Jon Krakauer‘s Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith sat on the to-read pile for quite some time. Then, once started, it lingered a while as I tried (in vain) to keep up with the daily flow of blogs and newspapers as well as the weekly/monthly flow of magazines. (Yes, for all my online time, I haven’t given up on print.) Yesterday, I finished this inquiry into the Mormons, seen through the lens of a vicious murder in 1984. The crime itself really isn’t the point, although until you get into the book, that’s hardly obvious. Krakauer is more interested in:
I was irresistibly drawn to write about Latter-Day Saints not only because I already knew something about their theology, and admired much about their culture, but also because of the utterly unique circumstances in which their religion was born: the Mormon Church was founded a mere 173 years ago [at time of the Author’s Remarks in 2003], in a literate society, in the age of the printing press. As a consequence, the creation of what became a worldwide faith was abundantly documented in firsthand accounts. Thanks to the Mormons, we have been given an unprecedented opportunity to appreciate — in astonishing detail — how an important religion came to be.
Not a bad thing to try and understand, even today, even (especially?) for the non-religious.
I’ve read Krakauer in Outside magazine for many years (though not recently), and — like so many — devoured Into Thin Air, the book that made him famous. This book intrigued me, but I think I’d rather start with Wallace Stegner’s history of the Mormons or another more historical survey than this weave of a present-day religious fundamentalism gone wrong with the broad history of the Church of Latter-Day Saints. That said, I learned quite a bit, and I recoil at the blatant censorship efforts practiced by the LDS, both against this title and more broadly. Information may or may not want to be free, but ideas in contrast undermine fanaticism — and that’s a good thing.