Interfield - History and Religion

Arranged marriage, apocalyptic prophecy, and religious abuse are some of the most identifiable practices of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or FLDS. Though their infamous leadership has brought negative attention to this religious movement under their current prophet Warren Jeffs, the leadership of previous prophets established foundations for many of the practices associated with the FLDS today. The patriarchal nature of this religious community altered the role women played in the 1970s and 1980s and developed through the 1990s and into the 2000s in Short Creek, Arizona. While domesticity was their primary function, polygamous women under the three most recent prophets of the FLDS faced increased political arranged marriages, husband reassignment, dependency on the church, and familial estrangement during a leadership crisis with an underlying apocalyptic threat. The present thesis is about the effects of leadership crises, destruction doctrine, and family rearrangement on the reaction of women in religiously taxing circumstances over the course of four decades, three prophets, two schisms, and many fauxpocalypses. For this research, interviews, memoirs, religious sermons and testimonies, FLDS church texts, and legal documents, as well as relevant Mormon scripture, from men and women spanning many levels of socio-religious status, and from both faithful practitioners and ex-members were analyzed using textual analysis, gender theory, and methods of anthropology. The Fundamentalist society kept gender norms from the period in which Mormonism grew in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the Fundamentalist Mormon women of Short
Creek, particularly mothers, reacted to religious and cultural crisis through either excessive fervor or costly resistance. The separation of families, the threat of apocalyptic damnation, and demands for loyalty to the prophet caused women to prioritize their faith, virtue, and moral standing for family or salvation.