctrinating their children while stifling education and imposing censorship on all outside ideas and media. Their doctrine notably includes the notion of "blood atonement" -- that some sins against God's one, true church (sins judged by men, naturally) can only be properly addressed with deadly violence.
These groups are creepy in the extreme. And I have to wonder, with all the public uproar over Catholic priests' molesting children, why there hasn't been more outrage over the outcome of the Elizabeth Smart case. Or over the case of disappeared teenage "bride" Ruby Jessop -- or of all the other underage Mormon "brides" in Arizona, in Utah, in Idaho and Oregon, in Alberta and British Columbia.
Is it because they're little girls?
Or is it because we honor the notion of "religious freedom" without any thought to protecting society's most vulnerable members from more powerful individuals (or classes of individuals) who frame exploiting their own children as religious observance, and who consider any idea of empowering them or educating them to be heresy?
I like to think of myself as tolerant, but my tolerance stops where child abuse, institutionalized murder, religiously-ordained sexism, or even the dangerous belief that one group is "chosen" begin. It stops where facts are suppressed and research squelched in the interest of propagating faith. Therefore I am not as tolerant as Jon Krakauer, and I am astonished at the evenness with which he was able to write this book.
rating: &&&&
~~~~~~~
From Housewife to Heretic: One Woman's Struggle for Equal Rights and Her Excommunication from the Mormon Church -- Sonia Johnson
genre: memoir
Johnson, excommunicated for being an Equal Rights Amendment proponent in the late1970s-early 1980s, tells the story of her feminist awakening and her rebellion against institutionalized sexism and rigid gender roles in the LDS Church. Written while ERA was still viable as a proposed Constitutional amendment, this book has a dated feel, as does the jargon Johnson relies on. She insists that the politicization of the ERA is the only issue that divorced her -- against her will -- from the church she grew up in and whose beliefs she still held when the book was written, and indeed she does not seem to question or rebel against other Mormon dogma that seems equally outrageous or biased a quarter century later. The cynic in me wonders how much her path has veered since, and whether her "feminist awakening" yielded other awakenings against not just patriarchy, but against an elitist, tribalist culture based on belief in the divinely-ordained entitlement of the "chosen" (Church members) to exploit and exclude non-believers.
rating: &&
2004 book count: 56