Under the Banner of Heaven

The trailer for Hulu’s Under the Banner of Heaven piqued my interest a few months back. Not because the show looked especially good, though it appeared well-made enough, but because it came at the crest of a wave of content from various media channels attacking the Mormons. Several documentaries hit the streaming services in a fusillade that felt coordinated in its volume and unity of message. Articles popped up from all corners of the regime media ecosystem - The Atlantic, The New Yorker, CNN, etc - covering a mosaic of different stories that all drove more or less the same point:

"Hey, remember there’s this population of weird religious people in the middle of America — like, people who really believe their religion — and they are backward and dangerous."

In the case of Under the Banner of Heaven, the story concerns a 1984 double murder in Utah committed by brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, fundamentalist Mormons who killed their sister-in-law and her baby because God revealed to them that they should. I had never read John Krakauer’s 2003 book upon which the show is based, and seeing as his Into the Wild had quite an impact on me in college, I sought out the book to read before checking out the Hulu show.

It’s an aggressively anti-religious book, though it’s careful to filter its animus through a focus on an extreme incident in a “fundamentalist sect” — “fundamentalist” ultimately meaning people who actually believe the tenets of their professed faith. Its perspective is in keeping with the modern establishment position when it comes to religion: “While we may pay lip service to organized religion, no actual religious assertions are real, and the people who still believe them to be real are backwards at best and crazy and dangerous at worst.”

The book came out in 2003, which is crucial to understanding its framing and intent. Following the rush of nationalistic sentiment after the 9/11 attacks — sentiment fueled by the still-potent Christianity in much of the country — a counter-barrage of messaging by public intellectuals and media channels rose to temper the surge in white Christian energy and head off “Islamophobia.” The 9/11 attacks had highlighted very real civilizational tensions between the Western World and Islam, and while the regime appreciated the mandate it now had to secure stronger imperial footholds in the Middle East, it had to subdue or redirect any notions that a) the Christian West still exists and b) that it is in very old and very natural conflict with the Islamic East.

The Bush administrative arm of the regime took on this work with the conservative Christian right — a delicate tightrope with a constituency they needed in the 2004 election — while a cadre known as the “New Atheists” set about the work on the squishy agnostic “Center,” liberal-conservatives who supported supported war and remained wary of Islam but who wanted to appear enlightened compared to their more religious countrymen. This younger crop of public intellectuals — Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and the like — had amassed a following in the liberal latte class by attacking Christians during the 1990s. They now pivoted to criticize “fundamentalist” Islam in a way that would mobilize Americans against Al Qaeda while safeguarding the wider multicultural project that was preparing to shift into overdrive in the coming decades.

While this was going on, the Left set on its own post-9/11 project of corralling the bubbling energies of an extant Christian America. Writers like Krakauer sought to make clear that while we had just been attacked by Islamic “radicals,” we must not forget that we have our own “radical” sects here in America and thus are really no different from the Islamic world that birthed the men who hijacked those planes. I say “we” in this way because Krakauer is a secular Jew who had long had a sharp ax to grind against American Christians and their culture, which is relevant to his perspective. Under the Banner of Heaven is subtitled “A Story of Violent Faith,” and Krakauer makes numerous comparisons between the Mormon fundamentalists in Utah to the Taliban in Afghanistan — they both ban television, their women wear shawls and veils, and they both practice polygamy. Ah yes, muses the adjunct professor at Bennington College, so many backward crazies of all faiths. Truly we in the West are no different. Nevermind that despite the focus on salacious tales of religious murder in the Utah foothills, the Mormons are not really a violent people — just check out the crime rates in Utah — nor are they violently expansionist in creed. No matter, association made. And once it’s made, the rhetorical framework is easily shifted to Mormons in general and then to other Christian denominations. The Catholics appear next on the hit list. The Atlantic has recently provided a handy piece entitled “How the Rosary Became an Extremist Symbol” for those keeping track of the narrative.

The Mormons have always been counter to the American religious mainstream, first to the prevailing Anglo Protestant regime and now the ruling faith of liberal egalitarianism. But while the WASPs more or less left the Mormons alone once they were driven to the deserts of Utah, the liberal regime can tolerate no such dissent from such a culturally and politically cohesive population, one that supports itself through healthy birth rates, keeps itself well-armed, and flexes some political power in Utah’s border states such as Colorado and New Mexico. Their very existence and stability is a thorn in the side of the neoliberal project, so the barrage against them is sure to continue. Everyone is aware of the silliness of their denominational narrative — seer stones in the Midwest forests and other absurdities that South Park skewered during those “New Atheist” 2000s. But the Mormons don’t much care if outsiders think their beliefs are silly, and silly beliefs certainly aren’t exclusive to them. So this barrage will instead focus on outlier cases like the Lafferty murders and, of course, the polygamists. Polygamists and their scary cult compounds are quite rare among Mormons, though, so then the focus must shift to the traditional gender roles, which are counter to liberal orthodoxy and thus morally egregious. Actual polls of and real discussions with Mormons reveal that both sexes are quite happy with their cultural arrangements, and Mormon women are on the whole happier than their liberal counterparts in the coastal cities. All the more reason to attack them rhetorically if not yet physically.

Though perhaps Krakauer and the people pumping out this latest agitprop are right to fear the Mormons. One thing they do have in common with the Taliban is that they really do believe their religion, in a visceral way that has mostly died out in the West among the larger Christian denominations. This is really what makes them “fundamentalist” in the eyes of the ruling regime, and it is what grants them greater immunity to the usual weapons of neoliberal absorption — marketing, consumerism, deracination, debt. The Taliban recently defeated the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. It wasn’t a quick victory. It took twenty years and great losses, but they were ultimately a rock upon which the hammer of liberal empire broke. And despise their faith or practices as you may, but the visceral reality of their religion in their own eyes is what enabled those goat-herders and tribesmen to become that rock.

Perhaps somewhere at Langley, a young CIA analyst has gamed out a situation within a future fracturing American in which the imperial forces must pursue Mormon holdouts into the Rockies, where they meet much the same fate.