that after her sister fled the FLDS, “The image
my father had nurtured for a lifetime was in
smithereens” (2008, p. 55). Carolyn Jessop’s
sister returned to the FLDS, but their parents
only partially reaccepted her. Wall stated that
her parents refused to fully cease contact with
her brother Travis: “…we were not prepared to
abandon a brother and son completely” (2008, p.
84).
Both authors attested that their love and loyalty
for their parents delayed their flight from the
FLDS. Carolyn Jessop (2008) and Wall (2009)
expressed that their parents’ demonstrated their
love for their children primarily through
compliant actions. Carolyn Jessop explained,
“My happiness, in their view, was dependent on
my willingness to do the will of God, no matter
how painful that might be to me” (2008, p. 82).
(In this statement, they refers to Jessop’s father
and polygamous mother, Rosie. Carolyn bonded
with her mother’s sister-wife, Rosie: “I loved
my mother but always had the conflicting
feelings of fearing her anger and abuse. Rosie
was different. Her stability enabled me to grow”
[2008, p. 44]).
In a few cases, however, authors attributed child
abuse to the stress of parental compliance. These
authors presented their parents as victims of
circumstance who expressed their frustrations on
their children’s bodies. These parents’
nonunitary subjectivities allowed them to love,
protect, and abuse their children simultaneously.
Carolyn Jessop claimed that, when happy, her
mother was “a woman worthy of love,” but that
she often regressed into a “depressed and
volatile” state during which “She beat us almost
every day” (2008, pp. 12, 15). After an incident
during which Jessop’s school principal beat his
students, her mother was protective:
My mother was outraged by the
principal’s behavior and told us that if
anyone ever tried to hurt us in school,
we were to come home at once. She
didn’t make a connection between her
abusive behavior toward us and the
beating that happened at school. Mother
managed to think that she was beating
us only because she loved us and was
trying to make us live godly lives. She
didn’t know that our small bodies were
unable to distinguish between the two.
(2008, p. 40)
Carolyn stated, “I used to wish she didn’t love
me,” so that her mother would cease beating her
(2008, p. 13).
Carolyn Jessop also stated that physical abuse
within the FLDS was normal: “Whatever my
mother’s mental issues were, she was overall a
much better mother than many of the women in
the community” (2008, p. 16). Carolyn
attributed her mother’s violence to feeling
powerless within a loveless polygamous
marriage (2008, p. 15). She portrayed her
mother’s slow transition into a protective and
loving mother who fled the FLDS: “When my
mother left I felt unbearably alone” (2008, pp.
276, 336). She related to her mother’s eventual
noncompliance with affection. Nevertheless,
even in some memoirs void of such
transformation, authors understood abuse as
socially determined and claimed to love their
parents.
As I mentioned, former Mormon Martha Beck
(2005) recognized her mother’s moment of
noncompliance, but she dedicated most of her
book to her father. Beck attested to loving her
father, and she explained that his raping her
“wasn’t about lust. It wasn’t even about sex,
except as a form of torture or even symbolic
death. No, it was all about religion” (2005, p.
208). Despite his emotional detachment and
abuse, Beck stressed, “I have no way to judge
whether he could have found another path”
(2005, p. 297). Beck attributed her father’s
abusive actions to his prior experiences in war,
his devotion as a Mormon apologist, and his
childhood sexual abuse.
Beck (2005) detailed the physical abuse she
suffered from her mother less than her father,
but she asserted that both parents were abusive
and detached because of social conditions:
I both loved her desperately and found
her infinitely horrifying, like the Hindu
mother-goddess Kali, the source of
essential nourishment and malevolent
destruction. I didn’t understand that she
was probably profoundly clinically
28 International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 6, 2015

depressed, that her behavior was
perhaps the result of circumstance rather
than innate personality. (p. 44)
Beck attributed some of her mother’s actions to
gender norms within the Mormon town of
Provo.
Flora Jessop declared that all her siblings who
left the FLDS loved and missed her mother
(2009, p. x). Nonetheless, she viewed her
mother’s compliance as devastating to her
family and cautioned, “Blind obedience to evil is
still evil” (2009, p. ix). Her mother obeyed
demands to give seven of her children to her
father’s half-brother, a prominent and sterile
FLDS man (who was Wall’s stepfather and
Flora’s future step-father):
I would often catch Mom crying silently
to herself. She spent much of her time
staring into space, a distant hollow look
in her eyes. But she never complained.
She never spoke against my dad. She
never said a word about the seven
daughters who had been taken from her.
(2009, p. 14)
Flora Jessop explained, “I loved my mom a lot.
But sadly, because she was always so depressed
and beaten down, she had little positive
influence on my life when I was growing up”
(2009, p. 25). Instead, Flora said she found love
and affection from her grandmother, but that she
lacked the much-needed protection from FLDS
rules that she and her siblings needed (2009, p.
26).
Flora Jessop provided no evidence that her
mother intentionally abused or neglected her
children. Rather, she suggested that her mother’s
compliance limited her parenting abilities. For
example, Flora explained that after her little
sister, Ruby, failed to escape the FLDS, Jessop
told her mother it was time to change. She wrote
that she had heard enough of her mother’s
excuses for not protecting Flora from her father
raping her (2009, p. 173). She recounted how
she phoned her mother on several occasions
after she had fled the FLDS and snuck into
Colorado City (the FLDS commune) in order to
visit her mother (2009, p. 132). Despite her
overall compliance, Flora demonstrated her
mother’s conflicting commitments. Her mother
did not shun her when she visited, warned her
when FLDS authorities were attempting to
kidnap her back into the FLDS, and even visited
her once (2009, pp. 128, 132, 167).
Flora Jessop recognized her mother’s potential
to act otherwise in a controlling social
environment, and she expected such deviation
from what she thought was normal FLDS
behavior. Although Flora acknowledged her
mother’s role in her abuse, she did not express
resentment or blame toward her mother to the
extent she did her father. Despite the feelings
she expressed towards her mother, Flora’s book
presented her father as hypocritically compliant
in that he intentionally harmed his children in
ways that she suggested were excessive even in
her religious community.
Hypocritical Compliance and Detachment
Authors whose parents’ abusive behaviors
overshot religious demands wrote about parental
detachment. These parents allegedly deviated
from beliefs to drink, be adulterous, and inflict
excessive corporeal punishment, while they
forced strict religious adherence upon their
children. In response to these behaviors, authors
claimed they felt unloved because their parents
provided no protection, showed little affection,
and deviated from doctrines to satisfy guilty
pleasures. Regardless of their standard of
evaluation, all authors expressed that familial
love was normal. Therefore, when abuse
accompanied detachment, authors rarely
expressed forgiveness for their parents’ actions.
Julia Scheeres, Flora Jessop, and Brian Mackert
wrote about one or both of their parents this
way.
Scheeres (2005) held her father responsible for
physically abusing her siblings, but she
emphasized her mother’s lack of love:
When I was little and teachers had us
make Mother’s Day cards in art class
and told us to write “I love you” inside,
I’d write “no” somewhere near the
phrase. I no love you because you no
love me. (p. 333)
Scheeres wrote that the abuse in her family
resulted from a lack of love, and that children
International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 6, 2015 29