Under the Banner of Heaven

Andrew Garfield gives a killer performance as Officer Jeb Pyre as he dives deeper into the world of the Laffertys.

Another thing that makes the show amazing is how Jeb questions himself about what he was taught and what he is witnessing now. On the other hand, the world of men, as you would expect, is full of people who want to impose their own set of rules. While driving his car, he sees a little girl in the middle of the forest and quickly gets to the forest officer’s cabin. The second episode starts where the first one left off and the police have Robin Lafferty (Seth Numrich) in its custody now. So, we get to see two perspectives here: One story is being told by Allen ( Billy Howle), and the other one is being told by Robin. Robin and the other “male members” of the Lafferty family didn’t like Brenda ( Daisy Edgar-Jones) as she wanted to be something big in her life and the church believed that women should just be obedient wives. Based on the real-life killings of Brenda and Erica Lafferty, the series talks about how faith and religion can create dangerous men.

"Under the Banner of Heaven" explores the investigation into the murder of Brenda Wright Lafferty and her 15-month-old daughter Erica in 1984.

In 1985, Dan was sentenced to two life terms in prison which he is still serving, and Ron was convicted of first-degree murder for which he was given the death penalty. Per Krakauer, Dan went to Lafferty to tell him of Ron's so-called revelation and said that he and Ron intended to carry out the execution, Lafferty said he couldn't accept it as a revelation from God and claimed he'd defend his wife and child with his life. However, after getting pregnant she became a housewife upon Lafferty's suggestion.

Andrew Garfield stars as a conflicted detective in FX on Hulu's adaptation of Jon Krakauer's 2003 bestseller.

It’s slightly irksome that the show voices the bulk of its feminist critiques through the fathers of daughters, such as Pyre and Allen — the safest and most conservative bid for sympathy imaginable (though Brenda gets a few lines herself in flashbacks). But there’s something hard to shake about the series’ portrait of a tightknit community that acts exactly as designed: shielding its most visible members from consequences at the expense of their victims. Although the miniseries takes place in the same year that “Ghostbusters” and “Purple Rain” were released, the production offers few obvious signposts indicating the mid-1980s. In many respects, “Under the Banner of Heaven” is a deeply conventional (and heavily fictionalized) police procedural in which the investigator finds himself destabilized by a uniquely disturbing case. (“Language, please!” admonishes Pyre at one point.) More relevant to the case, Pyre knows how to navigate around the more anti-law-enforcement figures as an agent of the state — even when he’s out of his depth, as he and Taba draw closer to the kind of men armed and ready to defend their way of life. Garfield lets us in on his character’s sensitivity and existential injuries, but it’s largely Howle who provides the series’ emotional anchor. But Black may be assuming too much familiarity with these personages on the part of viewers, and the scenes detract — at least in the first five episodes screened for critics — from the main story line’s momentum. Unlike Krakauer, who was met with fierce backlash from the church for his book, series creator Dustin Lance Black was raised Mormon. (The Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Milk,” Black also penned a few episodes of HBO’s fundamentalist polygamy drama “Big Love.”) Black’s upbringing may explain why the TV adaptation stresses the differences between mainstream Mormonism and its fundamentalist offshoots. The dead woman, Brenda Lafferty (Daisy Edgar-Jones), was the kind of person who could expect to fit right in in her devout town. The Lafferty patriarch’s abuse of his sons is partly to blame, normalizing violence in the home. To set him on this journey, Pyre, reportedly a composite character, is rendered as more than a touch naive about the people around him, whose gravest sins and darkest impulses shouldn’t come as a surprise to a detective. The daughter of a bishop (the leader of a Mormon congregation), Brenda was a graduate of Brigham Young University, the church’s flagship educational institution, who didn’t see for herself a career past motherhood. She wasn’t local (she was from far-flung Idaho) and she aspired to join, however briefly, the male-dominated industry of TV news.

Dustin Lance Black's true-crime drama has nuance, but doesn't hit the suspenseful beats like genre-loving audiences have grown accustomed to.

In this sense, Under the Banner of Heaven doesn’t hit the suspenseful beats we’ve come to expect from crime drama, but it has nuance the genre often lacks. It’s rare for Mormonism to get such subtle treatment in popular culture, with Broadway juggernaut The Book of Mormon and TLC’s reality series Sister Wives offering more scurrilous takes on the religion. The Laffertys are an important family around Salt Lake City. In a helpful aside, Brenda, originally from Idaho, likens them to the sprawling Kennedy clan, which is part of Allen’s appeal. Mormonism isn’t simply a fact of these characters’ inner lives; it’s the series’ craggy landscape. Most of the officers immediately recognise his name, Allen Lafferty (Billy Howie), and from sunny flashbacks set in the years leading up to the double homicide, we quickly begin to understand why. Police interrogations look different in certain parts of Utah. We’ve seen TV cops ingratiate themselves with suspects before, but on Under the Banner of Heaven, faith is as important as the facts.

Andrew Garfield says his new Hulu drama, "Under the Banner of Heaven," tries to responsibly and truthfully explore what led to the 1984 murders of Brenda ...

"If the truth is offensive, I think some people may be offended. "For me, it was kind of a no-brainer because of the people involved, and the subject matter just interests me deeply. Likely not, but I think that there is something to be learned." "Cut to 10 years later, and I get a call from Dustin and from Ron and Brian. And I thought, 'Well, this is the perfect team to do it.'" Jeb isn't Garfield's first character to experience a crisis of faith. Like Pyre and Lafferty, Oscar winner Black was raised in the Mormon faith.

The 1984 murders of Brenda Lafferty and her 15-month-old daughter Erica by two of her husband's brothers shook their insular community—and put a spotlight ...

"And I felt impressed to wrestle her to the ground." (Still firmly entrenched in the belief that he was protecting his family in 1984, Ron told Salt Lake City Weekly in 2014, "True fairness was served by the act, immaterial of who carried it out. "She was quite a scrapbooker," he noted. In that revelation he...claimed that he was told that he had to eliminate some people. Dan was the one, though, who when they were more than a block away turned the car around and drove back to Allen's house. Instead, at some point Ron got it into his head that the 24th would be "'The Day,'" as Dan remembered it to Krakauer. "If he had told Brenda about Ron's revelation, she would have been out of there in a minute and she'd still be alive today," Betty said. Influenced by reading the 1842 pamphlet "The Peace Maker," it was Dan who first started to espouse the righteousness of polygamy, which the church outlawed in 1890, and practicing the most extreme, patriarchal version of their 150-year-old religion. And all of her sisters-in-law were going along with their spouses' new demands—except Brenda, who would argue theology with the brothers, much to Dan and Ron's outrage. Allen didn't want Brenda to work, and he told her to turn down an offer of a teaching position at BYU. It was different from a lot of crime scenes in a lot of ways." Passing their 15-month-old daughter Erica's room, he saw that the toddler and the blankets in her crib were also covered in red.

UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN on Hulu is a new crime-mystery series. It's a dark story about the power (and danger) of religious fanatics.

Rounding out the team of directors are Courtney Hunt ( Utopia) and David Mackenzie ( Hell or High Water) who each direct two episodes. Dustin Lance Black is a director on one of the episodes, while Isabel Sandoval and Thomas Schlamme also direct one episode each. UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN on Hulu is a new crime-mystery series. Dustin Lance Black is the creator of this new FX on Hulu series. Yes, Under the Banner of Heaven on Hulu is based on a true story. Still, this is the same group of people who took in Ted Bundy and thought he was a swell guy. Also, alongside Andrew Garfield in the lead role, we have his colleague, Detective Taba, portrayed by Gil Birmingham ( Wind River, Pieces of Her) who is not in the LDS Church. The main protagonist is Police Detective Pyre (Andrew Garfield) who is a devout member of the LDS as well. Here the focus is on love and trust with family and health at the core of everything. Think more The Handmaid’s Tale and less The Eyes of Tammy Faye (which also co-starred Andrew Garfield). This new FX on Hulu series opens with a brutal murder and this definitely sets the tone. This series is a very dark story about the power (and danger) of religious fanatics. Read our full Under the Banner of Heaven review here!

The brutal 1984 murder of Brenda Wright Lafferty and her baby daughter was about extremism, not religion, but in the close-knit Mormon community in Salt ...

Jon Krakauer's 2003 book Under The Banner Of Heaven is a shocking read, one that begins with the gruesome real-life murders of Brenda Lafferty and her ...

More than anything, UTBOH is a thoughtful and evocative display of reckoning with one’s faith. Despite part of the show feeling like a knowledge dump, UTBOH still stands out as one of the more sympathetic true-crime dramas. But the big difference for how it’s filtered on screen is the addition of fictional Detective Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield), a devout Mormon himself. After all, Jeb leads a pious and happy life with his spouse, Rebecca (Adelaide Clemens), and their two young girls, while also caring for his aging mother. Their initial prime suspect is Brenda’s husband, Allen (Billy Howle), who found his wife and child dead in their home in American Fork, Utah. Allen and Jeb scrutinize their perspectives on Mormonism through endless interrogations. (The phrase “blood atonement” gets mentioned a few times). UTBOH spans across time to examine the origins of these issues, and how many decades later, they crucially impacted the lives of Brenda (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her in-laws.

Gil Birmingham and Andrew Garfield in FX's 'Under the Banner of Heaven.' Michelle Faye/FX. CNN —. Two limited crime ...

Jamie Bell co-stars as the mysterious time-traveler, while Phillipa Soo ("Hamilton") is another potential victim. Nor does it help that the narrative flashes way back to the story of church founder Joseph Smith His situation is balanced by his grizzled partner (Gil Birmingham), an outsider more than willing to play bad cop if that is what's required.

The non-fiction book was published in 2003 and featured interviews with Dan Lafferty and Brenda Wright Lafferty's family, as well as survivors of polygamy. The ...

That said, FX’s adaptation of Under the Banner of Heaven fudges with the truth a little bit. Under the Banner of Heaven is inspired by Jon Krakauer’s book of the same name. But is Under the Banner of Heaven based on a true story?

The nonfiction book explores Joseph Smith founding the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, with its revelations of polygamy, justifications of violence ...

DUSTIN LANCE BLACK: I was sitting with leadership at the Mormon church when I got the rights to the book and I let them know this was something I was going to do. Some of the criticism I got from my book, and I’m sure we’ll get for the series, is that it wasn’t the church’s violent past that caused the Laffertys. It was misogyny and the patriarchy, and all of that’s true. We could do the crime, but we couldn’t really do the characters, and we could do the crime and a sense of the world, but we couldn’t allow you to understand. I talked to Lance about his history in the Mormon church and how he applied that to “Big Love” and how he would apply it to this. JON KRAKAUER: I know for a fact, from emails that have been leaked to me, that the church is really concerned about this series and they don’t know what they’re going to do about it. I was just riveted and fascinated, and felt there were secrets in there for us to know as human beings that were vital in order for us to expand our consciousness about how men can get to the place of doing such heinous, evil acts with the certainty that it’s in the name of goodness, righteousness, and God, and love. That was the trick of the book. For the first time, so much of my own history, my ancestry, and the answers to why things were the way they were when they didn’t seem to fulfill the basic tenets of Mormonism — meaning they didn’t seem to make the family stronger — now I started to understand why and where that patriarchal structure came from. I am the prophet.” And he was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. But when violence visited our home, the church was not there for my mother and was not there for me. For Dustin Lance Black, the Oscar-winning writer of “Milk” and a lapsed Mormon, bringing this story to the screen required more than a decade of work and a lot of false starts. Having grown up with Mormons, I knew a brilliant physicist and some other brilliant Mormon scientists and I couldn’t understand how they could reconcile quantum theory and modern science with the fact that Mormons believe the Old Testament and that the Earth was 6,000 years old and created in six days.

Why did Ron and Dan Lafferty kill Brenda Wright Lafferty? Ron Lafferty claimed that he had received a divine revelation from God to kill Brenda Wright Lafferty ...

Brenda reportedly stopped Allen from joining the School of the Prophets, which Dan and Ron allegedly believed was her attempt to split up the family. During the trial it was revealed that Ron had killed Brenda while Dan murdered Erica. But in a 2004 interview, Dan continued to take credit for killing the mother and daughter without remorse. He was one of the longest-serving condemned inmates in the country, having sat on death row for 34 years. (The School of the Prophets has been referred to as a “polygamist cult” by the Associated Press.) He told Deseret News that he committed the crime “the way they did it in the scriptures” and the violent acts “never haunted me, it’s never bothered me. On the night of July 24, 1984, 24-year-old Brenda Wright Lafferty was found dead by her husband on the floor of their suburban Utah home. Ron was sentenced to death in 1985 for killing Brenda and devising the murder plot. She was also a talented singer and actress who majored in broadcast journalism at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. In the early 1980s, Lafferty married Allen Lafferty, the youngest son of a prominent Utah Mormon family known for their strong values. Weeks later, Ron and Dan were arrested in a casino buffet line in Reno, Nevada. Over the course of seven episodes, he wanted to explore “just how patriarchal the church had been, and in many ways still was,” he told Vanity Fair before the show’s premiere. “And how such an absolute patriarchal structure threatens the safety of many women.” Specifically, in those fundamentalist sects that continue to embrace polygamy, the custom of having more than one wife or husband at the same time, despite it being outlawed by the LDS Church in 1890. It soon becomes clear that the rise of fundamentalism in Mormonism, which Krakauer called “the quintessential American religion,” is more dangerous than anyone imagined.

Despite the strange mysticism and secrecy of the Mormon Church, Under the Banner of Heaven is a straightforward murder mystery, without the expected supernatural elements of, say, season one of True Detective. It doesn't need additional bells and whistles ...

Perhaps the scariest scene that doesn’t involve actually killing anyone is when he tries to talk his long-suffering wife (Chloe Pirrie) into polygamy with all the charm and smarm of a vacuum cleaner salesman, before quickly flying into a rage when she gives the slightest of pushbacks. However, he points the finger both at the Mormon Church, and his massive family, though he initially stops short at specifically accusing anyone, instead weaving a story of the events leading up to Brenda’s murder into the baffling, sinister history of the church, and its tenets of protecting faith and family at all costs, even if shedding blood is required. In contrast, there’s Detective Jeb, gentle as a lamb, and devoted to his wife Becca (Adelaide Clemens), two young daughters, and dementia-stricken mother in a way that the Laffertys would view as an affront to their shared religion. Even if you’re read the book and know how things turned out for everyone involved, it’s still a gripping, hold-your-breath watch. Based on Jon Krakauer’s 2003 book, the miniseries opens with the gruesome murder of Brenda Lafferty ( Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her 15 month-old daughter Erica, stabbed to death in their home. Chances are that if you know any Mormons at all, they’re far more likely to be ex-Mormons. Despite claims that the Mormon Church is one of the fastest growing religions in the United States (source: the Mormon Church), in reality, like most organized religions in America, membership has been on a steady decline for the past decade.

We hone in on Andrew Garfield's Detective Jeb Pyre, a faithful Latter-Day Saint and all-American family man who's woefully unprepared for the double murder he's ...

Just when I thought I’d gotten to a healthy distance from (and acceptance of) my former religion, TV decides to have its own mini “Mormon moment.” I just finished recapping Tokyo Vice, a show in which my favorite character turned out to be a former Mormon, and I happened to catch up on the latest season of Pamela Adlon’s Better Things, where the great Angela Kinsey guest-starred as, like, a lapsed Mormon from Utah with a son named Brigham (LOL). And now FX is running Under the Banner of Heaven. So when the opportunity came up to recap this show, I wasn’t about to question it; time is a flat circle and all that. His previous experience playing a man of faith beset with overwhelming doubt in Martin Scorsese’s Silence is sure to come in handy in this joint. But setting aside the fact that, from what I’ve seen so far, this show is pretty darn accurate in its portrayal of the larger Mormon world, I’m much more interested in tracking the underlying truths about Mormonism (and America, for that matter) that emerge from the series at face value. This piques their suspicions of Allen, who still swears that men with beards infiltrated and corrupted his family and every second they spend focused on him is a second another man of God is inspired to shed more blood. That night they get a call from a hotel manager with eyes on a suspicious man with a beard, matching the APB description he heard on his police scanner. She also observes older brother Ron (Sam Worthington) being passed up in favor of his younger brother Dan (Wyatt Russell) to take on the family chiropractic business and household while his parents go away on a senior-couple mission for the church. “With their love,” Allen says, “God would share hidden truths.” That’s the church he misses, and what stands in its place is a faith that breeds dangerous men, as he’ll say later. Now she’s in Utah meeting her boyfriend’s all-star LDS family, which is bussin’ with creepy-ass brothers and an insane dad who walked right out of the 18th century to stand at the head of this Rockwellian nightmare of a dinner table. And even though, as Allen relays, everyone in his family was looking for fault in Brenda, she comes out on the other end seemingly undeterred from making a place for herself in the family. Anyone who knows he’s a Lafferty is aghast, seeing how the Laffertys are a prominent Mormon family in the valley (“highly regarded”). There’s some version of a big, multigenerational, highly regarded Mormon family in every ward in Utah (“ward” is the Mormon word for a local congregation), often filling out a chunk of the “prestige” church positions and running a family business together. But they switch positions when it’s revealed that Allen has fallen from the faith (Pyre catches him without Mormon temple garments when he’s changing out of his bloody clothes). Pyre gets testy, equating what he perceives as a loss of faith with a loss of morality (something I wish I could say I’d never done as a Latter-Day Saint), bursts into the interrogation room, and starts quoting LDS scripture at Allen and throwing cuffs on him. From here, we flash back to Brenda’s idyllic pre-Allen life in Idaho with her family, led by a bishop father who keeps the faith while supporting his daughters in all of their life’s pursuits.

Andrew Garfield finds fresh empathy in the FX on Hulu series's tired true-crime patterns.

All the energy and individuality of Pyre’s characterization are absent from the depiction of figures like Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. They are men with hats and collars, gesticulating angrily or falling to their knees in prayer. Garfield’s Pyre — clean-cut, family-focused, a devout Mormon who believes in American government and the rule of law — is a creation for TV and a one-man foil for the whole dark weight of fundamentalist Mormonism. He is at the center of the story and often acts as its implicit narrator. There’s a perverse relief in insularity — as long as you can assure your own safety on the other side of the wall. In practice, I suspect much of its audience will watch for opposite reasons: the weird comfort of the dark murder show and the particular satisfaction of witnessing an unusually heinous crime in a remote, long-ago place and time. Under the Banner of Heaven, the series adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s lauded 2003 nonfiction book premiering on FX on Hulu today, is primed to fit into well-worn grooves in your TV brain. In spite of its overfamiliar rhythms and fancy murder-show aesthetics, there are elements of Under the Banner that achieve something distinct and idiosyncratic.

Andrew Garfield and Daisy Edgar-Jones shine in a mixed adaptation of Jon Krakauer's 2003 book on a double murder by Mormon fundamentalists.

With his baby face and mostly smooth American accent, Garfield is more than convincing as a buttoned-up church guy fraying under the weight of cognitive dissonance – the gap between what he believes (that man is the authority of the household, that the church is the ultimate authority) and what he knows (that his wife is his equal, that Brenda and Erica deserve justice). Edgar-Jones, too, captures this – some form of unbreakable spirit – in her heartbreaking portrayal of Brenda, a faithful Mormon and nascent feminist. (Warning: if you, like me, find dog suffering/death to be unbearable, the second episode will be tough.) I don’t know if you can say it’s something inherently rotten about the LDS church, as the show sometimes seems to argue; what’s clear is that the church – an institution that secretly amassed a $100bn war chest – is more protective of its reputation than its people, like many other large institutions. (Krakauer had no official role on the TV series.) Black, who was raised Mormon, casts a similarly harsh and probing light on the LDS church, both in the specifics to this case (an unwillingness to help Pyre’s investigation – the Laffertys, we’re told, were “Utah Kennedys”) and the conservative faith’s general subjugation of women. Whatever support the Mormon historical record lent to Krakauer’s analysis in the book doesn’t translate here; the 19th century scenes – stark, hokey, mostly sans historical context – resemble budget History Channel re-enactments and do almost nothing to enhance the later stories. The seven-part limited series, created by Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (Milk), follows the investigation into who slashed the throats of 24-year-old Brenda Lafferty (Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her 15-month-old daughter in July 1984. From the moment in the first scene when a phone call takes detective Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield) away from his two young daughters, there’s a sense that Something Bad is coming, that each step forward will sink deeper into darkness.

In FX's 'Under the Banner of Heaven', available only on Hulu beginning April 28, actor Andrew Garfield plays Detective Jeb Pyre in the original limited ...

“I don't think it's exclusive just to that particular organization,” Birmingham said. So the fact that we're looking at a religion that was founded on those kind of principles, it's tricky; I don't know where God is in any of that particularly.” “Yeah, that was the balance to strike for sure in terms of playing the character; that's the struggle,” Garfield told me.

With a second Lafferty brother now in custody, Detective Pyre asks Robin why he fled from the officers leading up to his arrest: “Well, from 1795 on, the ...

As Robin tells it, the Patriots for Freedom were just helping them navigate their “unjust tax burdens by filing lawsuits to relieve all citizens of unconstitutional tax laws,” not to mention the burdens of “Jimmy Carter, socialism, and haughty women who don’t know their place.” You know, all the godless stuff. As Brenda will be told in so many words time and again, a woman’s “rightful place” isn’t in her “worldly ambitions.” The more Brenda gets involved with the family, the more Allen wants to get her away. She reminds me of so many of the women I grew up with — strong, intelligent, with chutzpah to spare, ready to take on the world and make a name for themselves in a big way, but also loving their faith so much it’s hard to see the fences it has placed around their heart’s desires (to be fair, that last part would also accurately describe my younger self). “My brothers and I were building something modern and holy but worried that others may not understand.” Well, the IRS certainly doesn’t understand, and when it comes a-knockin’, Dan sees it as a test from God and a sign to build a newer, better practice. Taba is checking with Forest Services for any sightings of three bearded men in the woods. Since they are doing these flashbacks, I hope they go all the way with it down the road. Back to this mystery bearded-man group (I love that “dude with a beard” is enough of a profile to raise suspicion in 1980s Utah). With Robin still in custody, Pyre asks him if he has ever attended a group focused on tax issues. “What if it was his father who told him that I was broken enough to say yes to a never-married 27-year-old Mormon who smoked and drank and fancied my sister?” With no option but to stay in a lane that was never hers and defer to the authority of her husband, Matilda is overwhelmed with a nagging sense of inferiority, and Brenda is probably the only person in her life who has told her that she’s closer to God than anyone else around her. Since their marriage, Dan has shaped up his act, and now he’s head of the Lafferty household. From about the mid-20th century onward, the mainstream LDS Church has succeeded and grown by assimilating into mainstream American culture, but it definitely wasn’t always like that. All the while providing context for how modern Mormonism came to its beliefs.

A review of the new true crime series Under the Banner of Heaven, now streaming on FX on Hulu.

Her story, told by Allen in jail, has a more welcome type of radicalism: she went to Brigham Young University with hopes of becoming a TV journalist, she outsmarted creepy professors who then told her only men could read the news, she became a voice of vital reason while the Lafferty men were starting to lose their minds to the gods in their head. Using its nuanced emphasis on faith, “Under the Banner of Heaven” gradually depicts in extensive flashback how their ways became so monstrous. It’s a personal case, with the show’s unique stakes being that of his belief in an institution he seems to have never questioned. He plays one of the most gentle, wholesome cops to have been in a true crime story—perhaps too soft, why is he in this business? Allen becomes one of many messengers who clues us into the progressively sinister ways of the Laffertys, which started with espousing rebellious anti-government ideals to later preaching about polygamy and embracing fundamentalism. It’s a calm, outdoor lunch, and the pleasant setting contrasts with how uncomfortable it becomes: the harmonious nature of the Laffertys turns disquieting, and that's before one brother tells Brenda’s future husband Allen to “mind [his] property.”

Daisy Edgar-Jones as Brenda Lafferty in the FX streaming series "Under the Banner of Heaven." The portrayal of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ...

I really would like our own community to get away from the sort of faith politics of ‘does the show prove the church is good or bad or true or false?’ This is a Mormon world that the show creators created. I have a lot of Mormon fundamentalists that helped on my research on this show, and they are having these brave, hard conversations in their community, and I hope that can happen in the mainstream church. It's kind of embarrassing and humiliating to realize that our defensiveness of this kind of show is playing into the exact critique of the show, the exact critique that people have of Mormonism. People don't trust Mormons because we're often not the first to address these things. I think you need some familiarity with the church and the culture to kind of get what's going on. But working now in this role on the show, I realize the difficulties in translating that sort of accuracy. “I never felt growing up in the church like I was any less than anyone else, and Brenda sort of feels that,” she said.

Few considered Black's goal and the reality that Banner didn't only seek to portray the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the largest religion under the “Mormon” umbrella. Under the Banner of Heaven is the true-crime bestseller about Ron and Dan ...

Today, fundamentalist Mormonism encapsulates the experience of many men—and it is men—who claim divine revelation as the impetus to start their own group. It also reflects the reality that sometimes Mormonism can lend doctrinal support to men who commit horrific crimes, like Bryan David Mitchell, Arvin Shreeve, Warren Jeffs, Ervil LeBaron, and the Lafferty brothers—but certainly not always, especially given that each either left the LDS Church or was excommunicated for their beliefs. In later accounts, one of the men present during the revelation claimed that John Taylor ordained six men who were tasked with ensuring polygamy’s survival. In addition to the AUB and FLDS, people might be familiar with other groups from headlines and documentaries, including the Kingston group, LeBaron group, and Centennial park, to name a few. The men were raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a religion that most are familiar with to some degree. Mormonism encapsulates the over 400 religions that trace themselves to Joseph Smith, as well as the individual families whose beliefs and practices differ from “traditional” experiences with the faith. Today, most Mormon fundamentalists trace their history to one of these men. Few considered Black’s goal and the reality that Banner didn’t only seek to portray the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the largest religion under the “Mormon” umbrella. However, in the 1970s, the men joined a small group of believers who understood themselves to be the most authentic remnant of the religion founded by Joseph Smith in 1830. It’s also indicative of the growing reality that the term “Mormon” is increasingly separate from a single institutional identity. In a public Facebook post, a historical consultant for the show, Troy Williams of Equality Utah, spoke of his experience investigating the fundamentalist Apostolic United Brethren after his LDS mission. At the Salt Lake City premiere of Under the Banner of Heaven, writer, director, and producer, Dustin Lance Black explained that the series sought to tell a broader story of Mormonism, including Mormon experiences foreign to most viewers.

It's a fictionalized account of the investigation into the 1984 murders of Brenda Wright Lafferty and her 15-month old daughter, Erica. And it's an absolute ...

One of the mob members says there is a witness to Joseph’s “crimes and whoredoms committed over and again with an unmarried woman.” The mob spokesman threatens to cut out Joseph’s tongue or castrate him, and tells him to leave Ohio with his followers. “I could not see how the best for my little girl was being caught up in a church that would force her to make covenants to obey all men for the rest of her life.” She said she prayed, and was told by the “holy spirit” to obey her husband. “So he got us all to stand in a circle, then he called the dog into the center. “I can’t ever be certain of anything again.” But he was certain that church membership was not the best thing for his daughter. Allen says he only saw the men with “old Mormon beards” once, about a year earlier. “And the Laffertys — they’re kind of like Utah Kennedys.” That’s a crazy exaggeration that could only be justified if viewers are supposed to believe that Pyre’s perceptions were warped by his sheltered life in small-town Utah. He tells Pyre, “If you feel certain” that the LDS Church is true “you don’t know a thing” about it. BACK TO THE FLASHBACK, the Lafferty family — and Brenda — gather to clear the neighbor’s field. “LDS women are taught to be obedient,” he says, “To serve. (The line is realistic for then — and now). “I’ll go to a big city with values — Salt Lake City.” To attend BYU. She’s under the impression that BYU is in Salt Lake City. Which is weird. Pyre takes the lead in the interview with Allen, “Mormon to Mormon.” Allen says he didn’t kill his wife and daughter, adding that he’s worried there’s “someone out there hunting my family.

The new FX series starring Andrew Garfield suggests there is a thin line between believer and zealot; faith and madness; and, most provocatively, ...

Under the Banner of Heaven is an outside intervention, though it’s ultimately a story about what festers within. For its journey to the screen, Under the Banner of Heaven gives that congregant a face and a name: Detective Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield), the devout Latter-day Saint assigned to investigate the shocking, bloody murder of young housewife Brenda Wright Lafferty (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her 15-month-old daughter. Under the Banner of Heaven can’t simply lay this all out for us. Was it when Dan (Wyatt Russell), the second-oldest son, buckled under the pressure of being left in charge, turning to radicalism for guidance? The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is an enduring object of fascination in popular culture. They’re also the subtext of the seven-episode adaptation that premiered this Thursday on FX, written by Milk scribe Dustin Lance Black and initially directed by Hell or High Water’s David Mackenzie. If the premise of Big Love was that even religious extremists could lead surprisingly normal lives, Under the Banner of Heaven inverts it: Even the most by-the-book congregant, the show argues, can have ties to wildly unorthodox beliefs—whether they’re conscious of those ties or not.

Spoiler alert: the culprits are Brenda's brothers-in-law, Ron (Sam Worthington, “Avatar”) and Dan Lafferty (Wyatt Russell), who murdered her for “God told me to ...

As Jeb and Bill interrogate Brenda’s widower, Allen (Billy Howle), Brenda’s story unfolds in flashbacks that reveal how, as the ambitious girl meets Allen’s family, her brothers-in-law progress from friendliness to hostility. “Under the Banner of Heaven” could easily be a chaotic mess. The Laffertys, as the show explains, were big fish in this small pond, like a Utah version of the Kennedys.