Onias's School of the Prophets

Onias's School of the Prophets was a Utah religious group formed around Onias’s revelations and the conviction that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had strayed from the doctrines revealed to Joseph Smith. Its members helped circulate Onias’s warnings to church leaders and met to learn about revelation; its central contradiction emerged when Ron Lafferty received a commandment the school’s prophet and most of its members rejected. The resulting split exposed the difficulty of teaching people to seek divine direction while retaining a leader’s authority to decide what counted as divine.

Formation and Message

Near the end of 1983, businessman Bernard Brady brought Onias and the Lafferty brothers together at a gathering that lasted late into the night. Allen Lafferty was absent. The others responded enthusiastically to Onias’s account of a revelation received on November 26, which directed him to prepare pamphlets for stake presidents and ward bishops in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The pamphlets were meant to warn church authorities that, in Onias’s view, they had committed serious religious errors.

The indictment focused on the church’s support for the government’s criminalization of plural marriage and its decision to admit Black men to the priesthood. Onias presented these changes as violations of doctrines revealed to Joseph Smith. His writings also expressed racist claims that Black people were inferior. The pamphlets thus joined a call for religious restoration to a denunciation of both official church policy and the wider social changes that policy represented.

Onias demanded that church leaders acknowledge their errors and yield control to the prophet he identified as chosen by God. The Lafferty brothers saw his message as confirmation of their own opposition to the church’s direction and as support for preparing the earth for the Second Coming of Christ. What brought the group together was not simply a shared interest in religious study: they understood their work as part of a divinely appointed struggle over who could define the true church.

Organization and Work

The Lafferty brothers gave the new movement practical momentum. They printed, folded, collated, addressed, and mailed more than fifteen thousand pamphlets to church leaders around the country. Onias credited their sustained work—completed in two weeks of working day and night—with accomplishing in a short period what otherwise would have taken months of spare-time effort. The mailing campaign made the school’s religious challenge tangible: its revelations were not confined to private conviction but were deliberately sent into the institutional hierarchy they condemned.

By early 1984, Onias's School of the Prophets met weekly, usually in the Provo home of the Lafferty brothers’ mother, Claudine Lafferty, upstairs from the family chiropractic clinic. The brothers’ involvement helped the school get off to a vigorous start, and Onias regarded their contribution as pivotal. The group’s principal purpose, however, extended beyond distributing pamphlets. It was also intended to teach its members how to receive and interpret revelations from God.

That purpose made the school’s form of authority unusually consequential. Its members were encouraged to seek revelation themselves, but their experiences still had to be judged within a community gathered around Onias. The school therefore combined a prophet-centered structure with a practice that could produce claims beyond the prophet’s control. Its later rupture was not an accidental interruption of its work; it arose from this tension at the heart of the school’s religious method.

Ron Lafferty’s Rise

Onias’s revelations gave the Lafferty brothers a special place in the group. On January 8, 1984, he received a revelation identifying them as an elect people and chosen seed. About six weeks later, another revelation instructed him to appoint Ron Lafferty bishop of the school’s Provo chapter. Onias did so, and the other participants approved. Ron’s appointment formalized a position of authority for a man whose younger brothers, including Dan Lafferty, had long looked up to him.

The promotion came amid personal and community setbacks for Ron. After his wife, Dianna Lafferty, left him, he devoted himself to the school, which became his family and his world. He concentrated on advancing the pamphlet campaign and urging church leaders to abandon what the group regarded as an ungodly course. At the same time, he began learning the practice that the school was meant to teach: receiving and interpreting revelation.

On February 24, Ron became the first of Onias’s students to receive a commandment from God. He sat at a computer borrowed from Bernard Brady and waited for what he understood as divine influence to guide his fingers as he typed. He received further revelations on February 25 and 27. Dan watched his brother’s experiences with fascination; he had not received revelations during his time in the school and wanted to understand what the process was like. Ron described revelation as an experience in which thoughts came to him for recording, sometimes word by word and sometimes in phrases.

Dispute and Break

The school’s authority was tested when Ron presented his removal revelation for evaluation. At the meeting on April 5, nine men discussed whether it was a valid divine commandment and then voted. Ron, Dan, and Watson Lafferty supported accepting it. The other participants rejected it. Ron, Dan, and Watson became angry, left the meeting, and ended their association with the school.

The vote revealed a conflict the school’s practice had made possible. If students were taught to receive revelations, an individual student might claim divine instruction that contradicted the prophet who had established the school. For Ron and his supporters, the word of God could take precedence over Onias’s judgment; for the others, Ron’s claim was not to be accepted as a commandment. The group’s attempt to evaluate revelation collectively therefore produced no shared resolution, only a division over who had the authority to recognize it.

The consequences were serious enough to alarm Bernard Brady. Concerned that Ron might act on the removal revelation and kill the four people it named, Brady recorded his concern in a notarized affidavit on April 9. The school’s story thus moved from a coordinated campaign of religious admonition to a struggle over the credibility and danger of a member’s revelation.

Significance

Onias's School of the Prophets united prophetic authority, collective religious activity, and individual claims of divine communication. Its members worked together to send thousands of warnings to church leaders, met regularly to study revelation, and accepted Ron Lafferty’s appointment as bishop. Yet the same teaching that encouraged revelation created the possibility that a student could claim a commandment incompatible with the leader’s authority and the community’s judgment.

The April vote marks the point at which the school’s shared mission could no longer contain that disagreement. Ron, Dan, and Watson departed rather than accept the majority’s decision, while Brady’s affidavit registered a fear that the rejected revelation might lead to violence. The organization is therefore significant both as a vehicle for Onias’s attempt to challenge the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and as the setting in which the Lafferty brothers’ religious alliance broke with Onias over the authority of revelation.