Christian (mormon) sharia law

Their Town On the border of Utah and Arizona, Mormon fundamentalists have long lived according to their own rules. But in recent years, the outside world has started to encroach. When a former sect member and his family moved to the town where he’d grown up, they expected a homecoming of sorts. What they got was a war.


By Ashley Powers
Photographs by Jim Mangan

WHEN JINJER COOKE and her family pulled into Short Creek in 2008, with a giant Ryder truck and a Weekend Warrior trailer, they didn’t realize the community was at war with itself. Jinjer was an outsider, a woman who’d spent much of her life in Phoenix and favored jeans and flip-flops. She had one husband, three children, and no interest in polygamy.

They were moving to a half-constructed house on a dirt road, with a backyard of pink earth and green scrub and a breathtaking view of the cliffs. At the time, it was little more than a roof and a frame that had moldered for years, so the Cookes planned to spend a few weeks in their trailer while it was fixed up. Jinjer didn’t mind. To her, the house marked a fresh start after years of anguish. She felt so hopeful that she stopped taking her antidepressant.

Jinjer’s husband, Ron, was born here, the son of polygamists, one of 57 siblings who grew up clambering over the cliffs. Then, Short Creek’s neat grid of homes had few locked doors or tall fences. Kids raced around on bikes and giggled through church dances. Their prophet, Leroy Johnson, was known as “Uncle Roy,” and on his birthday, townsfolk trucked in watermelons to Cottonwood Park.

Ron’s parents struggled to make ends meet. When he was 10, he was sent to live with his uncle. A few years later, Ron was yanked out of school and put to work on a construction crew outside of town for little pay. He spent his weekends framing, stuccoing, bricking, shingling, and weather­proofing Short Creek for nothing.

By 19, Ron had fled to Phoenix. He and Jinjer met at a barbecue around 1999. He was 6 feet 4 inches tall, with sandy hair and an easy smile. She was dark-haired and shy, a single mother struggling to support two girls and a boy with a string of restaurant jobs. She swooned at how this bear of a man, someone who she was sure could have his pick of women, embraced her family. Within a month, they moved in together.

By the mid-2000s, Jinjer and Ron were prospering. She ran a home-cleaning business; he worked construction. They rented a house in a neighborhood called Dreaming Summit. Then, one December morning, Jinjer tried to turn left down a nearby street. It was blocked off with yellow police tape. Ahead, paramedics huddled around someone at a construction site. It was Ron.
He had been rearranging traffic cones when a truck barreled into him. At the hospital, he was tethered to a knot of tubes, and his doctors asked Jinjer if they should remove him from life support. She said no, convinced he was still present. Three months later, Ron came home. He was mostly confined to a wheelchair. His vision blurred. His memory fuzzed. His bowels betrayed him.
Navigating their two-story home was a monumental task. Jinjer threw together a makeshift bedroom downstairs, and a friend rigged up a portable shower. But the setup was untenable, and so was staying in Phoenix. Ron couldn’t work. Neither could Jinjer; she was caring for Ron. They relied on Social Security and workers’ comp, and dreamed of moving somewhere slower-paced. By Christmas 2007, Ron’s brother Seth came up with a solution: Ron, he said, come home.

THE CHURCH OF Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints renounced plural marriage in 1890, bowing to the rest of the country’s unease and clearing Utah’s path to statehood. But the Manifesto, as the edict is known, didn’t wipe out polygamists. Instead, they splintered into sects and fanned out across the West.

Since its early days as a fundamentalist settlement in the 1920s, Short Creek has been a place on guard. Adherents of “The Work,” as the f⁠​lds doctrine was once called, believe that a man must have at least three wives to reach the highest level of heaven. Each is expected to deliver as many children as possible, and it’s not uncommon to meet a woman who has borne 16.

The faithful have little say these days in whom they marry, or much else. They heed their prophet, revered as God’s mouthpiece. He can force girls to wed men as old as their grandfathers. He can banish fathers on a whim and reassign their wives and children. He can oust entire families from their homes, with few repercussions: Since the 1940s, Short Creek residents have handed over property to a trust called the United Effort Plan, meaning almost no one has a deed to his home.

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https://stories.californiasunday.com/2014-12-07/mormon-fundamentalists-warren-jeffs/