Satan

Satan is a recurring theological adversary in the book, but not a character followed through a continuous plot. He appears through religious arguments and revelations that assign him different roles: the force polygamy is said to drive from the human mind, the marker of a stark division between righteousness and wickedness, and an infiltrator allegedly seeking control of the church. Taken together, these references show how Satan gives religious claims about authority and moral order an adversarial shape, even as the book distinguishes those claims from independently established events.

Satan and the Claimed Cure of Polygamy

In The Peace Maker, polygamy is presented as a divinely ordered remedy for the disorders attributed to monogamous relationships. Its author connects that proposed remedy to the restoration of household authority and social order, claiming that it would drive Satan from the human mind. Satan is thus cast as an enemy of a particular religious and patriarchal arrangement: the tract does not merely present plural marriage as permissible, but as a means of displacing evil and restoring God’s intended order.

The argument also helps reveal the tract’s stakes. It frames obedience within the household as part of a larger struggle between divine law and Satan, while assigning the husband authority over the wife. Its sweeping assurance that polygamy regulated by God’s law could not produce crime makes the moral claim absolute. The book places this reasoning in the context of disputes over the authorship of The Peace Maker: Dan Lafferty studied whether Joseph Smith had written it and came to believe, through study and prayer, that he had, while acknowledging that he did not know for certain. Satan’s role belongs to the tract’s argument; the account of Dan’s investigation shows how that argument acquired significance for a later reader.

A Divided Moral World

Satan also belongs to the stark moral division associated with Joseph Smith’s teaching of free agency. In that account, people may choose between the Lord’s side and wickedness, but choosing wrongly leaves them undeserving of sympathy or mercy. The passage does not describe Satan taking a particular action. Instead, it presents a world in which moral allegiance is sharply polarized and the consequences of choosing the wrong side are severe.

A similar structure appears in the book’s analysis of Dan Lafferty’s literalism. Lafferty treated early religious writings and founding political documents as sacred texts whose authority was absolute, and the account characterizes this form of literalism as dividing the world into a virtuous in-group and an evil out-group. This is not presented as a direct statement by Satan or as proof that Lafferty attributed every opponent to Satan. Rather, it clarifies the kind of moral landscape in which Satan’s conventional opposition to righteousness could carry force: ambiguity and compromise recede, while conflict becomes a contest between truth and wickedness.

The Alleged Infiltration of the Church

In a pamphlet associated with Onias, Satan’s role becomes more directly political and institutional. The pamphlet declares that Satan has infiltrated the church and seeks to become its head. It predicts that those who have heeded him will be exposed, and presents the church as facing a cleansing and purging. The accompanying claim that God dispatched Onias to cleanse the institution makes Satan the alleged source of internal corruption and casts Onias’s intervention as divinely authorized correction.

The same passage embeds Satan in a racist myth about the origins of Black people. It attributes to Satan a scheme involving Cain and the corruption of the earth’s seed, then links that story to the flood. The pamphlet’s language therefore does more than identify a spiritual opponent: it uses Satan to give a hateful racial mythology a cosmic explanation. The book records the pamphlet’s claims as claims, not as facts about people or history. Within its argument, however, the imagined contamination of the church and the alleged corruption of humanity reinforce each other, making purification seem both religiously urgent and institutional.

Limits and Narrative Function

The references do not establish a single, consistently elaborated portrait of Satan. In The Peace Maker, he is the force that a divinely regulated social order supposedly expels; in the pamphlet, he is an enemy already within the church; in the discussion of moral allegiance and literalism, he belongs to a broader vocabulary of opposition between good and evil. These portrayals come from different arguments, and the book does not collapse them into one continuous account of Satan’s actions.

That discontinuity is important to his role. Satan is less a participant in narrated scenes than a figure invoked to make claims about what threatens religious order and who has authority to confront that threat. In the tract, the threat is disorder attributed to the abandonment of polygamy; in the pamphlet, it is corruption supposedly embedded in the church. The contrast shows how the same adversarial figure can support sharply different prescriptions. The book’s treatment keeps those prescriptions visible as human religious claims, exposing the moral and political work Satan’s name is made to perform without presenting the accusations themselves as established truth.