The 1986 First Ward–Second Ward Split in Colorado City was a succession crisis that divided a fundamentalist community after the death of its revered prophet, LeRoy Johnson. Rulon Jeffs took up Johnson’s mantle, but the challenge to his right to lead led nearly a third of the community to leave and establish a rival congregation across the highway. The split gave competing claims to religious authority a durable institutional form: two neighboring groups, each condemning the other as apostate.

A contested succession

Johnson died in 1986 at the age of ninety-eight. The community had expected him to live forever, so his death brought not only grief but uncertainty over who could legitimately lead. Rulon Jeffs assumed leadership, yet his succession was furiously contested by followers of Marion Hammon, a prominent bishop. The account presents the dispute as a struggle over Johnson’s mantle, not simply a change of office: acceptance of the new leader was divided, and allegiance to Hammon offered a competing basis for religious belonging.

The break and its geography

Hammon’s followers, nearly a third of the community, left the fold en masse. They moved onto a stretch of desert just across the highway and founded their own fundamentalist church, known as the Second Ward; the original congregation became the First Ward. The physical distance between the groups was small, but the departure created separate congregations and competing claims to the community’s religious identity. The break made disagreement over succession visible in the landscape as well as in church membership.

A division sustained by mutual condemnation

The First and Second Wards each accused the other of being godless apostates and warned that the other congregation faced eternal damnation. These reciprocal denunciations turned a leadership dispute into an enduring boundary between communities: each side’s claim to religious legitimacy depended, in part, on rejecting the other’s. At the time the book recounts the split, that mutual condemnation remained in place. The episode is also presented as part of a recurring pattern in Mormon Fundamentalism, whose adherents had repeatedly divided into rival sects. In Colorado City, the death of a prophet did not settle authority; it exposed how sharply authority could be contested.