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New and Alternative Religions
Saints Under Siege: The Texas State Raid on the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints
In April 2008, state police and child protection authorities raided Yearning for Zion Ranch near Eldorado, Texas, a community of 800 members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints (FLDS), a polygamist branch of the Mormons. State officials claimed that the raid, which was triggered by anonymous phone calls from an underage girl to a domestic violence hotline, was based on evidence of widespread child sexual abuse. In a high-risk paramilitary operation, 439 children were removed from the custody of their parents and held until the Third Court of Appeals found that the state had overreached. Not only did the state fail to corroborate the authenticity of the hoax calls, but evidence reveals that Texas officials had targeted the FLDS from the outset, planning and preparing for a confrontation.Saints under Siege provides a thorough, theoretically grounded critical examination of the Texas state raid on the FLDS while situating this event in a broader sociological context. The volume considers the raid as an exemplar case of a larger pattern of state actions against minority religions, offering comparative analyses to other government raids both historically and across cultures. In its look beyond the Texas raid, it provides compelling evidence of social intolerance and state repression of unpopular minority faiths in general, and the FLDS in particular.
284 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2011
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June 7, 2020
Well, it's not every day that you get to read a book that cites your own writing multiple times, but since I spent a year covering the Texas raid on the FLDS for the San Angelo Standard-Times, I wasn't too surprised to see my name mentioned a few times in Saints Under Siege, a scholarly work that anthologizes articles about the 2008 YFZ Ranch raid from a number of different disciplines.
Unfortunately – let's get this out of the way now – the reference is none too complimentary, mainly because they cited an article I wrote about the FLDS when I was less than a year out of college. And I'll be honest, it's a sensationalistic article that relies too heavily on ex-FLDS members and self-described "cult experts" who had their own reasons for juicing local fear of the group as it was building its gleaming temple in the West Texas scrubland. On top of that, I got some easily checked facts obviously wrong – nothing related directly to the FLDS itself, but wrong is wrong, and it's embarrassing to have an article of mine called out for it, even if the call-out wasn't strictly necessary and reads a little bit like a cheap shot (I'll throw in one of my own and point out this book lists three different totals for the number of children removed during the raid – the final official count was a whopping 436, actually lower than initially estimated – and includes several obvious grammatical errors).
If my early-career article was too sensationalistic and not sufficiently fact-checked (guilty on both counts), thus creating an inaccurately negative portrayal of the FLDS, this book errs in the other direction: It defends the FLDS and condemns the state of Texas so thoroughly, a casual reader might miss entirely the fact that the raid turned up enough evidence to convict ten men – including FLDS leader Warren Jeffs and YFZ Ranch head Merrill Jessop – of sexually assaulting children.
In fact, several times authors of this anthology erroneously claim the raid turned up no direct evidence that children had been abused at the ranch, perhaps because they didn't read my other, more accurate articles describing that evidence, including photos of Jeffs himself locked in an open-mouth kiss with a clearly underage girl, captioned as being taken on their wedding day.
Saints Under Siege contains some interesting comparisons between the 2008 YFZ Ranch raid and other state actions against isolated fundamentalist sects, including the notorious Short Creek raid of the FLDS in 1953 and the disastrous federal raid on the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. These comparisons are informative and instructive, but the one-sided approach to the YFZ Ranch raid hobbles the overall usefulness of the comparisons. Over and over, the authors point out that these other raids were based on misrepresentations of the religious groups, showing how ex-members and so-called cult experts inflated or fabricated allegations of sexual abuse, especially. The authors consider this a similarity to the 2008 raid, but rarely ever mention, except a handful of times in passing, that in fact the YFZ raid led to actual convictions for sexual assault – which significantly undermines the thesis of most of the chapters.
That said, they do make the case persuasively that authorities mishandled the YFZ raid, first by not investigating more thoroughly the initial allegations, which turned out to be a hoax; then by removing all of the children at once instead of only removing those most in danger of abuse (teenage girls); then by arguing the FLDS' religious beliefs formed a single household placing all children at risk, with all sorts of troubling implications for religious freedom. And two or three times, they do add that perhaps investigators could have gotten the evidence they needed to find wrongdoing in a less intrusive way (though without detailing exactly what that might have entailed given the group’s notorious reclusivity) – but for the most part, the failure of Saints Under Siege's editors to acknowledge that, the hoax allegations notwithstanding, the YFZ Ranch raid did in fact uncover a pattern of abuse that would not otherwise have been exposed, disrupted or punished undercuts the credibility of the rest of their arguments.
In the end, Saints Under Siege's problem is not necessarily that they don't cite me enough – I wasn't the only reporter to detail the evidence of abuse found at the YFZ Ranch, nor was I the only one to detail ways in which the state's investigation had fallen short, much as I would like my only contribution to the book to not be one of the worst articles I ever wrote – but that they only bothered to focus on the San Angelo newspaper's coverage from three years before the raid, and so little on its coverage from the year immediately afterward, is a sign of the book's deeper problem: The authors and editors knew what they wanted to say, and found the evidence to support it while dismissing anything that might complicate the narrative.
In many ways, ironically enough, the failings of this book mirror the failures of the Texas authorities who believed the worst about the FLDS without taking the time to fully investigate the allegations that confirmed their prior beliefs.
Unfortunately – let's get this out of the way now – the reference is none too complimentary, mainly because they cited an article I wrote about the FLDS when I was less than a year out of college. And I'll be honest, it's a sensationalistic article that relies too heavily on ex-FLDS members and self-described "cult experts" who had their own reasons for juicing local fear of the group as it was building its gleaming temple in the West Texas scrubland. On top of that, I got some easily checked facts obviously wrong – nothing related directly to the FLDS itself, but wrong is wrong, and it's embarrassing to have an article of mine called out for it, even if the call-out wasn't strictly necessary and reads a little bit like a cheap shot (I'll throw in one of my own and point out this book lists three different totals for the number of children removed during the raid – the final official count was a whopping 436, actually lower than initially estimated – and includes several obvious grammatical errors).
If my early-career article was too sensationalistic and not sufficiently fact-checked (guilty on both counts), thus creating an inaccurately negative portrayal of the FLDS, this book errs in the other direction: It defends the FLDS and condemns the state of Texas so thoroughly, a casual reader might miss entirely the fact that the raid turned up enough evidence to convict ten men – including FLDS leader Warren Jeffs and YFZ Ranch head Merrill Jessop – of sexually assaulting children.
In fact, several times authors of this anthology erroneously claim the raid turned up no direct evidence that children had been abused at the ranch, perhaps because they didn't read my other, more accurate articles describing that evidence, including photos of Jeffs himself locked in an open-mouth kiss with a clearly underage girl, captioned as being taken on their wedding day.
Saints Under Siege contains some interesting comparisons between the 2008 YFZ Ranch raid and other state actions against isolated fundamentalist sects, including the notorious Short Creek raid of the FLDS in 1953 and the disastrous federal raid on the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. These comparisons are informative and instructive, but the one-sided approach to the YFZ Ranch raid hobbles the overall usefulness of the comparisons. Over and over, the authors point out that these other raids were based on misrepresentations of the religious groups, showing how ex-members and so-called cult experts inflated or fabricated allegations of sexual abuse, especially. The authors consider this a similarity to the 2008 raid, but rarely ever mention, except a handful of times in passing, that in fact the YFZ raid led to actual convictions for sexual assault – which significantly undermines the thesis of most of the chapters.
That said, they do make the case persuasively that authorities mishandled the YFZ raid, first by not investigating more thoroughly the initial allegations, which turned out to be a hoax; then by removing all of the children at once instead of only removing those most in danger of abuse (teenage girls); then by arguing the FLDS' religious beliefs formed a single household placing all children at risk, with all sorts of troubling implications for religious freedom. And two or three times, they do add that perhaps investigators could have gotten the evidence they needed to find wrongdoing in a less intrusive way (though without detailing exactly what that might have entailed given the group’s notorious reclusivity) – but for the most part, the failure of Saints Under Siege's editors to acknowledge that, the hoax allegations notwithstanding, the YFZ Ranch raid did in fact uncover a pattern of abuse that would not otherwise have been exposed, disrupted or punished undercuts the credibility of the rest of their arguments.
In the end, Saints Under Siege's problem is not necessarily that they don't cite me enough – I wasn't the only reporter to detail the evidence of abuse found at the YFZ Ranch, nor was I the only one to detail ways in which the state's investigation had fallen short, much as I would like my only contribution to the book to not be one of the worst articles I ever wrote – but that they only bothered to focus on the San Angelo newspaper's coverage from three years before the raid, and so little on its coverage from the year immediately afterward, is a sign of the book's deeper problem: The authors and editors knew what they wanted to say, and found the evidence to support it while dismissing anything that might complicate the narrative.
In many ways, ironically enough, the failings of this book mirror the failures of the Texas authorities who believed the worst about the FLDS without taking the time to fully investigate the allegations that confirmed their prior beliefs.
September 14, 2016
I mostly skimmed through this book and what I saw turned me off from wanting to read it cover to cover. I have to say, I do appreciate what looks like an intensive amount of research that went into the creation of this book, but just from reading the summary on the back cover, I started to get a vibe that this book intended to make the FLDS come out of it looking very innocent. The first thing that I noticed that was off was the fact that Merril Jessop, one of the major players at the YFZ Ranch, isn't even mentioned in this book. His ex-wife Carolyn is, and I found it very odd that they would mention her, but not bother to mention him as a foil to her. Maybe they decided not to include Merril since mentioning him would've required mentioning how he gave several of his underage daughters and granddaughters away in marriage to Rulon and Warren Jeffs and other older men in the community, some when they were as young as 12.
Considering how many of Warren Jeffs' priesthood records are easily available on the internet, I wonder why the authors didn't mention how often Warren talked about "training up" young girls for marriage, how he blatantly wrote about marrying and marrying off preteens and teenagers, how girls were trafficked to and from Canada for underage marriages. No mention that Warren recorded himself raping a 12 year old girl.
The book was informative, true, but it also seems to grant innocent toward the FLDS and their actions because the raid was triggered by a false phone call. Yes, the raid could've and probably should've been handled differently, but that doesn't change the fact that abuses were going on at the YFZ and in Short Creek, and when authorities uncovered those abuses, they had a legal responsibility to act on them. I appreciate that the authors did their research, but anyone looking for the full story should browse sites like TexasFLDS and PoliticsRUsPrinciple where you can find actual court documents and FLDS records that show just how deep the abuses go.
Considering how many of Warren Jeffs' priesthood records are easily available on the internet, I wonder why the authors didn't mention how often Warren talked about "training up" young girls for marriage, how he blatantly wrote about marrying and marrying off preteens and teenagers, how girls were trafficked to and from Canada for underage marriages. No mention that Warren recorded himself raping a 12 year old girl.
The book was informative, true, but it also seems to grant innocent toward the FLDS and their actions because the raid was triggered by a false phone call. Yes, the raid could've and probably should've been handled differently, but that doesn't change the fact that abuses were going on at the YFZ and in Short Creek, and when authorities uncovered those abuses, they had a legal responsibility to act on them. I appreciate that the authors did their research, but anyone looking for the full story should browse sites like TexasFLDS and PoliticsRUsPrinciple where you can find actual court documents and FLDS records that show just how deep the abuses go.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews