Review of Jon Krakauer's Under The Banner of Heaven

Originally written for Goodreads, reproduced below:

I’d have easily given it 5, had it been Krakauer’s first novel I read. But that happened to be Into Thin Air – one of the few truly deserving of 5 stars - so this one has to settle for 4, owing largely to tedious details of the history of Mormonism that could have been easily avoided.

The book starts off with an electric shock to the brains of those who consider US as the last bastion of law and order in modern times. The Fundamentalist Mormon theocracies that dominate parts of Northwestern US and Canada are perhaps worse than Saudi Arabia, where women are treated as sex slaves, underage marriages and polygamy are rampant, and asking questions is a heresy.

But the book is far from a mere crime thriller, or a critique of Fundamentalist Mormonism for that matter. It's a brilliant, wholesome commentary on the nature of religion itself.

In the postscript, Krakauer says, “those who write about religion owe it to their readers to come clean about their own theological frame of reference”, so here’s mine – I am an atheist, and I firmly believe all religions are basically tools of mind control to allow its founders/leaders to exercise unencumbered authority over their followers.

Now that I have confessed to my confirmation bias, I will go ahead with the main bit of the review.

Reading about the mindless horrors committed by Lafferty Brothers – the near-decapitation of a young mother and her 15 month old daughter - at apparently the commandment of god, it’s natural to presume they were nothing but two mentally deranged individuals whose crime should be treated similar to that of another psychopathic murderer, without maligning Mormonism, or any other religion, on its pretext.

However, like a great music composition, this book reaches its crescendo towards the very end, when it establishes conclusively – by going into painstaking details of the trials of Lafferty Brothers – that these were two otherwise perfectly sane individuals who suffered from unwavering faith in their religion and the infallibility of their own actions. More worryingly, by deftly weaving together the story of Lafferty Brothers and that of the founders of Mormonism, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, the readers are informed that the brothers shared these traits with the two founders, and derived complete justification for their most heinous actions from them. Such justification, given the call for “blood atonement” given by the founders as well as their complete disregard for laws of man in favour of laws of god, is only logical.

Perhaps Fundamentalist Mormonism is especially bad - its stalwarts rape their own minor daughters and take tens of wives - but an intelligent reader should be able to make the leap from the story of Lafferty Brothers to religion in general, and from Smith and Young to founders of all religions – ultimately, all religions are forms of mind control and all founders were deeply narcissistic individuals who were undoubtedly virtuous in some ways but, “at need a great liar and a great scoundrel” (words, not used by Krakauer, to describe Young) who were not afraid to lie, maim, kill and rape to establish their version of truth as the only valid one. At the risk of being labelled a bigot, I’d say this is most true of Abrahamic religions and their founders. In their narcissism, the founders of religions shared a trait also found in Hitler, Osama, Caesar, Napoleon, and indeed al-Baghdadi (founder of ISIS) – all great leaders cum murderers in history.

The unfortunate bit is that the control of religion over human psyche, despite millennia of scientific progress, has hardly loosened. If there was Joseph Smith then, there is Donald Trump now – an example of an individual who suffers from the same unabashed narcissism and an entrenched sense of infallibility. If Smith was a prophet, Trump is a demigod. The names change, the cycle perpetuates. Animal Farm isn’t one of the best books ever for no reason.

In Into Thin Air, Krakauer erred in blaming Boukreev for loss of lives, so I was open to reading logical rebuttals to this book by Mormons. Sadly, as expected, they consist of nothing but ad hominem attacks on the author, and laughable reiterations of their belief in Mormonism being the “one true faith”. If anything, they only strengthen my belief in the evil inherent to religion.