Under the Banner of Heaven

Under the Banner of Heaven Review

Under the Banner of Heaven is Jon Krakauer’s most ambitious book — a work that uses a violent crime as the entry point for a comprehensive history of the Latter-day Saint movement and an examination of what happens when religious certainty is taken to its logical extreme.

The crime is the 1984 murders of Brenda Lafferty and her infant daughter by her brothers-in-law Ron and Dan Lafferty, fundamentalist Mormons who believed they were executing a revelation from God. Krakauer uses the Lafferty case as the contemporary anchor for a narrative that moves fluidly through the full history of the LDS church — the founding visions of Joseph Smith, the practice of polygamy, the mass migration to Utah, the government’s attempt to suppress polygamy, and the fracturing of the movement into mainstream LDS and the various fundamentalist splinter groups that refused the 1890 Manifesto abandoning plural marriage.

The dual structure allows Krakauer to do something that simple true crime cannot: to show the Lafferty murders not as an aberration but as an extreme expression of premises that lie within the founding documents and history of the tradition. This is also the book’s most contested claim — the LDS Church objected that Krakauer was unfairly implicating mainstream Mormonism in acts it condemns. The debate this created is itself instructive about how religious institutions manage their histories.

Krakauer’s great quality as a writer is that he takes his subjects seriously. He is genuinely interested in what it would feel like to believe what the Laffertys believed, and his attempt to enter that perspective makes Under the Banner of Heaven more disturbing and more honest than most true crime.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Under the Banner of Heaven apart: The dual narrative structure is perfectly calibrated — the historical and contemporary threads illuminate each other; Krakauer’s research is thorough and his engagement with his subject is genuinely fair; and The book raises profound questions about faith, revelation, and religious authority without dismissing belief. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Core Ideas

The central arguments the book develops are worth summarising. Religious revelation is unfalsifiable, which is what makes it both powerful and potentially dangerous. The history of the LDS church involves violence and revision that its official narrative minimizes. Fundamentalism is not a distortion of a pure original but a possible reading of founding documents. These ideas are grounded in evidence and example rather than speculation, which distinguishes this book from comparable titles that rely on anecdote alone.

The Reading Experience

Under the Banner of Heaven is the kind of book that changes slightly depending on when you read it. The surface — plot, character, setting — remains constant, but the reader brings different things to it at different points in life, and the book meets them there. This is a property of enduring work, and it distinguishes Under the Banner of Heaven from titles that are consumed once and not returned to.

Limitations

The LDS Church objected strenuously to the book’s characterizations, and some critics found Krakauer’s framing of mainstream Mormonism tendentious. The true crime elements occasionally feel subordinate to the historical survey. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Publication, Subject Matter, and Krakauer’s Method

Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith was published in July 2003. The book interweaves the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — from Joseph Smith’s founding of the religion in the 1820s through the 19th-century practice of polygamy and the persecution of Mormon communities — with an account of the 1984 murders of Brenda Lafferty and her infant daughter by her fundamentalist brothers-in-law, who claimed divine revelation as justification.

The book provoked controversy within the Mormon community: the LDS Church issued an official response arguing that Krakauer had mischaracterized mainstream Mormonism by focusing disproportionately on fundamentalist splinter groups. Krakauer’s response was that the fundamentalist groups he documented were following Mormonism’s original revealed doctrine more faithfully than the modern church, which had abandoned polygamy under federal pressure.

Jon Krakauer’s previous books — Into the Wild (1996) and Into Thin Air (1997) — had established him as the leading American writer of narrative nonfiction about extreme situations. Under the Banner of Heaven extended his method to institutional religion and domestic violence, arguing that faith untethered from communal accountability can generate extreme harm. FX produced a limited television series based on the book in 2022, starring Andrew Garfield as a detective investigating the Lafferty murders.

The 2022 FX series starred Andrew Garfield as Detective Pyre and Daisy Edgar-Jones as Brenda Wright Lafferty, dramatising both the 1984 murders and the wider history of Mormon fundamentalism; producers worked with a cultural consultant and former LDS member to balance accuracy with dramatic compression. The series introduced Krakauer’s research to an audience unfamiliar with either the book or the case.

Krakauer’s Method

Jon Krakauer’s research methodology in Under the Banner of Heaven — combining historical scholarship on LDS church history with journalistic investigation of the Lafferty case and ethnographic observation of contemporary FLDS communities — was criticised by LDS scholars who argued that his treatment of Joseph Smith’s revelations was sensationalised. Krakauer responded that his account used primary sources throughout; the controversy contributed to the book’s sales and to ongoing debate about the relationship between religious faith, historical interpretation, and criminal motivation.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Krakauer at his most ambitious — the dual narrative works brilliantly, and the result is both a gripping true crime account and a serious examination of how revelation and religious certainty can lead to atrocity.