Children of God and Children of the Devil

Children of God and Children of the Devil is a stark doctrine of moral division that organizes Dan Lafferty’s account of humanity into two permanently opposed groups. It is more than a distinction between good and bad conduct: in Dan’s telling, people inherit an unchangeable spiritual identity, and that identity determines how he reads love, political authority, the end of the world, and murder.

An Unchangeable Division

Dan describes humanity as divided between those chosen to be children of God and those who became children of the devil. In his formulation, a person is either a brother, belonging to God, or an enemy belonging to the devil; no action can move someone from one side to the other. The distinction makes moral identity prior to individual choice, placing people inside an absolute scheme rather than judging them by particular deeds.

He associates the two groups with opposite emotional capacities. The children of God possess love, which Dan says the devil cannot understand or give; those belonging to the devil are characterized instead by greed, hatred, envy, and jealousy. This contrast gives love a diagnostic function in his worldview: it is not merely a virtue but evidence of which spiritual family a person belongs to.

A World Awaiting Its Harvest

Dan’s division of humanity supplies the cast for an apocalyptic account of history. He imagines Christ promising a thousand-year reign on earth, preceded by six thousand years in which the devil’s children dominate an earthly hell and God’s children endure life within it. Their suffering becomes accumulated credit toward the promised thousand-year celebration; at the end, Christ will return and the earth will be harvested, with the devil’s children removed.

Dan connects this scheme to his conviction that he is Elijah, a forerunner charged with preparing for the Second Coming. He regards organized institutions as part of a world run by the devil’s children and imagines that the children of God must be shown whom to recognize when Christ comes. The division therefore provides both a cosmic explanation for present disorder and a claimed purpose for Dan’s own place in the final events.

Apostasy, Authority, and Belonging

The book also places this absolute division alongside the boundary-making practices of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. In Colorado City, members are forbidden to watch television or read newspapers, and they are barred from contact with outsiders and relatives who have left the faith. When DeLoy Bateman left, Rulon Jeffs ordered that DeLoy’s wives and children be taken from him under the belief that family members belonged to the priesthood rather than to their husbands or parents. DeLoy’s wives refused the order and stayed; most of the children left the religion with them.

The condemnation of apostasy makes religious departure more than a change of belief. Warren Jeffs described an apostate as exceptionally dark and as serving Lucifer, while teachings recalled by Debbie Palmer threatened that those who left would be cast into outer darkness. These examples do not make every institutional rule identical to Dan’s personal theology, but they show how a strict division between the faithful and the rejected can intensify the consequences of dissent, isolating former members from family and community.

Violence Recast as a Religious Role

Dan applies the division with particular force to violence. He interprets the biblical harvest as a time when Christ’s angels will gather and kill those who do not belong to him, and he says that killing Brenda Lafferty and Erica Lafferty was, in part, a foreshadowing of that event. He understands the angels not as winged beings but as men on earth carrying out what they believe to be their Father’s work. In this interpretation, violence becomes a claimed instrument of divine sorting rather than an act to be judged on its human consequences.

The same framework shapes Dan’s account of his brother Ron. Dan speculates that Ron’s voices were instructions from the devil, and he interprets Ron’s reported physical training in prison as a possible sign that Satan was preparing him to kill Dan and delay the harvest. He believes God will prevent that outcome and sees the danger as confirmation that the final conflict is near. The reasoning makes contrary evidence part of the prophecy’s apparent confirmation: threat itself can be read as proof that the cosmic division is real.

The doctrine’s interpretive power is also its danger. By treating people as permanently righteous or evil, Dan’s account subordinates the particular lives and actions of individuals to a totalizing spiritual classification. His explanation of the murders does not establish divine authorization; it records how he recasts a grave crime as participation in an apocalyptic struggle. The book presents that claim as Dan’s interpretation, revealing how a worldview of fixed moral enemies can turn a promised future judgment into a justification for violence in the present.