When my best friend Savannah and I were visiting Hurricane, Utah, outside of St. George, we noticed what appeared to be some polygamist women at a local eatery. They caught me off guard with their “prairie dress” attire and their reserved, awkward behaviors. Savannah, who knows the area well, noticed my silent response to their arrival. She explained to me that there was a town nearby, which is known to be occupied by practicing members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And with nothing to do the following day before our departure, Savannah suggested we take a trip to Colorado City, Arizona, to get a first-hand look at the FLDS culture.

Frankly, I shudder to remember our experience in Colorado City, where people worked like zombies, seemingly numb to their existence as we passed by them in our car. We didn’t see many adult men, but there were women and kids, ranging from ages six to fifteen-ish, doing manual labor in their traditional homemade clothing. Only a few roads were paved, and there were many abandoned and run-down homes and buildings.

It didn’t look like much money was being invested in the construction and proper maintenance of the town until we came across a massive compound in the center of community. Huge walls, maybe twenty feet high, with an abundance of security lighting, spanned half a block. We could see the tops of buildings with numbers printed on their faces beyond the thick concrete. I’ve since been told it was one of Warren Jeffs’ properties. Jeffs led the FLDS sect for many years. He apparently housed his wives and underage women who were illegally married off to older men, within the compound. It resembled a Nazi concentration camp, casting a dark and hopeless shadow on the humble town. We both got the chills looking at it.

Visiting Colorado City led Savannah and I to study the culture more deeply, talking to locals and researching online. In my opinion, the FLDS sect is one of the most demeaning and abusive cults active today. So much goes wrong for those who have fallen to the power of authoritative, manipulative and brainwashing leaders and the culture they support and propagate. So why do people stay?

There are various reasons why people would choose not to forgo their polygamist and FLDS lifestyles. Possibly the most dominant reason is separation from families. When an individual chooses to escape the bondage of the FLDS church, he or she usually ends up facing the loss of contact with loved ones. The thought of a possibly permanent separation from family and children is often enough to keep people from leaving. Additionally, when all a person has known growing up is the land and inhabitants of a 10 square-mile town that preaches unusual and frowned-upon beliefs, contact with the outside world probably seems daunting. FLDS members are often led to believe, perhaps rightly so, that they may not have the skills to survive outside their cultural walls. And even if they did survive, potentially violent punishments may await them later on for their religious and cultural betrayals.

In staying, however, people are forced to comply with a wasteful lifestyle of hopeless abuse and isolation. Women are raised to engage in what appear to be illegally intense levels of manual labor until they are old enough to wed and bear children. Boys, too, are forced into excessively strenuous physical labor, and, upon reaching a certain age of maturity, a few are kept within the community and “given” wives. Others are kicked out to make their ways in the outside world, contributing to the nation’s homelessness, crime and drug addiction problems. Furthermore, the illegal components of the FLDS community, and the group’s desire to maintain separation from the majority of America, make it nearly impossible for social integration, where members of the FLDS church would contribute in a real way to the betterment of this country. All of which is both a shame and a frustration for those of us who wish to put an end to such a demoralizing and corrupt religious culture.