Religious Authority, Obedience, and Patriarchal Rule

Religious Authority, Obedience, and Patriarchal Rule is the book’s account of how claims to speak for God become power over people’s beliefs, public institutions, and family lives. Its examples range from Joseph Smith’s early effort to regulate revelation to the concentrated authority of later fundamentalist prophets. Obedience gives these systems continuity, but their dependence on a singular leader also makes them vulnerable to rival claims, contested succession, and the decisions of people who refuse to comply.

Revelation and the right to lead

From the beginning, the authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was tied to continuing revelation. Its supreme leader’s title, President, Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, expressed the principle that religious truth and institutional direction came through divine communication. Joseph Smith initially encouraged individual members to seek personal guidance from God. That openness, however, created a problem for centralized authority: if members could receive revelations that contradicted the prophet’s, the basis for his unique leadership was uncertain.

In 1830, the same year the Church was organized, Joseph Smith announced a revelation reserving the right to receive commandments and revelations concerning the Church to himself. The attempt to limit rival claims did not eliminate them. Members continued to believe that God could speak to them directly, and the book connects this enduring conviction to the repeated emergence of schismatic Mormon communities. The tension is structural: personal revelation is presented as a source of religious legitimacy, yet institutional order depends on deciding whose revelation counts.

A later example is Robert Crossfield, known as Onias. In a 1975 commandment, he was named the true prophet and rightful leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with authority to set the Church in order. His claim brought him into conflict with the leaders of the United Effort Plan, who expelled him from their prayer meetings and community. In the early 1980s he moved near Provo and established a School of the Prophets. There, his revelations first designated the Lafferty brothers as an elect people and then appointed Ron Lafferty bishop of the Provo chapter. The brothers’ work printing and mailing more than fifteen thousand pamphlets helped the school get started; Onias’s authority, in turn, gave Ron an institutional role. The episode shows how personal revelation can reproduce a hierarchy even as it contests another one.

Obedience as religious and social discipline

The book presents obedience not merely as assent to doctrine but as a daily rule governing conduct. LeRoy Johnson, known to followers as Uncle Roy, preached that the way to heaven required total obedience. The community motto in Bountiful, “Keep Sweet, No Matter What,” carried that expectation into ordinary domestic life. In both the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and fundamentalist communities, the priesthood and positions of ecclesiastical authority are reserved for men, and prophets alone are authorized to receive revelations directing the faithful. Fundamentalist practice pushes these arrangements further, assigning women the primary responsibility of serving husbands, bearing children, and raising them within the faith.

Rulon Jeffs’s leadership in Colorado City illustrates how spiritual authority could extend into community governance. His influence reached the mayor, city employees, police, and schools. A ban on television and print media was reinforced by sermons warning members that the prophet knew who possessed satellite dishes and that disobedience endangered their souls. After such sermons, dishes were repeatedly discarded; restrictions later eased in practice until another crackdown. This recurring pattern suggests both the reach and the limits of control: members tried to comply, but some secretly acquired televisions, and enforcement had to be renewed.

Authority also governed marriage and kinship. In the United Effort Plan, wives and children were understood as belonging to the priesthood rather than exclusively to a husband or parent. When DeLoy Bateman stopped attending the weekly priesthood meeting after breaking with Rulon Jeffs, the prophet sent someone to remove his wives and children and ordered that they be assigned to another man. Both wives refused to leave DeLoy, and all but his three oldest children became apostates along with him. The episode makes the stakes of dissent concrete: a challenge to the prophet could put a family’s continued life together in question, while resistance by family members could defy the very hierarchy that claimed authority over them.

The authority to arrange marriage could likewise shape a woman’s place within a highly complex household. At fourteen, Debbie Oler believed she had received an impression from the Lord that she should marry Ray Blackmore. LeRoy Johnson approved the match, and the following year married her to the ailing fifty-seven-year-old Blackmore as his sixth wife. She became stepmother to his thirty-one children, many older than she was; because Blackmore was also the father of her stepmother, the arrangement made her, in effect, her own stepgrandmother. The family structure illustrates how religiously authorized marriage could reorder kinship around decisions made by male leaders, rather than around age or conventional family roles.

Religious authority and civil government

The book also follows the claim that divine law should take precedence over human law into the courts and institutions of government. In Nauvoo, a charter granted by Illinois gave Joseph Smith’s city unusual sovereign powers. He stood at its head, took the title King, Priest, and Ruler over Israel on Earth, and commanded the Nauvoo Legion. His ambition extended beyond the city: he petitioned Congress for a force of one hundred thousand men and later announced his candidacy for president. Religious leadership and political sovereignty were thus not separate ambitions in this account; Nauvoo’s charter gave them an institutional setting.

Under Brigham Young, the same principle shaped Utah’s legal order. The Utah Territorial Legislature expanded the jurisdiction of local probate courts, which Brigham controlled, at the expense of federal authority. Many probate judges were Mormon bishops, and juries were largely composed of Mormons who followed instructions from Church leaders. This arrangement made competing systems of law more than a dispute in principle: local courts could apply the community’s religious authority where federal officials expected state law to prevail. Federal officers complained of the resulting theocratic control, while some left the territory amid persistent harassment and fears for their safety.

Colorado City presents a different but related negotiation with civil law. Polygamy was illegal in Utah and Arizona, so men commonly entered a legal marriage with one wife while their other wives were spiritually married and legally single. That arrangement could allow large families to qualify for public assistance. Although followers regarded the governments of Arizona, Utah, and the United States as hostile to their community, Colorado City received more than six million dollars a year in public funds. The contrast complicates any simple picture of separation from the state: religious leaders could denounce government authority while community members relied on public programs and adapted family arrangements to its legal rules.

Succession, resistance, and division

A prophet’s authority does not pass automatically to an uncontested successor. After LeRoy Johnson died in 1986, Rulon Jeffs took leadership, but followers of Marion Hammon disputed his right to inherit the mantle. Nearly a third of the community left with Hammon and founded the Second Ward across the highway from the original congregation. The rival groups condemned one another as apostates and warned of each other’s damnation. The split shows how the same religious language that binds a community can also sharpen its divisions: rival leaders claim fidelity to the faith while denying one another’s legitimacy.

The movement had already fractured over succession. After John Y. Barlow died, Joseph Musser became its leader, but a series of strokes left him debilitated. In 1951, Musser appointed Rulon Allred his second elder and heir apparent, despite opposition from those who believed LeRoy Johnson should succeed him. After Musser’s death in 1954, Johnson led the larger group that remained in Short Creek, while Allred led the Apostolic United Brethren in the Salt Lake Valley. The eventual division reveals the practical force of succession disputes: disagreement about who holds authority produced separate congregations, institutions, and lines of leadership.

The community’s response to Rulon Jeffs’s later death echoed its anxiety after Johnson’s. Warren Jeffs moved swiftly to take control, having already managed much of the church during his father’s illness, but he did not command the same affection attributed to the earlier prophets. An older sibling described his approach as grounded in fear and exacting obedience. The contrast underscores that inherited office and personal legitimacy are not identical. Across the book’s examples, authority depends on followers recognizing a leader’s claim, yet the means used to secure that recognition can produce resistance, family rupture, or another breakaway group.