LeRoy S. Johnson

LeRoy S. Johnson was the prophet of the United Effort Plan community until Rulon Jeffs assumed leadership in 1986. Known to followers as Uncle Roy, he joined religious authority to decisions about schooling and marriage, while his sermons made obedience a defining ideal. Through his adoptive grandson DeLoy Bateman, and through the family arrangements he authorized in Bountiful, his influence is shown as both personal and institutional.

Leadership and Doctrine

Until 1986, Johnson led the United Effort Plan. He was remembered as a plainspoken farmer, but the principle repeated in his sermons was uncompromising: “The path to heaven is through total obedience.” That message was not merely devotional. In the communities depicted in the book, prophets determined how followers should live, and questioning religious authority was treated as a threat to faith. Johnson’s leadership therefore belongs to a wider patriarchal system in which men held ecclesiastical authority and women were expected to serve husbands, raise children, and submit to religious direction.

Johnson’s influence continued in the community’s everyday language after his tenure. The motto “Keep Sweet, No Matter What,” posted in Bountiful homes, was associated with the obedience emphasized during his leadership. The phrase condensed a social expectation into a domestic instruction: endure and comply rather than openly challenge authority.

Decisions About Education and Marriage

Johnson was DeLoy Bateman’s adoptive grandfather. Recognizing DeLoy’s intelligence and the community’s need for teachers, Johnson sent him at eighteen to Southern Utah State College in Cedar City to train as an educator. He had also directed DeLoy’s first wife, Eunice Bateman, to marry him. DeLoy returned after completing his degree and taught young people in Colorado City, but college exposed him to scientific claims that conflicted with religious teaching, especially in geology. He later described that education as the beginning of his eventual loss of faith: Johnson had sent him to study, and the experience made it harder for him to set aside questions.

Johnson also traveled from Short Creek to Bountiful to perform religious duties and approve marriages. When Debbie Oler was fourteen, she asked her father to relay her feeling that she should marry community leader Ray Blackmore. Johnson approved the match, and a year later married her to Blackmore, then fifty-seven. Debbie became his sixth wife and a stepmother to his thirty-one children, most older than she was. Because Blackmore was also the father of Debbie’s stepmother, the marriage placed Debbie in an unusually tangled set of family relationships. The episode shows Johnson exercising authority over marriage while also revealing how religiously sanctioned family structures could rearrange kinship roles.

Succession and Continuing Influence

After Ray Blackmore died in 1974, Debbie’s father, Dalmon Oler, led Bountiful. In 1985, Winston Blackmore displaced him and took control of the community. Johnson’s own tenure ended the following year, when Rulon Jeffs assumed leadership of the United Effort Plan. These changes place Johnson within a succession of male leaders whose authority extended across religious and community life, though the account distinguishes his period of leadership from Winston Blackmore’s later consolidation of power in Bountiful.

Johnson’s legacy also includes the warnings attached to leaving the faith. Debbie recalled that Johnson, Rulon Jeffs, and Winston Blackmore had warned that those who abandoned the religion would be cast into outer darkness and condemned. For DeLoy, however, the doubts that emerged after college eventually outweighed the authority of the tradition in which he had been raised. Johnson’s story thus carries a central tension: the prophet who sent a young man to acquire an education also represented the obedience DeLoy came to question.