Women who experienced trauma living in fundamentalist patriarchal communities say they saw themselves reflected in the Lafferty women in “Under the Banner of Heaven.”
Dustin Lance Black, the series’ creator and main writer, sought Hansen Park out for the show because of her expertise with Mormon fundamentalism and feminism. Her job covered such things as mapping out the exact route of Dan Lafferty’s car chase, or finding exactShe’s heard thousands of stories from women through the years on her podcast. “We used some of those stories to help shape how we shot and framed certain things,” she said.
This shift of acknowledgment is new, she said, and traceable to social media attention to patriarchy over the past two years. Now, there’s an effort within church culture to shift away from that, butHansen Park said the defensiveness around discussing the issues with patriarchal order hasn’t changed, which is why so many people are unwilling to hear stories from women who connect with the plight of the Lafferty women.
Hansen Park also answered critics who argue that women are just angry: “Of course people are angry. You would be angry, too, if you married into an abusive family and the church didn’t help protect you in the way that it promised that it would.”Bev said she remembers making her plan to escape the “compound,” a 60-acre plot where her extended fundamentalist Mormon family lived in what she called “trailers.
It was a plan that took months of execution — despite its apparent simplicity. Bev knew she needed to be strategic. Watching the miniseries, Bev said, had the ring of familiarity. “Their mannerisms, some of the phrases they say, I can hear my [former] brothers-in-law saying the exact same things to me,” she said. People in the church warned Bev’s ex-husband she was a “spitfire.”, when Brenda meets her future husband’s family. Instead of helping the women, she helps the men load rocks they are moving from a neighbor’s property.
“We grew up in a family where we were expected to go to BYU, to stay in the church, to get married in the temple,” she said. “I was raised with the impression that if I did A, B, and C and I chose a husband who was educated and our priesthood holder, who served a mission, that I would be OK,” she said. “What was most shocking to my system was that the church, which had been presented to me as a place where I would always be safe, became a place where not only was I not safe to express what was happening to me, but anytime I did, my situation got significantly worse.
This wasn’t always the case, Rosetti said, because “women did have more autonomy religiously within their own personal lives in the early years of the church.” As she and her husband navigated the waters while deciding to attend two different graduate schools, Janessa became pregnant. “I felt like I was having to grapple with this collision of all my identities coming together at once,” she said.
From there, things became more strained. Eventually, Janessa and her husband moved back to the state where his family lived, in the summer before they started graduate school. They weren’t speaking much, but one day he called her and asked her to get dinner together. Janessa said the choices of her ex’s family are easy to blame on the fact that she had an abortion. But the underlying issue, she said, was that she, like Brenda Lafferty, was “an out-of-the-box thinker, and choosing to dedicate her life to an education and career, versus settling down and starting a family.”
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