Under the Banner of Heaven review, Culture Whisper
With any true-crime drama, facts and fictions are hard to discern and, if you look deeper, the grey areas grow and grow. As an atheistic critic, the Mormon murder series Under the Banner of Heaven feels like a more nuanced vision of the Church of Latter-Day Saints (LDS). But many in the religion have disagreed.
Writer/creator Dustin Lance Black – a former member of the church – doesn’t plunge the LDS into malevolent darkness, but certain Mormons have taken issue with how they're represented. The Atlantic writer McKay Coppins melodramatically claims the series is 'one of the most openly hostile treatments of a minority religious group to appear in popular American entertainment this century'.
But it’s exactly these predictable controversies that make this type of series a curious rarity. Not just in terms of Mormonism, but in the suggestion that religion is at least partly responsible for certain heinous deeds. Black doesn’t push this latter point too far: he empathetically differentiates between moderates and fundamentalists, or ‘fundies’, but he also examines the similarities between them.
