Under the Banner of Heaven

by Jon Krakauer

  Like fundamentalists in other faiths, he was intent on adhering unfailingly to God's “true” commandments, as determined by a rigorously literal interpretation of his church's earliest and most sacred texts. And he was no less intent on adhering to the “true” commandments of his country's earliest and most sacred texts, as well. To Dan, such documents as the Book of Mormon, The Peace Maker, the United States Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence are all of a piece: they are holy scriptures that provide a direct link to the Almighty. The authority that flows from their divinely inspired sentences is absolute and immutable. And it is the duty of righteous men and women to conduct their lives according to a stringently literal reading of those sentences.

  For people like Dan who view existence through the narrow lens of literalism, the language in certain select documents is assumed to possess extraordinary power. Such language is to be taken assiduously at face value, according to a single incontrovertible interpretation that makes no allowance for nuance, ambiguity, or situational contingencies. As Vincent Crapanzano observes in his book Serving the Word, Dan Lafferty's brand of literalism

  encourages a closed, usually (though not necessarily) politically conservative view of the world: one with a stop-time notion of history and a we-and-they approach to people, in which we are possessed of truth, virtue, and goodness and they of falsehood, depravity, and evil. It looks askance at figurative language, which, so long as its symbols and metaphors are vital, can open—promiscuously in the eyes of the strict literalist—the world and its imaginative possibilities.

  For his part, Dan scoffs at this sort of pointy-headed exegesis. “I was just on a quest,” he insists. “A quest to find the truth.”

  After seeking guidance through prayer and receiving confirmation that he was acting in accordance with the Lord's wishes, Dan sent his driver's license back to the state of Utah, revoked his marriage license, and returned his Social Security card. He ignored posted speed limits, which he believed were illegal, and simply drove “wisely and carefully” instead. And he quit paying taxes of any kind—including the sales tax when he shopped in local stores, which provoked frequent confrontations with cashiers.

  Energized by the self-evident righteousness of his crusade, in the summer of 1982 Dan declared himself a candidate for sheriff of Utah County and embarked on a lively political campaign, speaking at public forums, writing letters to the Provo newspaper, doing radio interviews, and riding in small-town parades. He promised, if elected, to enforce the laws according to a scrupulously literal interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. As he explained, “My motive in running was to restore the primacy of Common Law juries, and to restore the fundamentals of the Constitution.”

  On October 4, 1982, Dan was driving home after meeting with another candidate for sheriff (the American Fork police chief, with whom Dan had hoped to engage in a public debate), when he was stopped on Interstate 15 by a Utah state trooper for speeding and not having a vehicle inspection sticker. “I had already had some confrontations with the officer who pulled me over,” Dan allows. “He knew I would be driving home from this debate meeting, and he had set a trap for me. They wanted to get a felony against me so I couldn't run for office, and they swarmed me on the freeway. I had just published an important article in the paper—a very important article—which had really unnerved a lot of people, about how the powers of government were being improperly used through improper warrants of arrest—how it was unconstitutional to stop a person on the freeway and arrest them.

  “When the officer pulled me over, he told me he had read my article—‘I've got it right here in my car,' he said. So I told him, ‘Well, if you've read the article, you understand why you can't arrest me right now. If you want to arrest me, go get a warrant from a judge, bring it to my home, and I'll conform to the proper procedures.' ” Dan had by now locked the car doors and rolled up all the windows, leaving only a one-inch gap at the top of the driver's window, which, he says, “I figured was narrow enough to keep a hand from reaching in and grabbing me, but would allow me to talk to the officer.”

  The trooper wasn't amused. He ordered Dan out of the car. “When I refused to get out,” says Dan, “the cop did something I hadn't anticipated: he grabbed the top of the window with both hands and pulled hard, pulling the window out of its tracks, and then he tried to reach in and grab me. So I said, ‘Well, I gotta go now! See you later!' and took off.”

  The state troopers gave chase and apprehended Dan a short while later. He was charged with five crimes (including second-degree felony escape, third-degree felony assault by a prisoner, and evading an officer) and locked up in the county jail. At his justice court trial, Dan served as his own attorney and attempted to mount a defense based on several arcane points of constitutional law. The judge repeatedly pointed out, however, that justice courts in Utah are not empowered to hear constitutional matters, which infuriated Dan. He was further angered when the judge overruled his objection to the makeup of the four-woman jury (Dan argued that he was entitled to have at least one male on the jury).

  When Dan ignored the judge's instructions and continued to argue his case on constitutional grounds, the exasperated judge declared him in contempt of court—at which point Dan's brothers and several other supporters staged a riot in the courtroom, shouting that they were placing the judge, prosecutor, and court clerk under “citizen's arrest.” In the middle of this melee, Dan stood up and loudly admonished the judge, “In the name of Christ, do justice or be struck down!”

  In the end, the theatrics didn't do anything to help his case. Dan was sent to the state prison for a forty-five-day psychiatric evaluation, then transferred to the county jail to serve a thirty-day sentence.

  His stay behind bars only hardened his resolve. As a matter of principle, he stopped paying the property taxes on his father's home and business. His father's property, Dan explains, was “owned free and clear. By paying property taxes, you are basically telling the government that they're the ones who really own the property, because you give them the right to take it from you if you don't pay your taxes. And I was willing to force a standoff to determine who actually owned that property.”

  When that inevitable standoff occurred, Dan did not prevail. The Utah County assessor notified him that the county was taking possession of the Lafferty home for nonpayment of taxes, as well as seizing all of Watson Lafferty's office equipment. At which point Dan politely informed the assessor's office “that I intended to defend myself against any invasion of my constitutional God-given rights.”

  Dan's four younger brothers fully supported him in his ongoing battles with the state. But when Dan's father—who was still out of the country on his LDS mission—learned that his home and business equipment were about to be auctioned off for nonpayment of taxes, he was furious. Watson Sr. called Dan from abroad to express his profound displeasure, and to accuse Dan of “hypnotizing” his brothers; the Lafferty patriarch even suggested that Dan was trying to hypnotize him and Claudine from afar, over the telephone line.

  Watson managed to save his home from the auction block by cutting short his mission and rushing back to Provo with Claudine, but he remained furious at Dan. Although his father's wrath saddened Dan, it did not dissuade him from his crusade.

  During the last months of 1982 through early 1983, that crusade became more overtly religious, and Dan's four younger brothers became increasingly infected with his fundamentalist zeal. The Lafferty boys started meeting on a more regular basis to discuss the merits of polygamy and other principles advocated in The Peace Maker. When three of Dan's brothers attempted to impose these principles in their own homes, however, their wives refused and began to complain to Dianna—the wife of Ron, the eldest Lafferty brother—about the disturbing changes in their husbands' personalities.

  FOURTEEN

  BRENDA

  [Fundamentalist movements] are embattled forms of spirituality, which have emerged as a response to a perceived crisis. They ar
e engaged in a conflict with enemies whose secularist policies and beliefs seem inimical to religion itself. Fundamentalists do not regard this battle as a conventional political struggle, but experience it as a cosmic war between the forces of good and evil. They fear annihilation, and try to fortify their beleaguered identity by means of a selective retrieval of certain doctrines and practices of the past. To avoid contamination, they often withdraw from mainstream society to create a counterculture; yet fundamentalists are not impractical dreamers. They have absorbed the pragmatic rationalism of modernity, and, under the guidance of their charismatic leaders, they refine these “fundamentals” so as to create an ideology that provides the faithful with a plan of action. Eventually they fight back and attempt to resacralize an increasingly skeptical world.

  KAREN ARMSTRONG,

  THE BATTLE FOR GOD

  Ron and Dianna Lafferty lived with their six kids in Highland, a small, prosperous, semirural community tucked against the foot of the Wasatch Range, just north of American Fork, midway between Provo and Salt Lake City. In 1982, Ron was a Highland city councilman and a stalwart of the local LDS congregation, where he had been appointed first counselor to the bishop and was a leader of youth activities.* By all accounts he was a wonderful father to his six children, and he and Dianna had an uncommonly solid marriage—a relationship envied by most of their acquaintances. “I remember a marriage that was so happy for sixteen and a half years,” says a close friend of Dianna's named Penelope Weiss. “The first thing my daughter said when I told her about what happened, you know, with Dan and Ron and all, she said, ‘That can't be true!' She said, ‘All of us young girls wanted a marriage just like Ron and Dianna's marriage.' ”

  Ron's apparent contentment, however, masked troubles that had been churning just beneath the surface since childhood. Although his father's violent outbursts scarred all the Lafferty children to some degree, Ron—who had an especially close relationship with his perpetually downtrodden mother—seems to have suffered the greatest emotional damage. According to Richard Wootton, a psychologist who has examined Ron extensively over his nineteen years in prison, Ron remembers “seeing his mother hit by his father and being so mad that he wished he could have been big enough to have kicked his father's ass. . . . I think that stayed with him. And it became a pattern by which he kind of handled difficult, mistrustful situations.”

  Ron's anguish wasn't apparent to outsiders. As a child, he had been popular with other kids in the community and brought home decent, if unspectacular grades. He was also an outstanding athlete who starred on his high school football team and was captain of the wrestling squad. Throughout adolescence and young adulthood he appeared to thrive. As was expected of high achievers in the Mormon faith, after graduating from high school and completing a stint in the army, he went on a two-year mission for the church, eager to spread the gospel so that others might experience the incomparable joy of being a Latter-day Saint.

  There is nothing easy about being a Mormon missionary. Missionaries must pay their own way, and they are required to go wherever in the world the church decides they are needed. In Ron's case, after four weeks of indoctrination at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, he was called upon to save souls in Georgia and Florida. As an obedient Saint, he had already pledged not to drink, smoke, take illegal drugs, ingest caffeine, masturbate, or engage in premarital sex.* As a missionary, he was now also forbidden to read anything but LDS literature or listen to any music not produced by the church. Movies, television, newspapers, and magazines were strictly off-limits. He was permitted to write letters home just once per week, and he could phone his family only on Christmas and Mother's Day.

  Ron dutifully followed these rules, for the most part, but he had a rebellious streak that emerged from time to time. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the warped relationship he had with his father, figures of authority provoked a complicated emotional response in Ron. Part of him was desperately eager to please his superiors, while another part raged inwardly against anyone who held power over him. Every now and then Ron felt compelled to let his keepers know that they didn't own him.

  In those days, missionaries were required to wear hats. According to Dr. Wootton, who is Mormon, Ron “refused to wear a hat. In the summertime when it was hot and muggy in Florida, as it is, they were supposed to wear coats. He wouldn't wear a coat. He made a statement at one time that he ‘wasn't down there to make a fashion statement.' He ‘was down there to convert people and fulfill a mission.' ”

  Every morning Ron would roll out of bed at 6:00 A.M., don black slacks, a crisply pressed white shirt, and an ugly clip-on tie, and then study scripture for two or three hours before hitting the streets to troll for prospective converts. Like all LDS missionaries, to accomplish the latter he had to endure insults, threats of physical violence, flying spit, and callous rejection; typically he would have a door slammed in his face forty or fifty times a day. Ron, however, turned out to be astonishingly good at this line of work. Nothing fazed him. The incessant rain of ridicule and dismissal glanced off him as though he had a Teflon hide.

  Ron knew the LDS Church was God's One True Church, and he was determined to share this glorious fact with as many people as he could. Typically, an especially dedicated missionary might convert no more than three or four people a year—and feel justly satisfied for this accomplishment.* Ron, in marked contrast, had baptized more than fifty people into the LDS Church by the time his two-year mission was over.

  While saving souls in Florida, Ron met a sweet young nursing student, fell in love, and married her at the conclusion of his mission. He then took his new wife, Dianna, to Utah, so they could live near his parents and siblings. Ron landed a good job operating heavy equipment for a construction company owned by a fellow Mormon, and settled down to raise a family of faithful Saints.

  Comfortably reestablished in Utah County, Ron functioned as the emotional anchor for the greater Lafferty clan. His younger brothers and sisters had looked up to him for counseling and emotional support since they were small children; he had tended to be the one who mediated family disagreements. One of Ron's siblings affectionately characterized him as “a mother-hen type,” and he relished the role. For the two decades after he returned from his mission, he made certain he was available whenever his mother or his brothers and sisters needed him.

  By mid-1982 it was apparent to Dianna that several of Ron's siblings were in acute need of some brotherly guidance. In August of that year she became aware that four of the other five Lafferty wives were being made miserable by the fundamentalist strictures that Dan had been urging his brothers to adopt, so Dianna pleaded with Ron to have a talk with Dan and his other brothers to “straighten them out.” Ron agreed to pay them a visit.

  One evening when his five brothers were meeting at their parents' Provo home to discuss religion and politics, Ron stopped by to join in the discourse—the first time he had ever attended one of these gatherings. His brothers welcomed him warmly, even when he began to read from an essay published by the LDS Church warning of the evils of fundamentalism and admonishing all Saints to obey the teachings of the church's president and prophet, Spencer W. Kimball. As the evening progressed, Ron asked increasingly pointed questions about Dan's new beliefs, and he tried as hard as he could to persuade his younger brothers that Dan's nutty ideas were putting their eternal souls in grave jeopardy.

  “Ron was embarrassed by me,” Dan remembers. “He was a devout Saint, and he said I was an embarrassment to the Mormon Church. He told me, ‘There's no place in this church for extremes!' ”

  Conceding nothing, Dan fired back, “Well, how about extremely good? All I'm trying to do is be extremely good!” Dan argued with great passion that the LDS Church had taken a wrong turn when it had abandoned polygamy, and that the only way to put it back on a true course was to adopt the sacred tenets advanced in The Peace Maker. Ron tried to refute Dan's arguments, point by point, by quoting scripture from the Bible and The Book
of Mormon. Dan countered with points of his own drawn from the same texts, as well as from the Constitution. “Ron wasn't at that meeting too awfully long,” as Dan remembers it, “before he stopped trying to convince us we were wrong. ‘What you guys are doing is right,' he admitted. ‘It's everyone else who is wrong.' ” In the space of a few hours, Dan had converted Ron from a dutiful Saint into a fire-breathing Mormon Fundamentalist. Dianna told her friend Penelope Weiss that when Ron returned home late that night, “A totally different man walked in the door.”

  Having adopted their defiant worldview, Ron became a regular attendee at his brothers' meetings. He threw away his driver's license and removed the license plates from his vehicle. And then he quit his job—which greatly heightened Dianna's concern, because the family was already balanced tenuously on the edge of financial ruin. Ron was in the latter stages of what was, for him, a large construction project: a four-unit apartment complex he had financed with a bank loan and was building himself, after hours, as a business investment. Up until this time, after working all day at his “real” job, he'd been devoting most evenings to building the fourplex and spending the remainder of his nights constructing a “dream house” in Highland for his own family. His two after-hours construction projects were straining their cash flow to the limit and beyond.

  Compounding their woes, the economy throughout the Rocky Mountain region had just plunged into an abysmal recession. Ron and Dianna failed to make their loan payments. There wasn't enough money for groceries or clothes for the kids. Ron began to succumb to the stress. “It was a really bad recession,” Weiss remembers. “Ron was going to lose everything. In fact, the papers were already made up for the bank to take away their home, which he had worked so hard on for so many years.”