Early in the trial, attorneys on both sides agreed to play some audio tapes of Warren Jeffs instructing girls in a home economics class at Alta Academy in the 1990s (as time had gone on, the Prophet kept up with the latest technological advances; a defense witness would testify that she kept 769 of his teachings on her Ipod and listened to one of them every morning). His lessons to the girls were long and repetitive, delivered with almost no feeling or inflection. As his recorded drone filled the courtroom, Warren bowed his head and closed his eyes, as if honoring the work of a church elder doing his best to educate and protect the youngsters of his community -- especially the females -- about to enter a world crammed with temptation and evil. The defendant was never going to testify or talk to the media, so these unedited teachings were the best available evidence for trying to comprehend him. They were the revelation of the trial. He was doing what he truly believed in doing, and his words held no irony or deception. Addressing the girls, he was absolutely solemn and sincere:
“You wake up each day yearning to please your husband…In your life are no secrets, but you keep his secrets.”
Because polygamy involves men having several (or more than several) wives, the external world tends to look at plural marriage and focus on sexual relations. How does all this work in the bedroom? Who sleeps with whom and when? Jeffs’ lessons were utterly sexless. He not only insisted that Alta’s boys and girls treat one another “like snakes,” but his manner conveyed the opposite of sensuality or desire. What leaked out instead were the emotions of someone with a desperate need to control the feelings and behavior of females. Girls or women were never to raise their voices, criticize their husbands or question male authority. They were never to challenge the men’s leadership role. This was what “keep sweet” really meant and why it was so important in the FLDS religion and the culture. As his soft and endless stream of language poured out from the tapes, the fragility of the male psyche screamed out from the recordings -- the loudest thing in the courtroom:
“If a woman rules over a man, both will lost the spirit of God…”
He didn’t merely want to hold all of modern society at bay, which was monumentally ambitious. He wanted to create a world in which men could not be hurt by the opposite sex. Inadvertently, he revealed on the tapes just how easily men could be hurt by women and how far some would go to try to keep this from happening.
His teachings had little to do with faith, as most people might think of that term, and everything to do with wanting to escape the uncertainty and mess of life itself. The lessons were a naked attempt to control other people and reality itself -- and they nakedly revealed the cruelty one needed to attempt such a thing. Jeffs, and the religious tradition he was drawing on in the classroom, handed down from Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and the other Prophets, didn’t want to give anyone, but especially not females, the chance to wound him or his protected heart. And if anyone even thought about doing that, he’d threaten them with eternal damnation.
Men everywhere had long been befuddled by women, but most tried to recognize this within themselves and adapt. They attempted to learn from intimacy and from their own sense of vulnerability. Jeffs had gone the other way with a vengeance -- if anyone questioned his authority or violated his feelings, they were giving him permission to be as tyrannical as he chose to be. If you criticized him, you undermined him as a male and he was free to do with you as he wished:
“The very nature of women is that their desire should be for the husband and to completely submit so that he should rule over you.”
His words were disturbing enough, but echoing through the courtroom they set loose larger and more unsettling questions. Fundamentalists like him had not only emerged worldwide in recent decades, but had become a troubling religious and political force. The American government was currently spending around $2 billion a week and many lives fighting a global “War on Terror” -- without much evidence to show that this war was being won or that the United States understood the nature of the enemy. On these tapes, Jeffs was revealing a source of terror inside his own mind and faith, and the effect of that was alarming. Were other fundamentalists in other religions this afraid of women and of treating them as equals? Was their need for psychological or physical violence driven by feeling this vulnerable? How did one build a foreign policy or mount a successful battle against this mindset? Did we grasp anything yet about what we were trying to defeat?
The tapes had caught Jeffs in an unguarded moment and he’d tumbled out the secrets that he and the FLDS has so fiercely protected by living in isolation for so many years.