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In trying to understand and explain the disparity between Carolyn Jessop’s account of her life in the FLDS culture and what I have personally observed and experienced as an FLDS member, I ran onto a fascinating book that gives a key to understanding not only Carolyn herself and her book Escape but also Elissa Wall, Flora Jessop, Dan Fischer, and other vocal ex-FLDS members. (David G. Bromley, ed. The Politics of Religious Apostasy: The Role of Apostates in the Transformation of Religious Movements. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1998.)

 

This book, which the American Journal of Sociology calls a “remarkably unified collection of high-quality essays by many leading sociologists of new religious movements,” explains the process by which individuals who leave a religious organization become critical of their former faith in order to justify their departure. Our self concepts are tied to our social roles. Persons who leave a religious faith have the challenge of reconstructing their self concepts, which they often do through what has come to be known as the “apostate narrative,” in which they tend to paint their former group according to their current role as a crusader rather than their actual experiences in the group.

 

During the nineteenth century, numerous apostates from the LDS Church followed this pattern of attacking their former faith, often accusing the Saints of the very crimes they were guilty of themselves.

 

Ezra Booth, a Methodist preacher, was converted in 1831 through witnessing the miraculous healing of the wife of John Johnson, who had been afflicted for years with a lame arm. He desired the Savior to grant him the power to smite men and make them believe. When he found instead that “faith, humility, patience, and tribulation go before blessings,” he apostatized and attacked the Church in a series of nine letters, which first appeared in the Ohio Star and were later published in E. D. Howe’s book Mormonism Unveiled.

 

Sampson Avard, a relatively new convert, attempted during the Missouri persecutions of 1838 to found a secret oath-bound organization which he called the Danites to rob and plunder the neighboring communities. When his followers learned the nature of his schemes, they refused to support him. His treachery became known to the Presidency of the Church, and he was excommunicated. Avard then joined the mob and accused the leaders of the Church of using just such an organization as he had tried unsuccessfully to establish.  The alleged existence of the Danite band provided one of the main “justifications” used by Missouri Governor Lilburn W. Boggs in issuing his infamous exterminating order against the Saints.

 

John C. Bennett, a convert to Mormonism during the Nauvoo period, became the first mayor of Nauvoo, General of the Nauvoo Legion, and chancellor of the University of Nauvoo. After he became involved in adultery and other gross moral offenses and was cut off from the Church, he wrote newspaper articles and a book accusing Joseph Smith and the Church of such crimes as treason, conspiracy to commit murder, prostitution, and adultery. He claimed that he had never believed in Mormonism but had only joined the Church for the purpose of exposing the Prophet’s treasonable plans.

 

In 1868 Ann Eliza Webb, a twenty-four-year-old divorcee with two children, married LDS Church President Brigham Young. She sued for divorce and alimony in 1873 and was excommunicated from the Church for apostasy in 1874. She then wrote a sensationalized book entitled The Twenty-Seventh Wife and spent the rest of her life lecturing against Mormonism. 

 

Controversial organizations tend to have a greater number of apostates, who also produce narratives with more extreme content. Bromley describes the “archetypal account” as “a ‘captivity narrative’ in which apostates assert that they were innocently or naively operating in what they had every reason to believe was a normal, secure, social site; were subjected to overpowering subversive techniques; endured a period of subjugation during which they experienced tribulation and humiliation; ultimately effected escape or rescue from the organization; and subsequently renounced their former loyalties and issued a public warning of the danger of the former organization as a matter of civic responsibility.” 

This description would almost serve as a blueprint for Carolyn Jessop’s book. Apostate narratives may be either oral or written and typically exist in both forms. Lonnie Kliever, Ph.D., a professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, says that constructing such a narrative “then opens the door to being recruited and used by organizations which seek to use their testimony as a weapon against a minority religion.” Kliever further states that dedicated opponents present a distorted view of their former religion, which cannot be relied upon by responsible journalists, scholars, or jurists.

 

Daniel Carson Johnson, writing a chapter in Blomley’s book, makes several observations regarding the reliability of apostate narratives:

 

“The politically charged nature of the ‘apostatic’ atmosphere is hardly one that lends itself to clear judgments of facticity.”

 

“The task of weighing the trustworthiness of the accounts offered by the various players in instances of apostasy demands painstaking efforts…—efforts that, for all their rigor, still often fail to yield a single story that an objective researcher can tell with any degree of certitude.”

 

“While we may recoil from the sentiment so starkly expressed by George Bernard Shaw in his own autobiography—‘All autobiographies are lies. I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies: I mean deliberate lies’—there is no denying the fact that autobiographies consist of highly selective, idealized accounts of the lives of the people who write them.”

 

“This characterization applies doubly to apostate narratives, which are shaped by something more than just authorial vanity or constructionist endeavors. Beyond the authors’ basic concerns that the tales told of them coincide with… their ‘private mythologies,’ the autobiographical elements of apostate narratives are further shaped by a concern that the targeted religious groups be painted in the worst possible light. In this respect, every apostate account—even the tamest among them—strives to slacken the lines that tie it to its moorings in ‘real’ biographical history. The only question is, just how much slack can they give themselves?”

 

In spite of the credibility generally given to Carolyn Jessop’s book, it is no more reliable than the general run of apostate narratives. Merril Jessop’s son Parley reported that Carolyn’s brother Vergel told him that her father’s family did not approve of what she was doing and that when he questioned Carolyn about the misleading information in her book she said that the biographers tell her that she only needs 35 percent truth to call her work an autobiography.

 

Carolyn’s attacks on the FLDS people are motivated at present both by her need to justify her own actions and reconstruct her self concept and also by the financial rewards and widespread public attention she is receiving from her book. During interviews in recent months she has made claims even more extreme than those in her book, especially in her denunciation of her husband Merril Jessop. In msnbc.com of April 8, 2008, she is quoted as saying the following on Matt Lauer’s TODAY Show:

 

“She said her husband controlled his wives through their children. ‘The way he controlled me was by being violent to my children. If I did something that he didn’t like, my children paid, and they paid a big price. He would hurt them. If he would have been hurting me, I probably would not have conformed. But when you go after a woman’s child, that’s one thing that will put a woman on her knees quickly.’”

 

“’The method he would use with infants was a form of water torture,’ Jessop said of her former husband. ‘He would spank the baby until it was screaming out of control, and then he would hold the baby faceup [sic] under a tap of running water so it couldn’t breathe. He would do this repeatedly. Sometimes, it would go on for an hour, until the baby was so exhausted it couldn’t cry anymore. This method he called “breaking them.”’”

 

Anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with Merril and his family knows that the bizarre accusations being made here are completely false. I have known Merril for the past 46 years and have taught most of his older children in eighth grade and high school. They have all been intelligent, well-adjusted young people with a delightful sense of humor that found expression both in their conversation and also in their writing. Witness, for example, Maggie Jessop’s essays and her appearances on Larry King Live. I never taught Maggie personally, but I have taught enough of her brothers and sisters to know that many of these same character traits run through all of Merril’s children. Every one of his sons and daughters that I have ever met is completely devoted to Merril and feels as though he or she is his favorite child. As soon as Carolyn’s oldest daughter Betty came of age, she left her mother and returned to Merril’s family. I visited with her just over a month ago and know that she is very happy and has no desire to be elsewhere.

 

Last week I had two interviews of about an hour and a half each with three of Merril’s wives: Cathleen, Tammy, and Lorraine. We discussed Carolyn’s book and the conditions in the family. Much of what I learned will need to wait for another article, but all three ladies were unanimous in their praise of Merril’s treatment of his wives and children and flatly denied that he was abusive to any of them. A statement from Tammy expresses the essence of how Merril’s wives and children feel about him:

 

“When you see the whole picture, you see a man who overcame a constant barrage of obstacles. It never got easy and comfortable that I know of. The whole time we were living at the Creek [Short Creek], he had all these weird people he had to deal with—it’s sad to admit I was one of them—very immature. When we started getting the picture—oh, he labored with us—started seeing what he was dealing with financially. And he was gone most of the time.

 

“I remember saying to him, ‘How did you raise such good children when you were gone all the time?’ He said, ‘I was never gone.’   ‘Yah, I know what you mean, but you were always gone. You were never there.’ He said, ‘I was never “gone”!’ I finally got it through my head that even though his physical body was everywhere doing everything—his focus, his ability to tune in to what his children, his people, needed, to take care of everything—I’ve never seen anything like it.”

 

I have no desire to demonize Carolyn as she has Merril, but considering the distortions that permeate her book as well as her interviews and talk-show appearances, I must speak out on this issue. Carolyn is one of those invited by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to testify next week before the Senate Judiciary Committee. All of the potential witnesses are either bitter ex-FLDS members or those who have relied on them as their primary source of information. Considering the general unreliability of apostate narratives, Carolyn’s included, how can we expect that the testimony to be given will be anything but distortions?