Under The Banner Of Heaven A Story Of Violent Faith

Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith is Jon Krakauer’s investigative nonfiction account of the 1984 murders of Brenda Lafferty and her 15-month-old daughter, Erica, in Utah. Brenda’s brothers-in-law, Ron and Dan Lafferty, were convicted in the case after claiming that divine revelation had instructed them to commit the killings.

Krakauer uses this case as the book’s central narrative and expands outward to examine the history of the Latter-day Saint movement, the abandonment of official plural marriage by the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the development of separate Mormon fundamentalist groups that continued to practise polygamy. He reports from isolated fundamentalist communities in the American West, Canada, and Mexico while exploring how religious certainty can become entangled with authority, family control, misogyny, and violence.