DeLoy Bateman's Atheism and Apostasy

DeLoy Bateman’s atheism and apostasy mark a gradual break with a religion that had formed his family, education, work, and sense of identity. His departure was not simply rejection of a demanding way of life: it began when he could no longer accept the authority of its prophets as divine, and ended with his rejection of religion altogether. Yet DeLoy did not leave Colorado City or cease feeling connected to the people and traditions he had left behind. His story holds those facts together: a decisive loss of belief, and an enduring attachment to the community that had taught him how to understand the world.

Identity and Background

DeLoy was born and raised in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints community. His religious inheritance was unusually close: his great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather were among the religion’s founding members, and his adoptive grandfather, LeRoy Johnson, led Colorado City before Rulon Jeffs. DeLoy became a teacher at Colorado City High School, a role that kept him within the place and culture that had educated him.

His route to teaching was itself directed by the community’s religious authority. Because the group needed educators and LeRoy Johnson considered DeLoy academically capable, he was sent to Southern Utah State College in Cedar City. His first wife, Eunice Bateman, was instructed by the prophet to marry him and accompanied him. Neither had previously lived outside Colorado City; while DeLoy studied, Eunice cared for their young children and helped with his schoolwork. After graduating, he returned to teach the town’s youth.

Even in childhood, DeLoy noticed contradictions between religious teachings and scientific knowledge. LeRoy Johnson’s instruction was to avoid certain questions, and DeLoy learned to set those contradictions aside rather than examine them. He later described himself as having been intensely religious and said that the faith had supplied answers to fundamental questions about existence. His later disbelief therefore unsettled not only a set of doctrines but a worldview he had spent years learning to inhabit.

Authority and the Break with the Work

In Colorado City, religious authority reached beyond worship into ordinary life. Residents were forbidden to watch television or read newspapers and magazines, and were also barred from contact with people outside the United Effort Plan, including relatives who had left the faith. DeLoy described a recurring cycle around concealed satellite dishes: members would secretly acquire them, Rulon Jeffs would denounce television in a sermon and warn of spiritual danger, and people would remove and dump the dishes. For a time televisions would disappear, only for hidden viewing to resume gradually. The pattern showed how prohibition, enforcement, and private dissent could coexist.

DeLoy’s decisive rupture came after Rulon Jeffs accused him of something DeLoy knew to be untrue. DeLoy directly told the prophet that the accusation was a lie. He then considered the contradiction between Rulon’s status as a man who supposedly received continual knowledge from God and his failure to know the truth in this instance. DeLoy concluded that the prophet was not communicating with God and decided to leave the Work, understanding that his familiar life might end with that choice.

The break was made concrete when DeLoy did not attend the next weekly priesthood meeting. Within twenty-four hours, Rulon Jeffs sent someone to take DeLoy’s wives and children away and decreed that they should be assigned to another man. Under the United Effort Plan’s doctrine, families were treated as subject to priesthood authority rather than belonging exclusively to husbands or parents. Both wives refused to leave DeLoy. Their decision defied the religious hierarchy, and all of the children except the three oldest became apostates alongside him.

Family Separation and the Stigma of Apostasy

Leaving the faith changed DeLoy’s relationships with relatives who remained. He and his brother David had raised one another after their father became disabled during their childhood. As adults, they lived in immense houses separated by a six-foot fence, but the religious ban on contact prevented them from speaking freely. DeLoy feared that if David’s wife caught him talking to his apostate brother, she could lose her children and be married to another man; David, meanwhile, could be allowed to remain in the religion without his family. The fence stood between two homes, but the prohibition made it a boundary between family members as well.

Apostasy also carried an explicit moral stigma. In Colorado City, DeLoy explained, adherents were taught to regard apostates as more wicked than outsiders or members of mainstream Mormonism. In a 2000 sermon, Warren Jeffs, Rulon Jeffs’s son and heir apparent, portrayed apostates as enemies of the priesthood and servants of the devil. Against that teaching, DeLoy’s departure was not merely a change in private belief: it placed him and much of his immediate family on the condemned side of the community’s religious divide.

Atheism and Continuing Attachment

DeLoy’s rejection of the faith eventually extended beyond fundamentalism. He no longer practiced plural marriage, explaining that he could not justify it once he stopped believing in the religion that prescribed it. His second wife moved to St. George, while her children stayed with him in Colorado City and she visited them weekly. DeLoy did not convert to mainstream Mormonism, another Christian church, or a New Age religion; he identified himself as an atheist and said he no longer believed in God.

That conclusion was accompanied by uncertainty rather than a newly adopted comprehensive account of existence. DeLoy allowed that a supreme power or a plan behind the universe might be possible, but said that common sense led him away from belief. He attributed his departure not primarily to the religion’s sexual customs or restrictions on daily life, but to his conviction that its claims were false. He thought its leaders might sincerely believe those claims themselves, rather than knowingly deceive their followers, but he had come to regard all religions as false.

The change remained difficult because the faith had also given him answers, education, and a durable sense of belonging. DeLoy took pride in what the religion had made of him and acknowledged that its influence persisted in habits that were hard to discard. Even after he stopped believing, he sometimes continued wearing the sacred garment, the long underwear prescribed by the religion; without it, he said, he felt improperly dressed. The garment became a modest but telling sign of how belief can end before its physical and emotional traces do.

DeLoy continued to live in the town where he had been raised and remained attached to Colorado City. He valued residents’ hard work and strength and considered it a good place to raise a family, even while acknowledging accounts of abuse and his knowledge of cases involving men in the priesthood and their daughters. He did not treat that attachment as proof that the religious system was true. Instead, his account preserves the tension between condemning the authority that had governed his life and recognizing the community, family history, and personal formation he could not simply disown. His apostasy was therefore both a break and a lingering connection: he had left the Work, but not the place that had made it part of him.