...LDS Church authorities bristle visibly when Mormons and Mormon Fundementalists are even mentioned in the same breath. As Gordon B. Hinkley, the then eighty-eight-year-old LDS president and prophet, emphasized during a 1998 television interview with on Larry King Live, "They have no connection with us whatsoever. They don't belong to the church. There are actually no Mormon Fundementalists."

Nevertheless, Mormons and those who call themselves Mormon Fundamentalists (or FLDS) believe in the same holy texts and the same sacred history. Both believe that Joseph Smith, who founded Mormonism in 1830, played a vital role in God's plan for mankind; both LDS and FLDS consider him to be a prophet comparable in stature to Moses and Isaiah.

Mormons and Mormon Fundamentalists are each convinced that God regards them, and them alone, as his favored children: "a peculiar treasure unto me above all people."

But if both proudly refer to themselves at the Lord's chosen, they diverge on one especially inflamatory point of religious doctrine: unlike their present-day Mormon compatriots, Mormon Fundamentalists passionately believe that Saints have a divine obligation to take multiple wives. Followers of the FLDS engage in polygamy, they explain, as a matter of religious duty.
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The LDS Church happens to be exceedingly prickly about its short, uncommonly rich history - and no aspect of that history makes the church more defensive than "plural marriage."

The LDS leadership has worked hard to persuade both the modern church membership and the American public that polygamy was a quaint, long-abandoned idiosyncrasy practiced by a mere handful of nineteenth-century Mormons.

The religious literature handed out by the earnest young missionaries in Temple Square makes no mention of the fact that Joseph Smith - still the religion's focal personage - married at least thirty-three women, and probably as many as forty-eight. Nor does it mention that the youngest of these wives was just fourteen years old when Joseph explained to her that God had commanded that she marry him or face eternal damnation.

Polygamy was, in fact, one of the most sacred credos of Joseph's church - a tenet important enough to be canonized for the ages as Section 132 of The Doctrine and Convenants, on of Mormonism's primary scriptural texts.

Fundamentalists believe they are following the "true" Mormon faith as laid down by founder Joseph Smith, while the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is "out of order" because of its disavowal of plural marriage, the United Order and other early doctrines.

The LDS Church's 1978 decision to give the priesthood to black men, in particular, galls fundamentalists.

But it is their marriage views that are most often noted by outsiders.

All trace their priesthood authority to conduct plural marriage back to LDS Church President John Taylor, whom they say had the doctrine confirmed to him in a 1886 revelation.

Fundamentalists believe monogamy is limiting for both men and women -- men because their sexual drive enables them to father more children than one woman can bear, and women because a certain percentage will never find a worthy man to marry and thus be unable to fulfill God's edict to "be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth."

Plural marriage allows a man and his "ladies" greater opportunity to provide bodies for waiting heavenly spirits and increases their ability to populate this and future worlds; righteous plural marriage brings access to the highest degree of the Celestial Kingdom.

This belief aside, Utah's three largest fundamentalist groups have developed distinctive cultures. The FLDS church is the most restrictive when it comes to lifestyle.

Independent fundamentalists believe these organized groups are in error given early counsel to avoid structure or collection of tithing