Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey

I recently watched a documentary called "Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey" on the events leading up to the arrest and imprisonment of Warren Jeffs, prophet of The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS). The term "keep sweet" was a favorite phrase of Warren's father Rulon Jeffs, while Rulon was the prophet - it essentially meant that no matter what happened, women were not to outwardly express anger, frustration, disappointments or disagreements but should always "keep sweet." The subtitle of Pray and Obey was from wording from the Jeffs' home (shown to the right) - emphasizing the importance of continuing always in prayer and strict obedience to the FLDS church.

I was shocked, appalled, and disgusted by the experiences retold by a few of the wives of Rulon and Warren Jeffs and I think Warren Jeffs very much deserves his life sentence in prison.  I was also encouraged by the bravery of some of these women who stood up for themselves and left the FLDS community, leaving everything they knew and possessed to forge a new life for themselves and their children. 

I am personally a product of polygamy. My third great grandfather was Marriner Wood Merrill - an LDS apostle, first president of the Logan temple president and an advocate, participant and officiator of post-manifesto polygamous marriages. Merrill married 8 women and fathered 46 children. He married his second wife, Cyrene Standley (pictured to the left) when she was 16 years old and they went on to have 8 children together, including my great, great grandmother, Healen Merrill.  I have not been able to find much that indicates whether or not my third great grandmother struggled with sharing her husband with seven other women. At the age of 65, she told one of her sons, "When I married your father I made a solemn covenant to obey and live and abide by his counsel. This I have done always and hope for a crown of righteousness as a reward. Your father is a righteous man and will be crowned as a king and I a queen by his side." From this I gather that her experiences with her husband were largely positive, or at least that was what she seemed to wish to convey to others.  But it's interesting to imagine what challenges she may have faced sharing her husband with seven other women. I have a hard enough time giving each of my four children enough attention. Such would be impossible with 46 children.

I thought "Keep Sweet" did a good job of painting much of the FLDS community as a whole in a positive light, particularly in the earlier days under Rulon Jeffs. With being significantly sheltered from the outside world, there seems to have been a strong sense of community among the FLDS, even much more so than is seen in the mainstream LDS communities, which itself I think is admirable in many ways. Many women worked together with their sister wives and others to build the best community they knew how. Without as many distractions from the modern world such as television, they gathered together and sang songs, played games, performed skits, and prayed and worshipped together.  

But lurking beneath the keep sweet appearances, there were very real struggles and evils as these women struggled to survive and thrive. There was naturally great amounts of jealousy among sister wives sharing their husband physically, sexually, emotionally, and otherwise. Men seemed to favor certain wives and by extension their children. Women were often treated as property, not able to choose who or when they would marry, but instead being given to men as a reward for the men's loyalty and close association with the prophet.  Women were expected to have sex with their husbands on demand and refusal to do so resulted in punishment. Rebecca Musser, who has since become a powerful advocate against the abuses of polygamy, emotionally described being forced by her father to marry the then 85-year old prophet Rulon Jeffs when she was only 19. She described the horror of having the elderly, grandpa-like and seemingly loving figure in her life force her to have sex with him for the next seven years when he died - in her words "if this is heaven, then give me hell because I don't want that heaven." The picture above is Rulon Jeffs with about 50 of his wives. Warren Jeffs went on to be significantly worse than his father, marrying and having sex with girls as young as 12, forcing women to perform group sex acts for him, and many other disturbing practices.

I grew up in the LDS church, from which the FLDS church and its practice of polygamy has its origins. According to the FLDS church,  President John Taylor, the third president of the LDS church, received a revelation from God in 1886 that polygamy was to continue forever.  According to the story, Taylor set John Woolley and others apart as apostles and gave them a special charge from God to continue polygamy regardless of what the official church position became on the topic (the LDS Church officially denounced polygamy in the 1890 and 1904 manifestos).  If my ancestors had chosen to follow this group, I may have been born into an FLDS family.  But they didn't and I wasn't. 

So I grew up in an era of the LDS church where polygamy was not practiced or condoned but was (and is) still an official canonized doctrine that I was taught would be practiced in eternity. As a teenage and young college student, I remember discussing with LDS friends the hypothetical that if God brought back polygamy could we follow it and the pretty universal answer was that 1) one marriage to one person would likely be challenge enough and 2) we didn't think we could bear to put our future wives through that struggle. Some expressed a sentiment that they might do it after much fasting and prayer. Brigham Young reportedly "desired the grave" when polygamy was revealed but he certainly got on board with the doctrine as he ended up with 56 children by 16 of his 55+ wives. Compared to the FLDS, I was never so restricted in my daily activities, exposure to the outside world, or who I could marry.  The LDS church when I was growing up was actually actively engaged with the media to show that they were a respected mainstream religion through public relations campaigns with the Olympics, interviews with talk show host such as Larry King, Meet the Mormons, and the "I'm a Mormon" campaign. I was a proud "Mormon" boy before using the term "Mormon" went out of style.

I'm grateful I did not grow up in the FLDS community, but it's terrifying and sobering to think that this very much could have been me. Like the LDS tradition, the FLDS rely heavily on subjective emotional religious experiences and testimony as a means to confirm the truthfulness of their prophets and revelations. If I were born into this community, I likely would have gained a strong, heartfelt and emotionally powerful "testimony" of the truthfulness of Rulon and Warren Jeff's prophetic calling just as I had a "testimony" of the truthfulness of the LDS church's claims.

If I had grown up in the FLDS church, I likely would not have known the full extent of the abuses taking place by leaders of the church. Would I have justified underaged marriages and pregnancies as God's will simply because I grew up with such behavior being considered "normal"?  Would I have had the courage to stand up to these men? If I recognized the abuses, would I have had the faith to leave my family, faith and community?