Over the past century or more, there have been quite a few breakaway Mormon sects scattered across rural North America, small groups led by self-appointed prophets who rejected the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ decision to disavow Brigham Young’s famous doctrine of “plural marriage” in the 1890s. For the most part these splinter sects have been left alone, even (or especially) in a place like Utah, where the mainstream Mormon Church still dominates the political and cultural landscape. In the larger picture of American society and religion, such fundamentalist Mormon groups have been nothing more than tiny, stagnant backwaters of belief. All of them, that is, except one.
That group is the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (usually called the FLDS Church), a multi-million-dollar business enterprise that owns large chunks of remote real estate in Utah, Arizona, Colorado, South Dakota, Texas, Oklahoma and northern Mexico. FLDS-owned companies made the O-rings that failed in the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986 (although the failure was likely a result of flawed NASA specifications), have managed and run major construction projects all over the Western states and have installed the lighting in numerous Las Vegas casinos. For many years the FLDS Church has been dominated and operated by a man named Warren Steed Jeffs, who “married” more than 60 women and girls, some as young as 12 years old, and has repeatedly been accused of molesting children of both sexes, including his sisters, his daughters and his nieces and nephews.