Author blunders over LDS history

Jon Krakauer is a respected adventure author whose books "Into the Wild" and "Into Thin Air" have won him significant popularity. Oddly, he has shifted his interests from physical adventure to "extremes of religious belief" — specifically the Mormons.

Krakauer's new non-fiction book "Under the Banner of Heaven" is billed as an American story of "Taliban-like theocracies . . . controlled by renegade Mormon prophets." The major focus is the grisly double murder of Allen Lafferty's wife and baby, committed by his brothers Ron and Dan in the mid-1980s. Krakauer declares that "the underbelly" of Mormonism is revealed through the hideous Lafferty crime because the brothers believe they were "divinely inspired" to commit murder.

The author then jumps from the Laffertys to polygamy and other facets of what he calls "Mormonism's violent past." For instance, he treats once more, and in great detail, the subject that has become the veritable bad dream of Mormon history, the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857.

So why does a successful non-Mormon writer feel compelled to dabble in Mormon history when he has no background in it? And when he does so, why does he present only a one-sided account? I can't answer the first question, but the answer to the second is that Krakauer's knowledge of Mormonism is obviously scant.

He includes a reasonably balanced bibliography at the end of the book, but he seems to have used only a few of those works. He has drawn heavily from Fawn Brodie's discredited biography of Joseph Smith, "No Man Knows My History," to explain Joseph Smith's intentions and accomplishments, as well as the principle doctrinal beliefs of Mormonism. He refers to Brodie's book as "a masterpiece."

Krakauer's thesis is that because religious devotion leads to extremism and violence, all religious devotion is wrong-headed and dangerous. Since he admits to being agnostic himself, he lacks the personal understanding of religious devotion necessary to deal with such a complex topic.

That doesn't stop him from being tough on both Joseph Smith (whom he refers to as "a megalomaniacal tyrant" who "frequented houses of ill fame") and Brigham Young (whom he describes as "an unapologetic racist.") Krakauer also exposes the practices of "Mormon Fundamentalists," those who persist in practicing polygamy more than a century after the LDS Church abolished it, but mostly fails to differentiate between these extremists who are not members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and mainstream Mormons who are.