DeLoy Bateman

DeLoy Bateman’s life in Colorado City, Arizona, is defined by a difficult separation: he rejects the faith and authority that shaped him, yet remains attached to the community where he was born, raised, and made a family. A teacher and descendant of prominent fundamentalists, he moves from questioning the claims of the prophet Rulon Jeffs to leaving the religion and, later, to atheism. His account also complicates a simple story of escape: family ties, local belonging, and the habits of religious life persist after belief has ended.

Identity and Formation

Bateman was born and raised in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. His family history placed him close to the community’s leadership: his great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather were among the church’s thirteen founding members, and his adoptive grandfather, LeRoy Johnson, led Colorado City before Rulon Jeffs. As an adult, Bateman taught science at Colorado City High School. At one point he had two wives and seventeen children, and his home in the middle of town, which he built himself, measured sixteen thousand square feet.

His upbringing emphasized obedience and restricted access to information. Residents were forbidden to watch television or read newspapers and magazines, and members who left the United Effort Plan were not to have contact with those still inside, even when they were relatives. Bateman observed how prohibition itself could make forbidden media more attractive: people would secretly buy satellite dishes in St. George, Utah, or Cedar City, hide them, and watch television until a sermon from Rulon Jeffs prompted residents to discard the dishes. The prohibition was repeatedly enforced, but the hidden sets gradually returned.

The structure of authority extended beyond religious instruction. Rulon Jeffs’s word carried weight in municipal affairs, and the town’s mayor, employees, police, and school superintendent answered to him. Bateman also described the community’s rationale for accepting substantial government assistance: leaders framed public money as the Lord’s provision for a chosen people, while fundamentalists called defrauding the government “bleeding the beast.” In his account, religious authority shaped not only private belief but also residents’ access to information, relationships, and civic life.

The Break with the Work

Bateman’s departure began with a direct challenge to Rulon Jeffs’s authority. After Jeffs accused him of something Bateman knew to be false, Bateman confronted him calmly and told him that the accusation was a lie. At home, he considered the contradiction: if the prophet received knowledge continually from God, Bateman reasoned, he should have known the accusation was false. That moment led Bateman to decide to leave the Work, despite his expectation that departure would end the life he had known.

The consequences followed quickly. When Bateman missed the next weekly priesthood meeting, Rulon Jeffs sent someone to his home within a day to take his wives and children. Under the United Effort Plan’s doctrine, wives and children were treated as belonging to the priesthood rather than to individual husbands or parents; the stated plan was to transfer Bateman’s family to another man deemed more worthy. Both wives refused to leave him. Their decision, extraordinary within the community’s hierarchy, meant that they and all but the three oldest children became apostates as well.

Bateman’s family relationships made the cost of dissent especially concrete. His brother David lived only yards away, across a six-foot fence. Because their father had been disabled when they were children, the brothers had raised one another, and Bateman described them as exceptionally close. Yet David was forbidden to speak with him. Bateman understood that his brother risked losing his own children if his wife caught him in conversation with an apostate; the prospect was that David would be left in the religion without his family. The fence thus marked not a lack of affection but an imposed boundary between brothers.

The religious culture intensified that boundary by teaching that apostates were more wicked than Gentiles or members of the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In a 2000 sermon, Warren Jeffs, Rulon Jeffs’s son and heir apparent, described apostates as aligned with the devil. Bateman’s departure was therefore not treated as an ordinary change of belief: it was cast as betrayal of the priesthood and as evidence of moral corruption. That judgment helps explain why leaving threatened both his standing and his family’s place in the community.

Historical Curiosity and Family Memory

Bateman’s skepticism coexisted with a sustained appetite for learning. He recalled that, even as a boy, he wondered about conflicts between religious teaching and scientific knowledge. LeRoy Johnson’s counsel had been to avoid certain questions, but Bateman kept his curiosity and tried to encourage it in his children. He also objected to restrictions on books and learning because he understood Joseph Smith’s teachings to encourage study of good books.

That intellectual independence informed a family camping trip to Mount Dellenbaugh, an extinct volcano at the southern edge of the Arizona Strip. Bateman organized the ascent with his children to locate a signature said to have been carved on the summit more than a century earlier. The younger hikers stopped to look for animals and examine plants and geological specimens; Bateman welcomed these diversions as opportunities to teach biology. Near sunset, the family found the inscription on a broad basalt rock: “W Dunn,” followed by the date 1869 and an arrow pointing north toward the Utah line.

The signature connected Bateman’s family expedition to the lost members of John Wesley Powell’s Grand Canyon expedition. William Dunn, whose name appeared on the rock, disappeared with Oramel Gass Howland and Seneca Howland near the end of Powell’s journey. The inscription was the last known trace of the missing explorers. The next day, Bateman stopped with his family to examine a memorial that reflected the prevailing account: that Dunn and the Howland brothers had been killed by Native Americans east of the marker in August 1869.

Bateman had reached a different conclusion. He believed the three men had been killed by Mormons in southern Utah, and that the violence grew from a misunderstanding connected to the Mountain Meadows massacre. The hypothesis brought his historical curiosity into contact with an uncomfortable family inheritance. William Bateman, DeLoy’s great-great-great-uncle, had approached the Fancher emigrant party under a white flag and helped arrange the false truce that led them to surrender their weapons before John D. Lee’s attack. DeLoy was not proud of his ancestor’s role, but believed it should be investigated rather than concealed. The expedition therefore served both as a search for physical evidence and as an effort to face a history his community might prefer not to examine.

Atheism and Attachment

By the time Bateman was perched above Colorado City, he had moved beyond apostasy from one church. He no longer practiced plural marriage; his second wife had moved to St. George, Utah, while her children remained with him and she visited them weekly. Bateman said that he could not justify plural marriage once he no longer believed the religion’s teachings. He had not joined mainstream Mormonism, another Christian denomination, or a New Age faith. He identified himself as an atheist and said he no longer believed in God, while allowing that he could not rule out every possible explanation for the universe.

The change did not erase the religion’s imprint. Bateman described having relied on it throughout his life for answers and acknowledged that it had helped make him who he was. Even after disbelief, he continued to wear the sacred garment, the long underwear associated with the faith; he found it difficult to stop and said that going without it felt wrong. The garment became a small, persistent sign that leaving a belief system does not immediately remove its habits or emotional force.

His view of Colorado City also remained divided. Bateman valued its hardworking residents and considered it a good place to raise a family, even as he acknowledged reports by women who said they had been abused as girls and recognized that some men in the priesthood had abused their own daughters. He did not dismiss those accounts, but believed such abuse occurred elsewhere too. His attachment to the town was genuine, as was his awareness of its harms; neither canceled the other.

Bateman’s final contrast is between comfort and freedom. He argued that prophetic authority could relieve believers of the burden of making and owning difficult decisions, because responsibility could be transferred to the prophet’s command. He also thought people inside the religion might, on the whole, be happier than those outside it. Yet he placed greater value on the freedom to think independently. His story ends not in a clean break from his origins, but in the unresolved position of a former believer who remains in the community, cares about its people, and insists on the right to question what it teaches.