Lesson from polygamy TV
 
By Chris Jones
The Daily Texan - The University of Texas at Austin
 
Last Sunday, HBO debuted its new show "Big Love," following "The Sopranos." Like HBO's previous "dramedy" "Six Feet Under," "Big Love" is the tale of slightly off-kilter suburbanites - but rather than Six Feet Under's mopey undertakers, "Big Love" showcases a polygamist family of man and wife and wife and wife.

On the one hand, "Big Love's subject matter is fairly novel for mainstream television, but at the same time, the show's not nearly as groundbreaking as it clearly wishes to be. One of the running themes of "Big Love" is that, for all the weirdness of balancing three families headed by one father, the protagonists have the same worries about money, time, life and love that we all do.

"Big Love's" bad guys are considerably more interesting, especially fundamentalist cult leader Roman Grant. A man who stands almost entirely outside of our Enlightenment-derived American culture, Roman falls somewhere between a feudal lord and the chief of some nomad tribe.

His organization collects huge tributes from all the businesses in his insular community of polygamists, and treats women either as yet another teenage bride to be acquired or yet another daughter to be married off to secure a strategic alliance. Roman comes across as someone for whom the concepts of equality and personal freedom don't even register - it's "I, me, mine" covered with a veneer of religious belief and authoritarian dogma.

Furthermore, while the relatively affluent suburban lifestyle enjoyed by the main characters in "Big Love" may not closely mirror the actual existence of many polygamists, Roman Grant and his followers do clearly resemble certain real-life polygamist cults, including the "Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints" of Colorado City, Ariz., and their late "prophet," Rulon Jeffs. Scores of newspaper articles have been written on this insular society, a place where women are assigned - and sometimes reassigned - to husbands by the prophet, who is the only man allowed to perform marriages. Women - high school-age girls, most typically - have no say-so in who they marry, and teenaged boys are typically abandoned in surrounding towns by their own parents, ostensibly for "sins" such as chewing gum and listening to rock music, but in actuality to keep the community's warped male-to-female ratio intact.

To read more about these fundamentalist polygamists is to stare right in the face of the enemies of modernity. In fact, while the term "American Taliban" is often (unfairly) used by strongly partisan leftists to attack social conservatives, the term seems tailor-made for Jeffs and his followers.

Both the Taliban and the FLDS hung out in remote, mountainous areas far from mainstream civilization. Both the Taliban and the FLDS preached doctrines that promised heavenly rewards in return for blind obedience here on earth, and both the Taliban and the FLDS are currently broken organizations, running for cover - the Taliban in the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the FLDS in remote compounds secreted throughout the United States, including one location here in Texas.

Taliban leader Mullah Omar is in hiding, as is Warren Jeffs, son of Rulon, current prophet of the church, and a wanted fugitive by the FBI.

More important than the salacious details of the FLDS, however, is the insight it gives us into how difficult extremist beliefs can be to overcome. Former FLDS members find it difficult to break away from the community - having lived their lives away from the modern world, they're ill-equiped to enter modern society. Having been fed a lifetime of dogma that paints their leaders as the keepers of heaven, and everybody else as literal pawns of the devil, it's nearly impossible for defectors to see themselves as anything but hell-bound apostates and as such, it's fairly common for women to walk back into familiar, abusive relationships.

Keeping in mind that these are English-speaking American citizens who, in many cases, have support networks and sometimes even family support in the outside world, we perhaps begin to see why it's difficult for places like Afghanistan and, to a lesser extent, Iraq, to change into modern, functional democracies overnight, given that the citizens of those countries are in many cases far more divorced from the Western world than FLDS victims.

Both the struggle against Islam and the breakup of the FLDS may shed light on the struggle against fundamentalist extremism. It might be suggested that, in both cases, although force may be useful to bring down a regime or arrest criminals, the real fight is internal, for the hearts and minds of the oppressed. As such, a long-term, low-key approach might yield better results than showy, but short-lasting, prosecution efforts.

In the meantime, as the protracted battles against the Taliban and Warren Jeffs play themselves out, we can distract ourselves with "The Sopranos," "Big Love" and any other "gritty" televised entertainment we wish. Just remember, however, that truth is almost always stranger, and more engrossing, than fiction.

Jones is an electrical and computer engineering graduate student.
 
dailytexanonline.com
Originally published March 22, 2006
 
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