Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

An Account of Harmful Belief

A complex, terrifying story of polygamy, brutal brutality, messianic hallucination, and unwavering faith. This is classic Krakauer—an very fascinating piece of nonfiction that sheds light on an otherwise perplexing area of human behavior.

The foundation of Jon Krakauer's literary renown is his incisive accounts of lives lived on the edge. He moves his emphasis from extremes of physical experience to extremes of religious conviction inside our own boundaries in Under The Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith. The horrific double murder of two Mormon Fundamentalist brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who claim they got a revelation from God ordering them to kill their innocent victims, lies at the heart of his novel. After providing a painstakingly detailed depiction of this "divinely inspired" murder, Krakauer delves into a complex and horrifying story of messianic hallucination, brutal brutality, polygamy, and unwavering devotion. Along the way, he unearths a dubious branch of the religion that is expanding the fastest in America and poses thought-provoking 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. Extremists who answer only to God, the leaders of these criminal cults in Salt Lake City defy both the civil authority and the Mormon establishment. Fundamentalist prophets wield complete control over the lives of their followers, marrying prodigiously and with almost impunity (the head of the largest fundamentalist church took seventy-five "plural wives," several of whom were married when they were fourteen or fifteen and he was eighty). They preach that the world will end tomorrow in a hurricane of fire, leaving only their most faithful followers unharmed.

By skillfully combining the narrative of the Lafferty brothers and their fervent comrades with an objective analysis of Mormonism's violent history, Krakauer delves into the inner workings of the most prosperous domestic religion in America and uncovers a very American kind of religious fanaticism. The end product is classic Krakauer, a completely engrossing piece of nonfiction that sheds light on an otherwise perplexing area of human behavior.