THE COLONY – Faith and Blood in Promised LandSally Denton
Religions that are created by men tend to be less favorable for women. Through history, men prophets claimed divine authority to write laws that perpetuate masculine power and cast women aside as intellectual inferiors or evil tyrants who threaten male glory.
We reject sexism in many other areas of our society, but it is embedded in many religious creeds. A faith that is based on male supremacy is more prominent than in the polygamist sects of the American West and northern Mexico. These sects follow the original teachings of Joseph Smith, the libidinous founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Billing himself as a “prophet, seer and revelator” in 1830, Smith bested the religious start-ups of yore: He claimed that God — viewed as male, always — allowed men to take multiple wives. Smith accumulated up to 40 himself, including a 14-year-old girl — a troubling history that Mormon leaders denied until 2014.
“Central to Smith’s theology was the doctrine that all male devotees were on the road to godhood,” Sally Denton writes in her meticulously researched new book, “The Colony.” She goes on, “In the Mormons’ patriarchal system, a woman could only enter heaven as an appendage to a man, yet a man could take as many women to the eternal kingdom as he pleased.” Unsurprisingly, young men found Smith’s sales pitch very attractive.
Denton, an award-winning journalist and author of eight previous books, including two about Mormonism, is a descendant to polygamists. In “The Colony,” she traces the lineage of Melissa LeBaron, the plural wife of one of Smith’s early acolytes, to the present-day Colonia LeBaron, a polygamist community of 5,000 people in Chihuahua, Mexico.
“This book is an exploration of LeBaron — the place and the family — in an effort to explain the impulses that drove thousands of women over generations, including ancestors of mine … to join or remain within a novel American religion based on male supremacy and female servitude,” Denton writes.
In 1890, the Latter-day Saints complied with federal government pressure and issued a manifesto against plural marriage. The sudden shift in dogma caused a split in the church. Fundamentalists, including LeBarons, fled Mexico to continue their polygamous lifestyle.
The author couldn’t have found a more bizarro clan to profile than the LeBarons, whose history of murdering family members, mental illness and incest rivals that of the Hapsburgs. One LeBaron patriarch, after 14 years of marriage to one woman, claimed he had a vision telling him that he needed a “quorum” of seven or more wives to attain godhood. Another blamed God in his seductions of underage girls. Another incorporated U.F.O.s as well as extraterrestrials in his teachings. One family member told Denton that a “streak of insanity haunted the family,” the result of generations of marriages between first cousins and even half siblings. Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult for followers to distinguish between their leaders’ “divine” revelations and mental derangement.
Most of Denton’s polygamous sources insisted on anonymity, reflecting a culture ruled by secrecy and fear. Practitioners skirt the law by marrying only the first wife; subsequent wives are relegated to the status of “concubine,” with few legal rights. Whether male practitioners truly believe Smith’s teachings or are only “converted below the belt” — as one woman who fled the colony suggests — is impossible to tease out.
The family has become quite wealthy in Chihuahua. They own more than 12,000 acres worth of walnut and pecan trees that rise out of the desiccated landscape like an oasis. The trees are irrigated by water drawn from communal aquifers and rivers. This has sparked ongoing water wars among neighboring farmers.
The 1972 murder of Ervil LeBaron, a rival polygamist leader, made the LeBarons famous. The murder kicked off a 15-year killing spree that claimed 33 lives, as Ervil (known as “the Mormon Manson” in the press) enlisted some of his 13 wives and 54 children to kill his enemies — murders that were financed by drug trafficking, bank robberies and a vast, trans-border car theft ring.
The family made headlines again in 2009 when drug traffickers kidnapped the boy, a teenager from the colony, and demanded a ransom of a million dollars. The case caught the attention of Keith Raniere, leader of the Nxivm sex cult, who billed himself as “one of the top three problem solvers in the world” and flew to Mexico to advise the family. Raniere was struck by the “docility and submissiveness” of the LeBaron women, Denton writes, and chose 11 girls, ranging in age from 13 to 17, to bring back to his headquarters in upstate New York, ostensibly to work as Spanish teachers in a school he’d founded, but in reality, according to prosecutors, to groom them as sexual partners. Raniere was unable to solve the polygamists-versus-narcos problem, however, which came to a head in 2019 when gunmen opened fire on a caravan of three cars from LeBaron and a sister polygamist community, killing three women and six children.
As I read this book, I felt more angry. Denton is a fascinating historian of a polygamist culture, but she never fully explains why women chose to remain in a religion that treats them so poorly. But as someone who grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household and understands how self-eroding patriarchal religion can be to girls, I’ll take a stab at an answer. The stranglehold of a dogma embedded in a child’s mind from infancy can be loosened only by exposure to new ideas. But for the LeBaron women — hobbled by chronic pregnancy, economic dependency and lack of a formal education — the odds of escaping that stranglehold are very slim.
“The colony is a magnet for trouble,” one woman who fled long ago told Denton. “They have a good racket. Many of the women are not there by choice.”
Perhaps women should develop a belief system that values respect and equality for themselves and their sisters. Oh wait, we already have one: It’s called feminism. Denton’s book is a testament to what happens when male power, under the guise of religious conviction, goes unchecked.
Julia Scheeres is the author of “Jesus Land” and “A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown.” Her latest book, “Listen, World! How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman,” will be published in September.
THE COLONY: Faith and blood in a Promised Land, Sally Denton Liveright | Illustrated | 288 pp. | Liveright | $27.95
Source: NY Times
