Under the Banner of Heaven

The book braids the modern murder with the violent early history of Mormonism — Joseph Smith, the doctrine of blood atonement, the practice of plural marriage — because Krakauer's argument is that the two are not separable. His claim is that absolute obedience, once located in a revelation that cannot be argued with, will eventually license whatever the revelation demands, and that women and children pay first. Attend to the logic the killers used and the founders modeled: the line that perfect obedience produces perfect faith, and the move by which a man who claims to hear God forecloses every objection by recasting it as faithlessness. The book has been contested by the LDS Church, and Vela reads it as one account in a live argument, not a verdict. We hold it on the religion-and-authority axes, beside the Christianity arc's longer study of how obedience and shame get installed.