February 2008: Under the Banner of Heaven (Krakauer)

Post date: Jan 07, 2010 10:9:18 PM

Just down the hill from the Mormon Temple in Oakland, Sherrill hosted a small but lively bookclub discussion of Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer on Thursday, February 21, 2008. With five Smithies and a visiting mother in Sherrill's cozy, firelit living room, and one Smithie on speakerphone, our diversity spanned not only geographical location but several decades of graduations (as usual). The technological participation also included several comments Sherrill received from people who couldn't attend the meeting but shared their thoughts about the book via email.

We were all fascinated and horrified with the information we'd learned in the book, specifically certain Fundamentalist Mormon practices such as older men marrying girls as young as 14 (usually pressuring them with threats of hellfire in the afterlife if they don't do as they're told). Although no Mormons were present at our meeting, most everyone has known Mormons, who were probably the mainstream Mormons, not the Fundamentalists who are the ones who believe in polygamy. Despite their reputation for traveling on international missions, Mormons in daily life, in our experience, do not talk about being Mormon nor prosthelytize.

The strong community that the Mormon church provides does seem valuable, and in one anecdote it helped one man to overcome addiction and continue to law school and a successful family and life. A years-ago magazine article Jennie's mother read described how the plural wives enjoyed each other's company and appreciated sharing the husband and the child-rearing.

At the philosophical level, Krakauer spent a chapter near the end covering the legal issues surrounding Ron and Dan Lafferty's murder trial; we discussed how to live in a society of people, we all have to agree to follow the rule of human law, because God's law, as those brothers claimed to follow above all else, is too subjective. If a man follows his god's command, is he insane?

Conversation also touched on former presidential candidate Mit Romney, the Mormon voting bloc, the current case of Warran Jeffs, comparison to Islamic Fundamentalism and that strong, male-dominant community, the mystery of the sacred undergarment (perhaps not unlike the Jewish Orthodox tallit katan?), and the confusing order of Krakauer's storyline, which jumps from past to present and from place to place so that it's sometimes hard to remember all the names.