Customer Reviews

God's Brothel: The Extortion of Sex for Salvation in Contemporary Mormon and Christian Fundamentalist Polygamy and the Stories of 18 Women Who Escaped

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This expose is badly needed.

I am not a Mormon, but I do know that the original believers advocated polygamy and later on the mainstream LDS church repudiated it. Since I don't have a thorough knowledge of Mormon doctrine so I'll not attempt to do a critique on it here.

But I do know that the kind of polygamy shown in this book is ghastly. That's the only way I can describe it.

1. First of all, the young age of these brides is unbelievable. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old. I believe that no matter what the culture, a person needs to mature emotionally and physically before marriage.

2. The refusal of many of these men to support their wives and children, making them dependent on the welfare system. This is just plain unbiblical. Even in the early cases of polygamous marriages in the Old Testament, the Patriarchs kept their wives and families fed and cared for.

3. The spousal beatings. If these people claim to believe the Bible along with their Mormon doctrines, they will have to realize that there is not one command given to men (in either the Old or New Testaments)that they can beat their wives. In one of the examples given in Moore-Emmet's book, a man hit his wife so hard that he broke her eardrum. Religion or no religion, there's one word for an act like that -- it's a CRIME! And it needs to be prosecuted as one. (By the way, the man I just mentioned was prosecuted later on.)

4. Although this book mostly concentrated on the plight of the girls, it also showed that young boys can be victimized, too -- that sometimes they are considered threats to the older men who want the young wives.

5. The slowness of the city and state governments to do anything about it. When the whole state is majority Mormon, I can understand the uneasiness about prosecuting polygamy in general, although I think it needs to be done. But how about outright abuse that is against the law? Or, for those who think they are above the law of the United States, how about against the Bible itself?

I think polygamy is set up for problems, and I'm not just saying this because I'm female. History is full of family squabbles over the children of one mother ganging up on their half-brothers and sisters who are descended from a different mother. It can breed a lot of jealousy and resentment because many men will have their favorite wives and neglect the others.

It's a thorny problem that won't go away soon. But thanks to this and other books like it, our attention can be guided to the problem and some time in the future we can find a solution. We must never forget about it.

Anyone who believes polygamy and slavery are sins of other cultures or times, will find this disturbing collection of true stories about contemporary American women who have escaped from polygamous marriages both shocking and a call to action. Readers learn about girls who are "bred" to become young brides of their own male relatives or of their father's close friends, of women denied education, freedom, and even the use of money, and of local government officials complicit in keeping the women and girls enslaved, even physically beaten.

Most chilling to me is the patriarchy's justification for polygamy, rooted primarily in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' (Mormon) history and doctrine. Although polygamy was officially outlawed by the Church in the late 1800s via a revelation (that many fundamentalists believe was politically motivated so Utah would attain statehood), the practice flourishes in growing enclaves in Utah and surrounding areas.

This powerful expose shows how the huge families of sister-wives and children drain welfare funds in order to survive and typically live in poverty while the patriarch enjoys his sexual, monetary, and religious status. It also tells of a group called TAPESTRY that is dedicated to helping the women and children escape from the religious and sexual domination of these men.

My feelings while reading this book included anger and disbelief, shock and sorrow, a voyeuristic horror, and finally pride in the women brave enough to tell their stories to the author so that the sexual predators could be "outed" and their victims, especially the young girls, offered hope of escaping the horror of this slavery. Polygamy in God's name is certainly NOT "sex between consenting adults" when young girls are treated as wombs and chattel, and given no choice in who or when they wed.

By giving a voice to the brave sister-wives, and creating an underground railroad route for others to escape, "God's Brothel," the author and other members of TAPESTRY may be the Harriet Tubmans of our time.

Andrea Moore Emmett opens our eyes to a horror that most of us assumed did not exist in modern-day America. How wrong we were. Through heart-wrenching tales told by the women who lived them we learn of a dark, dismal world in which girls are nothing more then human cattle. This is a must read for any one who doubts the existence of polygamy in the Land of the Free. This is an especially important read in light of the current threats to all women's rights.

to what horrors do go on in polygamous communities. I've read a lot about it and living in Utah and having been raised in the mormon community, I figured I had a good feel for what might go on behind the walls of these compounds and homes. The stories in this book describe pretty much every perversion and abuse I might have guessed could occur in such an environment. All it takes is an understanding of patriarchal cult/religion and power combined with human nature to figure that what these women describe makes sense.

I learned a little bit more about the state of Utah and how far it is from bringing justice and support where it is most needed. With the prevailing mainstream mormon influence within the power structures of this state, it seems they are still in the business of protecting their own polygamous doctrine and history first and foremost.

So far, the most revealing book I've read on polygamy. Others that I've read have left me feeling that there was much untold.

I was very impressed with the research into the various groups who practice Pologmy worldwide. This book has a map showing where these groups are thoughout the USA, and if they are Christian, Muslim or Fundamentalist Morman. She does explain that the Modern LDS church DOES NOT condone Pologamy, and explains why some groups continue to believe that this is the only way to heaven.

The first part of this book is a history of Pologamy, and gives a summary of many groups and how and why they got started. She makes it very clear that this is not just a "Morman" occurance, but rather widely practiced in many religions.

The second part contains 18 stories of women and girls from various groups who have chosen to withdrawal from this lifestyle, and have begun to speak out what their experience were, and how it affected them and their families. It is an eye-opening group of stories, allowing the reader inside the walls of the groups.

The people who become involved in these groups come to a believe that this lifestyle will be an escape from the stressful way the modern American lives. It appears to be a close knit family, pulling their money together, avoiding outside stressors, and living a Godly life in order to obtain lasting life in the hear-after.

Perhaps there are many groups who do practice the above: however, what this book tells is the stories where the system has gone corrupt, forcing girls as young as 12 into marriages, demanding they have a child a year, discarding males, and using the public welfare system to support the children. Education is withheld, and attempting to leave the groups can become a deadly game for the women and children.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in studying this lifestyle because it tells stories of all religious pologmany groups, and you hear the actual stories of 18

This powerful book is hard to read at any length because of the horrifying stories it contains. It is clear that polygamy (specifically the marriage of many women to one man) turns ordinary men into abusive cult leaders. Want to create your very own Jim Jones, David Koresh or Sun Myung Moon? Then tell a man it is God's will that he should marry many wives. He will proceed to ignore the emotional anguish of his wives as they try and fail to suppress their inevitable jealousy, and he will walk around as if he is perfect and beyond reproach even as he perpetrates or encourages rape, incest, child abuse, neglect, welfare fraud, and murder. Only a truly cruel God would wish such a fate on women and children. The mainstream Mormon Church should have not merely discontinued the practice of polygamy (as they did in 1890); they should have declared that the entire revelation of Joseph Smith with regard to polygamy had been mistaken. But they didn't, and as a result breakaway sects of fundamentalist Mormons still feel encouraged to engage in this destructive practice. Meanwhile, the State of Utah, being dominated by Mormons, tries as much as possible to ignore the abuses. After a thoughtful introduction by the author, this book contains the painful stories of 18 women who broke free. You will not be able to take a laissez-faire attitude to polygamy again after you read this.

The book is written by several different women who lived inside different polygamist groups. It was hard for me to believe that this type of practice still exists and it makes me sick that we allow this to continue within any state inside the U.S. I recommend this book to people interested in this subject. I read this book after reading, "Under the Banner of Heaven" and would recommend that book to anyone who hasn't read it yet - it explains the history of this religion and how the polygamy came to exist within it.

This is about Bible-based fundamentalist polygamy. This is a hot topic associated with the current best seller Escape and also Jon Krakauer sensational Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith. Those books convey polygamy is a euphemism for cults that promote child rape and women enslavement.

The author discloses a map showing Mormons and Christian fundamentalist polygamist communities spread all over the U.S. and Mexico. Some members live in major cities besides Salt Lake City such as Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Sacramento. Fundamentalists LDS (Mormons following the original scriptures of Joseph Smith) are fragmented among tens of groups. Those groups split apart to create new groups in other areas. They are lead by self appointed leaders who claim being direct descendents of either Joseph Smith or Jesus.

These self-proclaimed prophets are delusional. They rewrite the history of the world to fit their mad self glorification (pg 157). They have apocalyptic visions of the return of Christ. Some proclaim communicating with beings from other planets (pg 156). Others lead anti-government militia and believe the government controls the weather (pg. 169). A few have been arrested and placed in azylum.

Groups splitting results from rivalries. A rival breaks away from a group to start his own, declares himself a prophet. The splitting gets violent with killings under the guise of religious "blood atonement." Such killings are also aimed at members trying to escape.

The author suggests that the ills of fundamentalist polygamy emanate from Joseph Smith scriptures. She quotes his `Doctrine and Covenants': "And if he have ten virgins..., he cannot commit adultery, for they belong to him,... if one... of the ten virgins..., shall be with another man, she has committed adultery, and shall be destroyed..." Those words engendered communities that both the author and Jon Krakauer compare to the Taliban.

The author covers the history of the Mormon Church and how mainstream Mormons renounced polygamy only under military attacks from the Feds. To this day she indicates that in Utah State and police authorities make efforts to avoid prosecuting polygamy and related crimes (child molesting and rape, etc...). As polygamists referring to Utah authorities say "That prosecution dog don't hunt."

Such communities are disasters for males too. If the average male has 5 wives, this means 80% of the males are ousted to maintain this unnatural 5-to-1 female/male multiple. What happens to the 80% of males? The author states on page 50 "they are driven away... [or] stay to become worker bees ... or they die mysteriously." On page 181, she reiterates how they die mysteriously of car accidents on rural roads with no traffic.

Such societies are disasters for children. They are deprived from descent education, nutrition, and parenting. They are exploited as child labor to work for free for the businesses managed by those communities. The level of child abuse, beating, molestation, pedophilia, sodomy of young boys, and rape is sickening. On pg. 171: "My father began raping me when I was eight years old. My mother sexually abused all of us..." Herpes among very young children related to sexual abuse is common. Girls as young as nine are ordered to marry relatives sometimes in their fifties. They bear children soon after risking their own lives in the process. They never receive adequate medical care. They are taken out of school at a young age to ensure their total economic dependence.

From a genetic standpoint, this lifestyle is insane. The level of in-breeding through inter-marriages is unprecedented in the U.S. The rate of Down syndrome, autism, dwarfism, and deformities in many of those communities is sky high. Down Syndrome is hoped for by expectant parents because such individuals are compliant and bring in larger government benefits (pg. 173). Community leaders attribute those deformities as God's punishments to wives that have not been subservient. They don't know that procreating through incest, uncle and nieces, and brothers and sisters is not good.

The health of women is entirely subjugated to procreation. Women are ordered to produce a child per year regardless of their health condition. Women often have more than 10 children with little means to support any. On page 126, a testimonial describes a woman dying of brain cancer who gave birth against the advice of the doctors. She died during childbirth. Child birth is undertaken without any descent health care support. On page 136: "Brenda's pregnancy ended in miscarriage, and she hemorrhaged for four hours with out any medical attention." Treatment of women amounts to persecution (pg. 163: `Her husband had mutilated her genitals ... with fishing wire.'

From an economic standpoint, those communities are failures. They live in some form of totalitarian communism whereby all economic resources and assets are owned by the Church. The individual laborers (mainly wives and children) keep nothing. Economic subsistence is solely reliant on State and Federal subsidies. Those communities are all adept in extracting the maximum government benefits totaling in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And, they are proud of this feat. They call it "bleeding the beast" as an effort to bring the government down.

The testimonials of the 18 women who survived polygamy are nauseating. This passage comes to mind: `When Laura was four, one of her stepbrothers tied her to a bedpost and attempted to rape her... After I was crying, my father told me he would slap me until I stopped crying, which he proceeded to do... My mother made herself busy in the kitchen so she wouldn't have to watch." Another passage: `on her 16th birthday, her father took her for a ride in his Cadillac because it was time for her "Sexuality Lesson."

The book gives you much more in depth info that I don't come close to cover. This is an important book to read for anyone interested on the subject.

Over the years I have learned tidbits about polygamy from Andrea herself but reading this book put a totally different light on it. Before I could only imagine what was going on and never really knowing what polygamy was all about. Now after reading this book I want to and need to do something about this. These men are so disgusting and what these women had to endure is just amazing and extremly disturbing. With this book you go into the lives of these women and you can feel what happened to them, it's absolutly amazing. I am truly inspired that these women came fourth and told their stories and I continue to believe that these men need to be held accountable for what they are doing. They are sexual, physical, emotional abusers, pedaphiles, murders, and just plain sick!!

I thank you Andrea for giving this wonderful book to the world to read, I am hoping and praying that things will be changed because of your courage and that of all the wonderful people fighting to change this and that these men will be prosecuted to the fullest, meaning to me that they will never be allowed in society again!!

I finally got this book after reading other books dealing with these problems and all internet articles I could find for three years regarding the fundamentalist Mormons in the US and Canada.

I do not understand why a lot more has not been done to stop such outrageous practices as have been well documented by this author. I was in Utah a few years ago, prior to doing the reading I have since done, and there I saw headlines regarding the childbride problem and actual communities I now know are polygamist enclaves. (I noticed the poverty and backwardness in some areas and already had assumed the isolation and deprivation of polygamy could be the cause.)

It is sickening to know that US citizens, born here for generations back, are suffering in all these ways because the states involved will not prosecute when "religious beliefs" cross the other existing laws made to protect the innocent and naive. This book should be required for all Utah and Arizona legislators, and unfortunately, also now Texas, Colorado, Canada, Montana, and Wyoming. This is a dreadful thing to allow to continue in our great nation.