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Last Tuesday, The New York Times’ frontpage headline read “It’s Official: Mormon Founder Had Many Wives.” That Joseph Smith married as many as 40 women—one of them 14 years old, and others already married to his followers—was a rare story for national news. But it was just another day on the job for Nate Carlisle, perhaps the nation’s only polygamy beat reporter.
The Salt Lake Tribune role is no new fad; it’s been a beat at the paper since 2006. At that time, Carlisle pitched in on a slew of polygamy coverage as Warren Jeffs, leader of the polygamy-practicing Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints on the FBI most wanted list, was arrested and convicted of rape. “Back then I was the world’s only backup polygamy reporter,” Carlisle said. The FLDS, which split from the mainstream Mormon church after the latter renounced polygamy in 1890, is based in Hildale, UT, and Colorado City, AZ.
This January, Carslisle took over the beat, which he handles along with military affairs (“There’s not a lot of overlap between the two,” he said). His reporting has ranged from covering the nine FLDS boys, ages 12 to 17, who were found abused in a house in Idaho, to a child-labor court case the FLDS has tried to defend using the recent “Hobby Lobby” religious freedom decision.
Recent admissions that Mormonism founder Joseph Smith had 30 to 40 wives, and last December’s “Sister Wives” decision that effectively decriminalized polygamy in Utah (which the state is appealing) prove that polygamy news is still both relevant—and readable. “We don’t have as many stories as we once did, but when we do have them, they frequently rise to one of the most popular on the site,” Carlisle said. CJR spoke to Carlisle about the evolution of the beat, the national interest in polygamy, and common misconceptions about the FLDS world.
How has the polygamy beat changed over the last eight years?
First of all, it’s not so much of a cops beat like it was back in 2007 when Jeffs was on the run and law enforcement was pursuing him and then he had two trials. There’s a lot less crime involved these days.
There is a lot of courts, because the state of Utah still has custody and oversight of the polygamist-run trust, and that’s kind of a challenge for me, to not let this just become a courts beat. It’s tough to do, because I’m 300 miles away from Hildale and Colorado City, but when I can speak with people who are really impacted I try to put some faces to the court motions.
Since this Sister Wives case was resolved last December, cohabitation is not illegal. Do you sense that polygamists will increasingly be willing to speak out?
All I can say is that it makes sense that more of them would be willing to speak out given that the law has been struck down. It’s more of a logical assumption than it is a sense.
The important fact to remember too is [the court decision] came down at a time when there were a lot of people leaving Warren Jeffs. Some of those people are becoming more vocal. They’re not necessarily discussing how many wives they have, but they’re starting to speak out about what’s wrong in Hildale and Colorado City. So it’s a little tough to discern in some cases whether they’re speaking out because they’re free to now that they’re not following Jeffs or whether it had to do with the Sister Wives ruling.
But one way or another, there are more people talking?
That’s accurate, yes.
Joseph Smith was in The New York Times recently, and there have been legal battles that various outlets have covered. Why do you think there’s a national interest in polygamy right now?
When you’re talking about the recent article about Joseph Smith, that has as much to do with the Mormon church as it does with polygamy. It’s tough for me to say where that interests stops and interest in polygamy starts. As far as why people are so interested in polygamy—this is just a hunch—it’s just because it is so different from how so many of us live. And so they’re just curious about it for its exoticness.
Are there any major misconceptions that you feel a reporter would have to watch out for if they’re reporting for a national audience?
Oh, sure. The first one would be that the towns of Hildale and Colorado City are dangerous places. They’re not. I’ve never heard them attacking a reporter, for example, or attacking outsiders. There have been, of course, instances of sex abuse, and I don’t mean to minimize that, but that’s really about the only violence which has occurred there in the years I’ve been covering the FLDS.
I think the other misconception is that Jeff’s followers are all ignorant. They maybe don’t have as many bachelor’s degrees as the general population, but they are at least no dumber than the rest of us. They use all the technology the rest of us do. But they’ve been ordered not to communicate with outsiders, and they’ve been ordered to ignore what’s written or said about Warren Jeffs under threat of having their families taken away from them.
In that case, what are the main channels that you would use to speak with them for stories? You can’t just walk up to their front doors and start asking questions.
I do have sources down there, but here’s the trouble: Just about all the sources are people who are not part of Warren Jeff’s circle any more. So you hear about these weird orders that are given during Sunday services like, ‘don’t eat beans anymore,’ or ‘don’t drink milk anymore.’ And you try to track this down, and it’s darn near impossible because no one who was in that Sunday service will actually speak to you.
Are there any big flashpoints you can see on the horizon that you want to cover?
We’re going to have to monitor for some sort of culture change as a result of the Sister Wives case. There’s also a Department of Labor case against the FLDS which gets into their use of unpaid and child labor—that’s the one where they used the Hobby Lobby [decision] to defend themselves. There are people who continue to leave Warren Jeffs, and that’s created really two sets of polygamists down in Hildale and Colorado City—those that follow Warren and those that do not. It’s become a divisive thing down there.
As for this culture shift, do you have any hypothesis of what will change?
I’m still waiting to see if it will change. Just because the laws change doesn’t mean public perceptions have changed, and that may be keeping people in the closet as much as what’s written down on a state statute. Remember, polygamy was something done out of public view really since the turn of the 19th century. That’s a hard habit to break.
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