Religion Dispatches April 22, 2011
40,000 Fundamentalists Can't Be Wrong: Investigating Mormon Polygamy
Interview with Sanjiv Bhattacharya, author of Secrets & Wives: The Hidden World of Mormon Polygamy Soft Skull (2011)
What inspired you to write Secrets & Wives: The Hidden World of Mormon Polygamy? What sparked your interest?
I’m one of those unbelievers who’s obsessed with religion, so moving to America, from England, was a bargain. The Bush presidency was underway, the Christian right were on the march and the country was going down the tubes so fast you could hear a sucking sound.
But I was only peripherally aware of Mormons. I remember the polygamist Tom Green appearing on Jerry Springer once, with his harem, but it wasn’t till Jon Krakauer’s book,Under The Banner of Heaven, came out that I started paying attention. And right on cue, Warren Jeffs, the prophet of the FLDS, went off the deep end in epic style — he banned laughter and the color red and set about building a giant temple in Texas with the FBI in hot pursuit. There are few things I find more entertaining than a cult leader going clear off the reservation.
I’ve always been drawn to outsiders and fringe groups — people who stand apart from the mainstream. So the mere existence of a subculture of 40,000 fundamentalists living outside the law in America struck me as tremendously exciting. Not to mention the fact that their faith is American — it could scarcely be more so — and yet they live in hiding, worshipping at secret churches with scores of secret wives. I couldn’t resist.
I wrote a few articles and made a documentary, all of which focussed on Warren Jeffs and the FLDS, as most media coverage still does. But it soon became clear that the FLDS was just one group. There were 30,000 other polygamists out there — a broad diaspora of smaller churches and independents that remained discreetly marbled into the populations of Utah and Arizona especially. What were they hiding? Was hiding really necessary? Would they open up to me if I asked nicely? That’s how Secrets & Wives began.
What’s the most important take-home message for readers?
There are a few. That Utah is bubbling over with self-declared prophets and messiahs — the Mormon religion is strong potion. That the illegality of polygamy is a boon to cult leaders who wish to control their flocks and commit sex crimes with impunity.
And most of all, that not all polygamists are alike. Attitudes seem to have shifted lately from suspicion to sympathy — many now see polygamists as victims of persecution who ought to be left alone. But this is as insufficient as the opposite view — that polygamists are sinister deviants who must be prosecuted. The truth is more complex. Certainly, some groups like The Order, did strike me as sinister — the practice of incest, for instance, or of changing surnames to mask identity, not to mention the allegations of child labor and underage marriages. No question about it — there are shocking stories of abuse within fundamentalism. But equally, some groups are comparatively benign and more inclined to open up to outsiders.
I believe it’s time to decriminalize polygamy and bring these people out of the darkness. Too many awful things happen in the dark.
Anything you had to leave out?
Some stories were cut for length. The story of a liberal businesswoman from the Bay Area for instance, who fell in love with a younger fundamentalist carpenter and became his second wife. Her mom was a hippy and now she lives in an exclusively polygamist community in Arizona. That’s one of them.
What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic?
That polygamy is somehow drab or dismal — a bunch of oppressed women in prairie dresses doing household chores and suckling babies, often at the same time. But that’s not the case. (Not completely anyway — there’s bound to be some oppression and suckling going on.) The truth is, polygamy is intense. It’s a cauldron. Much stranger and richer than Big Love or Sister Wives.
This is a world in which men converse with God, the stakes are eternal, the apocalypse is imminent and no one “out there” can be trusted. It’s all belief and longing and paranoia. All the dials are turned up to 11 — there’s more risk, more conflict, more drama. It’s a world where a few men have over 100 children a piece. One guy has over 250. Drab doesn’t get a look in.
I was often shocked on my travels. Shocked I never imagined that polygamists would get me drunk on margaritas, for example. Or that fundamentalist children would have started a Bollywood movie club. Or that way out in the Moab desert there is a polygamous community that inhabits a giant rock powered by solar panels. For all their faults — which are many — fundamentalists have a point when they say that Mormonism lost its most colorful characters when it abandoned polygamy.
Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing?
As a topic, polygamy appears to have a very broad appeal, so I’m hoping Secrets & Wives will too. I wrote it for anyone who’s interested in American religion, Mormonism in particular, the religion of Mitt Romney and Glenn Beck; in how modern polygamists actually live and why; in prophets and followers and the dynamics of cults; in child brides and women’s rights; and in how a subculture of zealots might respond to an English atheist with a funny name asking deeply personal questions.
Are you hoping to just inform readers? Give them pleasure? Piss them off?
Pissing people off was never a mission objective, though I doubt Mormons will be rushing out to buy copies for their friends. But to inform and entertain? Absolutely.
This is a first-person exploration of polygamous groups and the issues they raise, and I always thought of the reader as my traveling companion as I went around Utah knocking on doors. Sometimes things didn’t go according to plan. While some groups invited me to stay over for weeks on end, others threw me out into the street. And occasionally, I would stumble across some drama or intrigue that sucked me right in.
But however the adventure unfolded, that’s how it is told — I stayed true to the rollercoaster. And that goes for tone too. Polygamy is certainly rich in heartbreaking stories and serious issues, but there were also funny moments along the way. So I’m actually hoping that readers will laugh uproariously in some places and weep sweet tears in others. And world peace would be nice.
What alternate title would you give the book?
We toyed with titles and tag lines till the cows came home, but I think we chose wisely in the end. Here are a few options that didn’t make the cut. To Be A God: The Secret Lives of Polygamists, When One Won't Do: The Hidden World of Mormon Polygamy, First You Get The Wives, Then You Get The Planet: The Things I Learned About Polygamists During My Summer In Utah, and Mormon Polygamy: A Gentile Investigates.
How do you feel about the cover?
I love it. I feel very lucky. Adrian Kinloch is the designer and he’s managed to perfectly evoke a hidden people, a life in the shadows. There’s a wife standing there but we can’t see her, her identity is concealed, she’s a secret. And look at those dramatic skies ahead of her. That’s polygamy — a gathering storm in the desert.
Is there a book out there you wish you had written? Which one? Why?
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, for obvious reasons. But also Jeff Sharlet’sThe Family - impeccably researched, expertly constructed and of lasting importance. Simply the best and most frightening expose of the Christian Right in America. I’m also envious of Sam Harris whose book, The End of Faith, was a brilliant blast of dissent at a time when religion appeared to be on the rampage in America.
What’s your next book?
There are a few ideas cooking but I don’t want to say too much. I might be an atheist but I believe in jinxing.
Sanjiv Bhattacharya is a writer and editor from England, now living in Los Angeles. He blogs here.
This article was found at:
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Polygamy and me: Growing up Mormon
ReplyDeleteBy Maggie Rayner, Special to The Sun December 16, 2011
When my family lived in Richmond, a group of Mormon fundamentalists from Bountiful, near Creston, visited our mainstream Mormon congregation extolling the practice of polygamy, also called the principle or plural marriage. They were looking for wives to add to their collections. They targeted families who had young girls.
My oldest sister at 16, with blond hair, blue eyes and a blossoming body, was a magnet for the young men and 19-year-old missionaries of the Church. One Sunday after Sunday school, I watched an older man from Bountiful rush over in the parking lot to open our station wagon door for her. He left the wife he had with him struggling to open their car door on her own, a baby on her hip, a diaper bag over her shoulder, and two toddlers clinging to her legs. I was 10 years old. I giggled at his ardour, finding his behaviour ridiculous, while a queasiness roiled in my stomach.
My parents weren’t swayed by the arguments to take up a polygamous lifestyle and my two sisters and I were saved from the principle.
Even so, my mother explained, “Polygamy is a hardship for men.” This did not make any sense to me.
My mother told me Joseph Smith introduced polygamy in the 1830s, soon after he founded the Mormon Church, because of the shortage of men and the abundance of women. “There were a lot of widows and older women immigrants, that worked as housekeepers and servants, joining the Church,” she said, “It was practical for the men to take more than one wife to ensure the older women were taken care of.”
...
The Church’s current position on polygamy, not widely known among younger Mormons, let alone non-members, is that God suspended the practice and temporarily disallowed plural marriage to spare the membership legal and political problems. The president in Salt Lake City, considered a living prophet by members today, could, at any time, give the word, and Latter-day Saint men would once more be called upon to marry multiple wives. ...
...
While I was growing up, the books I read were censored, limited to Church-approved literature. My parents dedicated themselves to breaking my child’s spirit to accept their beliefs. The friendships I was permitted and the activities I could pursue were all closely monitored. They were unsuccessful. While I was physically present at the services and activities I was forced to attend under fear of punishment, my mind refused to be taken prisoner.
When I left home and had the freedom to question, and seek out history books not sanctioned by the Church, I read with astonishment, and a growing sadness for my mother’s and father’s gullibility, of the chronological events surrounding the introduction of plural marriage. ...
...
My mother wouldn’t have known what a sex addict was or how to recognize one. While she was growing up, there was little, if any, information available about sexuality. The anatomically correct names used to describe intimate parts of the body weren’t common knowledge. Frank discussion of carnal desire or marital relations did not take place. She told me the intimacies of married life came as a surprise to her on their three-day honeymoon in Calgary, after she married my father in the Cardston temple.
I can’t, as a result, fault my mother for believing Smith was following godly direction rather than earthly appetites. She simply didn’t have the knowledge or experience to make informed decisions on what she was taught, and therefore believed, without question.
Whether the same can be said for my father, I don’t know. He held the highest level of priesthood conferred, only on men, by the Mormon Church, and the respected position of a bishop with his own congregation. ...
Maggie Rayner lives in Vancouver.
read the full article at:
http://www.vancouversun.com/life/Polygamy+Growing+Mormon/5874641/story.html
Polygamy policy - Utah County attorney gets it right
ReplyDeleteEditorial, Salt Lake Tribune Jun 02, 2012
The Utah County Attorney’s Office may have raised eyebrows when it declared in a court filing that it would not, as a matter of policy, prosecute polygamists under the state bigamy law unless some form of abuse, violence or fraud were involved. In Utah, this makes practical as well as legal sense.
Polygamy as practiced by several of Utah’s fundamentalist Mormon clans is pernicious. It enslaves women from girlhood in a patriarchal and religious web that denies them education, reproductive freedom, self-actualization and career opportunities. It can be equally corrosive in the lives of boys.
But there are exceptions. When consenting adults enter into religious marriages that are polygamous, without the expectation of the benefits of the state’s legal sanction, and there is no fraud, violence or abuse involved, there’s nothing to be gained by prosecution.
Several of the state’s attorneys general have realized this for many years. Current Attorney General Mark Shurtleff has made it a formal policy, and the new policy in Utah County mirrors that reasoning.
The county attorney there stated in the legal filing, "The purpose of this policy is to prevent the future prosecution in Utah County of bigamist marriages entered into for religious reasons." Again, absent any fraud or abuse, it makes sense for prosecutors the err on the side of religious freedom and respect for privacy in intimate relations.
Literalists will point out, correctly, that polygamy is outlawed explicitly in the Utah Constitution. But as in other areas of law enforcement, limited resources must be prioritized. There are an estimated 30,000 polygamists in this state, and it would be impossible to enforce a ban on polygamy across the board. The costs would be too high, and the human price to be paid in broken families would be even higher.
However, when one partner deceives another to achieve a bigamous relationship, or when older men make brides of children, or when incest or violence or sexual assault come to the attention of authorities, that’s when charges should be brought and cases tried.
Some legal experts argue that there should be no prosecutions of polygamists based on religious marital status alone, that the laws against other crimes give prosecutors the tools they need to punish and deter abuse without crossing into the difficult constitutional areas of religious freedom and the right to privacy.
That may be correct, and it is the practical consequence of the new policy in Utah County.
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/opinion/54226826-82/utah-county-policy-attorney.html.csp
Living the life of polygamy
ReplyDeleteAuthor tells personal story, seeks to help others leave polygamous lifestyle
St. George Daily Spectrum June 5, 2013
While growing up, Kristyn Decker, who now lives in New Harmony, was a seventh-generation polygamist on her father’s side. More recently, she has made efforts to share her experiences of growing up in a polygamous community by writing “Fifty Years in Polygamy: Big Secrets and Little White Lies.”
“I want people to realize that children and women living in polygamy need more attention and protection,” Decker said.
Decker wrote of her childhood and marriage in polygamy. Her unabridged version is scheduled to be out in July.
As she spoke at events across the country to promote her book, Decker became more involved in helping others leave polygamy. Decker heard so many stories similar to her own that she realized there was a dire need to create a coalition of like-minded people to raise awareness about the adversities of generational patriarchal polygamy. As a result, she founded Sound Choices Coalition.
“The Sound Choices Coalition is a partnership of organizations and individuals uniting in an effort to end human rights violations due to polygamy and other forms of patriarchal abuse,” Decker said.
Decker’s heart is always open to assisting those who want to leave polygamy and find genuine happiness.
“Every time someone has a successful escape or departure, my soul celebrates with their soul. I laugh and cry for joy,” she said.
A rough childhood
Decker is the 12th child of 23 biological children. Her mother, Vera Cooke, was the first of 13 wives to Decker’s father, Owen Allred, one of the early leaders of the Allred Group in Murray.
“I don’t remember my mother being very happy. She was often crying and depressed. For many years, she was verbally and physically abusive, as was her father, and always hid herself behind a book, especially the scriptures,” Decker said.
Decker’s difficulties went beyond her home life. In public schools, Decker was branded as a “polyg,” made fun of and shunned by the other students. In elementary school, she only had two dresses and had to wear boy’s shoes.
“The teachers were not protective of me when the kids picked on me. I never felt safe in or out of the polygamous culture,” Decker said. “It was a rough childhood.”
One such difficult incident in her life occurred when her father took her to the doctor for an examination prior to entering kindergarten. Without her father in the room, the doctor molested her, and when she didn’t cooperate, “He told me I was a naughty little girl. I was hurt physically and very confused about it. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t tell my dad because the doctor told me my dad would also be mad at me,” Decker said.
She wasn’t safe at home, either.
“One stepbrother, age 13, wanted me to play a game with him when I was 7 years old, a game that didn’t feel right to me. But since he was older and bigger than me, I couldn’t fight him off as he sexually abused me repeatedly for several years. He told me he would beat me up or hurt someone I loved if I ever said anything,” Decker said.
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Life as a polygamous wife
ReplyDeleteAt the age of 17, Decker married an independent polygamist who was 24, not of the Allred group, a first marriage for both of them.
“Even though my father counseled against the marriage, I had a choice as to who to marry,” Decker said. “We struggled with our marriage mainly over religion, as we were from different polygamy groups, which held to different requirements. Polygamous wives are required to always act happy even when we aren’t. You don’t want others to know that you are being deceptive.
“I later learned from other women that I was not the only one who felt heartache and jealousy. You learn to look happy and put on a good show, but I always felt that God hated me and was punishing me because I never behaved as good as I should have done.”
They were married for eight years before her husband took another wife — Decker’s second cousin. When children came along, not only did she watch after six of her own children, but she also watched three of her sister wives’ four children.
“It was not a choice. The doctrine I grew up with was to live polygamy, keep sweet and have as many children as you can. I was so busy taking care of our children that I didn’t have time to take care of myself while trying to deal with my emotions,” Decker said.
With all this pressure on her shoulders, she became depressed and started having suicidal thoughts.
“After my second to the last baby, fulfilling my obligation to have as many babies as God would give me, I realized I couldn’t take care of the ones I had. I hated me as a wife and as a mother. I wanted to die,” Decker said. “But I hung around because I knew that no one would love my children as much as me. They are what kept me going.”
Leaving the lifestyle
Then, a major thing happened in her life. Her 16-year-old daughter, who was addicted to drugs, ran away from home. When her daughter was arrested, the state mandated therapy for both of them.
“I began to discover myself,” Decker said.
After years of looking straight ahead with blinders on, Decker said it became impossible for her to ignore the never ending dysfunction, lies, cheating, abuse, leadership control and human rights violations that were going on around her.
“I realized the foundations I’d been taught to believe in had always been faulty and fractured; by then, it was crumbling into pieces,” Decker said.
To prepare for life outside the polygamous community, she decided to attend college at Southern Utah University to learn a skill to provide for herself and her children.
“I had to live or die. I felt if I stayed, I might suffocate,” Decker said. “Attending school was one of the best years of my life — I was finding and discovering more about me than ever before. I came to the realization that I would not be damned to hell for not living polygamy. I had already left polygamy in my heart and mind.”
Now that she has left the polygamous lifestyle, she is married to LeRoy “Dub” Decker.
“He’s my gift from the universe. I was very resistant as I felt that I didn’t need or want another man in my life, but Dub is the best man on earth,” Decker said.
For information, visit Kristyn Decker’s blog. at www.fiftyyearsinpolygamy.com or email her at kristyndeckerbooks@gmail.com. To learn about Sound Choices Coalition, email soundchoicescoalition@gmail.com or visitwww.sound-choices.com
http://www.thespectrum.com/article/20130605/LIFESTYLE/306050012/Living-life-polygamy
Smith polygamy essays commendable, but still not the full story
ReplyDeleteBy Gary James Bergera, Op-ed Salt Lake Tribune November 03 2014
The LDS Church’s publication of essays on its practice of plural marriage represents a good first step in acknowledging the history of the controversial doctrine (see Peggy Fletcher Stack, "New Mormon Essay: Joseph Smith Married Teens, Other Men’s Wives," Salt Lake Tribune, Oct. 22,). While the essays are presented as news releases, they exhibit an informed grasp of the growing number of the relevant scholarly articles and books that have appeared since the 1980s.
The authors of the essays, though anonymous, tackle head-on some of the most problematic aspects of the church’s embrace of what it once called "celestial marriage." This includes church founder Joseph Smith’s marriages to young women, at least one of whom was 14 (the essays characterize her as just shy of 15); Smith’s marriages to other men’s wives (which the essays contend may not have included sexual relations); Smith’s concealing most of his plural marriages from his civil wife, Emma Hale; Smith’s and the church’s carefully worded denials regarding the practice of polygamy; the church’s "civil disobedience" in performing the illegal marriages; and the church’s clandestine attempts to keep plural marriage alive for a decade or more even after publicly disavowing it in 1890.
In dealing with these and other controversies, the essays recognize that the church cannot explain away, at least not to everyone’s satisfaction, the many inconsistencies, misstatements and contradictions that accompany the history of plural marriage. In fact, the essays’ candor is sometimes jarring, like a splash of ice-cold water. Clearly, the authors believe that "hard facts" are a more effective palliative than spin.
The essays risk falling short in three areas. First, the essay on polygamy during Joseph Smith’s lifetime reflects an emerging apologetic argument that seeks to portray Smith as a reluctant polygamist who had to be coerced by an angel into engaging in sexual relations with his plural wives. Such a position misrepresents Smith’s zest for life and self-perception as Heaven’s lawgiver, while imposing on him a particular brand of morality that was foreign to him. "That which is wrong under one circumstance, may be, and often is, right under another," he taught (History of the church, 5:134). He also stated that there were "many things in the Bible which do not, as they now stand, accord with the revelation of the Holy Ghost to me" (Words of Joseph Smith, p. 211).
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Second for reasons not stated, the essays fail to mention, even in endnotes, some of the most important scholarship on Mormon polygamy. These omissions include, but are not limited to: Martha Bradley and Mary Woodward’s Four Zinas: A Story of Mothers and Daughters on the Mormon Frontier (Signature Books, 2000), a ground-breaking study of women and polygamy; Lawrence Foster’s Religion and Sexuality (University of Illinois Press, 1981), an early important work by an eminent non-LDS historian; George D. Smith’s Nauvoo Polygamy (Signature Books, 2nd ed. 2011), a work especially valuable for its statistical and genealogical data (apparently cited in one endnote without reference); and D. Michael Quinn’s truly ground-breaking discussion of post-1890 polygamy, "LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages" (Dialogue, Spring 1985). Granted that space in the church’s essays was limited, still the failure to credit these, and other past, researchers for their contributions seems deliberate.
ReplyDeleteFinally, the essays cite primary manuscript sources held by the church that are not available to the general public to consult. This makes it appear that access to the church’s vast archival holdings is more open than is actually the case. These documents include the diaries of George Q. Cannon, Francis M. Lyman, Heber J. Grant, Matthias F. Cowley and others. Historians and other researchers can only hope that such records may one day be as accessible as the essays imply.
There is much to recommend the LDS Church’s new essays on Mormon polygamy. There is also much still left to be done in narrating as fully and as accurately as possible the tumultuous history of the church’s distinctive, controversial practice.
Gary James Bergera is managing director of the Smith-Pettit Foundation (Salt Lake City) and the author of six published studies of early Mormon polygamy. He is past publisher of Signature Books and past managing editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.
http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/1764594-155/essays-church-smith-polygamy-plural-mormon
How I Escaped From a Polygamist Cult
ReplyDeleteRuth Wariner's dad was her religion's prophet. When she was a teenager, she finally broke free.
By Kate Storey Cosmopolitan January 8, 2016
When Ruth Wariner walked into her first day of elementary school in Chihuahua, Mexico, she didn't know a soul and couldn't speak the language. She'd grown up nearby in an isolated fundamentalist Mormon colony. She'd never had to learn Spanish.
Wariner's teacher paired her with another student who could translate that day's lesson. The little girl leaned in and whispered to Wariner, "Did you know that we're sisters?" and then pointed to another student. "She's our sister too."
The girls all had the same father: Joel LeBaron, the self-professed prophet who led the polygamist Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times. They were the three youngest of LeBaron's 42 children, born within five months of each other to three of his seven wives, but had never met until that first day of class.
For Wariner, being raised in a polygamist family was a far cry from the lives of the happy-go-lucky characters on HBO's Big Love and the TLC reality show Sister Wives. Her memoir, The Sound of Gravel, which is out this week, paints a heartbreaking picture of the poverty and neglect Wariner faced growing up in the shadow of her prophet father and a stepdad who she alleges sexually abused her.
"It's hard for me to watch anything about polygamy on TV. It's always a very glamorized version," Wariner tells Cosmopolitan.com. "Polygamy is very hard on women and children."
Wariner's mother Kathy was only 17 when she married Joel LeBaron, the leader of her church, a man 25 years her senior.
In 1972, shortly after they wed, Joel was killed in a plot concocted by his brother, Ervil LeBaron, the leader of a different sect who would later be known as "the Mormon Manson" because of the brutal murders he was believed to have ordered. (In 1980, Ervil was convicted of being the "intellectual author" of Joel's death, according to his obituary in the New York Times.) Wariner was only 3 months old when her dad died, but she grew up knowing how important he was to her community.
"I felt special to be the prophet's daughter," says Wariner. "Ever since I can remember, his picture was mounted in the church and it was everywhere we went. Just like Jesus is for Christianity, you start learning from a very early age what that role is for any particular sect, but for us in the fundamentalist Mormon church that I grew up in, it was my father."
She explains her dad's teachings in The Sound of Gravel:
My father believed that polygamy was one of the most important principles God ever gave His people. He preached that for a man to reach the Celestial Kingdom—the highest level of heaven—he had to have at least two wives. If a man lived this principle, he would become a god himself and inherit an earth of his own, one just like our earth. Women who married polygamists, loved their sister wives, and had as many children as they could would become goddesses, which meant they were their husband's heavenly servants.
Her mother remarried two years after Joel's death, becoming the second wife of another polygamist man living in the colony named Lane.
Wariner's grandfather, Alma Dayer LeBaron, was the original prophet who, in 1944, founded Colonia LeBaron, where Wariner grew up. He led his polygamist sect to Mexico, because he'd had visions of the United States becoming engulfed in flames and crumbling, Wariner explains. Because of his terrifying prophecies, LeBaron, which was home to about 1,000 believers when Wariner was young, was a sort of safe place for her and her dozens of siblings, because they believed they'd be shielded from the destruction there.
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Wariner and her moms other children were carted back and forth between Mexico and El Paso, Texas, where they'd collect their mom's welfare checks. Every trip across the border into the States brought waves of anxiety.
ReplyDelete"Whenever I went across the border, you never knew what was going to come," she says. "We learned that the destruction was going to come from the States."
But not all their views were so shocking. "LeBaron had more conservative people and more liberal people. There were people who were very strict, stayed home on Sundays, didn't listen to wordly music, dressed in those long dresses, and wore their hair a certain way," Wariner says. "But my mom loved Elvis Presley and the Everly brothers, so she introduced that to us. Her upbringing in California made her naturally less fundamentalist. We wore jeans and T-shirts, but I wasn't allowed to wear bathing suits or shorts. I couldn't show my shoulders."
While we often think of polygamous families living together or in houses side-by-side, Wariner rarely saw her half-siblings or her mom's sister wives. When her stepdad Lane took a third wife, Wariner, her mom and siblings were moved to a series of campers and mobile homes on the outskirts of town. When Wariner and her stepdad were alone, she alleges he would sexually abuse her.
She writes in her book:
My resistance to his kisses had become like a game for him. I'd resist, and then he'd beg me, and then he'd try to kiss me again, and then he'd repeat the cycle until I gave in and kissed him back.
Wariner told her mom, who promised to talk to Lane. But Wariner says the abuse persisted and continued to get worse.
"I think my mom was brainwashed into a religion that taught her she had to be married to see her creator again," Wariner tells Cosmopolitan.com. "She always had it in her heart to live for a higher purpose. I think that polygamy provided it for her."
Nearly every year brought a new baby into Wariner's family. When her mom would give birth, the second-youngest child would be passed off to Wariner to care for. So, at age 14, she dropped out of school to raise her younger siblings full-time.
Wariner assumed she'd follow in her mother's footsteps and enter into a plural marriage, until a conversation with one of her stepsisters made her realize that there were other options. She remembers being 8 or 9 years old when she was playing Barbies with Maria, the daughter of one of Lane's other wives. As they swapped out the doll's outfits, Maria boldly announced that she was going to be a fashion designer one day. "That was the beginning of the revelation that I could maybe do something else with my life too," Wariner says.
A few years later, she began having crushes on boys in her class, which made it even harder to imagine sharing a husband one day.
"It made me feel so uncomfortable — that feeling of jealousy," she says. "It crushed me in a way, especially because I saw how jealousy crushed my mom so many times."
Wariner's mom died tragically in 1988 when she was electrocuted by improperly installed wires in her backyard. Being left alone with her three younger sisters and her stepfather was Wariner's wakeup call.
"After that, once my little sisters were subjected 100 percent to my stepfather, I knew that for their sakes and for mine that I had to get out of there," she says.
She recalls the moment she knew she had to leave in her book:
All the words I'd ever heard in church, and at all the conferences and Sunday-school classes, seemed to be taunting me now: honor thy father, honor thy mother, be like Christ, be good, count your blessings, do what you're told, prophets, men, husbands, gods, visions, dreams, destruction, forgiveness, sacrifice, submission, faith, Babylon, heaven and all the blessed little children... I realized that all those words,
...words that had held such power throughout my childhood, words that had characterized our way of life, words that had defined me, my siblings, my mom—they meant nothing to me. All the preaching, all the hours in church memorizing scriptures, how could that mean anything when the community supporting it wouldn't defend the innocence and safety of a child?
ReplyDeleteShe called her older brother, who'd moved away from LeBaron years earlier to make money in the States to send back to the family. She explained the abuse she'd suffered since he'd left, and begged him to come pick her and her siblings up.
While her stepfather was on a work trip, doing construction in El Paso, Wariner collected her family's food stamps, Social Security cards, and a few mementos of her mom. At 2 o'clock in the morning, her brother arrived in an old Oldsmobile he'd recently bought, and they all piled in, immediately discussing what they'd need to tell the border police in Arizona — where they'd be sure not to cross paths with her stepdad who'd be driving back from Texas. Their plan to pretend they were just coming back to the States from a shopping jaunt in Mexico worked.
"No one said a word as the car crept into Arizona. Even after the border was a dot in the rearview mirror, the silence continued," she wrote in her book. "I think we were stunned, not to mention overwhelmed by the obstacles that lay ahead."
Once she was free, the effects of her upbringing manifested in ways Wariner couldn't have expected. The family moved in with Wariner's grandparents, who'd left the cult and Colonia LeBaron more than a decade earlier because of the struggle polygamy inflicted on their daughter's life. Wariner got her GED, and eventually went to college and graduate school to get a teaching degree. But throughout her 20s and 30s, she found herself dating wrong guy after wrong guy.
"My mom was someone who lacked a lot of self-love, that's something she didn't know how to have for herself and it's a problem that I've inherited," she says. "I kept being attracted to men who were apathetic. I realized that these men were like my stepfather, not in that they were abusive, but that they were absent emotionally."
Thanks to the health benefits that came with her first teaching job in Oregon, therapy helped Wariner deal with her past. She escaped from LeBaron 29 years ago, and today she's 43 years old and lives with her husband outside of Portland. She says the key to finding her partner was getting to know her husband first as a friend. They met at a fundraising party, where they didn't hit it off romantically at first. But, she says, "as we got to know each other, I adored him, respected him and fell in love with him." Now they have a healthy, equal relationship.
"I call myself a feminist — I consider myself equal to a man, and I don't think I should be submissive to a man," she says. And as far as religion goes, she says, "I'm not Mormon or fundamentalist Mormon now. I feel very spiritual, I still believe in God. I pray and meditate every morning. But I struggle with organized religion because I don't want other people to define what I do with my life."
Wariner has been back to LeBaron three times since her dramatic escape. Her stepfather died, but she still has family living there, who she likes to keep in touch with. While she missed LeBaron and its familiarity for years after she left, she says breaking free changed her life.
"I live a very wonderful, privileged life. I live in a beautiful townhome. I've been married for seven years. I decided not to have kids of my own after the years I spent taking care of my siblings. My siblings live in Seattle and Portland and Southern Oregon. We get to see each other all the time," she says. "I love my life."
http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/news/a51783/how-i-escaped-from-a-polygamist-cult/
I grew up with 41 siblings in a polygamist cult
ReplyDeleteBy Dana Schuster New York Post January 14, 2016
You may have watched television shows about it, but few have experienced the brutality and sexism of some cults firsthand. Ruth Wariner has. The 43-year-old grew up in a polygamist colony in Mexico where she had more than 40 siblings. Wariner, whose new memoir, “The Sound of Gravel,” is out now, tells The Post’s Dana Schuster what it was like growing up poor with an abusive stepfather, and about the final straw that caused her to plot her escape once and for all.
“Hey, did you know that we’re sisters?” Natalia whispered to me. It was my first day in elementary school and I had just met this girl.
“Are you sure?” I asked, thinking I misheard her.
“I think so. My mom said your dad is Joel the prophet … Joel was my dad, too,” she said. Then she pointed to the little girl in the front row. “She’s our sister, too.”
My mouth dropped.
I had never met my half-siblings, but I knew I had them. A lot of them. I grew up in a polygamist cult, the Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times, a Fundamentalist Mormon sect in Chihuahua, Mexico. My father, Joel LeBaron, was the prophet of the sect. I was 39th of his 42 children.
Three months after my birth, my dad was rumored to have been killed by his own brother in a bid for church power. My mother, Kathy, remarried, becoming wife No. 2 of a man named Lane. She already had four children with my father and went on to have six more with Lane.
Lane could barely support his first wife and her brood, let alone ours. We lived in a ramshackle adobe house where we subsisted on beans and eggs. My mother went to the States regularly to collect welfare checks — her parents lived there after defecting from the church. I took care of my siblings, many of whom were mentally disabled, feeding them and washing their dirty cloth diapers.
I never liked Lane, and hated him after I turned 8. That’s when he’d sneak into my bedroom during the nights he stayed with my mom and touch me. Lane promised me ice cream if I kept quiet, but I told my mom — multiple times — what he was doing. Each time she told me Lane was sorry and that we needed to practice forgiveness. It crushed my soul that my mother wouldn’t leave him. But in our religion, women needed to be married to get into heaven, so she stayed.
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When I turned 14, my mom and Lane pulled me out of school to help with the house and kids full time. One day, I found my brother Micah and stepbrother Junior hanging dead on a barbed-wire fence. Lane had been wiring electricity to another wife’s house, and the boys had been electrocuted. I screamed in horror. My mother came running out.
ReplyDelete“Do not touch the fence!” I yelled. But she did.
She died, too.
Heartbroken, my older brother Luke, three younger half-sisters and I were sent to live with Lane’s fourth wife, Marjory. When I found out that Lane had molested Luke (who was 17 at the time but had the mental capacity of a 5-year-old), I knew we had to escape.
My brother Matt, who had moved to California years ago, drove to Mexico to get the five of us. We lived with my grandmother while I got my GED. Lane tried to get his kids back, but I went to court and fought him and won.
I’m now living in Portland, Ore., where I stopped teaching high school Spanish in order to write, and have been married to Alan, a sales consultant, for eight years. Because we got married when I was 36, we decided not to have children.
Lane died three years ago. Somehow, I’ve learned to forgive him. Sometimes I look back on my life and think, “Really? Did this happen?” But I’ve tried to let go of the anger inside of me.
I’ll never forget when, a few months before my mother died, she told me she loved me — words I don’t think I had ever heard from her before.
“Ruthie, I need to tell you … that I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry for everything that you’ve gone through, for everything Lane has done to you. I do feel like things have gotten better. Don’t you think so?” she asked, crying hard.
I do now.
http://nypost.com/2016/01/14/i-grew-up-with-41-siblings-in-a-polygamist-cult/
Polygamous sect member pleads guilty in scheme to orchestrate sexual acts involving children
ReplyDeleteBy JACQUES BILLEAUD, Associated Press March 19, 2024
PHOENIX (AP) — A businessman pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiring with the leader of an offshoot polygamous sect near the Arizona-Utah border to transport underage girls across state lines, making him the first man to be convicted in what authorities say was a scheme to orchestrate sexual acts involving children.
Moroni Johnson, who faces 10 years to life in prison, acknowledged that he participated in a scheme to transport four girls under the age of 18 for sexual activity. Authorities say the conspiracy between the 53-year-old Johnson and the sect’s leader, self-proclaimed prophet Samuel Bateman, occurred over a three-year period ending in September 2022.
Authorities say Bateman had created a sprawling network spanning at least four states as he tried to start an offshoot of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which historically has been based in the neighboring communities of Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah. He and his followers practice polygamy, a legacy of the early teachings of the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which abandoned the practice in 1890 and now strictly prohibits it. Bateman and his followers believe polygamy brings exaltation in heaven.
The FBI said Bateman had taken more than 20 wives, including 10 girls under the age of 18. Bateman is accused of giving wives as gifts to his male followers and claiming to do so on orders from the “Heavenly Father.” Investigators say Bateman traveled extensively between Arizona, Utah, Colorado and Nebraska and had sex with minor girls on a regular basis. Some of the sexual activity involving Bateman was recorded and transmitted across state lines via electronic devices.
https://apnews.com/article/samuel-bateman-polygamous-sect-leader-charges-arizona-6cc702229fc3e6e735991e0ac86c5214