In April 2008, I came home from work one night and settled in to watch a few minutes of my boyfriend Anderson Cooper. (We all have our strange celeb crushes, right?) What was supposed to be a ten minute highlight-catching session ended up being a three-hour, glued-to-the-TV CNN marathon as I watched footage of the raid of the FLDS ranch in Texas. One of the callers to the show was Carolyn Jessop, former member of the cult and former fourth wife of one of its leaders. When I saw that she had written a book, naturally I was interested.
I knew the polygamist Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was pretty whacked. I have some extended family members who are part of the Mormon faith, and while I certainly don't believe as they do, for the most part they're pretty (what I would call) normal. (Or at least I thought so until my uncle's Mormon funeral... it was somewhat weird.) But their lifestyle in and of itself is not so very different from mine.
But then, they're not Fundamentalist.
Carolyn Jessop's story is pretty terrifying. At age 18, she was basically forced to become the fourth wife of fifty-year-old Merrill Jessop, whom she had only met a couple times before. She was one of the few women in the FLDS to go to college- not to be a doctor, as was her dream, but to be a teacher, as her husband wanted her to be. She graduated college pregnant with her second child, and went on to teach in the FLDS, until the curriculum became so regimented and downright ridiculous that she resigned. She was an independent thinker, and therefore labelled as a troublemaker by her 'sister wives' and became a target for verbal and emotional abuse from her entire family.
Her only joy in life was her eight children, but she was not allowed to raise them herself or spend nearly as much time with them as she would have liked. When Warren Jeffs began to take control of the community and life became one severe punishment after another, she knew that for her childrens' sake she had to get them out. She made a daring middle-of-the-night escape with eight children, all of whom believed she was condemning them to hell as they escaped. She was hunted and tracked by the FLDS, as one of their most prominent members' wives, but she refused to back down. She became the first woman in the FLDS ever to successfully escape, divorce her husband, AND get full custody of her children.
Divorce is an ugly word. But worse still, I think, is polygamy. Deuteronomy 17:17 states:
He must not take many wives, or his heart will be led astray.
There simply was no easy road to take. She could stay, miserable, and let her children continue to grow up in a poisonous environment. Or she could leave, and face the hardships of single motherhood, starting from scratch, ever fearful of her vengeful husband's wrath. In choosing the latter, though, she built a life for herself and her children beyond their wildest dreams. They were poor, but they were free.
This book was an account of incredible bravery in the face of adversity. However, at times I found it a tad self-indulgent on her part- maybe a little exaggerated...? But who am I to say? I wasn't there. Whether or not some of the details were stretched, though, I know the terror of cult life is very real, and I applaud Carolyn Jessop for her courage in escaping its clutches.
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1 comment:
You might want to read verse 16 in conjunction with verse 17. The Hebrew word for "many" is "Rabah" (רבה). Unless you propose that a King was to have only one horse, or perhaps, one piece of Gold ("Rabah" being repeated again) it is hard to see the passage as a limit to one wife. Jehoiada the priest gives Joash two wives, and Joash is said to "do right" all the days of Jehoiada. Furthermore all the kings about whom we have detail seem to have at least a few wives. Never once is their "failing" in this regard mentioned in a review of their careers, curiously enough, not even with regard to Solomon, whose sin is said in Nehemiah to be his "strange" or "foreign" (read unbelieving) wives.
The sin of polygamy is an oxymoron and in fact isn't even proper terminology. The FLDS are only polygamists in the sense that they are also the marrying kind. Mores specifically what the FLDS practice is polygyny.
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