Children of perdition

Children of perdition is a label Dan Lafferty and Ron Lafferty applied to people they believed God had commanded them to remove. In their reasoning, the designation settled the targets’ moral status in advance, helping transform a claimed divine command into a warrant for murder.

Meaning and Moral Division

The label appears within a fundamentalist worldview that divides creation sharply between good and evil, with everyone assigned to one side. After praying, the brothers concluded that the four people named in the removal revelation must already be wicked; Dan described them as Children of perdition. Their classification did not arise from evidence presented about the four individuals. Instead, it followed from their acceptance of the revelation and the moral framework through which they interpreted it.

Application to Erica Lafferty

The expression’s use became explicit when Chip Carnes questioned whether a baby should be killed. Ron Lafferty called Erica Lafferty a child of perdition and argued that God had named her in the commandment. He also reasoned that, after Brenda Lafferty was killed, the baby would have no mother, and therefore removing Erica along with her mother would be a blessing. The label thus extended the brothers’ judgment to an infant and recast the proposed killing as obedience and supposed benevolence.

Role in the Removal Revelation

Dan and Ron Lafferty concluded that it would be wise to act on the removal revelation. Calling its intended victims Children of perdition helped them bridge the gap between a command they believed divine and the murder it prescribed: once the targets had been placed categorically on the side of evil, their deaths could be represented as deserved. The phrase therefore functions not merely as condemnation, but as part of the brothers’ reasoning for carrying out the revelation.