Under the Banner of Heaven (45 page)

Despite feeling like a fish out of water when he left his hometown and set up residence in the larger world, DeLoy says, “I loved college. Looking back, I suppose it was the beginning of the end for me. I stayed in the religion for another twenty years, but going to college in Cedar City was when I had my eyes opened. That’s where I took my first geology course. Afterward I came home and told Uncle Roy, ”There’s a professor over there trying to tell us the earth is four and a half billion years old, but the religion says its only six thousand years old. How can that be?“ Which shows you why education is such a problem for the Work. You take someone like me, who was always as stalwart as could be, and then you ship him off to get an education and the guy goes and apostatizes on you. Happens over and over again. And every time it does, it makes the leaders more inclined to keep people from learning.”

When DeLoy finally lost his faith and left the UEP, his three oldest kids were married and no longer living at home. These three children have remained in the religion, but he has worked hard to teach the other fourteen kids to think for themselves and to question what the UEP has inculcated. “Sometimes I worry about what would become of the little ones,” DeLoy muses, “if something happened to me and the wife—if we died. My older children would take the younger kids into their homes and look after them, but they’d be brought right back into the religion. I think those kids would be happy with that—they’d probably never know the difference. But they’d be stunted. They’d never
get
to exercise their imaginations.”

To help prepare his children for this possibility, and to instill in them a healthy skepticism about religious dogma of all kinds, on December 31, 1999, DeLoy and Eunice loaded their entire brood into two vans (whenever the Bateman family travels anywhere together, at least two large vehicles are required to transport everyone) and made the three-hour drive to Las Vegas in order to ring in the new millennium.

“We took ‘em all down to the center of the Las Vegas Strip,” he explains, “which is supposedly one of the wickedest places on earth, and the first place God was going to destroy when the clock struck midnight. We went to the New York—New York Casino, and stood outside in the street there with thousands and thousands of other people as the ball dropped and they counted down the seconds to the year 2000. And you know what? The millennium came, and the world didn’t end. I think that made quite an impression on the kids.” DeLoy laughs hard, shaking his head.

Now that he’s no longer a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, DeLoy is astonished at some of the beliefs the religion instills in its members. “It staggers me,” he says, “to look back on the things I used to believe. For example, ever since I was a child we were taught that Negroes were terrible, that they weren’t even human. And we had no way to learn otherwise. There were never any blacks in town. They were entirely foreign to us. I never even seen a Negro until I was practically an adult, when I saw one on a trip down to St. George. I remember staring at him for just as long as I could stare— I’d never encountered such a creature. It was like he was some kind of strange animal to me.

“That’s an awful thing to believe, I know. I feel guilty about it now. But it’s the way I was brought up from day one, and when you’re brought up to believe something like that, it’s not easy to overcome it. Just the other night, when I went to bed I turned on the TV for a minute, and Oprah happened to be on. And I found myself immediately changing the channel—just because she was black. I knew even as I was doing it that it was wrong, but that’s what the religion taught me to think, and it’s surprisingly hard to shake something that’s so deeply ingrained. What’s really sad is, children in the religion are still being taught those same exact things today.” Indeed, the FLDS church continues to teach that interracial marriage is a sin so great that “the penalty, under the law of God is death on the spot.”*

* A horror of miscegenation is something Mormon Fundamentalists have in common with their Mormon brethren: even after LDS President Spencer W. Kimball’s 1978 revelation reversing the church doctrine that banned blacks from the priesthood, official LDS policy has continued to strongly admonish white Saints not to marry blacks. Make no mistake: the modern Mormon church may now be in the American mainstream, but it usually hugs the extreme right edge of the flow.

“It’s amazing how gullible people are,” DeLoy continues. “But you have to remember what a huge comfort the religion is. It provides all the answers. It makes life simple. Nothing makes you feel better than doing what the prophet commands you to do. If you have some controversial issue that you’re dealing with—let’s say you owe a lot of money to somebody, and you don’t have the means to pay them—you go in and talk to the prophet, and he might tell you, ”You don’t have to pay the money back. The Lord says it’s Okay.“ And if you just do what the prophet says, all the responsibility for your actions is now totally in his hands. You can refuse to pay the guy, or even kill somebody, or whatever, and feel completely good about it. And that’s a real big part of what holds this religion together: it’s not having to make those critical decisions that many of us have to make, and be responsible for your decisions.”

DeLoy looks out across the epic sweep of desert. In the distance, on the far side of the Arizona Strip, the dreamy silhouettes of Mount Dellenbaugh and Mount Trumbull hover in midair, suspended above a quivering sheen of mirage. “If you want to know the truth,” he says, squinting against the glare, “I think people within the religion—people who live here in Colorado City—are probably happier, on the whole, than people on the outside.” He looks down at the red sand, scowls, and nudges a rock with the toe of one shoe. “But some things in life are more important than being happy. Like being free to think for yourself.”

Table of Contents

Start

Table of Contents

Start