It is a genre in itself: documentaries about religious divisions in the US that seek out the purest doctrine in increasingly radical groups, no matter how bizarre the starting points. Yet every now and then you still fall out of your chair, as in Rachel Dretzin’s astonishing four-part documentary about the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (also: FLDS).
The FLDS was a relatively small offshoot of the Utah Mormon Church from the time polygamy was officially banned. Within the split, polygamy was precisely the central teaching, enabling the male members to climb a sort of divine ladder with as many wives and descendants as possible. Men with sixty children by many, many women were no exception. The rules of the game, indeed all theological teaching, was set by a man who was seen as the Prophet, the conduit of the words of God. Thus the prophet himself.
Women had (and still have) a purely functional role in the FLDS, like incubators and mothers, who had to know their place, were married off, spent hours putting their hair into complex braids or sewing some kind of 19th-century prairie dresses in pastel colors. And Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey may start out fairly traditionally as a portrait of a primordial American variant of a kind of Christian Taliban, but the perspective soon shifts to the figure of the self-proclaimed prophet Warren Jeffs, a life-threatening cult leader of the purest water.
renegades
Dretzin has spoken to a number of renegades, some run away, some exiled, and a chilling image emerges of a man who turned the FLDS into an insane cult of personality, which eventually turned out to be a kind of incestuous rape factory, with girls from the age of 14 turned to lions. thrown. The community lived in complete isolation, without any contact with the outside world, with its own police force and education, and for a long time it benefited from the tolerance with which every denomination is treated in the US.
At the very least, Dretzin’s series pays tribute to a few women who managed to escape the prophet’s regime, a heroic step under the circumstances into a world they knew nothing about. Thanks to the stories of those few escaped women, law enforcement slowly began to track down Jeffs’ reign of terror.
There is a striking amount of archival material from the 1990s and early 2000s; then the FDLS sank further and further into a nightmare of paranoia and the rituals became less recorded. It is especially the bizarre family portraits in which old men (sometimes on a ventilator) are surrounded by dozens of pious smiling wife sisters in a sea of pastels, which linger for a long time.
From 2006, Warren Jeffs ended up on the most wantedlist of the FBI, especially for marrying underage girls to his elders. In the meantime the municipality had withdrawn even further from civilization and in a Texan hamlet the Yearning for Zion (Longing for Zion) Ranch built. A huge snow-white temple was erected on the ranch grounds, the purpose of which was never quite clear until Texas police raided it after Jeffs was arrested. In the pitch-black world of the FDSL, it turned out that there was still a new circle of hell.
Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey
Documentary
Four part true crime series by Rachel Dretzin.
To be seen on Netflix.