Church of the Lamb of God

The Church of the Lamb of God was a breakaway Mormon fundamentalist sect associated with Ervil LeBaron and, after his death, with followers who carried out killings in his name. Its history grew out of rival claims to prophetic authority within the LeBaron family. Under Ervil, a claimed revelation could recast a personal and organizational dispute as a divine command; after his death, a four-hundred-page text turned that logic into a durable record of grievance and a guide for further violence.

Origins and Rival Prophetic Claims

The LeBaron sect was founded by Dayer LeBaron, who came from one of the Mormon colonies in Mexico. It had once maintained a loose association with Rulon Allred’s group, the Apostolic United Brethren. When Allred was convicted of polygamy in Utah in 1947 and fled parole, the LeBarons gave him refuge in Mexico. That earlier connection makes the later conflict between Ervil and Allred’s followers a rupture within an existing network, not simply a contest between strangers.

Dayer had seven sons, and three would each claim at some point to be the one mighty and strong, a divinely appointed prophet who could restore the Mormon Church to the righteous path it had supposedly left after the 1890 Manifesto. The claims placed prophetic legitimacy at the center of family and sectarian competition. Benjamin LeBaron, the eldest, made his claim conspicuous in public: in an early-1950s incident, he lay in a Salt Lake City intersection and performed two hundred push-ups, treating the feat as proof of his unique status. He was later committed to the Utah State Mental Hospital. His brothers Joel LeBaron and Ervil LeBaron would become the principal rival claimants within the family’s movement.

Ervil’s Break with Joel and Escalation

In the 1960s, Joel and Ervil emerged as leading figures. Both had charisma and both claimed the prophetic title, but their relationship ended in open conflict. In November 1969, Joel, the elder brother and nominal presiding prophet, expelled Ervil for insubordination. Ervil then reported a revelation that God regarded Joel as an obstacle to divine work and required his removal. On August 20, 1972, in Los Molinos, the settlement Joel had established on the Baja Peninsula, a follower loyal to Ervil killed Joel.

That killing marked the beginning of a broader campaign. Ervil ordered further murders, and at least five additional people were killed through 1975, while more than fifteen others were wounded. In March 1976, Mexican authorities arrested him for the crimes. His imprisonment did not stop his followers from acting on his behalf. Based out of a post office box in southern California, they circulated pamphlets against taxes, welfare, gun control, and rival polygamists. In 1976, as Jimmy Carter ran for president, Ervil’s subordinates issued a death threat against him over his liberal views. The group’s activity thus joined religious rivalry to political denunciation, presenting its opposition to government and competing fundamentalists as part of the same struggle.

Ervil was released less than a year after his arrest. The official explanation was insufficient evidence; the book reports that people generally suspected well-placed bribes had also played a role. Within months of his release, Ervil arranged for a disobedient daughter to be killed and then organized the murder of Rulon Allred. Allred’s followers were people Ervil coveted and hoped to convert to his own group, the Church of the Lamb of God. The attack therefore combined an internal power struggle with an effort to draw adherents away from a rival prophet.

The Book of the New Covenants and the Posthumous Campaign

Ervil remained free until his arrest in Mexico in 1979. After extradition to the United States, he was convicted and sentenced to life in the Utah State Prison. In August 1981, at fifty-six, he was found dead in his cell, apparently of a heart attack. Before his death he had written a rambling, four-hundred-page work titled The Book of the New Covenants. It named people he considered disloyal and described what he saw as their betrayals; in practical effect, it was a list of intended victims. About twenty copies were published, and most reached his most devoted followers.

Those followers called themselves the Lambs of God. Many were among Ervil’s fifty-four children, and the group was led by his son Aaron LeBaron, who was thirteen when his father died. The children and young adults resolved to avenge Ervil by killing people named in the book. His death, then, did not end the campaign: the text preserved his accusations, while devoted followers treated its record of betrayals as an instruction to continue it. A prosecutor described the younger followers as a generation of parentless children, a characterization that points to the human consequences of a movement organized around loyalty to Ervil even after his death.

Killings, Prosecutions, and Significance

Two people on the list were killed in 1987. On June 27, 1988, the 144th anniversary of Joseph Smith’s death at Carthage Jail, three more people named in the text and an eight-year-old child were killed in attacks at separate locations in Texas, three hundred miles apart. The attacks were planned to occur within five minutes of one another and at nearly the same hour as Joseph Smith’s death. The anniversary and coordinated timing connected the killings to a remembered episode of Mormon martyrdom. The Lambs of God claimed responsibility for seventeen deaths altogether and justified their victims’ deaths as blood atonement.

The state’s response continued after the attacks. In 1993, two of Ervil’s sons and one of his daughters were sentenced to life in prison for their involvement in some of the crimes. Aaron LeBaron was captured in Mexico in 1995, extradited to Utah, and sentenced in 1997 to forty-five years in prison. The whereabouts of several other LeBaron children involved in the killings remained unknown. The Church of the Lamb of God’s significance in the book lies in this passage from competing prophetic authority to organized retaliation: claims of revelation supplied religious authorization, the written list carried accusations forward, and followers translated that inheritance into violence and criminal prosecutions.