Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated, is difficult to digest. She’s the youngest of seven children in a fundamentalist Mormon family in rural Idaho. Her father rules with the proverbial iron fist. He’s a survivalist, a millennialist, a conspiracy-theorist. He keeps his children out of school, refuses them medical care, continually places them in physical danger. Her mother resists in small ways but ultimately caves whenever the father demands her submission. One of her brothers educates himself well enough to get into BYU and encourages Tara to […]
Bigotry and fundamentalism make for a bad mix
I’m on the books as being a fan of Jon Krakauer, so as someone who is not very familiar with Mormonism beyond that South Park Episode, I was beyond curious to read his take on the history of Mormonism and the ways that certain ingrained aspects of the faith can somewhat naturally progress into the type of extremism that causes two brothers to brutally murder their sister in-law and her child because they believed they were following God’s orders. In general, one of the ways […]
The Kind of Stuff They Don’t Teach You About At Church
“A Mormon has a right to believe what he will. His thoughts may be as free as the unconfined air, and his conscience should by no means be restrained by legal enactments. But his acts are quite a different thing.” -Raleigh News and Observer, July 20, 1881
Religion makes some people kinda cray cray.
I had wanted to read Under the Banner of Heaven for quite a long time, and finally found a copy at my local used book store this year. I started and stopped reading several times, to pick up lighter, less gruesome novels, but I kept coming back to read this intense, true-crime novel, that is less about the horrible murder of a 24 year old mother and her 15 month old daughter (and it was violently and insanely horrible), as it is about a fundamentalist […]