Doubleday, 2003

Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” was a narrative tour de force chronicling the disastrous 1996 Everest expeditions, and should be considered a classic of modern journalism. Measured against this awesome standard, “Under the Banner of Heaven” is a failure. It is a lucid and sometimes compulsively readable failure, but it lacks the narrative drive and cohesive perspective of “Into Thin Air.”

Loosely structured around the killing of Allen Lafferty’s wife and daughter by his brothers Ron and Dan, Krakauer takes his readers on a tour of mainstream Mormonism and its fundamentalist offspring, which frequently promote polygamy and racism. The killing is appropriately lurid and horrifying, and though some of the historical context explains a constellation of details around the murders, the book ultimately fails to explain the murders themselves.

Much of the blame lies with what Krakauer terms his “theological frame of reference.” In an author’s note following the text, Krakauer describes his almost radical agnosticism:

“In the absence of conviction, I’ve come to terms with the fact that uncertainty is an inescapable corollary of life. An abundance of mystery is simply part of the bargain—which doesn’t strike me as something to lament. Accepting the essential inscrutability of existence, in any case, is surely preferable to its opposite: capitulating to the tyranny of intransigent belief.” (p. 339)

Although in most situations the inescapable uncertainty of life may be preferable to uncompromising belief, this is not true of journalism. “Into Thin Air” succeeded largely because Krakauer believes that he knows what happened, and why: He was there; He knows. “Under the Banner of Heaven” is so suffused with doubt that the reader knows what happened, but not why.

Ron and Dan Lafferty were led to commit the murders by what they believed to be divine revelations. Krakauer only partially describes the process that produced these revelations, however, and his agnosticism never permits him to ask what he would do, were he to receive a divine revelation ordaining the death of someone else. What would the proper reaction be? Krakauer does, eventually, begin to ask hard questions:

“…if Ron Lafferty were deemed mentally ill because he obeyed the voice of his God, isn’t everyone who believes in God and seeks guidance through prayer mentally ill as well? In a democratic republic that aspires to protect religious freedom, who should have the right to declare that one person’s irrational beliefs are legitimate and commendable, while another person’s are crazy? How can a society actively promote religious faith on one hand and condemn a man for zealously adhering to his faith on the other?” (p. 294)

Unfortunately, rather than attempt to answer these (rather sophomorically phrased) questions, he engages in what will likely be read as political potshots, attacking Attorney General John Ashcroft for his religious practices. Not only does this fail to grapple with the questions he raises, but it seems both smug and likely to alienate a large number of potential readers. (It will also reduce the book’s relevance for future generations of readers; “Into Thin Air” is timeless.) Worse, Krakauer never returns to these crucial issues except in a similarly airy and hypothetical manner. His agnosticism has crippled his ability to interpret the situation for the reader.

The scant threads that connect the bloody and frightening murders of Brenda and Erica Lafferty to the larger questions of Mormon history are vague at best: One is the notion of a religion that encourages its members to seek divine guidance through direct communication with God; another seems to be the idea that Mormonism has had a particularly violent history. Although Krakauer spends quite a bit of time describing particular violent incidents in Mormon history, he does not really demonstrate that Mormon history is uniquely or even particularly violent, only that its history is more recent and more well-documented than that of many other religions.