Under the Banner of Heaven (miniseries)

Gil Birmingham & Andrew Garfield
"Under the Banner of Heaven"
(FX, 2022)

It’s that second day after a major procedure, when you can feel the worst. That’s where I am right now. Tried to sleep sitting up, tried to sleep lying on my chest. Around four in the morning I curled up on my side with my head twisted to the right and I was finally able to get a couple hours rest.

Meantime, I have been burning through the FX miniseries, Under the Banner of Heaven, Based on the true crime novel by Jon Krakauer.

My father first shared Krakauer with me. The summer my wife and I got married, I read Into Thin Air, his account of the 1996 Chomolungma (Everest) Disaster, while sitting on my porch in 90° weather, and it literally made me chilly. On our honeymoon, she was reading Into the Wild on the patio of a hotel room at Denali, not even 20 miles from where Christopher McCandless died.

Under the Banner of Heaven begins with a double murder which just happened to take place thirty-eight years ago today, July 24, 1984. A pious young woman and her child were killed by men who felt their actions were justified by God. Victim and assailants thought of themselves as Mormon, but had different ideas of what that meant. But women dying at the hands of men in a quest for dominance is universal, and not unique to any one belief system.

I haven’t read the book this series is based on. Father did, an amateur historian and devout Christian. I can only imagine how he may have judged each of the individuals represented in the book, those who are members of the Mormon faith.

I feel however, that this miniseries adaptation, like the musical The Book of Mormon, is not a critique or condemnation of this one Christian religion, but of all religion. In this case, it is also a metaphor for the United States as a whole. Watching this show, which follows the murder investigation and also depicts the historical origins of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I believe that the Mormon church is possibly the most American thing ever created.

I believe that Americans are essentially good, and that the American experiment has allowed us the freedom to live independently from strictures of the past. But it has also allowed for a minority of white men to pursue paths of complete selfishness which they defend through a mutating set of beliefs which they call righteous but are always a means to whatever end they desire.

So it is with the LDS, and also the Supreme Court.

Heavenly Father wants us to do this is a common phrase throughout the series, and it is as mutable as the assertion Founding Fathers want us to do this. Interpreting and perverting their unknowable wills has become its own religion.