Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven (2003) and the Dustin Lance Black television series based on the book and sharing its title, are ostensibly about the brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints living in suburban Salt Lake City, the Laffertys are drawn into Mormon fundamentalist movements and eventually commit murder. But both works have greater ambition than simply telling the Lafferty’s gripping and important story. Both Krakauer and Black want also to comment on the nature and meaning of religion in general, and the Mormon movement in particular. The miniseries shows how conversation about Mormonism has evolved in the twenty years since the publication of Krakauer’s book.The basic facts of the story on which both are based are the same. Over the course of the early 1980s, Ron and Dan Lafferty grew interested in the teachings of the Mormon visionary Robert Crossfield. Sometimes calling himself the “prophet Onias,” Crossfield began receiving revelations in the 1960s condemning the leaders of the LDS Church for their abandonment of countercultural practices like polygamy. He was excommunicated from the LDS church in the early 1970s, and founded his own branch of the Mormon movement, the School of the Prophets. By 1983, the Lafferty brothers had joined Crossfield, only to be ejected from the School of the Prophets when they claimed that God wanted them to punish their sister-in-law, Brenda Lafferty, for urging her husband Allen not to embrace his brothers’ teachings. Ron and Dan Lafferty killed Brenda and her fifteen-month-old daughter Erica in July 1984.These are the bare bones of the story. But Krakauer and Black shape the narrative in different ways. Krakauer’s book, published at the height of the New Atheist movement, centered on the work of authors like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, reads like a sweeping condemnation of religion in general. “Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off. Anything can happen,” Krakauer writes (xxiii). The particularities of Mormonism interest him only insofar as they illustrate his broader thesis, and the book has been critiqued for its sloppy understanding of the history of religion and the ease with which Krakauer blurs the lines between the LDS Church, fundamentalist Mormonism, the terrorists who happened to be Muslim that instigated the tragedies of September 11, 2001, and religious people of all sorts—from Roman Catholics to Hindus. Krakauer misses how concepts like common sense and reason are not normative, but rather are the products of history. For him, the baseline of appropriate human behavior is the scientific rationalism of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Western modernity. In this, Krakauer is echoing the language of Harris and Dawkins, scientifically trained atheists notable for their somewhat naive glorification of scientific ways of knowing.To demonstrate his thesis, Krakauer weaves the story of the Lafferty family with historical flashbacks into the story of Joseph Smith and the founding of the Mormon movement. The TV series follows this method and somewhat echoes the argument. But Black is more interested in the experiences of lay Mormons than is Krakauer, and is less given to the author’s grand sociological pronouncements.The book was often criticized for its seeming inability to make distinctions between the culturally conventional Mormonism of the sort that famous LDS Church members like Mitt Romney practice and that of the self-consciously countercultural movements like the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The miniseries is much more attuned to these distinctions, likely due to Black’s consultation with scholars of fundamentalist Mormonism. Unlike Krakauer, Black builds the story of the Laffertys around a fictional character, a police detective named Jeb Pyre, a devout member of the LDS Church. As Pyre wanders across the landscape of suburban Utah, he encounters Mormons of all stripes, and his investigation of the murders of Brenda and Erica leads him into an exploration of the history of his own church and growing skepticism about its truth claims.And that, perhaps, is Black’s point. While Krakauer’s interest in the story reflects his generalized suspicion of religion, the miniseries reflects the world of the American millennial generation of the LDS Church. Pyre’s journey is like that of Black himself, who has spoken about how his happy childhood in the Church fell apart as he came to terms with his identity as a gay man in a Church devoted to the nuclear heterosexual family, and as he learned more about the raucous nineteenth-century beginnings of the faith. The work of scholars like Jana Reiss (The Next Mormons, 2019) have begun to systematize and analyze the emergence of an ex-Mormon identity and conversion narrative, one that links coming to knowledge about the Church’s past to an inevitable loss of faith and presents it as a turning point analogous to those described in many Protestant conversion stories. Therefore the plot of the miniseries, unlike that in the book, ultimately belongs to the fictional character of Jeb Pyre rather than to any of the Laffertys. It is not so much a story of a murder or of the fragmentation of modern religion as it is an account of disillusionment.Black doesn’t share Krakauer’s conviction that all forms of religion are essentially the same and inherently destructive. Indeed, his series shows some real affection for Pyre’s religious life early in the series, even if it resembles other popular depictions of members of the LDS Church as simultaneously kind and ridiculously naive. Black instead is driven by the desire to point out that the LDS Church is built upon the fraught foundation of mendacity and repression that he believes Joseph Smith and Brigham Young laid. It is not that religion in general is a delusion; it is that the history of the LDS Church irrevocably demonstrates that it is in particular.There are genuinely fascinating questions about the sociology of the Mormon movement in the Lafferty story. How might a religious tradition built on the premise of consistent and ongoing revelation and a lay priesthood simultaneously support an elaborate priestly hierarchy? Such tension has consistently birthed Robert Crossfields. And yet, Black’s account consistently reaches too far in his presentation of Smith and Young and other early Mormon leaders as power-hungry con artists. Factual errors in the series undermine Black’s investigation of the issues the Lafferty case raises, but they do serve Black’s premise—that all religious belief will falter when confronted with history.