‘Deprogramming’ from the FLDS, Warren Jeffs’ secretive cult

This is the second in a two-part series about the FLDS. Read the first story here.

SALT LAKE CITY — The day Kenneth Thomas left his wife, Margaret, and their eight children, he hoped she would “wake up” from the spell she was under and abandon the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or FLDS, the secretive religious sect they belonged to, so the family could soon be reunited on the outside.

“Everyone was crying. My son asked me not to go. I said, ‘One day you guys will understand. Just know I sure do love you. I will make it all right.’ I gave them all a hug. I held my wife’s hand, then I got in my car and left,” Thomas, who goes by the name Ben, says now, choking up at the memory.

It’s been nearly two years since his departure, and Thomas’ family is still under the spell of the FLDS. Margaret and Ben, who had been together 17 years when he left, are getting a divorce. Deep down, he says, they still love each other, but the church elders have driven them apart. His children, who range in age from 4 to 18, give him the silent treatment when he visits. They have been indoctrinated, he says, by the orthodoxy of the sect, which holds that followers who leave or are excommunicated are “of the devil” and must be condemned.

A splinter group of the Mormon Church that broke away at the end of the 19th century, when the religion banned polygamy, the FLDS has survived as an outlaw sect ever since. Most of its roughly 10,000 followers live in the remote settlement that straddles the twin towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona. Despite its attempts at seclusion, over the past decade, the FLDS has repeatedly made headlines around the world after its anointed leader, the “prophet” Warren Jeffs, was hunted down and jailed for aggravated sexual assault in 2011. To his flock, however, he remains the voice of God and relays his edicts from behind bars via his younger brothers Lyle, a bishop in the church, and Nephi, who used to be Warren Jeffs’ personal assistant.

Thomas’ story is not unusual for families in the FLDS. They can be torn apart at a moment’s notice on the orders of the bishop, speaking for the jailed prophet and thus ultimately, Jeffs’ followers believe, from God. But the harsh religious rulings and the revelation of Warren Jeffs’ crimes are driving many of the faithful away. FLDS members are abandoning the sect by the hundreds, in an exodus that is threatening the future of the fundamentalists.

Thomas believes Jeffs is losing his mind in the state prison in Palestine, Texas, where he is serving a sentence of life, plus 20 years for the sexual assault of minors. (In his heyday as prophet, Jeffs had dozens of wives, some adult, many underage.) Now, his orders are much harsher than they used to be. Many feel he is trying to control every aspect of daily life for his followers — not just the details of the outfits they should wear but also what they can and cannot eat and exactly how they should wash their hands to remain “pure.” It’s crazy, Thomas says. Children are not allowed to play in the town park, and toys are forbidden. Nonreligious books, television and almost all access to the Internet are banned.

The FLDS did not respond to a written request for comment sent to Lyle Jeffs.

In a café on the outskirts of Salt Lake City where he is nursing a cup of soup, Thomas’ eyes fill with tears as he recounts the chain of events leading to his departure. He had been away for work at an auction near Las Vegas and was driving home to Hildale when Margaret called to tell him she had met with the bishop.

“From the tone of her voice I knew something was going to be rocking my world big time,” remembers Thomas, smiling wryly. His voice has that edge of dark humor that the betrayed deploy as an alternative to bitterness.

After he drove the last few miles across the expanse of barren wilderness that keeps prying eyes away from the religious settlement, he pulled up outside his home. He saw Margaret, her mother and two of her sisters engaged in tense discussion in the front yard. Inside the house, Margaret told him that the bishop had sent word that they were to be separated from each other and from their children and suspended from the FLDS until they received judgment on what punishment they would receive for having broken church rules.

“I basically knew that meant until he kicked us out. I’ve seen it happen. It was inevitable,” says Thomas.

Thomas says he has adjusted to his new life as well as he has, partly thanks to a cathartic experience he had last year when he met an old adversary from his FLDS days. In 2007, he testified for Warren Jeffs at the FLDS leader’s trial in St. George, Utah. Jeffs had been charged as an accomplice to rape for forcing 14-year-old Elissa Wall to marry her first cousin. (In the FLDS, “celestial” — i.e., unofficial — marriages are a common way to get around polygamy laws.) After fleeing the sect at the age of 18, Wall became prominent as an anti-FLDS activist. She was famously one of the few witnesses to testify against Jeffs at the trial.

Late last summer, Thomas saw Wall for the first time since they were on opposite sides of the court battle all those years ago. Wall had contacted him to discuss a legal case in Idaho in which the FLDS was accused of sending adolescent boys away from their parents, sometimes for years, for “sins” as trivial as texting girls. Not long after, he called her and they met at a Starbucks in a suburban strip mall. “I did apologize to Elissa,” who was very gracious, Thomas says. “She told me she understands most of the people there don’t know what kind of man Warren is and they are just doing their best in life.”

When she speaks about their meeting, Wall’s sympathy about what he is going through is evident. She reckons it took her about three years to feel a sense of stability and confidence after leaving the FLDS, and now she spends her spare time helping others who have gotten out. She puts people up in her cozy ranch house until they can get back on their own two feet and helps them get a driver’s license if they need one, legal advice, a job or enrollment in a GED course.

With the FLDS’ encouragement of homeschooling, followers grow up learning holy scripture and Warren Jeffs’ pronouncements, but are sorely lacking in geography, math, history and other basic subjects. Many leave with a voracious appetite for knowledge.

Wall is currently helping a young woman who left last summer to adjust to life on the outside. Now enrolled in college classes, the woman is not ready to be publicly named because her mother still lives within the sect, in Hildale, and fears the older woman would be punished if her daughter spoke out. When church elders discovered that the young woman’s relatives on the outside were trying to get her out, she was moved to secret locations and kept indoors so her family members couldn’t locate her. She finally managed to sneak a phone call to a sister who had left several years earlier and was able to get her out.

If some start questioning themselves after leaving the sect, for others the self-doubt began long before. Ever since she can remember, Kathwren Steed has felt suffocated by FLDS strictures. As a child, she would get in trouble for being dissatisfied with reading the Book of Mormon over and over, as kids in the sect are instructed to do. But growing up in Hildale, everyone around her was devout and obedient, so she tried to follow suit. As a first cousin of Warren Jeffs, she was a high-profile member of the church, and she did her best to stifle her feelings.

When she walked out 10 years ago, Steed buried herself in books and the Internet. She reveled in her unlimited access to Google, she says, which had been forbidden lest followers become corrupted by outside influences.

Now, Steed, 26, lives in Salt Lake City, where she is sipping a beer in a downtown bar just a block or two away from the enormous Mormon temple that dominates the Utah state capital. This is the first time she has talked to the press, and with her smart bob and neat skirt and jacket, she could be any young professional in the after-work crowd. “Thank goodness for the Internet,” Steed says. “I learned how to put on mascara from watching YouTube.”

Steed was almost 16, she says, when her father wanted to marry her off to a man who was in his late 40s to early 50s and already had three wives. So she stalled for time. “I told him I had prayed about it and I wasn’t ready.”

But the problem wasn’t their age difference, the sister wives or whether or not Steed liked the man. The problem was that she was gay. In fact, she had a secret girlfriend within the sect.

“We had been best friends for ages, then all of a sudden it had happened,” she says now. The two teens broke every FLDS taboo when they shared their first kiss. “I freaked out after,” Steed recalls. “I was on my knees the entire night, praying, ashamed.” But their attraction only got deeper. Soon they were parking in dark lanes at night in Steed’s car.

“We pretty much did it all in my little Dodge Neon,” she says with a grin. They thought their secret was safe, but eventually rumors about the “best friends” began to swirl.

Her parents confronted her with an ultimatum: be damned to hell or give up her forbidden love and get married. She told them she was leaving. Her mother broke down sobbing. Her father took her for a stern lecture from Lyle Jeffs and, when that didn’t work, a spin in his car.