Escape
by Carolyn Jessop
from Broadway
The dramatic first-person account of life inside an ultra-fundamentalist American religious sect, and one woman’s courageous flight to freedom with her eight children.
When she was eighteen years old, Carolyn Jessop was coerced into an arranged marriage with a total stranger: a man thirty-two years her senior. Merril Jessop already had three wives. But arranged plural marriages were an integral part of Carolyn’s heritage: She was born into and raised in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the radical offshoot of the Mormon Church that had settled in small communities along the Arizona-Utah border. Over the next fifteen years, Carolyn had eight children and withstood her husband’s psychological abuse and the watchful eyes of his other wives who were locked in a constant battle for supremacy.
Carolyn’s every move was dictated by her husband’s whims. He decided where she lived and how her children would be treated. He controlled the money she earned as a school teacher. He chose when they had sex; Carolyn could only refuse—at her peril. For in the FLDS, a wife’s compliance with her husband determined how much status both she and her children held in the family. Carolyn was miserable for years and wanted out, but she knew that if she tried to leave and got caught, her children would be taken away from her. No woman in the country had ever escaped from the FLDS and managed to get her children out, too. But in 2003, Carolyn chose freedom over fear and fled her home with her eight children. She had $20 to her name.
Escape exposes a world tantamount to a prison camp, created by religious fanatics who, in the name of God, deprive their followers the right to make choices, force women to be totally subservient to men, and brainwash children in church-run schools. Against this background, Carolyn Jessop’s flight takes on an extraordinary, inspiring power. Not only did she manage a daring escape from a brutal environment, she became the first woman ever granted full custody of her children in a contested suit involving the FLDS. And in 2006, her reports to the Utah attorney general on church abuses formed a crucial part of the case that led to the arrest of their notorious leader, Warren Jeffs.
Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist's Wife
by Irene Spencer
from Center Street
Irene Spencer did as she felt God
commanded in marrying her
brother-in-law Verlan LeBaron, becoming
his second wife. When the
government raided the fundamentalist, polygamous
Mormon village of Short Creek, Arizona,
Irene and her family fled to
Verlan's brothers' Mexican ranch.
They lived in squalor and desolate
conditions in the Mexican desert
with Verlan's six brothers, one sister,
and numerous wives and children.
Readers will be appalled and
astonished, but most amazingly,
greatly inspired. Irene's dramatic
story reveals how far religion can
be stretched and abused and how one woman and her
children found their way out, into truth and redemption.
God's Brothel: The Extortion of Sex for Salvation in Contemporary Mormon and Christian Fundamentalist Polygamy and the Stories of 18
by Andrea Moore-Emmett
from Pince-Nez Press
A chilling indictment of contemporary Mormon and Christian fundamentalist polygamy, God's Brothel reveals gruesome facts about Bible-based polygamy through the brave voices of 18 women who escaped from 10 of the 11 main religious groups as well as independent families. Their stories include rape, incest, orgies, and violence, making this form of polygamy more akin to sexual slavery than to any quaint religious or lifestyle choice.
When Men Become Gods: Mormon Polygamist Warren Jeffs, His Cult of Fear, and the Women Who Fought Back
by Stephen Singular
from St. Martin's Press
As the leader and self-proclaimed prophet of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, a sect of Mormonism based in isolated southern Utah, Warren Jeffs held sway over thousands of followers for nearly a decade. His rule was utterly tyrannical. In addition to coercing young girls into polygamous marriages with older men, Jeffs reputedly took scores of wives, many of whom were his father’s widows. Television, radio, and newspapers were shunned, creating a hidden community where polygamy was prized above all else.
But in 2007, after a two-year manhunt that landed him on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, Jeffs’s reign was forcefully ended. He was convicted of rape as an accomplice for his role in arranging a marriage between a fourteen-year-old girl and her nineteen-year-old first cousin.
In When Men Become Gods, Edgar Award nominee Stephen Singular traces Jeffs’s rise to power and the concerted effort that led to his downfall. It was a movement championed by law enforcement, private investigators, the Feds, and perhaps most vocal of all, a group of former polygamous wives seeking to liberate young women from the arranged marriages they’d once endured. The book offers new revelations into a nearly impenetrable enclave---a place of nineteenth-century attire, inbreeding, and eerie seclusion---providing readers with a rare glimpse into a tradition that’s almost a century old, but that has only now been exposed.
Daughter of the Saints: Growing Up In Polygamy
by Dorothy Allred Solomon
from W. W. Norton & Company
"Probably the best book ever written about polygamy. Neither an apologia nor an exposé."—Salt Lake City Tribune
"I am the daughter of my father's fourth plural wife, twenty-eighth of forty-eight children—a middle kid, you might say."
So begins this astonishing and poignant memoir of life in the family of Utah fundamentalist leader and naturopathic physician Rulon C. Allred. Since polygamy was abolished by manifesto in 1890, this is a story of secrecy and lies, of poverty and imprisonment and government raids. When raids threatened, the families were forced to scatter from their pastoral compound in Salt Lake City to the deserts of Mexico or the wilds of Montana. To follow the Lord's plan as dictated by the Principle, the human cost was huge. Eventually murder in its cruelest form entered when members of a rival fundamentalist group assassinated the author's father.
Dorothy Solomon, monogamous herself, broke from the fundamentalist group because she yearned for equality and could not reconcile the laws of God (as practiced by polygamists) with the vastly different laws of the state. This poignant account chronicles her brave quest for personal identity. Originally published in hardcover under the title Predators, Prey, and Other Kinfolk.
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
by Jon Krakauer
from Doubleday
In 1984, Ron and Dan Lafferty murdered the wife and infant daughter of their younger brother Allen. The crimes were noteworthy not merely for their brutality but for the brothers' claim that they were acting on direct orders from God. In Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer tells the story of the killers and their crime but also explores the shadowy world of Mormon fundamentalism from which the two emerged. The Mormon Church was founded, in part, on the idea that true believers could speak directly with God. But while the mainstream church attempted to be more palatable to the general public by rejecting the controversial tenet of polygamy, fundamentalist splinter groups saw this as apostasy and took to the hills to live what they believed to be a righteous life. When their beliefs are challenged or their patriarchal, cult-like order defied, these still-active groups, according to Krakauer, are capable of fighting back with tremendous violence. While Krakauer's research into the history of the church is admirably extensive, the real power of the book comes from present-day information, notably jailhouse interviews with Dan Lafferty. Far from being the brooding maniac one might expect, Lafferty is chillingly coherent, still insisting that his motive was merely to obey God's command. Krakauer's accounts of the actual murders are graphic and disturbing, but such detail makes the brothers' claim of divine instruction all the more horrifying. In an age where Westerners have trouble comprehending what drives Islamic fundamentalists to kill, Jon Krakauer advises us to look within America's own borders. --John Moe
Jon Krakauer’s literary reputation rests on insightful chronicles of lives conducted at the outer limits. In UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN, he shifts his focus from extremes of physical adventure to extremes of religious belief within our own borders. At the core of his book is an appalling double murder committed by two Mormon Fundamentalist brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a revelation from God commanding them to kill their blameless victims. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this “divinely inspired” crime, Krakauer constructs a multilayered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, savage violence, polygamy, and unyielding faith. Along the way, he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America’s fastest-growing religion, and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.
Krakauer takes readers inside isolated communities in the American West, Canada, and Mexico, where some forty-thousand Mormon Fundamentalists believe the mainstream Mormon Church went unforgivably astray when it renounced polygamy. Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the leaders of these outlaw sects are zealots who answer only to God. Marrying prodigiously and with virtual impunity (the leader of the largest fundamentalist church took seventy-five “plural wives,” several of whom were wed to him when they were fourteen or fifteen and he was in his eighties), fundamentalist prophets exercise absolute control over the lives of their followers, and preach that any day now the world will be swept clean in a hurricane of fire, sparing only their most obedient adherents.
Weaving the story of the Lafferty brothers and their fanatical brethren with a clear-eyed look at Mormonism’s violent past, Krakauer examines the underbelly of the most successful homegrown faith in the United States, and finds a distinctly American brand of religious extremism. The result is vintage Krakauer, an utterly compelling work of nonfiction that illuminates an otherwise confounding realm of human behavior.
JON KRAKAUER is the author of Eiger Dreams, Into the Wild, and Into Thin Air, and is editor of the Modern Library Exploration series.
Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling
by Richard Lyman Bushman
from Vintage
Founder of the largest indigenous Christian church in American history, Joseph Smith published the 584-page Book of Mormon when he was twenty-three and went on to organize a church, found cities, and attract thousands of followers before his violent death at age thirty-eight. Richard Bushman, an esteemed cultural historian and a practicing Mormon, moves beyond the popular stereotype of Smith as a colorful fraud to explore his personality, his relationships with others, and how he received revelations.
An arresting narrative of the birth of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling also brilliantly evaluates the prophet’s bold contributions to Christian theology and his cultural place in the modern world.
Colorado City Polygamists: An Inside Look for the Outsider
by Benjamin G. Bistline
from Agreka Books
Eldorado, Texas, is being invaded by polygamists from Colorado City. “Outsiders” unfamiliar with what they do and how they do it are aggressively seeking information about the group. And they should . . . The public needs to know how the one-man dictatorship developed and how maniacal Warren Jeffs rules today. He and his lieutenants are highly skilled and articulate business men who have mastered the art of deception and therefore pose a threat to any community they inhabit. . . Colorado City historian Benjamin Bistline’s first deeply documented book, The Polygamists: A History of Colorado City, Arizona was written to present the truth of the beginnings of the group and its original religious doctrine. Over the years, that doctrine has been verbally “rewritten” by religious leaders to support their claim of God’s approval of their one-man tyrannical dictatorship. . . For “outsiders” to whom Colorado City and polygamy are new, the first book was overwhelming with deep documentation. So we offer you this book, condensed, simplified, and easy to follow. . . People across America are asking how it is that girls as young as thirteen can be forced to marry, and not even to young men but old men; and how it is that women are treated as chattel and belong not to themselves or their husband, but to the Priesthood; and how it is that wives and children can suddenly be reassigned to a “more obedient” man; and how it is that teenage boys are cast out so older men can have more wives. . . (And now these disenfranchised boys are finally finding help from an organization in Salt Lake City.) And finally, how is it that tax dollars of American citizens are not only supporting many large polygamist families, but helping their communities expand. . . Polygamy abuses in America remain in the public eye thanks to Oprah, CNN, ABC Primetime, A&E Television and other media sources, including newspapers The Salt Lake Tribune, The Spectrum of St. George, Utah, The Phoenix New Times, The Arizona Republic, and the Deseret Morning News. With polygamists setting up an enclave in Texas, The Eldorado Success, San Antonio Express-News, Fort Worth Star Telegram, The Dallas Morning News, and others are working to make their citizens aware.
The Holy Secret
by James L. Ferrell
from Deseret Book
Many today carry a secret: We do not love what we have been commanded to love. We do not love what is holy. Although we might reverence things that are deemed holy-- the temple, for example, and the scriptures, and the Sabbath-- we do not love them. Not really. Not with our whole souls. The Holy Secret is the story of a man who learns how to love what matters. As he does, he learns another secret: Love for holiness transforms life itself. His realization of what he had been missing may lead you to some discoveries of your own!
Inside the World of Warren Jeffs: The Power of Polygamy
by Carole A. Western
from Wyndham House Publishing, Div of Cloud Peak Publishing, Inc.
Inside the World of Warren Jeffs looks deep into the world of the Polygamist lifestyle exposing the dark side as never before. You are skillfully taken by the author through the everyday existence of the pluralistic family to endure the pain, suffering, cruelty and regimentation of singular male domination. A much overlooked fact about polygamy is that it can only work when there are more women than men in a society. Eventually, polygamy burns itself out because of natural selection. When the number of men equals or almost equals the number of women, there are no spare women to marry, and polygamy ceases. Only in the Fundamentalist Polygamist Groups do they keep the practice of polygamy alive, by abandoning a large number of their sons. These teenage boys are cast out into society to fend for themselves with little more than a sixth grade education, nowhere to go, no friends, and knowing they can never contact their mothers or family members again. A father throwing away his sons effectively throws away his competition for young females to take as wives. Because women are considered prime property in the Fundamentalist Polygamist religions, and as the pool of eligible women shrinks, polygamist men look for younger and younger wives to fulfill their needs. Some men marry girls who are little more than children, or at least make contracts with a young girl s father for marriage at a later date. The usual age of marriage for polygamist girls, is between twelve and fourteen. By the time a girl is twelve or even younger in a polygamist culture, older males have already noticed her and are vying and negotiating for her hand in marriage with whichever prophet leads their church.
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