I just finished watching another docuseries in which a Mormon murder is examined, The Sins of Our Mother, about the Chad Daybell / Lori Vallow Daybell murder of two of her children, JJ (age 7) and Tylee (age 16). Since these murders took place so recently, many of us have heard about them in the news. In fact, the trial isn’t even set until next year.
Hanna Seariac did a pretty good review of this one in the Deseret News[1]. The Daybells were a part of the publishing and podcasting world of preppers. While several preppers have landed in hot water with the Church, eventually being excommunicated, this usually happens only when they amass enough followers that the Church sees them as a threat to the flock.
Unlike mainstream Mormons who keep a food storage supply, “preppers” go further, stockpiling weapons and food, anticipating an apocalyptic end that will occur any day now. In some cases, they believe their actions are hastening that end. In basically all cases, they are more invested in the world to come than they are in this one, including flouting laws. But this is a continuum. The first counselor in my ward around the time of Y2K was advocating stockpiling weapons to shoot neighbors who hadn’t prepared with their own food storage (a violent twist on the parable of the ten virgins?). Our then bishop told him to dial it down, and he did, but basically, that’s the same line of thought as these folks. When taken to extremes (or extremists might say “to their logical conclusion”), these ideas end up in a lot of self-justification at breaking the laws of a society they believe will no longer exist after said apocalypse. You can justify not paying taxes. You can justify violence. You can justify taking your kids out of school. You can justify cheating on your spouse. You can justify insurance fraud. You can justify murder.
Seariac’s most fleshed out criticism of the show is that it gives the “truth-tellers” a pass, not exposing their own conflicted and skewed perspectives. Lori’s parents are long-time tax evaders, likely also caught up in some prepper-lite thinking. Julie Rowe, a fellow prepper who was excommunicated looks downright reasonable as she criticizes the Daybells, but she espouses similar ideas, although has not been accused of any crimes. Lori’s son Colby has been accused of sexual assault, and while these charges seem unrelated, they also impugn his character. As they say on AITA Reddit [2], ESH.
What this series does better than most of the other Mormon crime series is in portraying the criminals as the guilty ones, not the Church. There are several Church members interviewed who knew Lori at various points in her life and who were not associated with the fringey prepper groups, and they pretty universally thought her beliefs were bizarre and that she was somewhat self-aggrandizing, believing herself to have visions and a self-centered spiritual superiority that they didn’t really agree was accurate. She became obsessed with religion in ways that they, as mainstream Church members, identified as going way way way too far. And these are Mormons. From Seariac’s review:
I watched the series with a friend who is not a Latter-day Saint and does not live in Utah. This friend remarked that it seems like Vallow Daybell just happened to be a Latter-day Saint and her extreme beliefs were connected to the extreme-prepper community.
https://www.deseret.com/2022/9/16/23354104/lori-vallow-netflix-documentary-review-2022
For this reason alone, Mormons should not find this documentary faith-shaking or threatening. It’s a sh!tshow, but one of the Daybells’ making, not the Church’s. There are a ton of “weird” Mormon shows out there right now, some true crime, some just prurient interest in fringe religious practices like polygamy. While the crime described in this one is among the most chilling, it also didn’t feel like it was trying to be something bigger than what it was.
So, what’s next? A show about Mountain Meadows Massacre? A show about Ted Bundy’s really brief (and probably insincere) stint as a Mormon (which seemed to be just one more disguise he used to find victims)? There’s clearly a real Mormon moment happening here, and I suspect it’s not the one the Church would have liked.
- Why are there so many Mormon crime dramas right now?
- What future Mormon crime (or other negative Mormon spin) shows do you expect to see?
- Which of these shows have you watched, and what did you think?
Discuss.
[1] Yes, I just said “Deseret News” and “good” in the same sentence for the second time in a month. Maybe the end days really are upon us.
[2] The “Am I The A-hole” Reddit group in which people share a story in which they’ve been told they were out of line, then ask readers whether they really were in the wrong or not. The reponses are usually: YTA (You’re The A-Hole), NAH (Not the A-Hole), or ESH (Everyone Sucks Here).
Wheat & Tares 
“And these are Mormons.” Quote of the week. Applies in many contexts.
Why are there so many Mormon crime dramas right now? I really have no idea, but I’d love to hear other people’s theories. People enjoy watching shows about crazy people, and Mormons are considered some of the craziest people around right now, so Mormonism is simply rich fodder for shows about crazy people?
What future negative Mormon shows do you expect to see?
I would love to see a show produced that followed the paths of several gay Mormon kids through their high school and early adult years living in Mormon-dominated communities. I would want the show to be balanced: depicting the positive influence of Mormonism on these kids and their families, but then also showing some of the discrimination and harassment that they experience because of Mormonism. Finally, it would show the circumstances and pressures which essentially force most of these kids to leave the Church, if not in high school, then in early adulthood. By showing realistic depictions of the paths of these kids through Mormonism (and perhaps contrasting their experience with a few straight kids’ experiences), I’d hope it might change a few minds of Mormons about how the Church’s current policies leaves very little room for gays once they become young adults, and I’d also hope that it would increase the outrage of non-Mormons towards the Church regarding its treatment of LGBTQ people. The Church says big changes in doctrine/policy only come through revelation directly from God. That would be great, but Church history shows that increasing internal and external pressure is almost always required for a such a revelation to come.
Which of the shows have you watched?
I think the only show I’ve watched so far is LuLaRich. It’s been a number of months since I watched it, so I can’t go into details, but I highly recommend it (I was so enthralled that I binge watched it one night and regretted it when I had to make it to an 8 a.m. meeting the next morning). LulaRich is a documentary about the meteoric rise and equally spectacular collapse of a Mormon-run MLM company called LuLaRoe. The show isn’t necessarily strictly a Mormon show–a lot of it shows the predatory behaviors of an MLM company like LuLaRoe–but the Mormon influence is very obvious. The two founders, a Mormon husband/wife couple, were extensively interviewed for the show. I got the feeling that they agreed to the interviews because they wanted to “tell their story” (to combat so much negative publicity LuLaRoe faced), and the documentary, I think, does give them a fair chance to do that. That said, I wonder in the end if they regret participating since I felt like they still came off as pretty slimy. Mormon themes like the prosperity gospel, patriarchy, etc. were front and center in this documentary, which I found fascinating.
To me the big question is chicken vs. egg: is the Church weird and attracts we1rd people or do weird people make the Church the way it is? Is it the institution with its far out beliefs or is it the fringe element that influences the Church culture to be the way it is? I don’t know but they (the weird members and the weird culture and beliefs) seem to feed off each other. And this is very entertaining for many people…thus all the shows.
Count me as a fan of the whole “Mormons Behaving Badly” genre. I grew up active in the Church, but well outside the Mountain Time Zone, so the only high-profile stories I heard about LDS people was about the shining example celebrities (the Osmonds, Steve Young, etc) or those nauseating profiles in the New Era about LDS kids (mostly from Utah, natch) who were accomplished athletes or academic high achievers or super talented in other ways. It made me feel incredibly inadequate for just being average, despite the fact that I was regularly told being LDS made me special. It’s refreshing to see that its perfectly fine to be an average, decent human being who generally complies with civil laws and pays taxes, while many of these Mormon (or Mormon-adjacent) troublemakers often use a cloak of uber-righteousness to cover up or even justify their immorality. Stories like these give us permission to stop pretending that being Mormon means we are better than everyone else by default.
OP: “What this series does better than most of the other Mormon crime series is in portraying the criminals as the guilty ones, not the Church.”
I still think the Church itself bears some responsibility for planting the seeds of extremism, by still hanging on to an institutional persecution complex wrapped in a superiority complex. I wonder if the Daybell-Vallows or Julie Rowe would have ever become what they are today if, at some point in the past, a bishop or stake president would have had the courage to take them aside to give them a stern warning to “knock it off” and nip that extreme behavior in the bud, back when they were still faithful believers who respected Church authority, and long before they were able to gain a following or connect with like-minded weirdos. Perhaps Julie Rowe would have been sufficiently offended that she would have quietly fallen away from the Church on her own early on, rather than build a following from which she would benefit by a widely-publicized excommunication. I’m guessing their respective bishops were too busy hunting down feminists, gays and intellectuals to even consider the potential danger of end-times preppers.
For those not familiar with the details of this case, I will point out that they each murdered their respective spouses also. Lori went first, setting up a scenario where her brother Alex shot her husband Charles, saying it was self-defense, which it was not. Then Lori moved to Idaho where her two children were killed and buried in Chad’s backyard. Shortly after those deaths, Chad murdered his wife Tammy.
Not only were Lori’s children murdered, but Chad’s 5 adult children, and Charles’ 3 adult sons from a previous marriage, were deprived of a parent who loved them dearly.
Crazy evil.
Jack & Josh H: Unfortunately, I think you may be right that the Church in general (right now at least) is somewhat more tolerant of extremists on the right than it is of mainstream people whose political views are left of center.
What I would have said earlier on (before some of these absolutely bonkers series) is that the fact that we have so many weird stories is just a sign that the Church is big enough to have had our share of these. But jeez, it’s sure hard to justify that perspective at this point.
I also think the Church’s current intolerance for liberals and progressives is the key reason that Hollywood is eating this up with a spoon, happy to dish the dirt on what they see as a homophobic, sexist, racist church because Mormons who end up in Hollywood are the very people who found current church culture intolerable. Their values and views didn’t fit with the current conservative church culture which used to be less intrusive about political differences, and is much more interested in hounding out diverse perspectives at this point. There are quite a few former Mormons in Hollywood and media at this point, far more than there are current ones.
I am a sucker for these shows and binged the Daybell docuseries. There are a few troubling threads that run through a lot of these stories that are definitely worth examining: 1. The focus on what is to come rather than the here and now. Lori and Chad were a very extreme example, but so caught up in a fantasy world and what was to come that they did not recognize they had murdered their children; 2. A fixation on “secret” knowledge, this is a current in the Daybell and Under the Banner of Heaven stories; 3. An outsourcing of morality and decision making. This is especially true in the Keep Sweet documentary, people are blindly following and not stopping and thinking if these things are bad. They are conditioned to think this way. Also, in Under the Banner, the Laffertys follow a prompting to kill a woman and baby. The important thing to these people is not doing what is right, but following the spirit/God no matter what. In the Daybell series, the spirit has confirmed people are zombies and then anything is fair game. All of this thinking leads to devastating results.
The takeaway from all of these for me is that skepticism and questioning are healthy, as is recognizing that the here and now may be all there is. Religion can be a huge benefit to quality of life, but taken to an extreme can lead to horrible results.
I think the reason people are interested in certain Mormon murders that were religiously motivated is that there is a kind of creepiness to religiously motivated crime. Using a loving God as motivation to murder your children is just creepy. How does one’s thinking get from food storage, to prepping, to murder? There is just something extra creepy about the thinking of “God wants me to kill people the people I love,” Whether it is the Lafferty brothers, or Jim Jones, or Lori Daybell.
We can all see the difference between crime that is ordinary crime and religiously motivated crime. So, how can we just calmly say that it is the criminals who are guilty not the church. I think it is both the criminals *and* the church. While it would be wrong to put too much blame on the church, I think in the case of religiously motivated crime, it is a case where the criminal is guilty, AND the religion is guilty. How much guilt the religion has depends on how far the criminal departed from the religious beliefs.
Take Moslem suicide bombers for example. Their religion teaches them they will be rewarded for killing. So, don’t tell me that the religion has no responsibility. But Lori Daybell departed from normal Mormon thinking by a bit more than your suicide bomber.
So, what about the guilt in a religion that teaches that God can command Nephi to kill Laban? God can command someone to kill. That is the Mormon belief. So, is there some guilt for the church when some nut case raised in that religion, decides that God has commanded them to kill (fill in the blank). How do you know your thinking is off the rails when you believe in a God that commands people to kill?
Personally, I don’t believe in *that* God, so if God told me to kill someone, I would know I was nuts because that is not from God. But for other Mormons, they do believe in that God.
Mormon religious crime has a pattern of the criminal believing that God is telling them to commit the crime. This pattern shows up everywhere from Lori Daybell, to Warren Jeffs, to the Lafferty brothers. So, in a way, it is our very belief that we personally can receive revelation, combined with the belief that God is the kind of God who would command murder, or use a drawn sword to command Joseph Smith to sleep with…um I mean marry teenagers and married women. As long as we believe in a God who commands people to commit murder and adultery, we are going to have nut cases who think God is personally commanding them to commit some crime.
So, just how responsible is our religion?
Why so many Mormon dramas? I don’t know for sure. I think we’re starting to approach a point where most every American knows at least one very good member of the Church. I suppose flipping that narrative attracts the curious.
Not sure what I expect in the future, but I doubt anything would surprise me.
I actually haven’t watched many of these shows, especially the Mormon ones. I’ll admit I prefer to read my non-fiction and watch scripted shows more often.
Didn’t Netflix do Ted Bundy already? I’m not sure how much of a focus was on his encounter with Mormonism since I haven’t seen it. My grandmother met him once, and I’m told there’s one part of the show where he likely mentions her, though not by name.
“I think you may be right that the Church in general (right now at least) is somewhat more tolerant of extremists on the right than it is of mainstream people whose political views are left of center.”
I mentioned this on one of Dave B’s posts months ago, but most, if not all of those involved in the Oregon incident were excommunicated. It was actually through a nonmember that I learned that. Unlike Kate Kelly, they probably didn’t blog about it. I imagine they felt some amount of shame as well. I remember reading how LaVoy Finicum did some deep introspection following criticism from the Church (he obviously only had a few weeks to think about it). It does surprise me somewhat that these excommunications weren’t shown all over the media, unless the desire is only to continue the narrative that the Church is more tolerant of the right.
Another thing to keep in mind is that a lot of these people don’t see themselves as breaking the law. They just see some of these laws as unconstitutional. Given the fact that a lot of these people in Oregon and Nevada were acquitted, it might be reasonable to assume the jury tended to see it that way as well. I’m not saying they went about it the right way, but I think they had some very valid points, of which their peers may have agreed.
felixfabulous’s comment really resonates with me. The more I hear about these stories, the more I’m convinced that there is a fine line between mainstream Mormon beliefs and absolute batsh*t crazytown. The focus on what is to come is especially troubling. There are a number of ways that a disturbed person could easily go down a path of violence with that kind of thinking. And frankly, the Mormon Church does the same thing, just on a more subtle level. A lot of really good questions, for example, have been asked about LGBTQ discrimination, racial discrimination, single people, women and the priesthood, etc. And a lot of the unsatisfying answers that the church gives have a lot to do with “the world to come”, including all of the BS about “oh, you gay/trans/single people just have challenges in mortality; it’ll all be straightened out in the afterlife”. There’s a LOT of deferring to the afterlife instead of focusing on fixing things in the here and now. I can easily see how some fanatical true believers could take that stuff even further.
The other disturbing aspect is the subjective nature of a lot of Mormon “spiritual” experiences. On the one hand, in a testimony meeting, we expect everyone’s experiences and beliefs to correlate exactly with Mormon doctrine, belief, and practice, but on the other hand, there’s another disturbing thread of anyone’s visions or “revelations” being automatically ratified just because they had them. Hell, that’s exactly what Joseph Smith did. No one else was there to see his First Vision, but he just kept insisting it was true. Mormons have a really hard time not understanding the fact that just because someone insists something is true doesn’t mean it’s actually true. This can certainly lead to a dangerous kind of self-authorizing morality.
I’ve sat in loads of Sunday school lessons where Abraham has been praised for his faithfulness in being ready to sacrifice his son.
Not sure Mormonism can fully wash its hands off any of this stuff so long as inspiration from God is seen as a justification for anything.
I haven’t watched the crime shows, but I have wondered at the connection between Mormonism and extreme views, similar to what Jack Hughes, Brother Sky and felix have mentioned. This line: “What this series does better than most of the other Mormon crime series is in portraying the criminals as the guilty ones, not the Church.”
My father has some serious issues. He’s not violent (mostly), but there are other ways to be unhinged. For a long time, I blamed the church for never reigning in a priesthood holder who does a good job at his calling. I eventually concluded that my father would have had problems in any community; he just happened to be LDS. I honestly don’t think that the Church could have said anything that would have gotten through to him that his views were extreme/wrong/misguided. The reason I wish the Church spoke out about extreme behavior more is because it would weaken the support system for people like him. Like, instead of thinking a wife/child/friend is Christlike, forgiving and supportive for being patient with crazy beliefs, the spouse/child/friend knows that he’s out of line and they don’t have to tiptoe around to avoid offending him. The people in the orbit (especially the family members) of extremists need to hear that these kind of views are wrong. You probably can’t reach the extremists, but you can give their enablers direction about not supporting them or joining them.
I don’t really understand the down votes on Eli’s comment. I thought it was pretty reasonable. The church has excommunicated those on the far right at times, and that’s important to know. As I said in the OP, this is particularly an issue if they are amassing a following and are seen as a threat. My observation about low tolerance for liberals & progressives was more related to church culture than actual church discipline. The average bishop is probably going to be more concerned about someone openly expressing that they support gay marriage or abortion rights than they are about someone blaming “the world” or “Hollywood” for secularization or criticizing teachers for being woke or making some kind of transphobic slur. That’s just my own observation, and I’d love to be wrong, but I don’t think I am.
Janey made the other point I was about to make. Yes, things like eating disorders, domestic violence, mental illness and even murder might take on a religious justification in a person’s mind, but I think it’s going too far to say the church caused that. I agree that the church should be very clear that it does not tolerate or accept those things in terms that perpetrators will recognize and accept, to the degree possible. The problem is that sometimes, these t ypes of mental illness lead the person to see things through a justifying lens. If church leadres say “abuse is never tolerated,” they don’t see what they are doing as abuse–just obeying or helping god. Or they imagine they heard dog whistle approval from leaders. There have even been murderers who explained facial signals they interpreted as approval or secret messages that were in fact no such thing. It’s similar to those who took Pres. Nelson’s pro-vaccine message and said, “He’s just saying that to placate the libs. He doesn’t believe it.” Really? Or in the case of Lori, she literally believed her own self-serving visions over the church, and she believed she was like a god in her ability to judge who was a zombie and who wasn’t. Son of Sam said his dog told him to kill people, but we don’t blame PETA. (Yeah, I realize that’s a bit of a one-off).
Yes, the Nephi story is disturbing, but every Bible-based church, including Judaism, has a bizarre way of justifying the Abraham story. It just recently came up in one of my book club meetings, and I’m the only LDS person there. Pretty much everyone said the same thing, that all religious people have an “orthodox” interpretation of that troubling story that justifies Abraham, but anyone who actually reads it should be horrified.
Go read Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover to get another view of being raised in a wacky (but not criminally violent) Mormon family. It was a bestseller. It shows how crazy one’s Mormon beliefs can get but still somehow be “mainstream” Mormon. There are enough crazy doctrines and beliefs lurking below the surface of modern correlated Mormonism (it’s in our history, our scriptures, and the classic Mormon books some of us have read) that the modern Mormon crazies just don’t seem that crazy to mainstream Mormons. Average TBM might think this or that fellow ward member is “out there” a bit, but because their crazy Mormon beliefs are still recognizably Mormon, it’s somehow okay (as long as it’s right-wing crazy we’re talking about).
This is off-topic, but I had to respond to the flood of thoughts and feelings that overcame me as I read @moutainclimber479’s comment: “I would love to see a show produced that followed the paths of several gay Mormon kids through their high school and early adult years living in Mormon-dominated communities. I would want the show to be balanced: depicting the positive influence of Mormonism on these kids and their families, but then also showing some of the discrimination and harassment that they experience because of Mormonism. Finally, it would show the circumstances and pressures which essentially force most of these kids to leave the Church, if not in high school, then in early adulthood. By showing realistic depictions of the paths of these kids through Mormonism.”
This is in no way a criticism of the comment – just sharing my reaction and experience as a father of a gay son.
We’ll have to start earlier than high school with the predator in the ward (less than two years older) who, when recognizing that my son was gay, bullied and demeaned him to the point that he was paralyzed when the abuse turned sexual. And the predator’s father, who was the scoutmaster, that tormented him and called him a sissy and bullied him about not wanting to go camping unless I came along – neither of us knowing that it was so that he wouldn’t be abused by his son on camps.
At 15, his mom and I were seeing the signs of his sexual orientation. We were a pretty soft place for that. I could tell there was more and asked about abuse. He told us and we started the wheels turning for counseling and reporting to the police. We were then in a different ward. The bishop was awesome and my son wanted to talk with him. Bishop called the church’s Help Line. He told them that the detectives had asked that no one tell the perpetrator’s family so that they could have a brief window for questioning when they made the arrest. The Help Line instructed new bishop to call old bishop and pass along the police instructions.
New bishop called old bishop and filled him in and passed on the part about not telling the family. Old bishop immediately called the family.
High school years – he attended some of his first year and a semester of his last. Just incapable of withstanding any more ridicule. He filled his time with work and caring for horses at an equine therapy center. Young adult – periods of great success at work interspersed with seasons of not being able to leave the house. I’ll never forget breaking in the bathroom door to find him with a rope around his neck with the other end tied around the shower head – and then later cutting the rope. He survived that and a couple of other attempts.
Now almost 30, he is succeeding as a general manager of a large restaurant. The trauma and associated demons are never far away.
“Discrimination and harassment” don’t even begin to describe the mental and sometimes physical and sexual abuse that takes place under the church’s umbrella. Robbed of being able to have a sense of self. Traumatized at an early age by being told they are going to hell and won’t be with their families. That acting on their “perversions” – thank you general conference – are sins next to murder. And I’ve attended far too many funerals for LDS LGBTQ+ youth who found it was all too much.
This s**t is real. We have to fix it.
@BeenThere — That’s a powerful story. I don’t have a gay child, so I can’t even imagine going through what you’ve gone through with your son. We do need to fix this.
“I’ve sat in loads of Sunday school lessons where Abraham has been praised for his faithfulness in being ready to sacrifice his son.”
Codeye: I hate the spin on this story also, with SS instructors all the while ignoring that it was not the first time Abraham nearly sent a son of his to the promised land, i.e. sending Isaac and Hagar into the wilderness with just enough provisions to get them out-of-sight/out-of-mind until an angel rescues them at the point of death.
I think our religion does plant seeds that can lead to extremism. At the point in the documentary where Lori talks about hanging out with Moroni and other angels, I pointed out that we teach 11 y.o. boys that “the ‘ministering of angels,’ mean[s] that holders of the Aaronic Priesthood are eligible to have angels minister to them.” ( byu.edu)
I am thinking the same as felixfabulous and Brother Sky (I seem to always agree with him). I didn’t see Mormonism as the main issue, but I would say it is a part. To me the interesting question is if all involved didn’t have Mormonism, would this have the same general outcome? There are other religions/belief systems that might have led to some other crazy outcomes. But then at the same time I just can’t shake that Mormon part of this didn’t amplify the bat guano craziness of this story – let alone the tragedy of the lives lost. If they ever put it up for vote in general conference I will vote for removing Nephi killing Laban and Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac from the scriptures. We just have to say “Go get help if God is telling you to kill someone”. Isn’t God powerful enough to take people out if he needs to?
I apologize that I haven’t watched anything since Banner, and I have no wisdom to dispense on the topic in the OP. My only thought here is that if ever there is a worthy topic to go “off topic” for in forums like ours, it’s to tell stories like that of Been There. God bless you and your family, especially your son as he heals from a childhood of covert abuse.
What if we look at it from a different angle: could other religions / cultural norms / ideologies have contributed to healthy behaviors?
(Many notable comments on this.
I’ll add my admiration for @BeenThere’s son’s inner strength to get where he is today, and encouragement for his continued well being.
I’d really like @moutainclimber479’s documentary idea to become reality.)
)
>Mormons who end up in Hollywood are the very people who found current church culture intolerable. Their values and views didn’t fit with the current conservative church culture which used to be less intrusive about political differences, and is much more interested in hounding out diverse perspectives at this point.
I think Black has said as much in his interviews, and I’d be surprised if he were alone.
I think there’s another layer here beyond being “squeezed out.” It isn’t just a feeling of not belonging, for many who are disaffected with conservative/institutional church, it isn’t just *politics*, it’s that something seems wrong *spiritually* with the church’s approach, things the church desperately needs to reflect on to live up to its name. But there’s also an absence of blessed avenues for discussing and addressing that internally. Now add on top of that the aggressiveness with which the church itself regularly impugns “the world” and what conservatives pronounce as its evils.
That kind of position is absolutely *begging* to have a mirror held up to it, to the church and the peculiarities of its people, asking it to confront moments at which garden-variety differences have sprouted into darkness.
One could imagine that committed practitioners of a gospel of repentance would take this as an opportunity.
I don’t think that this is a new phenomenon. There has been a long tradition of detective / true-crime novels that focus on and exaggerate violence within Mormonism. What’s new is that this tradition is moving into TV shows.
The best description of this trope is Michael Austin’s article in Sunstone from 1998: https://sunstone.org/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/111-51-71.pdf
I’ve also written about it on my own blog: http://thechaostician.com/the-violent-mormon-stereotype/
I was an executive secretary in 2014 and was introduced to Julie Rowe’s books by the second counselor in the bishopric. I then learned that the first counselor was also knee deep in the prepper culture and had also read her work. Then I found out that our high priest group leader was the biggest believer of them all. Fortunately, the Bishop was not in the loop but everyone around him had this quiet, unspoken understanding that the end was coming quickly and were all searching for the information the presidency and Q12 were not yet authorized to reveal. Its hard for me to say that the church is to blame but its clearly through the church that this culture is shared and takes root. Julie Rowe went on a book tour sharing her story and spoke in plenty of church buildings in Utah and Idaho. I’m not sure what the church can do to stomp it out because the church relies on the same belief system that prepper culture does. I don’t know if its possible to draw the line between reasonable belief and down right crazy belief when the same kinds of things exist in our scripture.
I usually b dummy post but been there that such a sad reality your son had to face. I’m glad he is still with us and succeeding now. B this needs to change.