Nine Facts About the FLDS Church, Including Followers’ Belief in Imprisoned Leader Warren Jeffs

The Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, known as the FLDS, is a polygamist group that split from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints more than a century ago. According to the source, its ancestors broke away over polygamy after the Mormon church renounced the practice.

Members call their community “The Creek.” It covers the twin towns of Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, which straddle the state line. About 10,000 people are believed to live there.

Warren Jeffs became the group’s leader after his father died in 2002. The source reports that many members still regard Jeffs as their “prophet” and believe he controls the church, although he is serving a life sentence in prison for sexually assaulting two girls. One of them was 12 years old and whom he considered one of his wives. According to former member Joe Broadbent, followers are expected to stop every hour to pray for Jeffs’s release, and Broadbent described periods of fasting and prayer. In a sermon, Jeffs said the role of an FLDS wife is to obey her husband and bear children. Many former female members said they were forced to marry while in their young teens, and some said they were forced to marry distant cousins. Protecting the vulnerable is the concern at the center of these accounts (Proverbs 31:8-9).

The source states that FLDS teaching holds that women cover their bodies from neck to ankle because the body is sacred and must not be exposed, and that women do not cut their hair because they will need it in heaven to wash men’s feet as an anointing. After Jeffs rose to power, he reportedly introduced strict rules and banned most forms of entertainment, including dogs, toys, television, newspapers, the internet, birthday and Christmas celebrations, festivals, parades, camping and fishing. Joe Broadbent and his sister Sabrina Broadbent, both former members who left years ago, described these rules.

The twin towns’ public school had been closed for 13 years after Jeffs ordered families to withdraw their children and home-school them using teachings from FLDS leaders, including Jeffs, a former schoolteacher. He viewed the public school as an evil influence. The school has recently reopened.

Former members also said that Jeffs’s face appears on every FLDS child’s school notebook. They claimed that FLDS schools teach that Jeffs is the president of the United States and that a man never landed on the moon because God guided Neil Armstrong away from it. The source presents these as claims made by former members and does not independently confirm them.

At the north end of the community is an abandoned man-made cave, a network of tunnels drilled about 100 yards into the mountainside half a century ago. The source says it was designed to protect the FLDS from a government raid.

The nonprofit Defenders of Children has set up a fund for Sabrina Broadbent, Charlene Jeffs and other FLDS families.

Source: Read the original report