Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), breakaway Mormon fundamentalist group that arose from communities that continued to practice polygamy after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS, Mormonism) abandoned official support for that form of marriage in 1890. The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) is estimated to be the largest of the splinter Mormon groups that continue polygamous marriage (specifically polygyny, multiple wives married to one husband). Its main population center has historically been on the Arizona-Utah border in an area called Short Creek, comprising the towns of Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah. The leader of the FLDS is Warren Jeffs, who in 2011 was sentenced to life in prison in a case that received significant media attention.

Mormonism and polygamy

Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, and others in the movement began practicing polygamy in the early 1840s. Smith claimed that he received a revelation authorizing the practice in 1843, and, after the movement settled in Utah territory under Brigham Young, promotion of polygamy became official doctrine in 1852. According to early Mormon theology, polygamous marriage reinstated the form of marriage observed by the patriarchs of the Hebrew Bible. Early Mormon teaching also interpreted plural marriage as fulfilling a divine decree to increase the population. Mormon theology holds that marriages create eternal bonds between husband and wife that last beyond physical death. Marriage in these eternal bonds is also understood to be a prerequisite for exaltation, eternal life in the highest level of heaven.

The U.S. government in the 19th century found polygamy to be objectionable, but it focused especially on the Mormon practice of polygamy since federal authorities were concerned about the political power of the LDS church in Utah Territory. With the Morrill Anti-bigamy Act of 1862, the U.S. Congress prohibited plural marriage in U.S. territories. Friction over polygamy increased between Mormon leadership and the U.S. government, and the issue reached the U.S. Supreme Court in Reynolds v. United States (1879), in which the Court upheld Congress’s power to outlaw polygamy, despite Mormon legal claims that the practice was protected by the free exercise of religion. The Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 further targeted the LDS church by disincorporating it, allowing for government confiscation of church property, and permitting plural wives to testify against their husbands in cases of polygamy, bigamy, and cohabitation.

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As the government applied pressure in the name of anti-bigamy, polygamy became central to Mormon identity and ideology, but it also stood in the way of Utah’s path to statehood. In 1890 LDS president Wilford Woodruff issued a decree, known as “the Manifesto,” officially ceasing the sanctioning of plural marriage in the Mormon community. Utah was then granted statehood in 1896. Plural marriage continued in some parts of the Mormon community, but in 1904 a second manifesto issued by LDS president Joseph F. Smith reiterated the prohibition on plural marriage and added the threat of excommunication. Within mainstream LDS, the notion of eternal marriage continues, but matrimonial theology within LDS is divorced from the earlier doctrine of plural marriage.

FLDS and polygamous Mormon offshoots

Not all Mormon communities accepted this change in doctrine, however, and some continued to engage in plural marriages. These early polygamist Mormons regarded the LDS church’s new stance on polygamy as a capitulation to U.S. government pressure and to American cultural norms around marriage. Mormon fundamentalists also appealed to a reported revelation in 1886 in which Jesus Christ and Joseph Smith appeared to LDS president John Taylor and assured him of the continuation of plural marriage. Within the communities that continued the practice, plural marriage is often referred to as “the Principle.” The FLDS developed within this broad Mormon fundamentalist movement that retained plural marriage.

According to reports, after Taylor’s revelation he charged a small group of men with maintaining plural marriage, and he granted them special priesthood status. One of those men, Lorin C. Woolley, became the leader of a group that in the 1920s settled an area on the border of Arizona and Utah called Short Creek, which became the main base of fundamentalist Mormonism. Woolley was the central figure, and he conferred upon a Council of Friends a special status as modern apostles.

The polygamist community in Short Creek faced many pressures, both external and internal. In 1935 LDS leadership excommunicated members of the Short Creek group. In 1944 federal and local officials conducted a raid on the community. In 1952 a difference of opinion over membership on the leadership council in Short Creek led to rival factions, one of which, in 1954, became the offshoot Apostolic United Brethren (AUB), the second largest of the fundamentalist groups. (Further disagreements about apostleship and attestations of prophethood produced additional polygamist splinter communities.) In 1953 Arizona state officials organized another raid on Short Creek in which more than 100 were arrested and over 200 children were taken into state custody (they were reunited with their families two years later).

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Following the 1953 raid, Leroy Johnson consolidated his authority over the fundamentalist Mormon movement in Short Creek, was regarded as a prophet, and led the community until he died in 1986. He was succeeded by Rulon Jeffs, who eliminated the Council of Friends and shifted the community to one-man rule. It was under Jeffs that the community’s president grew to be understood as the sole prophet who speaks for God. In 1991, also under Jeffs’s leadership, the group formally incorporated as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Among Mormon groups that practice plural marriage, the FLDS is characterized by its emphasis on one-man rule, leadership’s responsibility for the arrangement of marriages (rather than relying on marriage by personal choice), and the reassignment of wives as a method of control. FLDS doctrine also holds that men must have at least three wives to get into the highest level of heaven.

Warren Jeffs and legal trouble

Rulon Jeffs died in 2002, and FLDS leadership succession passed to his son, Warren Jeffs, under whom the movement took a more severe turn. As the leader of the group, endowed with prophetic authority, Jeffs was responsible for officiating marriages. He used this privilege to control the group, particularly by arranging marriages within the community. He also excommunicated many young men, officially for violating moral codes but allegedly to retain more wives for the elder males in the group. These excommunicated young boys and teens have been referred to as the “Lost Boys.” Jeffs prohibited books and other media from outside the community, ordered that children be taken out of local public schools, demanded that women follow strict rules of dress (prairie dresses), and insisted that women “keep sweet,” meaning to maintain a saccharine and obedient disposition.

In 2005 Jeffs was indicted in Arizona and a warrant was issued for his arrest for his role in arranging a marriage between a 28-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl. In 2006 he was also charged in Utah with two counts of rape as an accomplice for arranging a marriage between a 14-year-old girl and her 19-year-old cousin. Jeffs went on the run, the FBI put him on its Ten Most Wanted List, and he was found and arrested in 2006. In 2007 he was convicted on two counts of accomplice to rape, but the conviction was overturned in 2010 and dismissed in 2011.

In 2008 the government raided the FLDS’s Yearning for Zion compound near Eldorado, Texas. The raid resulted in the removal of more than 400 children, who were taken into state custody but returned to their families the same year. Evidence gathered from the Texas compound raid was used in Jeffs’s 2011 trial in Texas, in which he was convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child and sexual assault of a child. The charges concerned two of his spiritual wives, girls aged 12 and 15. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on the first charge and a consecutive 20 years on the second.

Jeffs resigned as president of the FLDS in 2007 and officially gave authority over the group to William Jessop. His brother Lyle Jeffs was appointed bishop of Short Creek, but he faced his own legal issues and became a fugitive. Warren Jeffs then appointed Nephi Jeffs, another brother, as bishop. But Warren Jeffs continues to be acknowledged by his followers as a living prophet, and reports indicate that he continues to have a significant influence on the FLDS community.

In the media

The FLDS was thrust firmly into the public eye by Warren Jeffs’s time as a fugitive, his appearance on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, his trials, and the raid on the Yearning for Zion ranch in Texas. News, media reports, books, and documentaries proliferated. Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (2003) explores Mormon fundamentalism and was made into a miniseries of the same name in 2022. Sam Brower’s Prophet’s Prey (2011) was made into a movie of the same name in 2015 and focuses on Jeffs and the FLDS. Numerous books written by women who fled the FLDS community provide autobiographical and critical accounts of the group. Documentary and television treatments of the FLDS and Jeffs include Sons of Perdition (2010), Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey (2022), and Preaching Evil: A Wife on the Run with Warren Jeffs (2022). According to some scholarly media critics, the plethora of popular portrayals of polygamy in the FLDS and related groups transforms the subject into a sensationalist spectacle.