FLDS raid in Texas: How did this happen?

2 say changes in church may be behind the troubles

By Carrie Moore and Elaine Jarvik
Deseret News
Published: April 19, 2008
Two weeks after 416 children were removed from the YFZ Ranch in Texas following allegations of child sexual abuse, the leader of the FLDS Church remains jailed in Arizona as his followers deal with the public consequences of private practices that he ordered and perpetuated after becoming leader of the group five years ago.

Warren Jeffs - who was convicted in September of rape as an accomplice for forcing an underage girl to marry her adult cousin - has directed the affairs of the Fundamentalist LDS Church since 2003, following the death of his father, Rulon Jeffs.

With that change in power, decades of living in relative harmony within their own Utah-Arizona border-town communities began to unravel as Jeffs sought to control personal property, family relationships and marriage within the community on an unprecedented scale, according to two authors who have written about the sect. Within two years of taking control of the group, Jeffs landed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list before his capture in 2006 and subsequent criminal conviction.

The authors agree that Jeffs' determination to wield control made him into something of a God-like figure among his followers, who seem to have taken his directives as divine decrees that bound them to do his bidding, regardless of the potential consequences.

Though he renounced his own leadership from prison during his criminal trial, calling himself a "false prophet" and "one of the most wicked men on the face of the earth," he later rejected those assertions, and followers regularly visit him in prison. Many observers believe he continues to direct the affairs of the FLDS group from behind bars.

Brian Hales, a Layton physician and historian who wrote "Modern Polygamy and Mormon Fundamentalism: The Generations After the Manifesto," said much of what has happened since Jeffs took the reins "has been unpredictable." FLDS leaders before him "followed similar goals. For Warren to waltz in, excommunicate people (he felt were a threat to his authority) and build a temple - those are brand new ideas and thinking which makes everything unpredictable with him."

As word of Jeffs' mistreatment of his own followers began to leak out in media reports, many of them moved to what is now the YFZ Ranch in Eldorado, Texas, constructing their first temple and shunning outsiders and the media. But with the fate of the FLDS children now in the hands of Texas authorities, the world press is both intrigued and baffled by polygamy's modern-day complexities as the women seek out reporters in unprecedented ways.

How did the FLDS community evolve to include allegations of widespread child sexual abuse from what some saw in the early 1900s as a religious offshoot group determined to continue plural marriage after The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints outlawed the practice for its members in 1890?

Hales, who has studied fundamentalist Mormons for years, has a theory.

"The tendency of polygamy ... is to create narcissists of men and co-dependents of women. It's a very fertile field for sexual exploitation and perversion. Beds in the temple ... there's a tendency to exalt the man. If he doesn't get what he wants from wife one, you can see him going to wife two."

Jeffs' quest for control built on a family legacy of power based in the idea that the FLDS leader would one day personally help usher in the second coming of Jesus Christ.

And Jeffs took it a step further, Hales said, recalling a recent conversation with an insider who has dealt extensively with current FLDS practice and had access to personal communications to and from Jeffs.

"When you get leaders like him thinking he has displaced Christ. ... Reading through some of those letters it dawned on (the insider) there were no references to Christ. Warren sees himself as their intermediary with God." Such a view is "the trajectory of the narcissism," he said.

"When left unchecked, men can become very controlling. The FLDS are an extreme example. They are by far the worst, particularly among the leadership, which is why the whole group will crumble, because you can't sustain it," Hales said.

Stephen Singular is the author of a new book yet to be released titled, "When Men Become Gods," which details how Jeffs has perverted spiritual doctrines for personal gain, taking on a God-like role within the FLDS Church.

He told the Deseret News that Jeffs' history of indoctrination and control began with his leadership of the Alta Academy in Salt Lake County 30 years ago. "His father made him head of the school at 17," where he began to experiment with children "using fear and manipulation. He sequestered the children and asked for dirt on their parents, then he used that against them. He learned to divide and conquer early on."

Jeffs used the concept of fear "to great effect," Singular said, telling the children, "'something terrible is going to happen to us, and I'm the only one that can protect us,' whether from law enforcement, a meteor striking Salt Lake City or some other outside force. 'You must obey and keep sweet,"' he would tell them.

As Jeffs eventually moved south, joined the faith's leadership with his father and finally succeeded him, he used the same tactics with adults in southern Utah, Singular said. "He would make outlandish demands: you can't wear this color or eat that food. He pushed it to see if they would get rid of media, give him more money, refuse to wear red, swim or dance. ... He found the adults would behave in exactly same way. Their need for authority and to be told what to do was profound."

Though Jeffs was served with several civil suits over the years, he refused to ever appear in court or address the charges against him, Singular said, adding to the notion that "he's above the law, and he only answers to God's law."

That philosophy eventually cost him control of the group's $107 million trust in Colorado City, which is now managed by a government-appointed trustee.

Hales said brainwashing is a legitimate description of what occurs within the FLDS Church "because they don't allow any outside information inside and vice versa." On the other hand, the Salt Lake-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - which many continue to mistakenly associate with the polygamist sect - sends missionaries around the globe preaching a gospel message centered in Jesus Christ, Hales said.

The opposite is true of the FLDS Church, which is insular, secretive and has no desire to share a message of salvation with others. "The gospel (LDS Church founder) Joseph Smith taught was for all the world, and even stretched beyond death to redeem the dead (with vicarious ordinances performed by living proxies). As the FLDS get further and further away from that, the narcissism grows, and they become very self-focused. That's their world, and it's the direct opposite from what Joseph Smith and Brigham Young promoted."

Even when early LDS leaders were prosecuted for polygamy in the 1880s, Hales said, "they weren't rounding up the wagons. It was not the same behavior you see among the FLDS." Some media continue to confuse the two groups because the FLDS claim the same 19th century history as the LDS Church.

He believes early polygamist leaders who preceded Warren Jeffs in FLDS leadership "would be appalled" at what has happened to the sect.

"The control over property and marriages - these (earlier) guys didn't do that," Hales said. "That level of control would not be well-accepted by John Barlow or Joseph Musser - but they don't hold Musser in high esteem. He went north with the (polygamist) Allred family, and the others stayed in the south with Barlow's children."

While the secretive FLDS believers are making headlines, they represent only one of several modern-day polygamous fundamentalist groups scattered around the West.

Some live in isolated communities (one group worships in a pyramid on the Utah-Nevada border); some may live next door in the Salt Lake Valley, not unlike the folks on HBO's "Big Love" television series. Others live in Texas, in polygamous colonies in northern Mexico and western Canada, and in tiny outposts scattered around the Intermountain West.

Despite the imprisonment of the movement's most visible leader, polygamous fundamentalism appears to have a staying power that makes it unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

Anne Wilde, a polygamist widow and a director of the pro-polygamy group Principle Voices, says there are currently some 37,000 people (including children) who are fundamentalist Mormons - and the number has stayed fairly consistent in the recent past.

The term "fundamentalist Mormons" is a name that the LDS Church finds objectionable, but one that the fundamentalists say is fitting. It is the mainstream LDS Church, they argue, that strayed from the faith's original doctrinal underpinnings when LDS Church President Wilford Woodruff issued the Manifesto in 1890, advising Latter-day Saints to refrain from plural marriage.

Because polygamy continued in secrecy to a small extent, a second "official statement" on the practice was issued by LDS Church President Joseph F. Smith in 1904, ending authorization for plural marriages on pain of excommunication from the church. Current LDS leaders acknowledge the practice as part of their early history, and LDS scripture still contains passages that fundamentalists use to defend its continuation.

In the first few decades of the 20th century, several LDS Church members - including a few leaders - were excommunicated as they continued to advocate polygamy and/or practice it. Some were later reinstated in the church, while a handful split from the faith to form their own groups under separate leadership. The ins and outs of those complex relationships are documented in Hales' 500-page book, which recently received the best book award in 2007 from the John Whitmer Historical Association.

Back in Texas, where Singular was attending the hearing on Thursday that will determine what happens next to the FLDS children removed from the Eldorado compound, the consequences of Jeffs' edicts - and his followers' willingness to adhere to them - are playing out now, he said.

After multiple interviews with teenage boys expelled from the sect and women who have left on their own, Singular said they eventually come to understand "how someone assumes power over people's lives and how people allow that to happen - and that they are both culpable. People who have broken away from it realize that."


E-mail: carrie@desnews.com; jarvik@desnews.com


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