By Elin Brimheim Heinesen
WARNING! This is intense stuff! Do you want to watch a chilling documentary about the harm that fundamentalism, blind faith, and loyalty to men who claim to be God’s chosen messengers can cause? Do you want to see what happens when a ruthless man achieves god-like status and gains power over thousands of people, then abuses their blind faith in God to commit horrific acts against others?
Take a look at this incredible mini-documentary series on Netflix: “Keep Sweet! Pray and Obey!” It explores the patriarchal sect known as The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and its self-proclaimed “prophet” Warren Jeffs. Jeffs married 78 women, including 24 underage girls, some of whom were his father’s widows.
Warren Jeffs created a surveillance society for his sect akin to a prison, where contact with the outside world was forbidden, and he allowed himself and other men in the sect to enslave women, using them as mere child-bearing machines.
In addition to this, he manipulated, indoctrinated, and brainwashed everyone into believing he had the divine right to rape girls as young as 12, presenting it as “holy” marriages of the girls to God. It’s shocking how one person can manipulate others to such a degree.
The most frightening part is that even after he was exposed for secretly living an extravagant double life and convicted to life imprisonment for raping young girls, many of his thousands of followers still believe he is God’s prophet, martyred for his cause. They remain in his cult out of fear of not reaching heaven if they aren’t 100 percent loyal to him—the same man who initially deceived them into believing this would happen if they betrayed the prophet.
“The Handmaid’s Tale” isn’t just fiction. It’s incredibly disturbing to see what faith, peer pressure, and submission can do to some people, and how much cognitive dissonance they can endure.
Here’s the trailer for the Netflix series:
