Sister Wives, White Supremacy, and America
A Memoir of Myth, Body, and Becoming
Dedication
For the ones who left the myth.
For the ones still inside it.
For the ones who choose to live.
Epigraph
“And I looked, and behold, it was good.”
Table of Contents
Author’s Note – This is a reckoning.
Introduction: I’m an Alien – Welcome to the world I was born into.
The War in Heaven – The origin myth of whiteness, chosenness, and America.
Uncle John and the Unspeakable Thing – The first crack in the myth.
The First Black Man I Met – The myth explodes.
A Skin of Blackness – Native Americans, scripture study, and Manifest Destiny.
The Body as a Battleground – Gender, power, polygamy, and the shaping of my body.
Of Course, Donald Trump – Donald Trump as inevitably, not insanity
The American Trafficking Story – Labor, exploitation, and my childhood in the bakery.
What Is Whiteness For? – A theory of whiteness as grooming for labor and war.
Shake Babylon, Shake – A mythic ritual of destruction, apology, and creative rebellion.
If I Were the Prophet of Turtle Island – If I were really The Prophet, what would I prophesy?
Author’s Note
I was born into a story.
Not a bedtime story. A cosmic one.
A myth wrapped in scripture, sealed in family prayer, and reinforced by everything and everyone around me.
It was a story about chosen-ness.
About a war in heaven. About spirits sorted into hierarchies before they ever had bodies.
About skin as a sign of righteousness.
About America as promised land.
About obedience as the only path home.
And at the center of that story was whiteness.
Glorified. Protected. Prophesied.
I didn’t question it at first. How could I? It was all I knew.
It shaped the way I saw God. The way I saw the world.
The way I saw myself.
This memoir is a reckoning with that story.
It’s a journey through the metaphysical system that raised me—a system that taught me to map virtue onto skin, to see difference as divine punishment, to fear my own desire, and to believe that being chosen meant being above others.
It’s also the story of what happened when that myth started to crack.
When I met people I was told not to love.
When I felt things I was told not to feel.
When my body refused to cooperate with the lie.
This is the story of unlearning.
Of grief, of rage, of tenderness, of holy confusion.
It’s a record of what I found in the ashes:
The body.
The Earth.
The erotic.
The truth.
I don’t claim to speak for everyone who came from where I did.
But I offer this as a witness.
A testimony.
A laying down of one myth and the planting of another—one rooted not in supremacy, but in belonging.
If you were raised in a story that never quite fit—
If you’ve been told that your joy is dangerous, your questions are betrayal, or your skin disqualifies you — or other humans — from divinity—
This is for you.
We were never broken.
We were just told to fear our own light.
And now, it’s time to come home to it.
Introduction: I’m an Alien
Hi. I’m Ben.
I grew up in the same world the sister-wife family on TV comes from.
Not exactly the same world.
I can’t claim their story, their choices, or their particular flavor of myth.
But I know the air they breathe.
I know the shape of it.
Because I was born into a story a lot like theirs.
I’m an alien here.
I come from a planet where the Earth is 6,000 years old.
Well, technically it’s more like 5,990-something—
because any day now, the world is going to end.
Not in the abstract way people sometimes say that.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
We were taught that the apocalypse was just around the corner.
That the Earth would soon enter a three-year cleansing period.
Fire. Famine. Wars. Calamity.
The wicked swept off like dust before the broom of God.
And after that?
A thousand years of peace.
A millennial reign with Jesus Christ himself sitting on the throne, ruling as king.
That was the plan.
That was the expectation.
It’s also, I would argue, one of the many ways that apocalyptic cult thinking helped prepare America to choose Donald Trump.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
This is the world I come from.
A world of prophecy and patriarchy.
Of chosen-ness and curses.
Of divine hierarchies and desperate hope.
We were ready for it all to fall apart.
In fact, we were counting on it.
But here’s the thing about being raised in a story where destruction is holy and survival is righteousness:
You start to believe that collapse is not only inevitable—
it’s desirable.
Because if the world falls apart, maybe we finally get a clean slate.
Maybe we finally get to start over.
Maybe we finally get to remake it.
And if we’re going to remake it—
I think we should remake it into something beautiful.
Not into another empire.
Not into another hierarchy.
Not into another theology of winners and losers.
Something softer.
Something wilder.
Something honest.
This book is about the myth I was given—
and the myth I am choosing to plant in its place.
Welcome.
Chapter 1 – The War in Heaven
Before I was born, I made a choice.
That’s what they told me.
Not a small choice, like what toys I wanted for Christmas or which mom I liked best that week. A cosmic choice. A war-level choice. A choice so big, it happened before Earth even existed.
You don’t remember it, they said, but you were there. All of us were.
We were spirit children in heaven, living with God—who we called Heavenly Father—because He was, literally, our dad. Not metaphorically. He made our spirits the way people make babies, except without bodies. Just spirit children floating around like glowing embryos of divine potential.
And God, being a good dad, wanted us to grow up to be like Him. Which meant we needed bodies. And we needed a world where we could prove ourselves worthy of His glory. Enter: Earth. The great testing ground. The sacred obstacle course. The eternal Hunger Games of righteousness.
But there was a problem. God looked down at all of us and, apparently, got real honest. He saw that we were all going to fuck it up. None of us would be perfect. None of us would make it back to Him on merit alone.
So God did what good dads do: He called a family meeting.
He gathered all His spirit children—billions of us—and presented the dilemma. “I want you all to come to Earth and get bodies,” He said. “But you’re going to sin. So I need someone to help.”
That’s when two of His sons spoke up.
The first was Jesus. The oldest. The golden boy. “Send me,” he said, “and I’ll go down and live a perfect life. I’ll be sacrificed. I’ll pay the price for everyone’s sins. That way, anyone who believes in me can come home.”
Big, bold, noble.
Then Lucifer stepped forward. The second son. The edgy one. “Send me,” he said, “and I’ll make sure nobody sins. I’ll force everyone to do what’s right. That way, we all come back.”
Efficient. Authoritarian. Problematic.
God chose Jesus.
And Lucifer, being a drama queen, lost his shit. He rallied a third of the spirits to his cause. “Fuck this!” he shouted (probably). “We could’ve had a perfect system!” And then war broke out. Not with swords. With loyalty. With eternal consequences.
Jesus’s side won. Lucifer and his followers were cast out. They would never get bodies. They became the demons—spirits of rage and jealousy, roaming Earth like invisible wasps looking for cracks in your righteousness.
But here’s the part that haunted me more than the demons.
There was another group. The ones who didn’t fight at all. The fence-sitters.
They didn’t choose Jesus. They didn’t choose Lucifer. They just waited to see who would win. And when the war was over, they got a punishment too.
“They get bodies,” my dad explained one night after scripture study, his voice low and firm. “But not the blessings. Not the priesthood. Not the light.”
We were all sitting on the couch. The air was warm and still. Popcorn bowl nearly empty. The scriptures closed on his lap like a courtroom verdict.
“They’ll be born cursed,” he said. “As a reminder. So we’ll know who they are.”
I was maybe seven. Maybe eight. And I remember the words like they were etched into my skin.
Born cursed.
It wasn’t said with hate. That’s the twisted thing. It was said with reverence. With sorrow. With the gravity of divine justice.
My sister asked, “But how will we know who they are?”
My dad adjusted his glasses. “The Lord marked them,” he said. “Just like He marked Cain. With dark skin.”
I looked down at my own pale arms. My freckles. My Mormon-gold hair. And I felt it: relief. Gratitude. Superiority, though I wouldn’t have dared name it. I was not cursed. I had chosen right.
I was white.
I was white.
I was in Wyoming.
I was a boy in a priesthood line born to a polygamist father on the high plains of Zion’s back porch.
Which meant I wasn’t just not cursed. I was valiant.
That’s how it worked.
The more righteously you had fought in the War in Heaven, the closer you were born to the restored gospel. And the restored gospel was in Utah. Which meant God’s favor could be measured, approximately, by proximity to Salt Lake City.
We didn’t say it out loud like that, of course. But it was there, underneath everything. Like mineral deposits of divine worth.
White was righteous.
Brown was cursed.
Black was evil.
And we, the children of polygamy, were the spiritual elite—the purest spirits, saved for the last days, placed in homes that practiced “the Principle” because God knew He could trust us with more.
The logic was airtight, if you didn’t breathe too deeply.
It explained everything: why we were poor, but proud. Why we lived in trailers, but felt chosen. Why our family was big and hidden and holy. Why some people were born to lead and others were born to follow. Why Black people couldn’t hold the priesthood. Why Native Americans lived on reservations. Why mixing races was not just discouraged, but spiritually dangerous.
God had sorted us before we even showed up.
And we were the ones who made the cut.
I didn’t know, back then, that this same logic had been used to justify slavery. That Brigham Young had said intermarriage with a Black person should be punished by death. That the curse of Cain and the curse of Canaan had been used to sanctify genocide, colonization, apartheid, and American exceptionalism in every form.
I didn’t know I was carrying a weapon.
I thought I was carrying the truth.
But even then—before college, before debate tournaments, before I’d ever met a Black person in real life—there were cracks in the glass.
Tiny, quiet doubts.
Like: if God is all-loving, why would He set some people up to lose?
If skin is just skin, why does mine make me special?
If Jesus died for everyone, why does the atonement have a waiting list?
I couldn’t ask those questions out loud. Not yet. But they flickered in the back of my mind, like warning lights on the dashboard of my soul.
Still, I held onto the myth. Because it explained everything. Because it gave me a place. Because it made me feel safe.
And because I hadn’t yet learned the cost of believing it.
Chapter 2 – Uncle John and the Unspeakable Thing
I became obsessed with fence-sitters.
I imagined them drifting like ghosts between the armies of light and darkness, afraid to choose. I wondered what it felt like to be so indecisive that you ended up cursed. I tried to picture their faces. I wondered if they knew, in spirit form, what their hesitation would cost.
I imagined the War in Heaven like a movie—Jesus in shining robes, Lucifer in black armor, the righteous spirits in glowing ranks behind their generals. And in the middle, the fence-sitters: blurry, indecisive, forever on pause.
That was the horror story beneath my childhood.
That you could be born into loss.
That your body could betray you before you’d ever taken your first breath.
It made me grateful for my whiteness.
And terrified of losing it.
And so I listened carefully when adults talked about race. I listened for cues. I watched skin like it was a spiritual barcode.
I knew, in the coded language of the myth, what whiteness meant: proximity to righteousness.
I also knew, instinctively, that you weren’t supposed to say that part out loud.
Until one day, my dad did.
I was in the living room, probably reading a dinosaur book or letting my blue Brachiosaurus march across the arm of the couch. Uncle John and Aunt Jennifer were visiting—my mom’s sister and her new husband. They were the first Burrells to come to the ranch after the wedding, after Mom had become Wife Number Two.
I remember the voices in the kitchen. Tense, polite, slightly too cheerful. And then my dad’s voice rising, steady, certain.
Something about “the curse.” Something about how “some people” were “meant to serve.”
And then Uncle John’s voice: incredulous, skeptical. “So… you’re saying Black people are supposed to be servants?”
And my dad said it.
He fucking said it.
“Well, yeah. Better a servant in my house than growing up fatherless in the inner streets of the big city.”
I froze. My hands gripping the edges of the book. My dinosaur forgotten.
I didn’t know what “inner streets” meant. My dad had barely been to Salt Lake, let alone a real city. But I knew what that sentence meant. I knew what he had just said. And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t just afraid of being wrong—I was ashamed of being heard.
Something twisted inside me. Not because I disagreed yet, not fully. But because I knew you weren’t supposed to say that. Not out loud. Not to outsiders.
And I remember thinking—not with words, but with a child’s deep instinct—you shouldn’t have told him that, Dad.
If you’re going to believe something that ugly, at least be smart enough to keep it hidden.
That was the beginning of the end.
I didn’t say anything that day. I don’t think Uncle John did either.
But something changed.
It was like someone had yanked back the curtain, just for a second, and I saw what we were actually doing. What my dad was actually saying. Not in religious terms, not in Book of Mormon vocabulary—but in plain, brutal English.
And even though I didn’t have the words for it yet, I felt the rot under the story.
The lie wasn’t just uncomfortable. It was designed. It was efficient. It was American.
Because here’s the thing I came to understand later:
Mormonism didn’t create white supremacy.
It just dressed it up in scripture and gave it a prequel.
The war in heaven?
Just another way of saying some souls are born to lead and some are born to serve.
The curse of Cain?
Just a spiritual justification for slavery.
The Lamanites’ “skin of blackness”?
Just another Manifest Destiny myth to ease the conscience of colonizers.
The entire religion—my whole metaphysical world—was not separate from America. It was America.
Just more literal. More structured. More… homemade.
Because America, too, was built on chosen-ness.
The Founding Fathers didn’t say “We the People” and mean everybody. They meant white landowners.
The Constitution didn’t accidentally forget Black people. It counted them as three-fifths.
The American Dream wasn’t offered to Native nations. It was built on their bones.
And Mormonism, with its cosmic timelines and cursed skin tones, just offered the most airtight moral defense of it all:
God wanted it this way.
Of course He did.
He’s white, after all. And He lives in Kolob.
It hit me, slowly at first, then all at once:
The religion I grew up in was not opposed to the American empire. It was a fan fiction of it.
Same characters. Same violence. Same self-justification.
Different costumes.
Mormonism didn’t rebel against the genocide of Indigenous people—it claimed to prophesy it.
It didn’t mourn slavery—it offered a cosmology in which it made sense.
And I had believed it.
Not just the doctrines.
The logic.
The rightness of white dominance.
Not because I was hateful.
Because I was taught. Because I was immersed. Because it was baked into the walls of our trailer and the books on our shelves and the blood in our bodies.
We weren’t just racist.
We were divinely correct about it.
And that’s the most dangerous thing of all.
Chapter 3 – The First Black Man I Met
I was seventeen.
Still wrapped in the myth. Still trying to wear it like it fit.