Under the Banner of Hulu
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
Give this to Under the Banner of Heaven, the buzzy true-crime miniseries that recently concluded its run on FX and Hulu: It wastes little time in getting to the point. Minutes into the first episode, Detective Jeb Pyre is interviewing Allen Lafferty in a Utah jail cell. Allen’s wife and daughter have just been brutally murdered by fundamentalist Mormon zealots, and in his grief and anger he unloads on the well-meaning Latter-day Saint detective.
“If you really still believe your God is love, then you don’t know who you are, brother,” he tells Pyre. “This faith, our faith, breeds dangerous men.”
This idea, that Mormonism is at heart an oppressive and violent religion whose mainstream adherents are ever perched on the brink of radicalization, runs through the series—and the show commits to its thesis. Grisly murder scenes are interwoven with flashbacks to early Mormon history. Modern Church leaders are villains who monologue about “the communists at the NAACP” and make menacing threats to police detectives. Even the most benign images of Mormon life—a little girl praying; a family reunion—are scored with ethereal synths and ominous woodwinds to make sure that viewers is one of the most openly hostile treatments of a minority religious group to appear in popular American entertainment this century. It is also an unqualified hit.
