Under the Banner of Heaven

Under the Banner of Heaven is Jon Krakauer’s 2003 narrative nonfiction book about violence inside fundamentalist Mormon communities, structured around the 1984 murders of Brenda Lafferty and her infant daughter Erica by Brenda’s brothers in law Ron and Dan Lafferty. The Lafferty brothers were members of a fundamentalist Mormon offshoot, and they claimed that they had been commanded by God to kill Brenda because she had been speaking out against the practice of polygamy and trying to talk her sister in law out of going along with the family’s plans.

Krakauer uses the Lafferty case as a window into the wider history of Mormonism, from Joseph Smith’s first revelations in upstate New York in the 1820s through Brigham Young’s leadership of the early church, the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, and the eventual mainstreaming of the LDS Church in the twentieth century. He spends significant time on the fundamentalist offshoots that broke from the mainstream church when the LDS Church officially renounced polygamy in 1890. The book moves between the historical material and the contemporary reporting on the Lafferty case in alternating chapters, and the structure works well to show how the violent currents Krakauer is examining run all the way back through the religion’s origins.

The LDS Church was unhappy with the book when it came out and pushed back hard against Krakauer’s framing. Other readers have argued that he sometimes paints with too broad a brush. Even with those debates, Under the Banner of Heaven remains one of the more important pieces of journalism written about Mormon fundamentalism, and Krakauer’s reporting on the Colorado City and Hildale communities, where Warren Jeffs was building his power at the time, turned out to be prescient.

For readers who liked Into the Wild or Into Thin Air, this is Krakauer working in a different mode but with the same intensity.