Theocratic ethics

Theocratic ethics is the principle that religious authority may take precedence over ordinary moral obligations and civil law. In the book, it is not only a justification for concealing plural marriage from outsiders; it also names a wider conflict over who may define the law, whose testimony is believed, and whether religious claims can shield a community from public scrutiny.

Concealment and religious authority

The historian D. Michael Quinn calls the leaders’ sustained denial that Mormons practiced polygamy “theocratic ethics,” while the Saints’ own expression for the practice was “Lying for the Lord.” The denial continued even after the community had established itself in the Great Salt Lake Valley. In this formulation, concealment was not merely a private moral lapse: it served a religious order whose leaders treated the community’s interests as superior to candor toward the outside world.

The book sets that ethic against a political arrangement that made religious authority unusually powerful. Nauvoo was more than a city: Joseph Smith stood at the head of a theocratic principality with sovereign rights granted through an unusual charter passed by the Illinois General Assembly in December 1840. The charter emerged when Illinois sought settlers and sympathy for the Mormons remained strong after their expulsion from Missouri. Its powers created a setting in which civic and religious authority could overlap rather than remain neatly separate.

Divine law and competing legal systems

Under Brigham Young, the conflict became explicit. He regarded God’s law as superior to laws made by men, especially laws made by Gentiles. In Deseret, the Saints established a legal system designed to ensure that when divine and civil law clashed, divine law would prevail. The argument was not simply that believers should obey their faith in private; it challenged the state’s authority to set the terms of public life.

Because Utah was a territory, legal power was formally supposed to rest with federal courts. The Mormon-dominated Utah Territorial Legislature expanded the jurisdiction of local probate courts, which Brigham controlled. Many probate judges were Mormon bishops, and their juries were largely composed of church members who followed instructions from church leaders. Religious priority was thus reinforced by institutions: the same community that asserted the supremacy of divine law could shape the local courts responsible for applying law.

A related, though distinct, example appears in Dan Lafferty’s discussions with his brothers. He argued from scripture in The Book of Mormon that government had exceeded its proper reach by requiring licenses, taxes, and Social Security numbers. Dan treated these requirements as instruments of government control and claimed that people already possessed basic rights without official permission. The episode shows the ethic extending beyond concealment of plural marriage: religiously framed resistance could also present routine demands of civil administration as illegitimate intrusions.

Reputation, testimony, and public response

The contrast between a community’s public defense and outsiders’ suspicions recurs in accounts of polygamy. After the raid on Short Creek made national headlines, photographs of children separated from their mothers drew sympathy toward the fundamentalists. They presented themselves as law-abiding Mormons exercising constitutional freedoms, while critics saw the raid as religious persecution. The arrests and trials cost taxpayers $600,000; by 1956, those arrested had left jail and reunited with their families. Members of the UEP resumed living the Principle taught by Joseph Smith, and the town’s population continued to more than double each decade, a pattern the book attributes to large families and a high birth rate. The episode shows how constitutional language could support a claim to religious legitimacy even as the underlying practice remained contested.

That defense of privacy appears again when Sam Roundy, Colorado City’s polygamous police chief, argued that what happened in residents’ homes was no one else’s business and asked whether they had the right to practice their religion. Such claims cast outside intervention as a violation of religious liberty. They also raised a harder question: whether privacy and religious freedom could be invoked without scrutiny when the people most affected were children or members with little power to challenge community authority.

The contrasting public and official responses to Elizabeth Smart and Ruby make that question concrete. Elizabeth was abducted from her Salt Lake City bedroom in 2002, and the case drew sustained national attention; after nine months, she was found alive. Ruby, also fourteen, was forced into marriage after being seen kissing a boy, then allegedly taken to the home of her stepfather, Fred Jessop, a church leader. When a sheriff’s deputy investigated, church leaders said she was on vacation, and he left without further inquiry. After Flora Jessop pressed for state intervention, Ruby met with a social worker in St. George in the intimidating presence of one of her alleged abductors, said that everything was fine, and was returned to members of the faith.

Antipolygamy activist Lorna Craig emphasized the disparity between the cases: Elizabeth’s abductors were jailed and charged, while Ruby was returned to her abusers and no charges were brought against those involved. Craig argued that Ruby had been subject to religious conditioning since birth. The comparison does not by itself establish that officials acted under a theocratic ethic; rather, it exposes how claims of religious privacy, differences in public attention, and the treatment of a child’s testimony could converge to leave alleged harm unaddressed.

Secrecy, credibility, and the cost of the ethic

The book also tests the concept through Jacob Hamblin, who was esteemed by southern Utah Saints as Honest Jake. The historical record presented in the book shows that Hamblin lied to protect the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints after the Mountain Meadows Massacre, despite not being present when the Fancher train was attacked. The account also says he was willing to lie for personal enrichment, complicating any portrayal of religious loyalty as his sole motive. John D. Lee, who had his own hostile nicknames for Hamblin, offers a sharply different view of his character.

Hamblin’s later report that Shivwits had admitted killing Major Powell’s men illustrates the lasting damage deception can do to credibility. John Wesley Powell was present when the confession was made and corroborated Hamblin’s account, but the book questions whether Powell understood the Shivwits directly or was relying on Hamblin’s translation. The uncertainty does not settle what happened; it shows how a record shaped by a narrator’s willingness to conceal can make even corroborated testimony difficult to assess.

Across these episodes, theocratic ethics describes more than a clash between belief and government. It concerns the power to decide when truth may be withheld, which legal order deserves obedience, and whose account of events counts. The same language of religious duty or constitutional freedom can defend a community against coercive state action, yet it can also protect institutions from accountability. The book’s examples leave that tension unresolved by slogans: they direct attention instead to the consequences of secrecy, the structure of authority, and the people whose claims may be discounted.