FLDS Church

The FLDS Church is a Mormon fundamentalist organization that combines a claim to prophetic authority with strict priesthood control over religious and community life. Its members share sacred texts and a history with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but diverge sharply over plural marriage, which the FLDS Church treats as a divine obligation. The organization’s history is marked both by efforts to preserve that practice against state interference and by recurring disputes over leadership that have divided fundamentalists into rival groups.

Identity and Historical Claims

The FLDS Church is based principally in Colorado City, Arizona, a settlement on the Arizona Strip that straddles the Utah-Arizona border. The book also refers to the organization as the United Effort Plan, or UEP, and describes it as the largest of at least three fundamentalist sects in Colorado City. Bountiful, British Columbia, is another UEP community, connected to Colorado City by the movement of girls and women across the international border for marriage. The two communities are geographically different, but both answer to the same prophet.

The FLDS Church grounds its religious legitimacy in a claimed line of priesthood authority reaching back to Joseph Smith. Members regard Joseph Smith as a prophet and share with mainstream Mormons a sacred history centered on him. They also regard themselves as God’s chosen people. The principal doctrinal divide is plural marriage: unlike the contemporary Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the fundamentalists described in the book teach that Saints have a divine duty to take multiple wives. Mainstream church leaders insist that the fundamentalists have no connection with their church, while the shared history and scriptures help explain why the two groups are often discussed together despite that institutional rejection.

The movement’s presence in Colorado City arose from a longer retreat toward isolation. After the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officially abandoned polygamy, remote settlements such as Lee’s Ferry and Short Creek offered fundamentalists a place to continue the practice beyond the attention of outsiders. Short Creek, founded in 1911, developed close ties with the polygamous families at Lee’s Ferry. In 1928, as improved access brought more outsiders to Lee’s Ferry, members of the Johnson family, including LeRoy Johnson, moved to Short Creek, where the community was less exposed. John Y. Barlow later cultivated ties with the settlement and moved some of his own families there.

Prophetic Authority and Community Rule

In Colorado City, the prophet’s authority extends well beyond religious teaching. Under Rulon Jeffs, town officials, the police force, and the public-school superintendent answered to him. The community’s restrictions included bans on television, magazines, newspapers, and contact with people outside the UEP, including relatives who had left. These rules were enforced through religious warnings and the threat of losing one’s standing in the community. DeLoy Bateman described a recurring pattern: people secretly acquired satellite dishes, a sermon condemned television and warned of spiritual consequences, and dishes were then discarded in the desert before gradually reappearing.

The organization also claimed authority over family relationships. According to the UEP doctrine described in the book, wives and children belonged to the priesthood rather than to husbands or parents, and could be reassigned by its leaders. When Bateman stopped attending a weekly priesthood meeting after deciding to leave the Work, Rulon Jeffs sent someone to take his wives and children. Both wives refused to leave, and all but the three oldest children also became apostates. Their decision challenged the claim that priesthood authority necessarily outweighed family loyalty.

The FLDS Church’s rules also shaped members’ relationship to the outside world. Its leaders taught that the earth was seven thousand years old and that the Apollo moon landings were a government hoax. Members were prohibited from contact with outsiders, including family members who had left the religion. Apostates were assigned an especially condemned place in the community’s moral order: in a sermon in 2000, Warren Jeffs described them as more wicked than Gentiles or mainstream Mormons. The organization’s boundaries were therefore not only geographic or informational; leaving the faith could recast a person’s identity and sever ordinary family contact.

Marriage, Gender, and State Support

Plural marriage is both a defining doctrine and a source of conflict with state law. Because it is illegal in Utah and Arizona, men in Colorado City typically legally marry only their first wife. Additional wives are spiritually married but remain unmarried in the eyes of the state, a circumstance that allows large families to qualify for public assistance. The book reports that Colorado City received more than six million dollars a year in public funds even as its residents regarded the governments providing that assistance as hostile to the UEP. DeLoy Bateman explained that leaders framed the money as coming from God and as a means of caring for the chosen people; fundamentalists called defrauding the government bleeding the beast and regarded it as virtuous.

The scale of public support was concrete. The city received $1.9 million from the Department of Housing and Urban Development for street paving, fire-department improvements, and water-system upgrades. The federal government built a $2.8 million airport just south of the city, while a third of residents received food stamps, compared with a state average of 4.7 percent. Colorado City received eight dollars in government services for every tax dollar its residents paid. These figures sit alongside the community’s claim that government is a threat, revealing a persistent tension between rejecting state authority and using public institutions and resources.

The FLDS Church’s patriarchal structure placed men in priesthood authority and assigned women responsibility for serving husbands, bearing children, and raising them within the faith. The book describes this pattern as more extreme in fundamentalist communities than in mainstream Mormon culture, while locating both within a broader tradition of male-only religious leadership. The organization’s position also complicated its public defense of religious freedom. Fundamentalists argued that private religious practice was no business of the state, even as the doctrine described in the book condemned homosexuality and treated it as a grave sin. Their appeal to constitutional protection thus existed alongside rules that sharply governed members’ intimate and family lives.

Splits and Succession

The FLDS Church emerged as a major branch of a movement repeatedly divided by disputes over prophetic succession. After John Y. Barlow died in 1949, leadership passed to Joseph Musser, who later appointed Rulon Allred as his second elder and heir apparent. This decision met strong opposition from those who believed LeRoy Johnson should succeed Musser. Following Musser’s death in 1954, the movement divided: Johnson led the larger group that remained in Short Creek and became the FLDS Church, also called the UEP, while Allred led the Apostolic United Brethren in the Salt Lake Valley.

A later succession crisis followed LeRoy Johnson’s death in 1986. Rulon Jeffs assumed leadership, but Marion Hammon’s supporters rejected his claim. Nearly a third of the community left and established the Second Ward across the highway; the original congregation was known as the First Ward. Each side branded the other apostate and warned of eternal damnation. The division remained unresolved in the period described by the book, demonstrating how claims to an unbroken prophetic line could produce rival institutions rather than unity.

The same uncertainty attended Rulon Jeffs’s death. He died three months short of his ninety-third birthday, leaving an estimated seventy-five wives and at least sixty-five children. His son Warren Jeffs moved quickly to take control, having already managed the church while his father was ill, but he did not command the affection that members had shown Rulon or LeRoy. Warren’s leadership also brought conflict in Bountiful: he removed Winston Blackmore from his position and installed Jimmy Oler, but at least half of the community remained loyal to Blackmore. The possibility of another independent sect made succession an active threat to the organization’s cohesion.

Legal Conflict and Narrative Significance

The FLDS Church’s claims of religious authority have repeatedly collided with state law and public scrutiny. Its members described plural marriage as a constitutionally protected religious practice, while the book notes that it was a crime in every U.S. state and in Canada. The departure of Ruth Stubbs from Colorado City, after she appeared on Phoenix television alleging abuse and arguing that polygamy was intrinsically abusive, made this conflict especially visible. Her case also exposed the difficulty of reconciling a police chief’s defense of private religious life with his sworn duty to uphold the law.

The organization’s history is presented not as a simple opposition between mainstream Mormonism and a wholly separate faith, but as a struggle over shared origins, competing authorities, and control of everyday life. Its insistence on prophetic continuity binds members to Joseph Smith and earlier leaders, while the repeated splits show that continuity is itself contested. Colorado City’s isolation, its restrictions on information and contact, its reliance on public funds, and its divisions over leadership all reveal the pressures within a community that seeks to preserve religious autonomy while exercising extensive authority over its members.