Divine Revelation

Divine revelation in Under the Banner of Heaven is not simply a belief that God communicates with people: it is a disputed source of knowledge and authority, capable of guiding private conscience, governing a religious community, or justifying acts that others regard as delusional or criminal. The book follows revelation from Joseph Smith’s early encouragement of personal communication with God through institutional efforts to restrict it, and into later conflicts in which rival claims to divine instruction fracture families and become part of a legal debate.

Personal Revelation and Institutional Authority

The official title of the supreme leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is President, Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, reflecting a tradition in which religious truth and ecclesiastical authority are linked to continuing divine communication. Joseph Smith initially urged his followers to seek impressions from God to guide their lives. The appeal was direct: believers could understand themselves as speaking with God without depending entirely on an established hierarchy.

That openness created a problem for the prophet’s authority. If other believers could receive revelations that contradicted Joseph Smith’s, the status of his own teachings could be challenged. In 1830, the year the Church was incorporated, he announced that no one besides him could be appointed to receive commandments and revelations for the Church. The restriction did not end personal revelation. Some followers continued to heed what they believed God communicated to them, whether about doctrine or personal matters. The book connects this unresolved tension between individual experience and institutional control to the repeated emergence of schismatic Mormon groups, including the communities associated with the United Effort Plan and the followers of Robert Crossfield, known as Onias.

In both the mainstream Church and fundamentalist communities, access to authoritative revelation is described as strongly hierarchical: men hold priesthood and ecclesiastical office, and prophets determine how the faithful should live, even in matters such as sacred clothing. The book emphasizes that fundamentalist leaders carry these practices of obedience and control further. Revelation in this setting is therefore not only a claim about what God has said; it can establish who is entitled to speak for God and whose choices must yield.

Revelation as a Rule of Community Life

In Colorado City, Rulon Jeffs’s authority illustrates how a prophet’s asserted knowledge could reach into ordinary conduct. Members were forbidden to watch television or read newspapers and magazines. DeLoy Bateman described secret television viewing followed by sermons in which Rulon announced that he knew who had a dish and warned that viewers endangered their eternal souls. The discarded satellite dishes, and their gradual return before the next crackdown, show the cycle of prohibition, concealment, and renewed enforcement. The authority of revelation was presented not merely as theological instruction but as knowledge of members’ hidden behavior.

The same authority governed relationships and family membership. When DeLoy stopped attending the weekly priesthood meeting, Rulon sent someone to take his wives and children away, decreeing that they should be given to another man. Under United Effort Plan doctrine, wives and children belonged to the priesthood rather than to individual husbands or parents. Both wives refused to leave DeLoy, and all but his three oldest children became apostates along with him. Their decision made visible the conflict between a prophet’s authority and the bonds of a family that chose not to obey.

DeLoy’s departure followed a direct challenge to Rulon’s presumed access to divine knowledge. After Rulon accused him of lying, DeLoy told him that the accusation was false. At home, DeLoy concluded that a prophet who continually spoke with God should have known the truth; the apparent failure of that claim led him to leave the faith, despite expecting the end of his former life. In the book’s account, revelation’s authority is tested not by abstract doctrine alone but by whether a leader’s supposed knowledge withstands a concrete contradiction.

Competing Revelations and Their Consequences

The disputes around the Lafferty brothers show how a claimed revelation could move from belief to proposed action. After Ron and Dan received what was called the removal revelation, Bernard Brady believed that people’s lives were in danger. He filed an affidavit listing those he feared were threatened, but kept it in a desk drawer rather than alerting police. Other members of the School of the Prophets likewise did not warn the people designated for removal. Dan later told his brother Allen that he and Ron intended to carry out the command to kill Brenda Lafferty and her baby daughter, Erica Lafferty. Revelation here was not a private experience: it was discussed within a group, taken seriously enough to alarm its members, and connected to planned violence.

The courts’ treatment of Ron’s religious beliefs exposed a further conflict. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned his 1985 convictions after finding that the state had used a faulty standard to assess his mental competence. The judges accepted that he understood the charges and their possible consequences, but concluded that his paranoid delusional system prevented him from interpreting them realistically. Their concern included his belief that obedience to God’s law could release him from the laws of man. The ruling raised broader questions about how a court could distinguish religious belief from delusion without treating faith itself as evidence of mental illness.

At the retrial, the question became especially consequential because Ron’s fate depended on whether jurors would regard his conviction that God had commanded the murders as sincerely held religious belief or as a delusional product of mental illness. Dr. Gardner argued that the School of the Prophets mattered to that assessment: Ron’s revelations arose among a group that prayed, read, talked, and weighed whether they were genuine. Gardner distinguished this shared process from the isolated experience he associated with schizophrenia. The book presents this argument as a challenge to any simple equation between hearing God’s voice and psychosis, not as a resolution of the moral or legal problem.

Prison, Prophecy, and the Limits of Certainty

Dan Lafferty continued to interpret his actions through divine instruction after imprisonment. He believed that God had appointed him as Elijah to identify Christ at the Second Coming and awaken the righteous. He also described a voice heard while pacing in his cell that gave him a sign involving the moon shining from noon until nine; he later understood it as a sign of Christ’s return. These beliefs extended his sense of prophetic purpose beyond the events that had brought him to prison and into an anticipated future.

Dan acknowledged a parallel between his actions and those of people who follow a religious leader to commit violence, but maintained that the decisive difference was that he followed a true prophet. He continued to regard himself as a good person, to remember feeling guided by God on July 24, 1984, and to expect a happy ending. His confidence that he would soon be released from prison and take his place in God’s kingdom shows how revelation can remain a framework for interpreting both past responsibility and future deliverance.

Across these episodes, the book gives revelation no single, uncontested meaning. It appears as an institutionally restricted privilege, a personal conviction, a leader’s claim to govern, a communal practice of discernment, and evidence argued over in court. The recurring difficulty is not simply whether people believe they have heard God, but how others can test that belief, limit its power, or hold its adherents responsible when it becomes a command to act.