Among the most notorious of the Mormon Fundamentalists is the Latterday Church of Christ, more commonly known as the “Kingston Clan,” consisting of about 1,000 members. The Kingstons separated from Musser’s group in 1935. Many of them live in Salt Lake and Davis Counties in Utah. They are probably the wealthiest polygamist clan in Utah, owning a cooperative of businesses across the state. The Kingstons achieved infamy in the nineties when John Daniel Kingston was arrested for beating his sixteen-year-old daughter for refusing to marry her much older uncle. Earlier in 1985, clan leader John Ortell Kingston was charged with welfare fraud, settling with the state for $250,000.
The True and Living Church (TLC) is led by James Harmston and bases itself in Manti, Utah. They have around 300–500 members. A relatively new sect, they are made up of dissidents from other organized Mormon Fundamentalist churches along with many independents searching for some order and structure to their religion.
In addition to the several organized groups are several thousand independents scattered throughout the United States, Mexico, and Canada. The most notable independent is Tom Green, who loved media attention and boasted his polygamous practices publicly on various talk shows in the nation. In 2002, the state of Utah used Green to set precedence for trying other polygamists for bigamy or unlawful cohabitation based on establishing marriage through common law. Prosecutor David Leavitt, brother of former Utah governor and now Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt, successfully tried the case that convicted Green of bigamy and statutory rape. Many of his wives were fourteen at the time he married them. At the time, fourteen was the legal consenting age in Utah, provided the parents consent to the union. However, Leavitt established that one of his wives conceived Green’s child at the age of fourteen. Utah has since risen the consenting age to eighteen (sixteen if parents give legal signatory consent).
The modern day LDS Church is one of the fastest-growing Christian religions. Led by President Gordon B. Hinckley, the Church wishes to distance itself from the polygamist sects, claiming that what the offshoots practice now is not what the LDS Church is about. Hinckley has asked the media to not refer to the Church or its members as Mormons, the term being coined in the nineteenth century, more as a derogatory name after the book of Mormon, scriptures that the Church members follow in addition to the Bible, the Pearl of Great Price, and the Doctrine and Covenants. Furthermore, Hinckley said recently that there are no “Fundamentalist Mormons,” preferring that the title Mormon be removed from these groups so as not to confuse them as being related to the modern LDS Church.
