Brigham Young University

Brigham Young University is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ flagship institution of higher learning, situated in Provo, Utah. In the book, it appears both as a conspicuously disciplined campus shaped by church authority and as the setting for a discovery that fed Dan Lafferty’s growing challenge to the modern church’s history of plural marriage.

Setting and institutional character

Provo, Utah, lies between Utah Lake and Provo Peak and serves as the seat of Utah County. The city is also home to the LDS Missionary Training Center, which sends tens of thousands of young missionaries abroad each year, and to Brigham Young University, which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints owns and tightly controls. The university is thus presented not as a detached academic institution but as a central part of the church’s educational and missionary presence.

The campus is described through its carefully maintained order. More than 99 percent of its roughly thirty thousand students are white; male students are barred from beards, tattoos, and piercings, while women face restrictions on immodest clothing and multiple ear piercings. Smoking, profanity, alcohol, and even coffee are forbidden. Students keep to the sidewalks rather than cross the manicured lawns, observing the campus dictum that Cougars do not cut corners. The neatness and rules make the university’s religious culture visible in ordinary conduct, from dress and grooming to how students walk to class.

A discovery in special collections

After completing chiropractic training, Dan Lafferty returned his family to Utah County and began an energetic investigation of the Latter-day Saints’ polygamous past. One afternoon, while searching the special collections at Brigham Young University’s library, he encountered a fifty-one-page typescript of a nineteenth-century tract advocating plural marriage, The Peace Maker. Its title page identified the work as published in Nauvoo in 1842 and named Joseph Smith as its printer.

The tract supplied Dan with more than an archival curiosity. It set out a biblical defense of plural marriage and argued that the practice could remedy problems associated with monogamous relationships; its argument also placed women in a subordinate position to their husbands. Finding this text at the university gave Dan a concrete historical document to weigh against the modern Church’s course. The book presents the episode as part of his wider research, not as proof that the university endorsed the tract’s claims.

Place in Dan Lafferty’s inquiry

The campus and the library occupy different but connected roles in the account. The university’s tightly regulated environment embodies the institutional discipline of contemporary Mormon life, while its special collections preserve a text that Dan uses in examining the religion’s earlier practice and defense of plural marriage. The contrast is not that the book depicts the university as repudiating its own history; rather, a search within its library brings Dan into contact with evidence that deepens his investigation.

Brigham Young University therefore matters to the narrative as both a physical center of the modern church’s educational world and a research setting in Dan’s movement toward Mormon fundamentalism. The discovery of The Peace Maker does not by itself explain his later beliefs, but it marks a specific point where his historical inquiry encountered a document that supported his scrutiny of the church’s abandonment of plural marriage.