Under the banner of heaven

Under the banner of heaven is both a declaration of religious allegiance and a name for the conflict that declaration helps define. John Taylor used the phrase in 1880 to describe a choice between the authority of the United States and what he understood as divine command. In the book, it resonates beyond that speech: it evokes a recurring struggle over who may speak for God, whose law should prevail, and what members of a religious community owe to their leaders and one another.

Taylor’s declaration

On January 4, 1880, addressing a Sunday assembly in Salt Lake City, Taylor argued that laws restricting the free exercise of religion could not command the Saints’ submission. He treated plural marriage as a divine institution that no government could abolish, and cast obedience to God as incompatible with obedience to the United States when the two authorities conflicted. The banner in his declaration therefore marks a boundary of loyalty: his listeners were asked to stand with heaven against the government.

The response made that appeal more than an individual flourish. As Taylor asked those who shared his position to raise their hands, every right hand in the assembly went up. The gesture showed the force of his standing among the Saints and turned his declaration into a collective affirmation. Taylor’s personal commitment to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and his history as a witness to Joseph Smith’s death gave his words particular weight. The scene joins prophetic authority to public assent: the leader names the allegiance, and the gathered community visibly accepts it.

Revelation, authority, and dissent

The phrase belongs to a broader dispute over religious authority. From the beginning, Joseph Smith encouraged members to seek personal impressions from the Lord. But unrestricted personal revelation posed a problem for a church led by a prophet: if others could receive contradictory instructions from God, the prophet’s authority might be challenged. In 1830, the year the church was incorporated, Smith announced that no one else in the church could be appointed to receive commandments and revelations. The practice of personal revelation nevertheless remained compelling, and members continued to heed what they understood as divine direction.

The resulting tension helps explain why the book associates religious allegiance with competing claims to leadership. Robert Crossfield, whom God called Onias in a commandment received in 1975, declared himself the true prophet and rightful leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His claim brought him into conflict with the men who ran the United Effort Plan communities; he was excluded from prayer meetings and expelled from the organization. The book presents such schisms as one consequence of a religious culture in which divine revelation could be claimed beyond the institution’s control. Among the followers of Onias was Dan Lafferty, whose later convictions about religious and political authority developed in this contested environment.

God’s law and human law

The banner metaphor also speaks to the competition between religious rules and civil law. In Nauvoo, Joseph Smith presided over a city endowed with unusual sovereign powers under its charter. He headed a disciplined Nauvoo Legion, assumed the title of King, Priest, and Ruler over Israel on Earth, and sought further military authority. The book presents Nauvoo as a place where religious leadership and civic power converged, making the question of who governed more than an abstract dispute.

Under Brigham Young, the Saints’ claim that divine law took precedence over human law acquired an institutional form in Utah. The Mormon-dominated territorial legislature expanded the authority of local probate courts, which Young controlled. Many judges were Mormon bishops, and juries were largely composed of church members who followed instructions from church leaders. Federal officials described the resulting system as theocratic rule. In this account, loyalty to heaven did not merely express private belief: it could shape courts and local governance, putting church authority into direct competition with federal jurisdiction.

The conflict also extended into ordinary political arguments. Dan Lafferty invoked scripture from The Book of Mormon to argue that government had no right to require licenses, taxes, or Social Security numbers. His reasoning treated such requirements as intrusions on rights he believed people already possessed. He had not yet allied himself with an established fundamentalist church or prophet, but his studies had made him a committed Mormon Fundamentalist. He became convinced that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had departed from its course when plural marriage was abandoned under government pressure. The language of divine allegiance thus frames not just a clash between government and church, but disputes within religious communities over which version of faith remains true.

Community, memory, and consequences

The book sets Taylor’s defiance beside the forms of collective belonging that sustain religious identity. At the Hill Cumorah Pageant, more than ten thousand Saints gathered for an annual outdoor production staged since 1937. Although nonmembers were welcome, more than 95 percent of the audience belonged to the church; the event functioned largely as a gathering where members celebrated their shared testimonies. The pageant’s scale and ritualized assembly offer a different picture of religious solidarity from Taylor’s confrontation with government, but both depend on a community recognizing itself through common belief and public practice.

Collective loyalty was also shaped by persecution and migration. After Joseph Smith’s murder and the acquittal of the defendants in his murder trial, Brigham Young declared that God and his people would avenge the blood of the church’s leaders. Church authorities introduced an Oath of Vengeance into the temple endowment, where participants pledged to pray for vengeance and teach the vow to their descendants. It remained part of the ceremony until 1927, when its disclosure to the non-Mormon press provoked public criticism. The oath carried the memory of violence forward as a shared obligation.

The westward exodus deepened that sense of collective identity. Many Saints died during the journey, and the trials of expulsion and migration bound survivors more closely to the church and to Brigham Young. At Sugar Creek, Iowa, the doctrine of plural marriage was openly shared with ordinary emigrants, even as church leaders continued to deny its practice to outsiders. The book calls this concealment theocratic ethics, also known among Mormons as Lying for the Lord. These episodes show how the banner’s promise of fidelity could coexist with secrecy, exclusion, and confrontation with the law.

A contested expression

Taylor’s declaration was not an abstract rejection of every government action; it arose in a specific struggle over plural marriage and federal efforts to restrict it. Congress’s 1882 Edmunds Act made unlawful cohabitation prosecutable as well as plural marriage, and federal agents pursued convictions across the territory. By the late 1880s, about a thousand Saints had been jailed, yet imprisonment could become a badge of defiance. The phrase’s force lies in how it converts this conflict into a stark test of allegiance, making religious resistance sound at once like obedience to heaven and opposition to the state.

That tension gives the expression its continuing significance in the book. The banner can signify solidarity among believers, but it can also mark the rejection of outside authority and intensify struggles over who may interpret divine command. The book follows those struggles from formal institutions and public assemblies into splinter movements and individual convictions. Its title points to a claim of sacred loyalty whose consequences depend on who invokes it, which authority is being resisted, and what actions are justified in its name.