Cedar City is presented as the place where education first opened a lasting breach between DeLoy Bateman and the religious world in which he had been raised. Sent there to train as a teacher, DeLoy encountered scientific accounts of the Earth that challenged his community’s teachings; the questions he brought home to LeRoy Johnson marked the beginning of a long process of doubt, though he remained in the religion for another twenty years.

Setting and purpose

When DeLoy turned eighteen, LeRoy Johnson—his adoptive grandfather and the community’s prophet—sent him to Southern Utah State College in Cedar City to become a teacher. The college was about an hour from Colorado City, but going there meant entering a world beyond the only community DeLoy had known. After completing his degree, he returned to Colorado City and taught its young people.

Family life away from home

DeLoy’s first wife, Eunice Bateman, went with him. She had been commanded by LeRoy Johnson to marry DeLoy shortly before the move, and neither spouse had previously lived outside Colorado City. Their second child was born a year after DeLoy began college. While he studied, Eunice raised the children, typed his work, and helped with his homework; she also recalled feeling like an outcast and homesick for Colorado City. Their experience shows that the move was not simply an educational opportunity for DeLoy: it relocated a young family whose daily life remained closely tied to the community they had left.

Education and religious doubt

DeLoy says he loved college, but identifies it in retrospect as the beginning of the end of his faith. He had wondered since childhood about contradictions between religious teaching and scientific truth, and LeRoy Johnson had advised the community to avoid certain questions. DeLoy had learned to set such conflicts aside. In Cedar City, a geology course made one difficult question concrete: a professor taught that the Earth was about four and a half billion years old, while the religion taught that it was only six thousand years old. DeLoy took that discrepancy back to LeRoy Johnson and asked how both claims could be true.

Return and lasting consequence

The college education did not immediately take DeLoy out of the religion. He returned to Colorado City after graduation and worked as an educator, remaining within the faith for two more decades. Yet he regarded his time in Cedar City as the point at which his eyes had begun to open. After he eventually left the United Effort Plan, he worked to encourage his younger children to think for themselves and question what the community had taught them. In the book’s account, Cedar City matters less as a destination in its own right than as a setting where formal education gave DeLoy a means to examine inherited beliefs—and where a question first voiced to his prophet became part of a much longer departure.