Under Heaven's Banner

Under Heaven's Banner is the book's title, drawn from a quotation attributed to John Taylor. The expression gives a unifying frame to episodes in which claims to speak for heaven become claims to command, bind, and organize people on earth. Across the book, the banner is less a settled emblem of one religious community than a contested sign of who may claim divine authorization.

Title and Attribution

The title's source is identified as a quotation attributed to John Taylor in an anonymously authored article, A Den of Treason: That's What John Taylor Made the Assembly Hall Last Sunday, published in the Salt Lake Daily Tribune on January 6, 1880. The book's sources also include compilations of revelations attributed to Taylor and Wilford Woodruff, connecting the title's provenance to its sustained attention to revelation and religious authority.

The title therefore points toward a recurring problem in the narrative: a declaration made in heaven may be treated as binding on earth, but competing people and institutions disagree over who has the right to make that declaration. The phrase offers a frame for the book's many different settings and conflicts without making them parts of one uncontested religious story.

Revelation and the Claim to Authority

The book traces this problem to Joseph Smith's early teaching that believers should seek personal impressions from God. That invitation made direct revelation an appealing feature of the new faith, but it also threatened the prophet's control: if God might reveal contradictory truths to different followers, the authority of any single revelation became difficult to settle. In 1830, Joseph Smith announced that no one else in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was to receive commandments and revelations for the church. The restriction did not end personal revelation; the book describes continuing dissent and the emergence of roughly two hundred schismatic Mormon groups.

The later history of the School of the Prophets shows how such claims could acquire practical force. Robert Crossfield, called Onias in a revelation he received, was declared the true prophet and rightful leader of the church. The Lafferty brothers helped him print and distribute more than fifteen thousand pamphlets, and the school began meeting weekly at their mother's home in Provo. A further revelation designated the brothers an elect people, and Ron Lafferty was appointed bishop of the Provo chapter. In this setting, revelation did not remain a private conviction: it established leadership, organized labor, and helped define a chosen community.

Words That Bind, and Revelations That Divide

The book repeatedly shows religious speech becoming a public commitment. After the defendants in the trial over the murders of Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith were acquitted, Brigham Young declared that God and his people were responsible for avenging the blood of the church's servants. Church authorities made an Oath of Vengeance part of the temple endowment ceremony. Participants promised to pray for vengeance and to teach that obligation to their descendants; the oath remained in the ceremony until 1927, when its disclosure to the non-Mormon press provoked public and political criticism.

John Taylor's later meeting with trusted followers offers another example of a religious declaration becoming an organizing act. After sharing his revelation, Taylor placed those present under covenant to defend plural marriage and consecrate their lives, liberty, and property to it. He also authorized a group to perform celestial marriages and ordain others to do so. The account notes that the meeting's authenticity has been disputed by Church leaders, making the episode itself a point of contention over religious authority and continuity.

The School of the Prophets also reveals the limits of agreement within a community that evaluated revelations together. When Ron Lafferty presented Bernard Brady with the removal revelation, Brady rejected it as wrong and frightening; neither man brought it before the other members at the meeting that followed. At a later meeting, members refused Watson Lafferty's request to dedicate a straight razor as a religious instrument. These refusals show that the language of divine command did not automatically produce shared assent, even among people who accepted revelation as a source of authority.

Belonging, Ritual, and the Banner's Reach

The title's collective dimension is visible in the book's account of the Hill Cumorah Pageant. Each July, more than ten thousand people gather for the production, staged at the site associated with Joseph Smith's recovery of the golden plates. Although the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints promotes the pageant as a means of conversion, more than 95 percent of attendees already belong to the church. The book describes it chiefly as a gathering in which members meet at a place of origin and celebrate one another's testimonies. Its crowds and performance turn shared belief into a visible public occasion.

The history of Mormon fundamentalist communities complicates any image of a single, unified banner. After LeRoy Johnson's death, a dispute over succession divided the Colorado City community: followers of Marion Hammon left and formed the Second Ward, while the rival congregations denounced each other as apostates. An earlier leadership dispute after Joseph Musser appointed Rulon Allred as his heir had likewise divided the fundamentalist movement, producing rival groups led by LeRoy Johnson and Allred. In these episodes, competing claims to inherited authority create separate communities, each with its own account of religious legitimacy.

Across pageant, covenant, schism, and personal revelation, Under Heaven's Banner links the sacred language of belonging to concrete consequences: people gather, accept obligations, contest leaders, or leave one another's communities. Its title is thus apt not as a guarantee of unity, but as a name for the contested authority under which religious groups seek to live.