Book Review

Banking on Heaven: Polygamy in the Heartland of the American West
Filmmaker: Laurie Allen (bankingonheaven.com) 2006

Review by Joan d’Arc

Colorado City, Arizona: population 3334 and growing. Life is regimented; outsiders are considered agents of Satan. TV, radio and books are banned. No child goes past the eighth grade. The town is run by something reminiscent of an organized crime syndicate. There’s nobody to go to if you want out.

The remote town is run by one Warren Jeffs, “prophet” and leader of the United Effort Plan (UEP), the largest offshoot sect of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS), a polygamist splinter group of the Mormon Church. Jeffs reportedly inherited the group and some 60 wives (“celestial unions”) from his father, Rulon Jeffs. It is claimed that the mayor, police force and superintendent of schools all report to Jeffs.

The community is under a heavy blanket of mind control. Most don’t even know what lies beyond the perimeter of their structured belief system. The average age in Colorado City is 4 and a half; girls are “married” at 13 to older men. It’s an “economy of women” where “new young brides feed the system,” says filmmaker Laurie Allen. Less favored males (“lost boys”) are expelled for minor infractions. Warren Jeffs, they say, is a tyrant who takes pleasure in ruining families.

The town’s primary income is “bleeding the beast”: collecting welfare payments for the church’s single moms (“spiritual wives”). It costs some $30 million a year to support the town on welfare payments. The women hand over their checks to their husbands, who dutifully transfer them to Warren Jeffs. Although most families don’t have enough to eat, the coffers of the UEP have swelled to some $400 million. Even food stamps are turned over to the “Prophet,” who was arrested in August 2006 for arranging marriages with underage girls.

Banking on Heaven tells a tragic story of rampant incest and sexual abuse, based on testimony of exiles and escapees. “My father thought of me as a farm animal,” says one escapee. “My father asked me my name,” says another. “I spent 17 years being beaten by my mother because I wouldn’t obey my father. He wanted me in his bed,” says another. Because Ruth Cooke spoke out about abuse, she was exiled from the community and put in a psychiatric hospital. Says Laurie Allen, “We know a lot of women and children would leave the FLDS church if they knew they had help on the outside.” Laurie escaped the sect at age 16 and graduated from film school in 2004.

Banking on Heaven makes the point that while we criticize the treatment of women in Muslim countries, we ignore a comparable situation in our own back yard. Mormons in government positions in Utah and Arizona have dragged their feet so long that the sect now has a compound in Eldorado City, Texas and another in Mexico. It also has one in Canada. Interviewees express fear that this could turn into a repeat of Jonestown. We can only bank on the hope that this courageous film will achieve a united front; but at the same time, nobody wants another Waco over “concerns for the children.”