Where the Polygamists Have White-Picket Fences

The neighborhood looks like any other in the upper-middle-class suburbs: sprawling homes with porch swings and manicured lawns strewn with kids’ bicycles.

But beneath the all-American veneer, much is different in this upscale subdivision 40 miles south of Salt Lake City.

“Pretty much everyone who lives here is polygamous,” said Mary, who gave a recent tour of the area and who is the second wife of a Utah man. She, like other polygamists interviewed for this story, asked to be identified only by her first name for fear of prosecution. “There may be one or two houses that aren’t, but virtually everyone else here is one of ours.”

In the weeks since the arrest of Warren Jeffs, the polygamous sect leader who made the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list for allegations that he facilitated the rape and marriage of underage girls, there have been constant questions about the pervasiveness and peril of polygamy in Utah.

Mainstream Mormons in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with 12 million members worldwide, have asserted that all polygamous groups -- including Jeffs’ Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints -- are aberrations in a state where the influential Mormon church banned polygamy more than a century ago.

But Utah’s attorney general, pro-polygamy activists and other experts estimate there are 40,000 people living in polygamous families or communities like this one across the western U.S., with a large portion in suburban Utah.

Although it is rare that allegations of abuse are as systemic or egregious as those reported in the community led by Jeffs, virtually every other polygamous sect practicing in Utah today has been linked to alleged financial, sexual or other improprieties. Federal grand juries in Arizona and state investigators in Nevada reportedly are probing polygamist practices.

In the wake of Jeffs’ arrest, Utah polygamists have come forward to defend their faith, values and lifestyle.

They say plural marriage fulfills the mission of all Mormons to be fruitful and multiply and to ascend to the highest reaches of heaven. They say it breaks their hearts that the mainstream church in 1890 abandoned polygamy -- what one expert called “the process of polishing the soul” -- to appease the federal government and ensure Utah would earn statehood. They point to communities like Eagle Mountain and Rocky Ridge, where polygamous families appear to be happy and prosperous, often with multiple wives of one husband living in palatial homes with adjoining yards.

“We’re really sickeningly boring,” said Jane, who shares a husband with Mary. “There is no high drama.”

During the 2004 campaign for Utah attorney general, candidates debated how best to handle polygamy, the state’s “dirty little secret.” The winner, Mark Shurtleff, implemented a policy to leave polygamists alone unless they were committing other crimes simultaneously. Although having more than one spouse is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison in Utah, authorities long ago stopped actively going after polygamists.

“We don’t have the resources, nor do I think that we should use our resources, to convict every polygamist in Utah, put them in jail and put 20,000 kids into foster care,” Shurtleff told a Canadian reporter recently. “What we’re focusing on are crimes against women and children, and tax fraud and other crimes involving misuse of public money.”

Long before Jeffs’ arrest, such crimes have been reported. For example:

* The True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days was the subject of much criticism when a woman fled the community and went to authorities alleging she had been coerced into marrying her stepfather after years of being told she would burn in hell otherwise, according to a book detailing the case. Utah’s attorney general chose not to prosecute the man, a preacher who has claimed to be the reincarnated Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, because the woman was 20 years old and deemed a consenting adult.

* The Apostolic United Brethren, or AUB, a polygamous community in Utah with 7,500 members, a suburban complex with athletic fields, an outdoor dance pavilion and a private school, was found to have bilked one member out of more than $1.5 million. A judge ruled the sect and its leaders had to return it.

* In the Davis County Cooperative Society, a polygamous community north of Salt Lake City, the leading family, the Kingstons, has been said by state prosecutors to have more than $150 million in assets. Yet according to court testimony in a recent child abuse case, at least some of the wives and children of one of the community’s patriarchs were living in squalor and dependent on welfare. Another of the family’s leaders was convicted in 1999 of felony incest for taking his 16-year-old niece as his 15th wife.

But even the most vocal critics are careful not to allege that every polygamist is guilty of such abuses.

“Listen,” said John Llewellyn, a leading polygamy critic in Utah. “I’m a former law enforcement officer, a former polygamist and now someone who’s working against polygamy. I’ve seen this from every side. And the bottom line is that there are a lot of polygamists out there who are good, honest people. There are, unfortunately, that many -- or more -- who are out there perpetuating every kind of horrible abuse you can’t even imagine.”

The AUB, whose members are scattered throughout Salt Lake City suburbs such as Eagle Mountain, are largely considered by authorities and even polygamy critics like Llewellyn to be a group where abuse is neither rampant nor tolerated.

Charles, 41, a computer programmer with three wives and 14 children, lives in central Utah and says he simply wants to carry out God’s plan. He and his first wife joined the AUB, and later he took second and third wives, Jeni and Alorah.

“We believe the purpose of plural marriage is to bring spirits here waiting to be born into good families that will teach them the gospel,” he said. “A lot of people around here want to live plural marriage so they make it to the highest heaven. When I see what the savior has done for me, you just want to pay him back and do what he says.”

Charles’ third wife, Alorah, said that although her mother was the third of four wives, her own decision to enter into plural marriage required intense prayer.

“There’s a saying that is kind of common among the girls in this group, that if you can have 10% of a 100% man, instead of 100% of a 10% man, then what would you choose?”

*

Mary and Jane’s husband is a middle-aged AUB member, something of a real-life equivalent of Bill Henrickson, the character in HBO’s series “Big Love” who lives in the Salt Lake City suburbs with his three wives, seven children and ever-mounting bills.

Over dinner at a seafood restaurant, Jane and Mary jointly make fun of their husband while he good-naturedly laughs at their quips. The women brush off questions about jealousy by saying he isn’t worth fighting over, but they later expound on the Mormon principle of building large families on Earth that can be replicated in heaven.

The family explains the mechanics of their lives: The two wives have houses next to each other. Jane jokingly complains that Mary has the better lawn. The husband, who asked not to be identified, spends three nights a week with each family; they rotate every other week on who gets the fourth night.

The family grows somber when discussing allegations that abuses are inexorably linked to polygamy. They say their community strongly discourages marriage before age 18. Mary proudly describes how one of her sons learned that a man in the community was abusing a girl and reported him to police.

“Bottom line,” she says, “if you wake up a 13-year-old girl in the middle of the night and marry her off to a man 20 years older than her, that’s abuse. Absolutely.”

It’s families like these that polygamy advocates hold up when they make their most frequent argument: decriminalization. They say that if the fear of prosecution is removed, polygamous groups could stop living in seclusion and secrecy, the very conditions that enable many of the alleged abuses. They would also feel less fearful about going to authorities to turn in abusers within their ranks.

“It would be all about going after the crimes, not the culture,” said Anne Wilde, a widow from a plural marriage who is co-director of Principle Voices, a pro-polygamy group.

But polygamy critics are equally adamant that the culture invariably leads to problems. At minimum, they say, women are marginalized by a religious doctrine that turns them into a modern harem.

They tell of marriages where the husband had more children than he could ever hope to support, thus leaving wives to scrape by as best they could on welfare. Worse, they say, the culture has a long tradition of physical abuse, rape, incest and underage marriage.

“I’ve lived that life,” said Vicky Prunty, a co-director of Tapestry Against Polygamy, the state’s most vocal anti-polygamy group. “Anyone who tells you women are not being hurt there -- forced into allowing their husbands to take on other wives in the name of religion, getting married too young to men much older, being hit or worse -- are not being truthful.”

*

On a recent Friday evening, as the fall chill seeped into the mountain air, teenagers from a polygamous community on the outskirts of Salt Lake City gathered for a barn dance.

Erin Thompson, 15, typified the youths who were there: bright, polite, optimistic. She spoke of her plans to attend college, perhaps become a dentist. Looking farther ahead, she spoke of marriage and children, and, without hesitation, said she hoped to be a plural wife.

She said she felt a religious calling to do so and believed that sharing a husband would teach her about sacrifice and prevent her from making him the center of her universe.

“Bad things happen in every community, whether they are polygamous or not,” she said. “I know that. But I believe that this lifestyle can bring more blessings than you can imagine if it is lived correctly. And I understand that if it is lived wrongly it can bring that same amount of pain.”