Warren Jeffs

Warren Jeffs is the son and successor of Rulon Jeffs, the prophet who led the United Effort Plan community centered in Colorado City. He had already been exercising much of his father’s authority during Rulon’s prolonged illness, but Rulon’s death made the succession explicit and exposed how uncertain the community’s unity remained. Warren takes power not amid the broad affection accorded to his predecessors, but amid apprehension, rival claims, and expectations that his rule may provoke another break.

Identity and rise to leadership

At the time of Rulon Jeffs’s death, Warren was forty-six and the second son of Rulon’s fourth wife. He moved swiftly to take the reins of the First Ward. The transition formalized a role he had occupied for years: because his father had been seriously ill, Warren had already been running the church and, in practice, functioning as prophet. His appointment therefore represented both continuity in leadership and a test of whether authority exercised behind an ailing prophet could command the same allegiance once it became his own.

The community’s understanding of prophetic succession rested on a claimed chain of priesthood keys. In Colorado City and Bountiful, portraits of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, John Taylor, John W. Woolley, Lorin C. Woolley, John Y. Barlow, LeRoy Johnson, and Rulon Jeffs were displayed together as successive leaders entrusted with divine authority. After Rulon’s death, Warren was treated as the next link in that lineage. Other fundamentalist communities honored different prophetic successions, however, so the pictures expressed a particular community’s account of legitimacy rather than a consensus shared across the movement.

An unsettled inheritance

Rulon’s death recalled the earlier transition after LeRoy Johnson died in 1986. LeRoy’s succession had been fiercely disputed by supporters of the bishop Marion Hammon. Nearly a third of the community left with Hammon, settled across the highway, and formed the Second Ward. The two congregations then denounced one another as apostates and warned of one another’s damnation. That history gave the anxiety surrounding Warren’s accession a concrete precedent: a change of prophet had already divided the community on a large scale.

Warren also lacked the personal affection associated with Rulon and LeRoy. The narrative describes him as tall and bony, with a high-pitched voice, and as possessing a pronounced conviction of his own perfection in God’s eyes. Those in Colorado City and Bountiful had not extended to him the familiar affectionate title used for the previous prophets. An older sibling’s assessment was sharper: Warren did not love the people, relied on fear and dread to control them, and demanded perfect, constant obedience under threat of spiritual exclusion. This account presents a leadership style markedly different from the warmth attributed to his father and LeRoy Johnson.

Consolidating authority and facing rivals

Some First Ward members had hoped that the admired ninety-five-year-old patriarch Fred Jessop would succeed Rulon. Warren’s appointment therefore left a possible rival constituency inside the community. There was speculation that Jessop’s followers might separate from the First Ward, although Warren’s brother suggested that they could wait rather than leave immediately. In his account, they expected Warren’s rule to be temporary and hoped that his removal would allow one of their own to take power while keeping the congregation intact. The possibility of a break remained unresolved; the faction’s expectation itself shows that formal succession had not settled the question of who deserved to lead.

Warren’s efforts to strengthen his position extended beyond Colorado City. In Bountiful, British Columbia, he removed Winston Blackmore from his leadership position and threatened to expel him from the religion. Warren installed a new bishop, but at least half of the Bountiful community remained loyal to Blackmore. If Blackmore formed an independent sect, many Canadian fundamentalists were expected to leave Warren’s church and follow him. The dispute thus placed Warren’s authority under pressure across the wider community, where appointment from above did not guarantee the allegiance of local members.

These conflicts belong to a much longer pattern of division. After John Y. Barlow died, Joseph Musser’s appointment of Rulon Allred as his second elder was contested by supporters of LeRoy Johnson, despite Barlow’s having specified Johnson as his successor. After Musser’s death, the movement split: Johnson led the larger group that remained in Short Creek, while Allred led the Apostolic United Brethren. The account traces such divisions partly to a central tension in Mormon religious authority: a tradition that encourages personal revelation can also produce competing claims about who has the right to speak for God. Warren inherited not an uncontested institution, but a movement in which rival interpretations of prophetic legitimacy had repeatedly generated new congregations.

Obedience, information, and the End Times

Warren’s leadership is associated with strict obedience and the close regulation of community life. The broader religious framework described in the book reserves the priesthood and ecclesiastical authority for men and gives prophets control over revelations governing the faithful’s conduct. In Colorado City, church authority also reaches beyond religious services: the community is described as restricting television, newspapers, and contact with outsiders, including family members who have left. These rules form part of the setting in which Warren succeeds his father; the evidence does not establish that he originated each restriction, but it shows the system of control within which his authority operated.

The book also portrays Warren as intensifying the movement’s expectation that the End Times were near. His father had predicted that a fiery hurricane would sweep the world clean by the year 2000, a prediction that did not come to pass. The attacks of September 11, 2001, nevertheless renewed Warren’s optimism. In public, he condemned the terrorists’ violence; in sermons to followers in Colorado City and Bountiful, he treated the attacks on New York and Washington as a portent that the End Times were at hand and that God’s chosen people would soon receive eternal glory. In the Bountiful school, photographs of the planes striking the World Trade Center were displayed as evidence of the approaching Last Days.

This contrast between public condemnation and the apocalyptic meaning Warren assigned to the attacks shows how events outside the community could be recast within its religious expectations. The same crisis that was publicly condemned was presented to followers as confirmation that their prophetic timetable was unfolding. Warren’s rise, his contested authority, and his end-times preaching together depict leadership as both inheritance and continual assertion: the mantle passed to him through an established account of priesthood succession, but each factional dispute and each new interpretation of events made that claim subject to renewed challenge.