A true crime documentary series about a cult where a despotic leader, who calls himself the Prophet, marries 78 wives, 24 of them underage, and predicts the end of the world in the middle of the Utah desert? Here !
Posted at 8:15 a.m.
It’s official that I walk through it in an evening without batting an eyelid and gobbling down an awkward amount of Party Mix. It is both fascinating and shocking, captivating and revolting. And very disgusting, cibole.
In line with the faithful in orange tunics farting Wild Wild Country and worshipers of Sirius – the star, not the radio – of the Order of the Solar Temple on Videotron’s Vrai platform, Netflix offers Keep Sweet – Pray and Obey (Keep Sweet – Pray and be quietin French version), on the sexual slavery that was practiced in the early 2000s in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Clarification: this is not about traditional Mormons, but about a fringe of cracked dissidents who venerate plural marriages and the colonial style of dress.
keep sweet is based on the brave testimonies of several women who have – thank God! – left this dangerous radical movement, which forced them to marry men having the age of their great-grandfather.
For four one-hour episodes of keep sweet, the ideal format for this type of production, the gloomy archive images parade before our eyes, and a particularly disgusting audio recording punctuates the fourth and last episode. We hear the nasal voice of polygamist guru Warren Jeffs preparing a 12-year-old pre-adolescent girl for an initiatory religious session.
Understand: this self-proclaimed prophet rapes a 12-year-old girl – who is also his wife – in front of a handful of his other wives. Yes, $@#&*, you are allowed to swear here. I did that plenty. Like Anne-Marie Cadieux in an epic scene from the film No by Robert LePage.
This Warren Jeffs is real scum, whose so-called piety serves as a screen for committing horrible crimes. In the fall of 2002, when he was 47 years old, this unattractive accountant succeeded his father at the head of the fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and radicalized its practices, already restrictive and completely ignored. .
Image courtesy of Netflix
Rulon and Warren Jeffs
The first thing Warren Jeffs does? He marries several of his daddy’s wives, of course! Which means, technically, that the guru passes the ring on to several of his own moms. Not fucked pretty much, the guy.
This sect of enlightened prohibits the denim of the devil and the color red, reserved for the return of Jesus on Earth. Within the group, established in Short Creek, a village straddling Nevada and Utah, the members live cut off from the real world, without newspapers, internet, television or any form of fun.
Strict rules force women to wear long type dresses little house on the prairie, under which they put on underwear that covers their bodies from the neck to the wrists and down to the ankles. As for their hair, which they never cut, they wear it in a braided bun as in the 19th century.e century.
Image courtesy of Netflix
The women of the sect must wear long dresses of the type Little house on the prairie.
The men, especially the old ones, have it easy. They live with a slew of wives, whom they force to tuck them in every night – with all that that entails. The monstrous Warren Jeffs even offered 67 young women in marriage to his guy buddies.
This rotten prophet exercises maniacal control over his flock. He spies on them with cameras and threatens to burn them in hell at the slightest nonsense.
The guru has the power to excommunicate the recalcitrant and then reassign their wives and children to other devotees. He also snatches young girls from their mothers to send them to a kind of training camp for teenage wives, deep in Texas.
There, after these very real horror film images, you are surely screaming: but why has no one fled or denounced this group before? keep sweet explain it clearly. Because these people were indoctrinated in the cradle. Because they only know this stupid view of the universe. Because they live in constant fear of disappointing the Prophet and not gaining access to Zion, their version of paradise.
And there is, this Zion. You will see it in keep sweet. It’s a place located in Eldorado (it can’t be invented), Texas, where only pastel colors are allowed.
In Zion, the Promised Land, we sing the glory of God with a huge smile on our faces. In Zion, women learn the specific role this Church of Fools has in store for them: to be gentle, to bear children, to follow the rules, and to be silent. Fortunately, some brave people disobeyed.