Technical Difficulties

Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Krakauer starts out with a question: how can two men, sane by all reasonable legal and medical standards, willfully, cold-bloodedly, and with malice aforethought murder their sister-in-law and eighteen-month-old niece and believe, sincerely, passionately, and with absolute conviction, that it was the will of God?

Much of the answer lies with the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints and its teaching on the subject of polygamy and women's necessary and ordained place (which, to be clear, is doing whatever the hell they're told to), but there's also a sub-theme here--which I picked up also in Into the Wild--which I'm not sure how to put into words. It's not the danger of masculinity so much as it is a concern about what happens when a certain kind of gender identity doesn't have a safe outlet. Into the Wild is about risk-taking. Chris McCandless had been taking crazy, unnecessary risks for years before he found the one that killed him, and Krakauer's remarks about his own mountain-climbing experience explain what called to him in Chris McCandless' story. (Also, in the prologue to Under the Banner of Heaven, where he says, "For some, the province of the extreme holds an allure that's irresistible" (xxiii).) Under the Banner of Heaven is about (in part) men who understand their masculine identity in a very clearly defined way (short version, paterfamilias), but are blocked from performing it by the changing gender and social roles of the world around them. Krakauer isn't using that to exculpate Dan and Ron Lafferty (far from it); he's just saying, here is this thing. Here is how the world looks to these men. Here is one source of their impregnable self-righteousness.





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