LDS First Presidency

The LDS First Presidency is portrayed as a center of institutional authority in a church whose leaders claimed the right to determine religious practice and, at times, to resist the reach of civil law. Across the book’s historical account, that authority shifts from defending plural marriage against federal intervention to ending official church support for the practice, while its effects continue in the underground marriages and fundamentalist movements that follow.

Authority and the limits of dissent

The book situates the First Presidency within a patriarchal religious structure in which men alone hold the priesthood and ecclesiastical office, including the office of prophet. Prophets are presented as the sole recipients of revelations governing the faithful, reaching from broad religious doctrine to personal conduct. In that structure, questioning a leader’s directives can be treated as an attack on faith itself. The principle is summed up in the familiar maxim that “When the prophet speaks, the debate is over.”

The account distinguishes this mainstream LDS structure from the more extreme practices of fundamentalist groups. Both, it says, place great weight on obedience, male authority, and prophetic revelation, but fundamentalist leaders extend those principles further into control over women’s roles, family life, and contact with outsiders. In Colorado City, for example, Rulon Jeffs’s authority extended across municipal institutions, while UEP doctrine treated wives and children as subject to priesthood reassignment. These examples illuminate the broader problem of concentrated religious authority, but they belong to the FLDS community and are not actions of the LDS First Presidency.

Religious authority and civil law in Utah

The contest between church authority and civil jurisdiction was especially sharp under Brigham Young. The Saints defended plural marriage as a protected religious practice and held that divine law took precedence over laws made by non-Mormons. In Utah Territory, a Mormon-dominated legislature enlarged the jurisdiction of local probate courts controlled by Brigham Young. Many probate judges were Mormon bishops, and Mormon juries were instructed in ways that reflected church leadership. The arrangement allowed local religious authority to prevail when it conflicted with federal power, provoking federal officials to describe Utah as a theocratic dictatorship.

The church’s capacity to shape legal outcomes is also visible in the second trial of John D. Lee in 1876. The LDS First Presidency screened the jurors, all of them Mormons, to ensure that Lee alone would be convicted. Jacob Hamblin, who had not been present at Mountain Meadows when the killings took place, gave testimony the book describes as perjured; that testimony helped secure Lee’s conviction for first-degree murder. The trial offered the appearance of a legal resolution while placing the accumulated responsibility for the massacre on a single defendant. Lee was sentenced to death, satisfying public demands for justice without resolving the broader question of responsibility.

Retrenchment under federal pressure

Federal efforts to suppress plural marriage intensified through the 1880s. After Congress passed the Edmunds-Tucker Act in March 1887, legal actions were initiated against church holdings, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in May 1890 that those holdings could be seized. With the church facing mounting pressure, Wilford Woodruff, installed as prophet after John Taylor’s death, confronted the question of whether the church could continue officially sanctioning plural marriage.

Woodruff later recounted that he struggled through the night of September 23, 1890, over what should be done. The following morning, he called five trusted leaders together and told them that he had received a revelation requiring the church to relinquish the practice. The decision was formalized on October 6 in the document known as the Woodruff Manifesto. The change marked a decisive retreat from the position that had placed divine law above federal law, made under the pressure of threatened institutional assets and the wider campaign against the church.

A policy change that did not end the practice

The Manifesto shook the church but did not immediately end plural marriage. For two decades, members of the First Presidency privately advised Saints to continue the practice discreetly, and senior church leaders secretly performed plural marriages. When the concealment became public, the Salt Lake Tribune published the names of about two hundred Saints who had married plural wives after the Manifesto, including six members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. The disclosures angered both non-Mormons and prominent Mormons, strengthening demands within the church to enforce the policy. By the 1920s, most Saints and their leaders opposed plural marriage and supported prosecution of those who continued it.

A committed minority rejected the Manifesto as a mistaken response to political pressure. They argued that it had not revoked Section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants, Joseph Smith’s revelation on plural marriage, but had only suspended the practice under exceptional circumstances. The distinction between scripture and official policy therefore remained contested: the church could announce an institutional change, yet believers could interpret its continuing scripture as authorization to resist that change.

Fundamentalist dissent and institutional legacy

The later fundamentalist movement grew in part from the conviction that the LDS Church had abandoned an essential principle. Dan Lafferty’s independent study led him to regard the church as having gone astray when Wilford Woodruff ended official sanction for plural marriage in 1890. His reasoning illustrates how a former or dissident believer could use church history and scripture to challenge the church’s present authority, even without joining an established fundamentalist organization.

The book also presents continuing authority struggles within fundamentalist communities as distinct from the LDS First Presidency itself. Members of the FLDS community defended their homes against government scrutiny as matters of religious freedom, while restrictions on information and contact, and leaders’ authority over family arrangements, showed how competing claims of religious and civil jurisdiction could affect daily life. Taken together, these histories make the First Presidency significant not simply as a leadership body, but as a site where prophetic authority, institutional survival, scriptural interpretation, and the law repeatedly met—and where an official decision could settle church policy without settling what believers understood their religion to require.