Killer ‘saints’

The history of the American heartland sometimes appears as little more than a bloody farrago of killing which, in the God-soaked vocabulary of the perpetrators, must be understood not as murder, but as something inevitable and even holy. This tradition persists long after the Native American resistance to European settlers was put down by settlers and soldiers certain of providential favor.

The panoply of characters in this historical picture comes from a wide spectrum of fundamentalist movements with different kinds of world-transforming visions. Among the most famous is abolitionist John Brown, who, while freeing slaves, also managed to butcher farmers and their families in Kansas before eventually going back East and helping to precipitate the Civil War. More recently, Timothy McVeigh's potent brand of apocalyptic nationalism spurred the massacre of almost 200 people in the Oklahoma City bombing. Like McVeigh, cult leader David Koresh found in his religious zealotry a mandate for violence carried out in the name of God, ending in the tragic confrontation between his followers and trigger-happy federal agents in Waco.

In Under the Banner of Heaven Jon Krakauer explores religiously motivated murder in the context of Mormonism and Mormon fundamentalism. His account of the Lafferty murders committed in Utah nearly 20 years ago has raised the ire of officials of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Early on, Krakauer takes us through the sickening central details of his story. On July 24, 1984, Dan Lafferty and his older brother Ron, two breakaway Mormon fundamentalists who claim to have received direct revelations and instructions from God (which Ron wrote down on yellow legal paper), drove to their youngest brother's duplex townhouse in American Fork.