Elisa did a post on the new Hulu series, announcing its imminent release, and while I wasn’t super excited to watch the show, having heard some mixed reviews of the book and the series, I finally did cave in and watch the first four episodes. New episodes are released on Thursdays, and there are seven total.
If you haven’t watched it, and you don’t want any spoilers on a true crime story that’s 40 years in the past, this is not the post for you. Personally, I already knew quite a bit going in, although I had not (and have not) read Krakauer’s book on which it’s based. I had low expectations based on the knowledge that Krakauer’s book was written in the wake of 9/11, based on the premise that all religions have the propensity to foster violence, and if Americans think we are any exception, we’re not because Mormonism, a religion that is totally American, is equally violent. I (mostly) disagree with that premise.
First, it sounds like what every Fox News-watching racist believes about Muslims, that their faith is irredeemably entwined with violence, and second, it reminds me of the way Ted Bundy used the fear of pornography to manipulate conservative Christians by deflecting blame from himself. Pornography didn’t make Bundy slaughter dozens of women, and claiming it did turned him into a prop for sex-negative Evangelicals, exhibit A for why pornography is bad. Krakauer’s premise seemingly does the same for the anti-religion fanbase by saying all religion is fundamentally violent and leads to extremism and zealotry. While there are certainly zealots in religion, some of whom have committed violence, non-religious groups can also engage in extremist violence, such as eco-terrorism or I dunno, storming the capital. Most religious people do not become extremists. Isn’t this an issue of correlation not equalling causation?
Here are some thoughts on the series, which I think is getting better, but I can’t go quite so far as to recommend you pay for Hulu on this basis alone. Let’s talk about how the series exceeds my expectations (over) and how it is disappointing (under).
Over
Across the board, there is universal acclaim for Andrew Garfield’s acting as the fictional Detective Pyre, and there’s no denying his ability to emote the hell out of this role. He may be terrible at interrogating suspects, he may not be great at shower sex, but he is a tender father and son, and he is effective at showing emotion, even despite some confusing and weird dialogue. He also just looks Mormon. I buy it. I thought his turn as Jim Baker in the Eyes of Tammy Faye was also spectacular. He’s good at religious characters.
Daisy Edgar-Jones is also a luminous presence on screen. I’ve enjoyed her acting in Normal People (that’s worth a watch, IMO). She is strong while also presenting as fragile and introspective.
Detective Taba, the native American detective from Nevada is a bright spot in all his scenes as an outsider observing this Mormon culture. His raised eyebrow at the Cigar-store Indian statue in a home they enter and his dismissive “charming” comment are classic. The exchange between him and Det. Pyre, and Pyre’s horror at the idea of racism is another great moment that felt very authentic. The police chief’s casual reference to him as a “Lamanite” was a believable gut punch, but Taba’s diplomatic correction reveals his own maturity: “Actually my dad was a Piute.”
There is a temple endowment scene that was actually very beautiful and moving in how it was filmed. I was dreading this; it just feels wrong, as it did in Black’s other project, Big Love, but it was handled with not just respect, but grace. Similarly, there is a shower scene in which the wife sheds her garments to join her husband in the shower, and I have to say, that’s the sexist garment situation I have ever seen. She’s rocking the one-piece skirt style that I’ve only ever heard about (did they even exist by 1984?), and they are actually attractive and flattering, two words I have never before used in combination with garments. I mean, these one piece skirt style g’s are totally impractical and unlikely since almost no women wore skirts and dresses on a daily basis by this point, but the filming choices allowed the garments and temple to seem desirable and special in unexpected ways.
The actual murder investigation was pretty straightforward. It was known who did it, and they were arrested in a buffet line at Circus Circus. They also readily admitted they did it. So how do you make a seven-episode arc out of that? Well, there’s a ton of stuff being added to this to make it more “mysterious,” and some of that plotting is interesting, although there are some threads I would have done differently. For example, the interrogation of Brenda’s husband who was arrested in blood-soaked clothes right outside the murder scene (although he is not the culprit), still ultimately reveals some culpability on his part as he heard his brothers’ plan and didn’t prevent it. If I were the district attorney (who is not portrayed), I would definitely be going after a conspiracy conviction on that guy.
The history flashbacks, while totally confusing, are fairly interesting in showing that 1830s frontier culture was super violent on a regular basis, and while I don’t personally buy the premise that it leads directly to 1984 violence, particularly given how painstaking the efforts to hide that history have been (as shown in the series), you can see why some extremists, particularly fundamentalists, would justify their actions with an appeal to the authoritative past. I did chuckle about them having to go to the rare reading room at the BYU library, something we all discovered as students there. And wow, the Joseph & Emma scene in which he reveals D&C 132 to her is unflinching, even if it’s not actually how it went down. That Joseph actor is also a handsome and charismatic dude, but honestly, not enough for her to put up with that nonsense because even a twenty-year-old Brad Pitt couldn’t pull that shiz off.
The cadre of sisters-in-law, who don’t get nearly enough screentime are really interesting and well done. Matilda in particular is a fascinating character, but she very quickly becomes a prop to illustrate her husband’s abusive, patriarchal and authoritarian beliefs. She just isn’t given enough to do, at least not yet.
Under
The dialogue is beyond cringe-worthy, which is funny because if it had been accurate, it would have been cringe-worthy but in a different way. The number of times “Heavenly Father” is used conversationally is completely unrealistic. It’s not just that “Heavenly Father” is used instead of “God” or other names for divinity; it’s that it feels like every Mormon character refers to HM or the “holy spirit” [2] in at least every other sentence. There is only one use of the phrase “Oh my Heck!” so far. The “Heavenly Father” to “Oh my heck” ratio is way, way off, at least based on what I experienced when I first went to BYU (two years after the murders) and for the first time in my life met people from that area. I haven’t heard a single “fetch” or “flip” yet.
The Mormon characters appear to have no social skills whatsoever. Apparently, the ability to read situations, put people at ease, and have a normal conversation are all washed away with “baby sins” at baptism [1]. While I will readily admit that there are weirdos in every congregation, some of whom are obsessed with the Church to the exclusion of most everything else, they are fewer and farther between than in this series, and they don’t kneel in prayer in the workplace or play MoTab in a police investigation or accuse people of murder because they quit going to church as if that’s a valid motive. Det. Taba has to actually point out that lack of church attendance doesn’t equal a motive for murder. So, as portrayed, Det. Pyre does not seem at all like a “mainstream” Mormon; he seems like a socially inept zealot confronted with troubling history and information for the first time in his life. His wife is a cipher, particularly in the first episode where I don’t think she has any lines beyond maybe announcing that dinner is ready. The Church members in the series act like it’s Stepford. I mean, I’ve certainly mocked Utah county once or twice in my life, but come on, man. This isn’t typical. Let it be terrible in realistic ways.
There’s an implication that Church leaders, at least local ones who are possibly acting from orders on high, are involved in a conspiracy to prevent the Lafferty boys from being held accountable for the murder, and to keep the story hushed up. The lengths they go to in order to protect them feels like they are in on the crime, but the murderers had been excommunicated two years earlier (which wasn’t mentioned in the script–that’s just factually correct). Even if they hadn’t been excommunicated two years earlier, why a Stake President would request that murder suspects be released to his custody is unfathomable. It also flies in the face of the idea that simply not attending church was enough to make the super-duper Mormon detective think Allen was a murderer, but being excommunicated raises no such concern among a higher ranking Church leader. Where’s the logical consistency here? If this really happened, I would like to see some receipts. If not, it’s a big, wild swing.
In a flashback, Brenda has an exchange with her BYU professor in which he has locked the door and is making sexual advances toward her, which she cleverly leverages into a gig as KBYU news anchor, an assignment which we are to believe was considered ridiculous to our hitherto patriarchal and misogynist BYU professor. There are a few problems here. First, one of my mid-1980s college roomates was a KBYU news anchor, which was totally uncontroversial and part of her program, and in my experience this BYU professor’s actions feel unlikely for this department (a religion professor, maybe). BYU faculty’s sexism is usually more along the the lines of discrimination and dismissing female students’ abilities, not trying to corner them in a dark room for hanky panky shenanigans, and even that is much more likely in a male-dominated STEM field, not the humanities. If you want that brand of sexism (attempted assault), I guess you’d have to go off campus to the MTC.
But fine, let’s assume that the Clarence Thomas of the College of Journalism existed; why would this clever Brenda be taken in by the abusive and patriarchal Lafferty clan, and why would she marry a milquetoast doormat like Allen and let him convince her to suborn all of her ambitions? She outsmarts and outclasses him by a mile. Her motivations seem to be all over the map. It feels like in the rush to indict the Church’s sexism (which was portrayed in such an overt and obvious manner that it undermines the critique), that we forgot to make the women real people. Brenda, one of the two victims along with her daughter, is literally not even in episode 4! Will the real sexism please stand up?
A genre problem
There’s always an ethical dilemma when it comes to true crime drama. You have to balance centering on the victim vs. the murderer(s), and frankly, the device that attracts and keeps viewers is the gruesome crime, bizarre motivations, and the did he / didn’t he (it’s usually a he) as you watch the plot unfold. That’s always going to be difficult to accomplish without treading on ethics a bit. Are we aggrandizing violence? Are we profiting from a murder? Are we behaving like craven ghouls? Yes. The answer is almost always yes. Should we stop watching true crime? I mean, it’s entertaining. As a genre, it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. It’s a guilty pleasure, emphasis on guilty.
Another problem whenever the Church is portrayed in mainstream media like this is that there are two main critical voices out there, and frankly, they are both essentially the same True Scotsman fallacy. Believing church members say “We’re not like that! These people are worse than us! We’re good! This is an embarrassment! Whoever wrote it is just a bitter anti-Mormon!” and post-Mormons say “Yes, this is how Mormons are, which is why I left! Because they are [insert stereotype or criticism]! They just can’t handle the truth which is why they will never learn from their abusive and terrible ways.”
In Solomon-like fashion, I’d like to suggest that both these critiques are right, and they are also both wrong. Yes, some Mormons are terrible in these ways, and yes, most Mormons are not. Maybe there’s a correlation between how many of this type of Mormon one encountered and the likelihood of getting the heck out of such a wacky, abusive religion. In the tug of war between staying for the good and leaving for the bad, the ratio of good to bad in one’s actual experience certainly matters.
As to the erasure of women in a show purporting to examine misogyny, the topic is worthy of exploration, but so far this story isn’t really nailing it. Is this really the vehicle for that story? Is it necessary to portray generic sexism and tropes with women whose actions are incomprehensible as the men around them boss and belittle them? That doesn’t feel like the most insightful perspective on Mormon sexism, as one who has lived in the culture for over fifty years, and there’s definitely a critique to be made. I’m not seeing the pedestalization, infantilization, and benevolent sexism that feel more common in the culture.
But can I turn off my brain and enjoy it for what it is? Mostly, although even I with plenty of inside-baseball knowledge am finding the complex plot with flashbacks, history, fundamentalism, and contemporary takes on sexism all a bit confusing, probably also because it’s a huge cast, even if you only include the Lafferty family. Also, the show’s insistence that the Lafferty family are “Mormon royalty” is very irritating. There are families that qualify as that, I don’t dispute it, but I never heard of the Lafferties aside from these murders. Was this a case of them being big fish in a tiny puddle? I’m not aware of any famous Lafferty church leaders in the early days of the church. Yet, the phrase “Mormon royalty” is used more often than the phrase “Oh my heck.”
- Have you watched the show? If so, what do you think? If not, do you plan to watch it?
- What types of sexism and misogyny have you actually seen and experienced in the Church? What do you think is typical?
- Just how weird was American Fork in the mid-80s?
- Do you think the true crime genre is problematic? Why or why not?
Discuss.
[1] A term I’ve never heard used in real life; I’ve also not really heard baptism at age 8 explained as washing away sins, but rather joining the church and making a covenant. Sins are what happens after the age of accountability, not before. The series took a dig at this by cutting to Brigham Young preaching in Hyde Park that the Book of Mormon makes it clear that original sin is a false doctrine, but then we see Det. Pyre promoting that same false doctrine with his 8-year old twins. I don’t doubt some Mormons and even leaders have taught it this way; it just wasn’t my experience.
[2] Missed opportunity as Mormons prefer to say “holy ghost,” right?
Wheat & Tares 
Not only were there no early Church leaders named Lafferty, the name doesn’t appear even once in the LDS Biographical Database with its more than 100,000 entries for pioneers and missionaries thru 1940. Strange kind of royalty, that.
So many LOL moments in this post. Thank you for that.
-have only watched the first episode. I think your assessment is fair.
-most sexism I’ve seen is benevolent patriarchy, although I would be quite curious to know about sexual assault at BYU in the 80’s.
-too young to remember American Fork in the 80’s. But I’ve started hearing from lots of neighbors about connections they had to the Lafferties and other fundamentalist folks – it was a small town and a small world. Very different from what it is today.
-I do think true crime can be problematic. I remember when the podcast “Cold” came out – which was about Susan and Josh Powell. I listened to a couple of episodes but stopped because I just really felt like it was exploiting Susan, playing private recordings and journal entries from her, and I wasn’t comfortable with it. But there’ve been others I’ve listened to (Dr Death – didn’t focus on victims, Dirty John – was actually done with the participation of the female victims) that haven’t felt that way.
Your Clarence Thomas reference was a cheap shot. You obviously assume he was guilty of Anita Hill’s accusations. Kavanaugh is guilty too, right?
I too have been baffled by the royalty comments. My dad grew up in AF. Never heard of these folks except for the crime.
The setting has me confused as well. Where the hell is East Rockwell? Are they trying to tie in the violence of Porter Rockwell? American Fork is in Utah Valley yet half the scenes take place in remote mountain wilderness. I’m confused on the “where” of it all.
Yes some of the phrasing is dumb. Garfield saying “in the name of Jesus Christ” while getting aroused kissing his wife literally made me laugh out loud.
Yet for all my complaints, I’m drawn into the story. Because underlying it all is some truth. Mormons do believe in violence. The temple supports this; blood atonement supports this; the Book of Mormon supports this; Mountain Meadows supports this; the Danites support this; JS-era history in the midwest supports this; our theology of the second coming supports this; and present day Mormonism still supports this. While we are generally not a violent people on a day to day basis, I think this portrayal has reminded me that we believe in a militant Jesus.
@josh h, yes, right. Because it turns out that the vast majority of women don’t make up these sorts of things. Especially when it subjects them to intense public scrutiny and shaming.
Christine Blasey-Ford essentially had to go into hiding. Why on earth would she fabricate that kind of thing? Who was more incentivized to lie – Hill and Blasey-Ford, or Thomas and Kavanaugh? Good grief.
Even my super conservative friends thought Kavanaugh shouldn’t have been voted through after watching the hearings. (I’m too young to have a percipient reaction to the Thomas hearings.)
If one really wants to watch this but doesn’t want to pay the $6.99/month, just wait until this fall. For the past several years Hulu has had a black Friday sale, with prices as low as $1.00/month for 12 months. And you can cancel at any time.
I’ve only seen the first episode in the series so far, but I like what I’ve seen.
I did read the book, though, and wanted to make the following comments to clarify a few things.
1) The Detective Pyre role is a creative director’s addition that wasn’t in the book at all, but was apparently viewed as necessary to convey the narrative arc of the story.
2) Yes, the book was written in the wake of 9/11 highlighting the reality that of religiously motivated violent extremism is a thing here, too. Even though faithful members of the church want to either dismiss or close the book on that chapter, that history is there and it’s uncomfortable. And while, yes, the 19th century was a more violent period in many ways (not just religious conflicts), religion has been used as a justification for bad behavior many times over. This should motivate introspection about what the elements of our own faith lead to such actions–@Chadwick’s comment above is right on point here. We believe violence will sometimes be occasionally necessary to fulfill the will of God–and this is the overlap with 9/11. Thus, in my view, it’s an accurate critique and comparison.
3) In the book, it feels pretty clear that the Lafferty’s were becoming increasingly radicalized in the years leading up to the murders, growing apart from their religious community and roots. I didn’t see the book as an indictment of the church per se, but certainly an indictment of teachings and values that have been allowed to persist in the church. Why have they been allowed to persist? While the faithful may view violence as a manifestation of godly justice, a cynic would say that it persists because that violence can be used as an instrument to benefit the church when necessary and creates a story that members will use to not turn on church leaders for committing the violent act.
4) In a recent podcast discussing the new Hulu series, John Dehlin and Radio Free Mormon discuss how the Lafferty’s are the ones who take the religion most seriously, which is a valuable insight that applies to both the series and the book. The normal church members are those who believe the restoration story, but have the unsavory edges rubbed off through real social interactions and are ultimately good, kind God-fearing people with a few peculiar beliefs. But those who are serious fundamentalists are those who want to bring about the fulness of the restoration, and see their actions as bringing that about through whatever means necessary just as religious zealots are wont to do. The lesson here is that real society is really an important anchor and check on religious extremism, though from the (fundamental) believers’ point of view caving in to social pressures is a hairshirt showing one’s true devotion.
I also haven’t watched past the first episode yet. I’ve been on the fence about whether to continue. I really wanted to like this show because I’m hungry for someone to make a really good onscreen representation of Mormon faith crisis but, from what I’ve seen so far, this ain’t it.
To me, it feels like the writers have a bone to pick and it’s interfering with the storytelling. As someone who does have a bone to pick with the church, even I find this annoying. Good storytelling comes from honesty and I feel like the attempts to connect this horrible crime with the mainstream Mormon experience are weakening that honesty. The interrogation scene with Allen heading into the weeds of church history in light of what had just happened hours before felt totally unrealistic. Whether they’re trying to stretch out the narrative to fill seven episodes or they really, really want to connect the murders to Joseph Smith or both, to me it felt ham-fisted and overwrought.
Based on your review, I think I’ll keep watching. Andrew Garfield’s fictional detective actually feels like a pretty good impression of my older brother. As you say, he just looks Mormon, weird attempts at Mormon-y dialog aside.
This series commits the cardinal sin – its BORING.
Good post, Angela. I haven’t seen any episodes, so I can’t really comment substantively. I did have a couple of questions about your observations:
1. One of your “unders” concerns Mormons and social skills. It’s been my experience that a fair number of folks in a Utah ward in the 1980s (I lived in Utah Valley from 1986 to 1996) would have had exactly the issues you describe. My recollection is that there was still a lot of “socially inept zealots” in the valley at that point (and still are, if the reports of friends and family who still live there are to be believed). Almost every Sunday I went to church outside of a student ward, I regularly heard a lot of hardline Mormon rhetoric about women’s roles, “Lamanites”, Book of Mormon racism and violence glorified, etc. Of course, that’s just my experience, and experiences vary; I was just wondering if you felt it was merely an inaccurate portrayal because of the number of characters who acted like this or whether the level of social awkwardness itself was a bit OTT?
2. Related to Chadwick’s comment above, I’m wondering if you think that the series is trying to argue that the kind of violence the Laffertys engaged in is not a bug of Mormonism, but rather a feature. In support of Chadwick’s point, I could see this argument being made, especially given a few things, including: the role that subjective “spiritual” experiences play in Mormonism, the subordinate role that women play in Mormonism (which would have been even more subordinate in 1984), the violence inherent in the Book of Mormon (some of which, it’s made very clear, is completely justified), the violence implied in the pre-1990 temple ceremony (which some offshoots of the mainstream Mormon church have not changed), etc., Mike H’s point about the “unsavory edges” being rubbed off of so-called “true believers” by social interactions is a really important one also, and I’m wondering if you think the series is trying to make certain points about religious zealotry in general and the fact that it may more readily flourish in so-called “closed” communities.
The sexual harassment bit wasn’t too far off, IME. Ok in my experience it wasn’t a BYU professor, but a BYU educated boss in a job I got through my BYU connections. My close friend was sexually harassed on the job, on campus, by a BYU staff (not faculty) boss. I had a summer job where a male BYU student had sexually harassed another female employee, and he didn’t get fired but the boss just tried to keep him away from me after I started working there. Maybe none of my examples are BYU faculty, but my experience was that men sexually harassing women was pretty normal at BYU and among guys who were former or current students in the 90s and early 00s.
Ardis: Thanks for confirming that the Lafferties were kinda nobodies. As always, I bow to your expertise!
Brother Sky: I appreciate the perspective on American Fork in the 80s. Maybe it was more like this than I imagine–particularly because anyone I knew from there would have been people who were at BYU (weirdly fundamentalists seem to think that’s some liberal bastion–I know they did in Tara Westover’s book Educated). I do, however, feel pretty confident that there is a lack of performative friendliness and smiling that you usually see in Mormon culture, and as mentioned in the OP, the diction is just not right. They literally could have “made fetch happen” had they only used it in the series as one of the Utah pseudo-swears, which it totally was at the time!
Kirkstall: Here’s another bright spot. I do think the historical scenes are actually pretty well done, even if they are jarring in the narrative.
Mike H: We’ll see how the thesis about violence in religion ultimately plays out as the series concludes. I just don’t buy (any more than the judge & jury did) that religion is the cause. It is definitely a justification people use, but to do so, they have to set aside their self-reflection (which lots of people are prone to do) and not see that the people God wants them to kill also happen to be the people they want to blame for their own failures (whether economic or marital). I do agree that it’s incredibly troubling that the Church today has more of a track record of weeding out LGBT allies than it does weeding out right wing extremists.
There are also related issues that need to be explored in this examination around mental illness and domestic abuse. There’s a scene in which Matilda writes a letter to President Kimball alarmed at her husband’s extremism, and that letter is then referred back to her stake president. Since her husband is also increasingly abusive, this is particularly troubling, and totally believable as well (unfortunately), but… I’m also not sure it happened, which is a problem in a supposed “true crime” show. If the stake president is protecting her husband and the Church is essentially siding with the Lafferty clan (even after excommunicating them), it is a potential crime committed by the Church and the stake president. If that’s not what happened, but it’s been invented, that’s very problematic. Again, I’ve got plenty of critiques about the Church’s actual treatment of marginalized groups and women, and its insufficient response to threats from the right (although these groups are certainly on their radar), but this is a real crime that happened. We don’t need to invent new crimes.
Josh H: I’m surprised anyone does not believe Anita Hill at this point. As to Kavanaugh, I have two main criticisms about how that played out: 1) Feinstein holding her testimony back until a gotcha Senate hearing was bad form–let the truth come out when it comes out, not as a political play, and 2) had Kavanaugh handled it with grace and poise, he would have looked less guilty and more jurisprudent. His demeanor was vicious and self-centered and totally unconvincing to most women who have been on the receiving end of these types of unwanted pranks / advances when we were young, vulnerable teens. That he would not remember her or this incident is, to me at least, believable (after all, he LIKES BEER), but that he would attack her so viciously and emotionally rather than extending sympathy and admitting that he drank a lot and had some crappy friends (evidence totally supports this), and he definitely supports and believes women and is now an adult who understands things better, etc. etc., is the bigger indictment of his character. Both Thomas and Kavanaugh being on the current SCOTUS is evidence of the rot at the heart of our patriarchal culture.
Just a few random observations:
The Laffertys are definitely not “Mormon royalty.” That particular expression is not unheard of, but not really in widespread use, such that it would be used over and over. It would be more commonly heard on the fringes, certainly not something you would see on lds.org or hear at church very much. More likely, you might hear that someone is connected to “pioneer stock” or some such phrase. Or just that someone is connected to the Pratts, or the Kimballs or whatever. But the Laffertys are certainly not Pratts or Kimballs. If I’m not making it up in my head, I think there was a Lafferty family in my ward 10-12 years ago. It seems like he did say that he was connected to some degree to the notorious Laffertys.
Lot of violence in Mormon scripture. Most of it is in the Bible.
I’ve never heard of skirt-style garments. But I guess I’m the wrong gender to have personal experience with it. As far as I was aware, the one-piece garments for both men and women always had the same two-legged style that one-piece garments have now.
Mormons do use “Heavenly Father” an awful lot. But it’s not like we invented the term, or that we never say God, or Father in Heaven, or the Lord, or any number of other expressions. It makes me wonder if Ziff has ever investigated the frequency of various terms for deity in conference, or in the church magazines? If not, someone should throw up the Bat-Signal and have him get right on that.
FYI, My mother wore the skirt style garments.and continued to wear them until the mid 1970’s when she left the church. She bought some for me when I married , but I rarely wore them. This maybe more information than you want, but as I recall, there was no crotch opening, so a woman needed to pull up the fabric on one leg and move all the fabric to one side. Not really practical.
Like any “true crime” drama besides wondering whodunnit, I find myself equally engaged wondering how much of the depiction is true vs. dramatized. Too bad we likely won’t ever know if senior church leaders behind the scenes were pulling strings. (I doubt it)
My 22 exmo (but not bitter) year old was blown away by the early episode where Garfield’s character meets with his bishop. My son’s comment was, “That manipulation felt so real.”
I agree with Hawkgrrrl’s overall assessment: much of the dialogue feels off. But there is a lot of truth captured in individual scenes throughout the series
The “skirt style” garments people are talking about were called “flare leg” and were available until October 2017. They weren’t open like a skirt, but each leg was very full so it could be pulled to either side (as Old woman) describes, for bathroom access. They were kind of like tap pants, except, of course, knee-length and connected to the top of the garment (they were only available in the one-piece style). Many women did find them more practical than the standard one-piecers, which had to be pulled to both sides from a center opening, and more comfortable than the snug two-piecers with their tendency to lead to yeast infections.
(This *is* a sorta history post, innit?)
I had a pair of the described flare leg garments. They worked for a lot of things but the pair I had weren’t long enough in the body so not entirely comfortable either. I hated the one piece garments so the two-piece was a huge improvement but still not a fan.
Although I’m not a US citizen I was around for the Clarence Thomas hearings. I totally believe Anita Hill and am in agreement with Angela on her assessment of Thomas and Kavanaugh. So thoroughly disappointing and a blight on your Supreme Court.
I’m really keen to see the series on the Lafferty case, despite its flaws, but it’s currently unavailable in Canada.
The Sunstone Mormon History podcast with Lindsay Hansen Park and Bryan Buchanan will dedicate its next seven episodes to breaking down the UTBOH series and sorting fact from fiction.
Most members i knew in the 70’s 80’s did not talk like they do in the show, but some did. And i did know and still know many men like Father Lafferty. I think that the fact that the church has a policy of having leaders call a hot line for abusive behavior and that hotline is actually Kirton McConkie should tell you that the church does indeed try to keep any negative information from becoming public. There are many stories recorded of the church (through Kirton) offering a settlement in return for a non-disclosure agreement when a person has a strong case against the accused leader. If they do not take the settlement then the church will almost always represent and defend the leader.
Perhaps they decided against having actors wear real garments? The things they show in the Temple are accurate for the time period.
My take is that the church did not expressly do anything to teach the Lafferty’s to be radical and to murder, but there are items in church history that they do not come out strongly enough against, so in essence they did not teach them that there was never a situation where killing was ok. As Mike H. said, ” I didn’t see the book as an indictment of the church per se, but certainly an indictment of teachings and values that have been allowed to persist in the church. Why have they been allowed to persist?”
I had flare leg garments which I wore to bed as more attractive than others available at the time, but that is probably way more info than anyone is comfortable with.
Haven’t seen the series nor read the book BUT from the discussion, it looks like they used my extended family as a template.
usshallbot: The first of the Sunstone podcast episodes is Lindsay interviewing the actors who play Emma and Brigham, and it really great. Both actors really dug into their roles despite only passing familiarity with the Church. Well worth a listen. Lindsay also makes the excellent point for those pearl-clutching Mormons who are concerned about the light the history casts on the Church, as she says the non-LDS viewers don’t believe this anyway, and they were never going to be convinced by this. And yet, I do think that the way the historical scenes are presented is, for a change, more understandable than the white-washed stuff we see put out by the Church. I also particularly appreciated the perspective that Emma & Joseph built this Church together as partners, and when he began cheating on her and then calling it revelation, she was not just personally betrayed, but also fighting with him for the soul of the Church (a fight which she either won, if you are either Community of Christ or RLDS or lost, if you are a Brighamite or fundamentalist). Obviously, any Brighamite who has read Mormon Enigma is probably inclined to think that the wrong side won that battle.
If anybody is interested, the church has a three-part official response to the book, the third part of which (written by Robert Millet and Richard Evans) addresses factual historical errors: https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/church-response-to-jon-krakauers-under-the-banner-of-heaven. I’ve read the book, and it really irritated me. I think I’m learning historical events, and then the author throws something in that I know just factually isn’t true, and I then I’m not sure what else he’s misrepresenting. It’s kind of like the Fox News approach. You don’t know when the facts segue to spin, and spin to falsehood.
I likely won’t be watching the show, though I find the conversations around it here and elsewhere interesting. From what I am reading (and listening to), it is an improvement on the source material. Krakauer is a phenomenal writer (loved Into Thin Air), but my History undergrad spidey senses couldn’t accept the vast logical jumps required to connect the dots between historical and contemporary violence. To be fair, Mormons have a fairly violent past but IMHO the average Mormon (even gun-loving, prepper, Trumpers) are no more prone to individual acts of violence than the average Evangelical who looks forward with glee to the day when Jesus comes back and burns up all the unbelievers. End-times thinking may have a lot of unfortunate consequences for the Christian “church” as a whole, but salacious, made for tv murder generally isn’t one of them.
Flair leg, then. That makes sense. Skirt-style sounded to me like something different. Having different styles is good, since different people like different things. I find two-piece garments to be horribly uncomfortable and mostly only use them when going to the doctor. I’m kind of hoarding the one-piece because I’m afraid one day, they’ll discontinue them without warning, and I want to have enough on hand to last until I die.
I did think to search my old email, and verify that there was a Brother Lafferty in my ward back in 2015. I think he did say he was related somehow to the less respectable Laffertys. Not that I asked him. When I was a teenager in Utah, a LeBaron family lived across the street from me for awhile. Good monogamous church members, but he also had some relation to the polygamists.
https://www.yearofpolygamy.com/living-under-the-banner/?fbclid=IwAR0j3VeCRXuxORRY7f9DC5dYRSLhILQOEVwpaFxX2tsaIzEVYlLyiIQzwCY
The above link is to a series Lindsay Hansen Park is sharing of stories people are submitting on their own personal brushes with fundamentalism in the main stream church. Compelling.
Something in the ex-Mormon community that drives me insane is the widespread notion that religion = violence and that Mormonism is inherently a violent religion because of MMM and Lafferty brothers. OK, first, let’s talk Jainism. It is the most non-violent religion on the planet whose extremists fear even committing violence against plants. If everyone converted to Jainism, I think we could solve global warming.
Second, MMM happened on the frontier in the 1800s. A violent time and place overall. The Lafferty brothers were mentally insane loons whom everyone in the Mormon community immediately condemned. They in no way shape or form represent Mormonism.
Sorry ex-religionists, atheists, ex-Mormons and others who think religion leads to violence. You’re grasping at straws and painting with a broad brush. Religion, even Islam, is overwhelmingly non-violent. Those who commit violence in the name of religion often have other issues going on at play that explain the violence better.
I watched the first 3 episodes alone, and it was chock-full of irritating details and also unexpectedly disturbing. In following the lively online discussions, I fashioned myself a shelf, as it were, on which to put the irritating missteps and to explain away the weird dialogue and process any residual stuff, and settled down to watch the show. I’m rewatching episodes with a visiting family member and it’s a lot more fun to have someone with which to heckle and cackle, and share thoughts.
I do believe the show has a problem with the erasure of women, both as characters and with any female POV in general, even though the showrunners try mightily to achieve more balance in that regard. But it’s one of the flaws of the way the story is constructed from the get go, in the book. It’s first and foremost a true crime narrative, focused on the perps and their arrest, and the sidebar stories focus on their possible motivations and influences from the religious culture, which we experienced in reality at that time, and is recreated as portrayed onscreen. Of course it’s male-centric. The additional story of the personal journey of the law enforcement guys only makes it more so. Good thing I have a well-constructed, sturdy shelf.
But I identity with the women characters, and feel the lack of exploration of them, and feel the familiar sting of their existence to serve as props in a story exploring the action of the various men. Watching as the episodes progress, and seeing Brenda and baby Erica receding into the background rankles the worst. It would take some ground-breaking creativity, but seeing the story constructed with female characters centered more, showing more of their narrative and giving them more voice would be more honest, both as an exposé of the sexism at work, and as fresher way to tell a compelling story.
And speaking of exposing the sexism, I hope that by the end of the series it’s made clear that the crime was misogynistic domestic abuse, and not religious fanaticism. That’s a whole nother discussion, but I’m not alone in this opinion.
John W, it isn’t that us exreligionists think Mormonism is violent at all, it is that we get sick of the church pretending they had no part in things like MMM, and how they continue to cover up and hide things like sexual abuse from leaders. I grew up being told at church that it was the Paiute Indians that did it. When I was about 12, we visited the site. My dad told us some kind of insider story, things that didn’t come out until they dug up the men’s bodies and discovered they were shot from above in the back of the head. But my father had apparently heard from someone who was there. He told us things that never did come out in books, with all the research, about why the women were killed and all the children over 7 years old. He said that there were verbal instructions from Salt Lake that the party had been rustling cattle, raping women, and that they should not be allowed to continue. The kind of thing the church tried and succeeded to cover up for years. It isn’t the violence, it is the lying about it.
Di’s link to Lindsay’s work gathering the stories of women who were, like Brenda, not raised in fundamentalist households, but who nevertheless accidentally found themselves married into them and then left without protection from the patriarchal abuse that was the norm in those families is chilling, and I encourage everyone to go to that link and do some reading. It opened my eyes quite a bit, and part of the problem in the Church is that these wolves in sheeps clothing are literally living among us in the cases presented, often given high offices and responsibility, and given cover by those who can’t imagine that such “good men” would ever be abusive because they themselves are not. But the families bolster their arguments with the many, readily available quotes from leaders that can be used to gaslight women and foster total financial dependence on their husbands. It’s honestly deeply disturbing, and yet easy to see how this abuse would flourish given the tendency in the church (that’s only become more prevalent under Nelson) to worship our leaders as if they are infallible gods, quoting them to support views that these abusers already believe.
I think I’m going to have to do a follow up post on this next week. This is very eye-opening and horrifying.
Anna, fellow ex-religionist here (well I maintain a loose cultural attachment to Mormonism since my wife is a nuanced believer). My point is derived from the many conversations I’ve had with ex-Mormons (in meet-up groups and online) and the many posts I’ve read on the ex-Mormon subreddit which routinely exaggerate the idea that religion and religious belief make you violent. I remember at an ex-Mormon gathering talking to one man who was involved in the Utah secular humanist movement talking about how religious people are killing each other and us non-religious are just sitting back watching it happen and telling people to stop being religious. Popular atheist author Sam Harris attributed in his book End of Faith, the 2004 book that catapulted him to fame, the bulk of mass violence committed in the last few centuries to religion and religious teaching. Even Nazism he attributed to Christian teaching. On page 79, he writes, “knowingly or not, the Nazis were agents of religion.” On page 100, “even explicitly anti-Christian movements, as in the cases of German Nazism and Russian socialism, managed to inherit and enact the doctrinal intolerance of the church” (full PDF of End of Faith is here: http://www.popeye-x.com/downloads/other/Sam.Harris.-.The.End.of.Faith.pdf). Here is Richard Dawkins in a 2017 interview talking about the Manchester bombings: “And the vast majority of religious people wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing. Nevertheless, religious faith is a motivating factor. It’s one of the few things that’s really strong enough to motivate people to do these terrible things” (https://www.npr.org/2017/05/27/530337283/richard-dawkins-on-terrorism-and-religion). Admittedly Dawkins and Harris both influenced my journey out of Mormon thinking and into secularism, but I now, and for years, reject a lot of what they have to say as simplistic and exaggerated. And what they say about religion and violence is incredibly simplistic and fails to consider all sorts of other factors.
In any violent act there are multiple motivations. We can make arguments as to how prominent each of these factors are. For instance, the Lafferty brothers commit murder. What motivated the murders? According to author John Krakauer (https://www.kuer.org/justice/2019-11-12/jon-krakauer-reflects-on-death-of-convicted-killer-ron-lafferty), sociopathy, narcissism, rigid Mormon belief, childhood trauma, anger, misogyny, and a few other factors. Some sort of distinct, and unique, toxic blend of factors motivated the murder, for sure, where Mormon belief is actually one of those factors. Now how high does Mormon belief factor into the explanation of motive? Extremely low. For if we placed higher on the rung, we would expect to see more violent activity of the sort among Mormons. On MMM, we can do the same. What motivated the massacre? A good number of factors, including Mormon belief. But we can’t just say Mormon belief, it is too broad. We have to flesh out what kinds of belief. What we find are unique beliefs, attributable to Mormonism, yes, but existing only during a specific time (i.e. blood atonement). We can’t ignore the fact that large-scale massacres by Native Americans against whites and by whites against Native Americans (overwhelmingly the latter type) were frequent throughout West 1850-1890. MMM fits a pattern there, but is distinct and unique at the same time because of Mormonism, which as I said, is definitely a factor, and a big one. But again, a flavor of Mormonism that did die out and which we do not see in present-day Mormonism under Russell M. Nelson.
On the church hiding and sugarcoating past violence? Absolutely. You’re 100% right. But in my experience, there is an unfortunate pattern in ex-believer and atheist communities of grossly overstating and exaggerating the role of religion in violence. I’ve studied religion and violence for a long time. Mostly, in the way religion is practiced today, I don’t see a correlation between the two.
My comment got put in moderation. Could you please review it and post it. Thanks.
One huge compliment to the series – they NAILED the production values. Having grown up (in my teens) during the 70’s in Salem, Utah – walking into the Pyre home and kitchen, looked just like my boyhood home; along with the lime green formica and the wire backed chairs. Honestly, even as cringeworthy as it feels, the dialogue is really not that far off. I clearly remember my Dad (a solid believer, HC, Bishop etc.) regularly referring to “building up the kingdom” and Heavenly Father being in everyday details. Honestly, I love the series (partly because of the nostalgic value), but I think it really is quite well done. I can’t imagine why anyone would go out of their way to not watch it. Pretty balanced and realistic really.
LHL’s comment makes me wonder do I find some of the dialogue cringeworthy because it’s not the language we use today, but was it more common then? For example, today Mormons refer to God regularly, but back then would it have been more common (in UT) to mention Heavenly Father? We blame it for anachronistically using the shelf terminology, but should we give it more credit for some of the cringeworthy dialogue? I honestly cant say because I grew up in NJ.
Regardless, there definitely is a gosh dang lack of “fetch” in the script
MTodd,
“Fetch” was more of a kids word… and “gosh darn” was only used when your Mom or Bishop were within earshot…
Di, thank you for posting that link. Those stories are hard to read but very eye-opening.