Murder and the Mormon Church
The making of “Under the Banner of Heaven” for FX
Dustin Lance Black still gets emotional when he talks about the time he left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, around three decades ago. It was hard, he said, because he loved the church. But his Mormon father had run off to marry his own first cousin, leaving behind a wife and three children. And when his stepfather became physically violent, local church leaders circled the wagons and told his mother, who was paralyzed from polio, to leave the police out of it.
So he had questions. And eventually, doubts.
He also still recalls when he first read “Under the Banner of Heaven” (2003), a book of investigative journalism by Jon Krakauer that is now the basis of an FX miniseries on Hulu, which Black created. Black had come out as gay by then and was trying to make it as a young screenwriter. “Banner” shined a clarifying light into corners of church practice and history that had always been hidden to him.
“It felt so true to me and then had all of these layers that I hadn’t yet examined about my childhood faith — my family’s faith still — and how I had grown up in it,” Black, 47, said in a three-way video call earlier this month. “It was formative for me.”
Krakauer, who was also on the call, had just seen the first several episodes of Black’s series, which debuted Thursday. His knowledge of Black’s script was minimal; he had no official role in the series. He could tell, he said, that the show’s depictions of how church leaders encouraged women to stay in abusive relationships was rooted in experience.
“That stuff is such a powerful part of the show, and it clearly comes from your personal experience,” Krakauer told him. “I mean, it really informs it.”
Black paused. “I don’t think those experiences are particular to me at all,” he said. “I saw it happening time and again, and sometimes it would work out just fine. But too often it didn’t. And most often, I saw that it was the women in the church that were suffering most.”
Exhibit A: Brenda Lafferty (played in the series by Daisy Edgar-jones), a church member who in 1984 had her throat cut, along with that of her 15month-old daughter, Erica, by a 10-inch boning knife. The killers eventually were revealed to be two of Brenda’s brothers-in-law, fundamentalists who said they were carrying out God’s will — an act of socalled blood atonement for being what the brothers deemed “children of perdition.” As the man who wielded the knife told Krakauer, with no visible remorse, “You don’t want to offend Him by refusing to do His work.”
The book drew intense criticism from church leaders, who in an official response called it “a decidedly one-sided and negative view of Mormon history.” (Krakauer admitted to a few minor factual errors but rebutted the broader criticisms pointby-point in an appendix to later editions.) Based on the unsparing depictions in the five episodes made available to journalists in advance, the series might inspire similar condemnation.
Black seems prepared. No stranger to complex or controversial subjects — he wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for “Milk,” about the pioneering gay politician Harvey Milk, and was a writer for the HBO series about a polygamist family, “Big Love” — Black has made the Lafferty murders the heart of his series. An investigation by two fictional detectives, one of whom, Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield), is a church member, provides the central narrative device by which Black unpacks big questions of history, faith and dogma.
Black and Krakauer spoke for more than an hour — Black from Los Angeles, Krakauer from his home in Boulder — about the book and the adaptation, and about why truth, however difficult, is the ultimate kindness. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Krakauer: The history is absolutely accurate. You have to remember that this church, until 2014, refused to acknowledge publicly that Joseph Smith (the church’s founder) had more than one wife. The church is going to say,
“Blood atonement is nowhere; you’ll never find that term in any of our doctrine,” and they’re right. Except that numerous Mormon leaders have referred to blood atonement, and say how necessary it is. So it’s there, and Lance got that right.
Black: I think I took a different view of the book, and I bet a lot of Mormons did as well. The PR department of the Mormon Church has their response. But there are many Mormons who, I would be willing to bet, read Jon’s book and had that lightning strike to their heart of,
“I’m going to listen to my doubt for a minute.” That hurt is uncomfortable, but it’s a growing pain. So I bet more people than not found some comfort in the relief of confusion. Because so much of what’s in there, we just aren’t taught. It’s not that it’s even debated; you’ve just never heard it before.
To me, the television series attempts to do the same. We now just have flesh and blood people standing in for the reader, which is why I wanted one (detective) to be Mormon and one (played by Gil Birmingham) to be an outsider.
Black: I didn’t blame the church for that. I thought there was something wrong with me, and I believed that till far too old an age. And I would suppress it. When I watch “The Book of Mormon,” the musical, and they get to the light switch song (“Turn It Off”), I’m like, that was me until my early 20s. Turn it off like a light switch.
I’ve done a lot of LGBT stuff, and I appreciate you asking that. But that’s not where this comes from. This comes from my belief that gender ought not determine destiny. And that flies directly in the face of this faith and frankly, most others. So this has more to do with watching my mother and her sisters in our ward be treated as second-class human beings.
Krakauer: Lance, before you came on (the call), I brought up the church’s attempt in 2003 to preemptively discredit my book. And I was saying, “Wow, you know, if my book pissed them off, this is going to really piss them off.” And I wonder if you’ve given thought about how you intend to counter the campaign to smear the show and paint it as something it’s not.
The show is subtle and nuanced. They’re going to say it’s this reductionist attack, that Lance hates the church and hates Mormons. It’s coming.
Black: I don’t doubt the Mormon Church will try to pick this apart. So all I can do is to make sure I am doing my homework. This isn’t my story.