Regarding John W. Bryant

Even though he’d had every opportunity to see it coming, the departure of his wife and children came as a stunning blow to Ron. Despondent at the prospect of Christmas without them, he planned to spend the holidays far from Utah, where he was reminded of his missing family everywhere he turned. Ron decided to visit a colony of polygamists near Woodburn, Oregon, headed by a charismatic figure named John W. Bryant.

Before landing in Woodburn (a farm town just north of Salem, the Oregon state capital), Bryant had established polygamist settlements in Utah, California, and Nevada. Like so many other renegade prophets, he had on occasion asserted that he was the “one mighty and strong” but he differed from his fundamentalist brethren in some unusual aspects. Bryant was a libertine by temperament, and his teachings emphasized experimentation with drugs and group sex—homosexual as well as heterosexual—proclivities seldom acknowledged by other Mormon Fundamentalists.

Such scandalous behavior was completely new to Ron, who was both enthralled and taken aback by what he saw during his extended visit to Bryant’s commune. When one of the prophet’s wives let Ron know she found him attractive, Ron was extremely tempted to hop into bed with her, but he worried that doing so might make Bryant jealous and angry, so he left and returned to Utah.

…

Around Thanksgiving of 1983, when Ron had gone to Oregon to visit John Bryant’s polygamist commune, he had been introduced to some new sensual experiences, including intoxicants. As part of their religious rituals, Bryant’s group administered wine as a sacrament, and Ron partook with the others. Having been raised in a household that was strictly abstemious, this was his first experience with alcohol, and he found it quite agreeable. It gave him a nice, mellow feeling that “heightened his sense of the spirit.” Thereafter Ron described wine as “the gift of God.”

Thus introduced to the pleasures of “strong drink” (as alcoholic beverages are negatively characterized in Section 89 of The Doctrine and Covenants).

The leaders of smaller—although sometimes no less bizarre—splinter groups, such as John W. Bryant, usually maintain lower profiles.

Like many other Independent Fundamentalists, Bryant first converted to mainstream Mormonism. Obsessed with early Mormon teachings on polygamy, he later joined the Apostolic United Brethren (the Rulon Allred group) and soon took a second wife, Dawn Samuels (not her real name), now totally disaffected from Mormonism and Mormon Fundamentalism. Dawn’s experiences with modern polygamy shed light onto the psychology of conversion to Fundamentalism, as well as on the practices of her ex-husband, who has attracted followers in Utah, Oregon, and California.

Also a convert, Dawn joined the LDS church because of its emphasis on families and eternal marriage. “Most of the guys I’d dated before seemed too immature or superficial to fit into that dream. I wanted a man of greater spiritual substance who would somehow make my life more meaningful and secure.” She had known Bryant years before in Connecticut, and they renewed their acquaintance in Utah after he married her former roommate. Though initially opposed to polygamy, Dawn, who believed her life had “become an emotional and financial struggle leading nowhere,” felt pressured to join the Allred group and to become Bryant’s second wife. Though not in love with Bryant at the time, she remembers that “part of the appeal of conversion is that they make you feel that you are something special and also that you really ‘belong’ in that group.”

Other members of the Allred group pushed her to join them as well, but Bryant was the deciding factor. “People like John,” Dawn says today, “are either sure they have all the answers or they’re in the process of getting them. Part of his charisma was that he wasn’t just some con man selling a bill of goods to gullible people. He was so single-minded in his own search for God that his enthusiasm created a sense of certainty. He believed that he was being led by God and his sincerity and intelligence convinced others. People trapped in nine-to-five routines without an overriding purpose can be easily motivated by someone who seems to have some answers.”

For a time Bryant and his wives remained with the Allreds, even moving to Pinesdale, Montana, where some of the group attempted to live communally. But after staying in that depressed area through one “bitter cold winter,” the Bryants returned to Salt Lake City. Within three years, Bryant was claiming a “visionary experience” in which he was told “he was the right person to fulfill a certain position in the priesthood.” Dawn relates that he claimed “Joseph Smith, Brigham Young and Jesus had appeared to him” after which “he was transported to the City of Enoch where the Melchizedek and Patriarchal Priesthoods were bestowed on him.” He was then “put through certain ordinances and then spent the next three days writing [them] down.”

With Dawn set apart as “The High Priestess of the Last Dispensation,” Bryant began bestowing his newly revealed ordinances on others. Collecting a small group of followers, which he called The Church of Christ Patriarchal, Bryant wrote prolifically while operating a Salt Lake City bookstore. Dawn joined him in highly secretive “sacred ordinances” which soon evolved into sexual rites.

Bryant would conduct a special “marriage ceremony before each time we had intercourse with someone we weren’t married to.” Dawn adds that there were various levels to this procedure: “one level was that you would have a marriage ceremony before each time you’d sleep together. The next level was that you’d be ‘sealed’ [joined or united] for a certain period of time, like a month or two. Then you were allowed to have sex with that person any time you wanted, provided John gave permission at the specific time. The third level was to be sealed into a family unit. For instance, if a single person were sealed into mine and John’s family, then all the sexual rights of marriage existed within that unit as long as John approved.” This applied to heterosexual and homosexual couplings.

Though the “sacred ordinances” were secret, they were not private. “John was always there whenever I was with someone else,” Dawn continues, “there were usually three together and John didn’t just observe. He would take part or guide us.… There were strong, caring feelings involved. I had a total of seven husbands over the years and had children by three of them. John considered these ‘holy children’ and claimed that having sex with more than one man at a time allowed the child-spirit to have a choice of more than one sperm. So the spirit could choose who would be the father. It probably sounds shocking, but it seemed like we were helping each other through this intimate sharing of ourselves. After all, John made it seem like God approved and considered it a necessary part of our spiritual development.”

Eventually Bryant’s group included a millionaire and funds were sufficient to purchase a 360-acre ranch near Mesquite, Nevada. Initially such isolation seemed desirable, but at “The Ranch,” the group soon attracted notoriety because of Bryant’s expansion of the third level of ordinances—family sealings. He was sealed within many families, and “soon it was opened up so that sex, even incest, could be with almost anyone, anytime.” The situation became impossible for Dawn. She became angry at what was happening and refused to take part when “things had deteriorated to a level that wasn’t good or Christlike.” Gradually Dawn began to feel that Bryant had lied and manipulated them to have power over them—often sexually. She described Bryant as being attracted to a polygamous lifestyle since it accommodated both his sexual and religious urges.

Once she decided to leave, Dawn feared that she would not be allowed to take her children with her. “I knew the only way I’d be able to take my children would be through a show of force.” She enlisted the aid of the local police. When the officers arrived and confronted Bryant, he argued that without birth certificates Dawn could not prove the children were hers. One officer replied that “he couldn’t image any woman in her right mind wanting a whole bunch of kids that weren’t hers.” Dawn left with the children.

Moving back to Salt Lake City, Dawn began a new life. Despite economic hardships and raising six children alone, she finished her degree at the University of Utah. She then obtained a good job and is today “determined to not fall into the trap of thinking that someone else has better answers for me than I do.”

When asked why she initially believed in Bryant’s teachings, she responds today: “He was very charismatic, very convincing. He’d show certain scriptures and then quote something out of the journals or writings of [nineteenth-century] Mormon prophets.… It didn’t seem like he was manipulating the situation because he appeared to believe in what he was saying. I didn’t realize the mind control he was using until years later. We were so conditioned to believe in biblical and Book of Mormon-era prophets that it didn’t seem unreasonable that God could work through Joseph Smith or John [Bryant].… It’s hard for me to look back and realize that I could make these ‘leaps-of-faith’ so easily. But I cared deeply about what I believed to be spiritual living that would one day lead us to heaven. And conversely I was terrified of apostasy and ending up consigned to outer darkness if I showed a lack of faith. There was an implicit view that individual doubts, skepticism, and criticisms were invalid, or possibly evil, if they differed with accepted ideas of the group. It wasn’t a giant step to take from Mormon prohibitions about ‘evil speaking of the Lord’s anointed’ to accepting John’s visionary claims to priesthood leadership.” Finally, Dawn remembers achieving a spiritual awareness that “we find God from within. Religion [can] help that process or hinder it, but it [isn’t] necessary. All those things I’d been told were necessary to find God really weren’t. That was when I felt really free of John and that whole mindset, and could leave without guilt or regret.”