A town formerly under the control of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints and their leader Warren Jeffs has been under court supervision for several years, and is seemingly on its way to becoming a “normal” town again.
The FLDS is not the mainstream Mormon church, but a denounced offshoot that emphasized plural marriage to underage girls. Jeffs was the subject of the Jon Krakauer book Under the Banner of Heaven - Wikipedia, and in 2011 he was sentenced to life in prison for sexually assaulting two young girls (out of the many dozens he’d previously assaulted). These were just some of the towns under his control, and this is the story of how their residents learned to leave the cult and create a more mainstream life for themselves.
Most of the people in the article still had Jessop as their last name, which I believe was one of the leaders of the sect. It’s not clear whether they’re still polygamist, or what happened to the girls previously subjected to underage arranged marriages. Just a couple years ago, another man was sentenced for coerced sex acts with his ten underage wives (which were just half of his 20+ total wives).
Yeah, I really wonder about that. SO many questions. Who started all the new bars, wineries, religious facilities, etc.? Did outsiders suddenly move in to make in-roads on the former FLDS market? Did the local residents decide on their own to integrate into mainstream US society?
The towns functioned for 90 years largely as a theocracy, so they had to learn how to operate “a first-generation representative government,” Roger Carter, the court-appointed monitor, pointed out in his progress reports.
I can’t imagine how they even started that job. Did they have to hire cult deprogramming, anti-brainwashing experts? Or were the townspeople long ready for “liberation”…?
How does dating work now? Did everyone suddenly jump onto Hinge or whatever… did they have to teach their kids, “Marriages aren’t arranged for you anymore, you’re on your own”?
I would really love to watch a documentary on this… it’s the kind of thing that would fit right on https://petersantenello.com/ (YouTuber who goes to different US communities to interview them).
Looking at it on Google Maps, Hildale at least looks more aesthetically appealing than the one time I went through it on the way to canyoneering. I didn’t see the walled compounds so I can’t say if there are fewer of them than before, but I do remember seeing a lot of partly-finished buildings, with walls apparently of just fiberboard. Those are gone from a quick look. I was told that those were a tax scheme since buildings that hadn’t been “completed” yet would get charged less property tax.
I seem to recall from Krakauer’s book that for the FLDS/polygamy theocracy to work in those towns, a majority of young males needed to be exiled. As soon as that practice was stopped (along with underage brides) a more monogamous society could evolve within a generation.
In 2024, my wife and I stopped at Colorado City for gas and food on the way from Las Vegas to Antelope Canyon (followed by the Grand Canyon). We had some surprisingly tasty supermarket sushi. I noticed that the supermarket had a fairly extensive selection of Mormon books for sale at the front of the store, but I didn’t think it was surprising at the time.
