REVIEW Author delves into history of Mormons

Jon Krakauer investigates the murders and polygamy in the church's past.
By CLAY EVANS
SCRIPPS HOWARD
"Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith," by Jon Krakauer (Doubleday, $26.)
That the world's fastest growing religion, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, would object to this book is hardly a surprise.
Launching from the savage murders of a young Mormon woman and her 15-month-old daughter in 1983, it burrows deep into the heart of a troubling offshoot of the LDS Church, polygamists known as Mormon Fundamentalists. Along the way, it delves into the sometimes violent past and selective history of the "mainstream" church and examines the lives of its founder, the charismatic Joseph Smith, and its second leader, Brigham Young.
Krakauer is no stranger to controversy (his 1996 "Into Thin Air," about a tragic season on Mount Everest, was widely criticized), but he's also a very careful reporter. Despite the tantrums of Mormon officials, his clear-headed, unbiased examination of the church -- leavened with genuine respect -- and his conclusions that it is a secretive organization bent on sanitizing its own past are hard to argue with.
1983 murders
The book bounces back and forth through the history of the church, but focuses on the 1983 murders, in which Ron and Dan Lafferty, two fundamentalist Mormon brothers who advocate polygamy and antipathy toward the federal government, slaughtered their sister-in-law and her baby girl because Ron received a "revelation from God" to do so.
Krakauer went straight to the source for his information on the crime, extensively interviewing the seemingly mild-mannered Dan Lafferty in prison. Still remorseless, Dan told the author in gruesome detail how he calmly slit the victims' throats (the men were thwarted by circumstances from killing two other people Ron believed responsible for his wife's leaving him). Dan was sentenced to death, but has not been executed; Ron is serving two life terms in prison.
Polygamy's history
Krakauer is interested in the deeper roots of the still-persistent -- and perhaps growing -- practice of polygamy among renegade Mormons. The LDS Church officially eschewed the practice in 1890 as part of a bargain with the federal government to obtain statehood for Utah, but Smith himself ingrained the practice into the church's teachings in Section 132 of the revered document, "The Doctrine and Covenants."
And so Krakauer ventures to Canada, where a colony of polygamists fled after the church officially forbade the practice, to Utah, and to the not-so-secretly polygamist haven of Colorado City, Ariz.
But for all his modern-day sleuthing, which portrays a truly disturbing bunch of people who marry so many wives (usually just girls, including step-daughters and other relatives) that their family trees are gnarled, twisted and almost comically tangled, his historical detective work is just as fascinating.
As incisive as Krakauer is, he maintains a respect for Smith, Young and those who took up the Mormon cause and writes sympathetically about their genuine persecution at the hands of "Gentiles" (all who are not Mormon, in LDS-speak).
Controlling the past
But even some of Smith's early followers -- notably young girls asked to marry men who already had wives -- balked at his polygamous revelation.
Young is no less controversial. He assumed leadership of the church after Smith was murdered in jail in 1844. Krakauer also examines the appalling Mountain Meadows Massacre, and finds -- at least -- that Young was inflaming Mormon hatred of Gentiles. Finally, Krakauer smoothly ties that sordid past to one of its ugly, 20th century conclusions:
"... the Mountain Meadow ... is now synonymous with one of the most chilling episodes in the history of the American West," he writes, "an episode that exemplified the fanaticism and concomitant brutality of a culture that would be so enthusiastically idealized a century later by Dan Lafferty and his fundamentalist brethren."