Novel of the week: The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams

The Chosen One is a fictional story of a thirteen year-old girl named Kyra, who is a member of a polygamous community, like the real-life ones in southern Utah and northern Arizona. The community’s “prophet” assigns Kyra to become the seventh wife of her sixty year-old uncle. By custom and by doctrine, Kyra is not free to refuse this marriage. Horrible as that sounds, it’s not far off from real-life situations in these communities. Kyra’s escape is highly dramatic, but is only a slight escalation of the real experiences of defectors from polygamy. Two recent bestsellers, Escape by Carolyn Jessop, and Stolen Innocence by Elissa Wall, give firsthand accounts of the great difficulties these women faced in leaving their closed communities.

Both Carolyn Jessop and Elissa Wall were members of the FLDS Church, which entered the public eye in 2006 when the FLDS “prophet” Warren Jeffs was arrested. He was subsequently convicted on two counts of accomplice to rape. Elissa Wall, married at Jeffs’ order to her first cousin at age fourteen, was the star witness against Jeffs. The court determined that because Wall was a minor, because her marriage was not entered into by consent, and because she was not free to leave it, her reluctant sex with her husband was not consensual and constituted rape.

As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is also known as the LDS Church or Mormon Church, I am sensitive to my Church being often mistakenly lumped in with these various polygamous groups. The FLDS church fashioned its name after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but is not affiliated with it. To the contrary, the FLDS was founded in the 20th century by people who left the LDS Church and lived contrary to its teachings. Unfortunately, it’s difficult for people unfamiliar with Mormons to know the distinction. The LDS church, with 13 million members throughout the world, doesn’t often make the news, yet the FLDS church, with a few thousand members, has popped up frequently in the news within the last five years.

I regret that the negative publicity earned and deserved by Warren Jeffs and men like him is sometimes incorrectly reflected onto the LDS Church. However, I welcome light being shed on the issue of contemporary polygamy in the United States. I am glad Jeffs was convicted, but I suspect it will take much more than that one incident to loosen the terrible grip of oppression that the polygamists exercise. I hope that the The Chosen One will help to bring polygamy further out into the light of public scrutiny, so that help for its victims will be more available when they seek it.