Montana community divided by Mormon doctrine, land rights and tithing
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When a splinter group of Mormon fundamentalists founded the town of Pinesdale more than 60 years ago, the hundreds of acres in the Bitterroot Valley were seen as a secluded haven, a place where its followers could live communally and practice polygamy without interference from the predominant church in Utah or the laws of Montana.
Over time, those followers built their homes, their school and their church, all on land owned by the breakaway group, the Utah-based Apostolic United Brethren. The expectation was that the members’ tithing and energy would benefit the church and the community.
AUB and other fundamentalist Mormon groups have similarly seeded numerous communities throughout the Western United States and Mexico. Today, according to the latest census, 883 people live in the town of Pinesdale.
For more than a decade, though, and amidst allegations of child molestation leveled against an AUB leader, some of those residents have sought to separate themselves from the church. Perhaps most critically, they want to own the land under their homes.
AUB — made noteworthy in recent years by the popular reality TV show, “Sister Wives” — isn’t budging. It paid the taxes all these years, it maintains, and continues to own the land. A Montana judge has been asked to sort out the peculiar circumstances. The Pinesdale residents suing AUB say their livelihoods and freedom are at stake.
Pinesdale has long been viewed as an outlier in Ravalli County in western Montana, and its curious founding is a source of difficulty facing the residents who have sought to separate themselves from AUB. They claim that the “Law of Consecration,” a collectivist Mormon doctrine from the 1830s that encourages communalism through the sharing of resources, includes a provision that promises eventual ownership of each family’s personal space.
“This is a community where we want to help each other and work together,” said Peggy Lynch, who moved to Pinesdale in 1972 but is now one of the residents suing AUB.
She said the community members built the roads, the school and the store, and did so for their collective well-being. She asserts that, although members built their homes on church land, ownership of individual lots is the piece of the pie that is now owed to them.
In the 1980s, much of the land in Pinesdale was transferred to the ownership of Unified Industries (UI), the for-profit arm of AUB. Meanwhile, the town adopted a charter and became the only municipality in Montana that operates with a “town meeting” form of government. Essentially, the residents gather and vote on town affairs. Pinesdale is largely residential, with one store, a school, a church and several private businesses, most of which are on land owned by UI/AUB.
Content retrieved from: https://montanafreepress.org/2025/03/04/montana-community-divided-by-mormon-doctrine-land-rights-and-tithing/.
