I'm Alan Alder and this is Clear Invid. Conversations about connecting and communicating.

What people have to understand about this place is that it was ruled by a prophet. It was

a theocracy and the prophet spoke for God. So if the prophet said you needed to do something,

that was God saying you needed to do that. And that's why so many of the people in this town,

even when things started to get worse and worse, even when Elyssa was faced with the prospect

of marrying her 19 year old cousin at the age of 14, they stayed and they did that because

it was a commandment.

That's Ash Sanders, who would say her eventually co-hosts a remarkable podcast series called

Unfinished Short Creek. It's remarkable for the riveting story it tells of people struggling

to recover from a traumatic schism in their community as it devolved into a cult of personality.

It's a story sensitively and beautifully told. This is so fascinating to have you both

on the show because you tell a story in your ten-part podcast. I'm so eager to talk to you about it

because the story you tell is amazing and the way you got to tell the story, what you went through,

was just as interesting to me. It's about short Creek. What is short Creek? What was short Creek

when you got involved with it?

So short Creek is a fundamentalist town on the border of Utah and Arizona that was settled by

fundamentalist Mormons when they split off from the mainstream church and they were looking for

a place to practice their religion in peace and that meant to practice polygamy and to practice

communal living and to do it in a place that they felt was safe from the outside world,

which was kind of kind of trying to come in and split them up and challenged their face.

So it was a town founded in the 1930s by these folks who wanted to build the kingdom of God

on Earth right in the middle of America.

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