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The banners being raised by American militias have a particular fabric in Utah, often woven with strands of prophetic patriotism and patriarchy stretching back to the earliest days of the Mormon Church.
Church founder Joseph Smith formed the 5,000-member Nauvoo Legion in Illinois in 1840 in part because he considered the state and federal governments too corrupt to protect him and his followers.
Today, in enclaves from Morgan to Kanab, there are - among dozens of other groups - the Culpepper Minutemen, the Mormon Battalion and the Sovereign Freemen.
Like many of their counterparts in the West, they were forged out of distrust of government and fear that the Constitution is eroding. But in many cases, Mormon millennialism is the catalyst.
"They literally believe they are in the last days" and interpret perceived attacks on their rights from both a political and theological perspective, said Becky Johns, a Weber State University communications professor who has studied fundamentalist Mormons in Utah.
"They are very cognizant of time, and believe things happen in an order and that somehow there is an end," she said. "And for these types of extremists, the end is always close."
Police can't say how many such groups are operating in Utah, although there are enough to cause concern. State and federal law enforcement agencies held a secret meeting in March 1993 in Midway to share intelligence about militias and paramilitary extremists stockpiling guns and ammunition.
"The Mormon religion is fertile ground for those kinds of anti-government, we-can-take- care-of-ourselves beliefs," said Jimmy Gober, a retired 25-year veteran of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
"There are groups all over Utah waiting for Armageddon."
In Sanpete County, for instance, Gober once found himself in a basement where the homeowner had stashed 137 SKS rifles - a cheap, Chinese-made semi-automatic carbine patterned after the AK-47.
In northern Utah, he said, some groups "parcelled out" an entire boxcar of SKS ammunition, likely intent on burying it. All of it, he said, was legal. And very, very scary.
"Some of these groups are seeing evidence and signs of the last days in all that is happening around us,"Gober said. "They're coming around to the idea that government is the Anti-Christ."
Mormon Church authorities declined an interview about militias. A spokesman said the church's general position is that its members obey the law and those who disagree with the government work "within the lawfully established system in their attempts to make desired changes."
Militant Mormon ultraconservatives have theological underpinnings to their political beliefs that others - most often Protestants - don't have, said historian D. Michael Quinn.
Conspiracy theories come easily to believers in the Book of Mormon, which warns of " secret combinations" involving judges, military leaders, and regular folk who become linked with bandits and common criminals.
"It is an historical event, and the book warns its 19th century readers to beware of future secret combinations,"Quinn said. "There is a very clear doctrinal basis to be on the lookout for conspiracy."
Sometimes they find it. For instance, while patriotic southern Utahns wrapped themselves in the flag during the Cold War, their government was knowingly enveloping them in clouds of deadly radiation from atomic tests in Nevada.
"Now they're saying, 'My God, they haven't just taken advantage of people we don't like, they've taken advantage of us,'" Quinn said. "The paranoia once directed at the Communist conspiracy is now directed at the federal government."
Another strand of Mormon belief - particularly strong in the 19th century - is in the ideal of a literal kingdom of God on Earth that supplants a strictly secular government with a theocracy. Johns points to the Mormon idea of "Zion" as being "far more than a description of a perfect and blessed land where all do God's will. It was meant to be a political order, and ... the fundamentalists pick up on that," she said.
In the West, neo-Nazis, skinheads and Christian Identity followers also are part of this milieu. And in Utah, Idaho, Arizona and a few surrounding states, fundamentalist Mormons - often polygamists - mix in.
Quinn thinks it is no coincidence that ex-Green Beret James "Bo" Gritz - a one- time Mormon convert and 1992 populist presidential candidate - received more votes in Utah than any other state: 28,602.
Gritz, a tough-talking constitutionalist with government conspiracy theories, thinks, for instance, that the CIA could have been behind the bombing in Oklahoma City. He also helped negotiate the end of a bloody standoff between Idaho white separatist Randy Weaver and federal agents in 1992.
"I've personally talked to people who say that Bo Gritz just might be the Messiah," said former BATF agent Gober.
This mix of religion and anti-government feeling - often laced with racism - can brew trouble within civilian militias that often lack a rigid command-and-control structure or well-defined mission.
The Utah State Guard, a state-funded militia, was forced to disband and reorganize in 1987 after it was infiltrated by the Aryan Nations and other extremists.
A similar incident forced the disbanding of the Constitutional Militia Association in Idaho, which had 1,500 members in seven states. Radicals infiltrated its ranks and its founder, Samuel Sherwood, abandoned it. He's trying again with the U.S. Militia Association in Blackfoot.
Similar circumstances forced Cleon Skousen, the patriarch of the constitutionalist movement in Utah, to rename his Freemen Institute the National Center for Constitutional Studies.
"There was no activism involved in it at all. Its intention was to educate people, " said Skousen, a former FBI agent and Salt Lake City police chief.
"But I found some people becoming militarily minded and calling themselves Freemen. We had to change the name," he said.
"We need to clearly distinguish between people who are trying to understand what's happening to government, and may be critical of some of the adventures its taken in the past 75 years ... and those people who can't stand talking about it and have to get out and do something.
"That is a whole different picture, and a dangerous one," Skousen said.
Still, Skousen is an avowed supporter of citizen militias and counts among his friends and students Sherwood, a Mormon and Brigham Young University graduate who has done much to push the national resurgence of militias.
Another militia proponent who is a Mormon is Mark Koernke, the controversial leader of the Michigan State Militia. Oklahoma City bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh may have attended Michigan militia meetings.
Sherwood discounts any perceived proclivity on the part of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to arm and organize themselves in anticipation of the millennium.
"I do this not because of my religion, but because of my conscience," he said. "If and when it ever happens to coincide with my particular belief system or scripture, so be it. That will be God's decree.
"But if they don't," he said, "then I can say I didn't waste my time waiting for the year 2000."
Source: Salt Lake Tribune, May 1995.