The Second Coming and Latter-Day Eschatology

The Second Coming and Latter-Day Eschatology is the expectation that Jesus Christ will return to earth and inaugurate a divinely ordered final age. In the book, it is more than a distant prediction: it shapes where believers understand sacred history to be unfolding, who may claim authority to interpret God’s will, and how communities distinguish the faithful from their enemies. Its consequences range from migration and strict communal boundaries to rival prophetic campaigns and the Lafferty brothers’ plan for a City of Refuge.

Restoration, America, and the promised return

Joseph Smith’s teachings placed the end-times expectation within a restored religious history. The Book of Mormon presented itself as a new testament and a correction to what Smith described as the Great Apostasy, when Christian leadership had led the church astray. Its stark division between the church of God and the church of the devil supplied a moral map in which religious belonging carried ultimate significance. Smith also encouraged adherents to seek personal communication from God, making revelation central to the religion’s claims about how divine purposes could be known.

That sacred history was distinctly American. The Book of Mormon located important events on the American continent and described Jesus Christ visiting its people after his resurrection. Smith’s revelations further placed the Garden of Eden in Jackson County, near Independence, and identified northwestern Missouri as a gathering place for the Saints. In 1831, he taught that this was the land appointed for their settlement and that Christ would return there before the century ended. The promised return thus gave a specific geography to the anticipated transformation of history: believers were not only waiting for the end, but gathering in a place they understood to be central to it.

The expectation also sharpened the boundary between the chosen community and those outside it. As Mormon migrants arrived in Jackson County, their claim to a divinely appointed Zion, their communal economic and political practices, and their sense of being God’s chosen people intensified local suspicion. Smith’s teaching that people were free to choose between the Lord and wickedness did not imply that the choices were morally equivalent; those who rejected the Saints’ understanding of God were cast as having chosen wrongly. The end-times framework therefore connected a promised future to present conflicts over land, allegiance, and who could be treated as an ally.

Authority, obedience, and competing revelation

Later fundamentalist settings in the book preserve the expectation of divine direction while concentrating the right to interpret it in a prophet. In Colorado City, Rulon Jeffs’s authority extended into municipal life, schools, police, and residents’ private conduct. Television and print media were forbidden, as was contact with people outside the United Effort Plan, including former members. DeLoy Bateman described a recurring cycle in which secret satellite dishes appeared, a sermon warned against television, and residents discarded the dishes before they gradually returned. The pattern shows how the control of information could be enforced through prophetic warnings and fear of spiritual consequences, even as individual behavior repeatedly diverged from the rule.

The doctrine of obedience also shaped family relationships. According to the account of DeLoy’s departure, UEP teaching treated wives and children as belonging to the priesthood rather than to husbands or parents. When DeLoy stopped attending the weekly priesthood meeting, Rulon sent someone to take his family and assign them to another man. Both wives refused to leave, and all but DeLoy’s three oldest children became apostates with him. This episode is not presented as a prediction of the Second Coming; it shows how a religious order organized around prophetic authority could make loyalty to the leader more powerful than ordinary family claims. Apostasy was described as a profound moral betrayal, giving communal separation an explicitly spiritual meaning.

Onias offers another example of competing claims to revelation. In November 1983, he said God had commanded him to send extracts from The Book of Onias to stake presidents and bishops of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The pamphlet warned that church leaders had departed from sacred doctrines and portrayed Onias as commissioned to cleanse the church and expose its wrongdoing. His message challenged established leadership by claiming that God’s judgment was imminent and that a newly authorized prophet had been sent to restore righteousness. The competing claims reveal a recurring tension: a tradition that makes revelation foundational can provide both a basis for institutional authority and a language for declaring that the institution itself has fallen into error.

The City of Refuge and an imminent crisis

That tension became a practical and dangerous project for Ron Lafferty and Dan Lafferty. Ron’s removal revelation named Brenda Lafferty, Erica Lafferty, Chloe Low, and Richard Stowe as obstacles to God’s work. He interpreted that work as the construction of a City of Refuge, and told Dan that a slaughter would have to precede the building project. The revelation joined a promised sacred future to a command about what must happen in the present; an end-times vision had become a warrant for action against specific people.

During a trip across the West, the brothers repeatedly discussed the revelation. Dan recalled Ron growing more agitated and increasingly focused on when the removals should take place, eventually settling on July 24. Dan prayed about whether to stay with Ron or separate from him, and believed the answer was to remain. Their conviction was not confined to the two brothers: they had earlier sought control of the Dream Mine to help finance the City of Refuge, and, after being rejected by its directors and expelled from the School of the Prophets, continued trying to enlist support from polygamist leaders. At John W. Bryant’s community, Ron preached about the refuge and its role in the Last Days. The project therefore moved through a network of prophetic claims, material plans, and efforts to recruit followers, even though the hoped-for support did not amount to control of the mine.

The account of the brothers’ beliefs also makes clear that apocalyptic certainty did not by itself settle the question of mental illness or explain the violence. At Ron’s trial, Dr. Gardner distinguished shared religious discernment within the School of the Prophets from an individual psychotic experience, while also describing symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. This distinction places the revelation in both a communal and a psychological context: the brothers’ end-times interpretation circulated among people who prayed and deliberated together, but the book does not present that process as proof that their commands were true or morally justified.

Persecution, separation, and the meaning of the end

The expectation of a final division between righteousness and wickedness made persecution narratives especially potent. The Book of Mormon’s two-church framework presented spiritual allegiance as an absolute choice, while Mormon settlement in Missouri brought that conviction into conflict with neighbors who viewed the Saints’ political and economic cohesion as threatening. Later fundamentalist teaching similarly marked apostates as spiritually more dangerous than ordinary outsiders. In these settings, opposition could be read not as a disagreement over policy or authority but as evidence of a struggle between God’s people and forces hostile to them.

The 1953 Short Creek raid shows how that perception could be reinforced by public events. Images of children separated from their mothers drew national sympathy toward the fundamentalists, who presented themselves as law-abiding Mormons exercising religious freedom. The raid was widely criticized as religious persecution; Arizona Governor Howard Pyle lost office in 1954, and by 1956 the arrested polygamists had been released and reunited with their families. The community resumed plural marriage, and the backlash helped limit state interference for decades. These consequences do not establish that the raid was understood by every participant through an end-times doctrine, but they show how a history of conflict could strengthen the sense that religious outsiders were persecuting a chosen people.

Across these episodes, the Second Coming is a powerful but contested horizon. It can orient migration toward a promised gathering place, intensify obedience to a prophet, or inspire a rival claimant to announce that existing leaders have failed. In Ron and Dan Lafferty’s case, the anticipated divine future was invoked to justify lethal action; elsewhere, the same broad language of sacred destiny reinforced separation from outsiders and resistance to government intervention. The book’s account thus distinguishes the belief in a final divine order from the human authorities who claim to know its timetable and demands: eschatological expectation does not speak on its own, but becomes consequential through the communities and leaders who interpret it.