Customer Reviews

Banking on Heaven: Polygamy in the Heartland of the American West (DVD)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Finally, the real story about the polygamists in Colorado City, AZ. This new documentary, the only film to get inside the cult, features, among others, Carolyn Jessop. Carolyn's book, "Escape", just hit the NYT Bestseller list. "Banking on Heaven" reinforces the horrors Ms. Jessop so clearly describes.

"Banking on Heaven" will shock and sicken the viewer. How can it be possible to have the Taliban in our own back yard?

This is a fast-paced and cutting-edge documentary, especially in light of the prophet Warren Jeffs recent conviction for child rape.

Banking on Heaven

I have just watched Dot Reidelbach's and Laurie Allen's documentary on the FLDS sect in Colorado City, Arizona and Hildale, Utah with shock and outrage. I thought I had seen everything when I read Jon Krakauer's "Under the Banner of Heaven" and Carolyn Jessop's "Escape", but they pale in comparison to the cruelty and abuse women right here in America are enduring at the hands of misguided and, in cases, perverted men.

Interviews with escapees, exiles, lost boys, women who have been victims of incest, who have lost their children and have endured tragedy at which we recoil in horror, makes this must viewing. Here you will discover abuse in the name of religion, elected officials turning their backs on these women's cries for help, the Mormon Church profiting from payoffs by the very well-heeled FLDS sect.

Film footage takes the viewer on a journey to northern Arizona where polygamist men live like potentates in houses worth millions, but whose wives and children lack the bare necessities of life and who are made to go on welfare at the taxpayers' expense. Here, young teenage boys are thrust out into the world to fend for themselves with only the clothes on their backs. Why? Because there are not enough young women to go around for the older men who have been taught they need a minimum of three wives to attain heaven.

Banking on Heaven reveals the corruption in the FLDS, a corruption that extends to a polygamous law enforcement and higher.

This film will anger you, disturb you, maybe make you cry, but it should be required viewing so more people can see a tragedy occurring right here in the United States.

I just finished watching this video after reading Escape. If what is happening to the women and children (girls become sex slaves for older men, excess boys, some barely past puberty, are taken to the streets of large cities in the region and tossed into the gutter like trash) does not make you angry, you are incapable of being outraged.

These are communities where violence and rape of children are normal activities, where God's spokesmen control the lives of everyone. Where happiness and love and knowledge are despised, and the only virtue is obedience.

We, the taxpayers, are funding this horror. Yet politicians in places where this goes on do little besides pay a little lip service. This may have something to do with the fact that many politicians in the region are members of the mainstream Mormon church, which would rather ignore the cruelty carried out in the name of its Prophet.

We listen to the stories of women and children who managed to escape. We listen to state officials, a few of whom are trying to do something, but somehow very little ever gets done.

It is amazing what you can get away with in America if you are a religion. If a bowling league was little more than a scam to bilk the taxpayer to fund the rape of little girls, it would probably, even in Utah and Arizona, be shut down pretty fast. But a church? No, that isn't child rape. It's our freedom of religion. It's our family values.

Listen to some of these women talk about their struggle to get their upbringing -- I would call it brainwashing -- out of their heads, and then try to tell yourself that religion isn't mind poison. For the women and children trapped in these communities, religious faith is a leash and collar around their necks.

This incredible film follows the struggles of a woman who was a former member of the polygamist Mormon sect which lived in Colorado city-the very same in which recent noted author Carolyn Jessop suffered before escaping and writing her best selling book "Escape". My recent read of this book is what compelled me to buy this film, and indeed, in some footage I could clearly make out Jessop's ruthless and abusive husband Merril Jessop, walking or standing with his sizable harem and oversized progeny. The film adequately outlines both the history and current state of the Mormon FLDS--the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, and culminates in the recent federal raid on the Texas compound in which so many children were rescued from the sects, and in the ultimate arrest and imprisonment of current "pedophile prophet" Warren Jeffs.

The movie is heartrending, tragic, and infuriating. It details the clear sexual and mental abuse and cynical brainwashing of both the women and the children of this fundamentalist sect of the United States' fastest growing religion. Although technically this sect has been criticized by the mainstream Mormon church, the movie makes enough tenuous connections between the FLDS ans the regular Mormon religion and community to inspire any thinking creature to know that where there's smoke, there's undoubtedly brimfire.

The saddest part is to realize that there are children RIGHT NOW in these communities which are being abused in a myriad of ways--sexual, mental, through actual child labor--and that it seems that the police and government is either powerless or unwilling to help them. The most maddening part is when you realize how the FLDS is actually a massive criminal enterprise which regularly defrauds the federal government and taxpayers of America of thousands of dollars every day by putting their multiple wives and children on public assistance--"bleeding the beast" as they term the practice--and that once again, no one seems willing to step in and stop it. Here we have an honestly patriarchal school of criminality existing within American borders and yet no one-NO ONE?!--seems able or willing to step in and eradicate it!?!

If there was one feeling that I couldn't shake after watching this tragic, compelling story, it was the feeling of disgust. Disgust that we allow this kind of sick, hurtful, psychotic fundamentalism in America. Disgust that we permit it under the camouflaging, whitewashing, rhetorical panacea of "Freedom of Religion". Disgust that we waste billions of dollars fighting crazy, murderous religious fundamentalists in foreign countries while turning a blind eye to what is happening in our own backyard. If you're a person of any conscience whatsoever, you'll feel that disgust too after watching this heartrending and infuriating film.