Apostasy

Apostasy is the condition of leaving or repudiating a religious community, but the book presents it as a contested change of identity rather than a simple disagreement over doctrine. In the Colorado City community, a person who leaves can be recast as morally dangerous, cut off from relatives, and deprived of control over family life and property. DeLoy Bateman’s departure makes those costs concrete; Debbie Palmer’s account shows how questioning religious authority can become a struggle to reclaim responsibility for one’s life and children.

Belief, Authority, and the Boundary of Belonging

The social force of apostasy rests on a sharp division between insiders and outsiders. The Book of Mormon frames religious allegiance as a choice between two opposed churches, while Joseph Smith’s followers claimed a divine right to gather in Jackson County, Missouri, as God’s chosen people. Local residents’ resistance to that claim intensified the boundary between the Saints and their neighbors. Joseph Smith’s teaching of free agency allowed people to choose, but described rejection of his religious message as a choice for wickedness rather than a neutral difference of conviction.

This framework helps explain why departure could be treated as betrayal. Within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the book describes male-only ecclesiastical authority and a system in which prophets alone receive revelations directing the faithful. Fundamentalist leaders carried those principles further in their control over daily conduct and women’s roles. In Colorado City, Arizona, restrictions included bans on television and print media and on contact with outsiders, including relatives who had left. DeLoy describes members secretly installing satellite dishes, abandoning them after prophetic sermons against television, and later resuming the practice. The cycle illustrates a community in which conformity was enforced through both formal rules and the expectation that the prophet could identify disobedience.

DeLoy Bateman’s Break with the Work

DeLoy had been born and raised in the faith and belonged to a family with deep standing in it. His forebears were among the founding members of the fundamentalist church, and his adoptive grandfather, LeRoy Johnson, had led the Colorado City community before Rulon Jeffs. DeLoy’s break therefore came from within a religious and familial inheritance, not from unfamiliarity with its teachings. He also saw the reach of its authority in public life: Rulon’s influence extended across city employees, police, and schools.

The decisive change came after Rulon accused DeLoy of wrongdoing. DeLoy concluded that the accusation was false and recognized that it conflicted with the claim that the prophet received knowledge directly from God. He decided to leave the Work, understanding that departure would end the life he had known. His account makes the rupture epistemic as well as institutional: the authority on which his understanding of truth depended no longer appeared trustworthy to him.

DeLoy’s absence from the next weekly priesthood meeting was followed within a day by an effort to take his wives and children. Under UEP doctrine, spouses and children were treated as belonging to the priesthood, which could reassign them to another man. Both wives refused to leave DeLoy; all but the three oldest children also became apostates. Their decision turned one man’s separation into a family break, while demonstrating that relatives could refuse the religious authority that sought to divide them.

Exclusion and the Material Costs of Leaving

The community’s response extended beyond condemnation. Warren Jeffs, Rulon’s son and heir apparent, preached in 2000 that apostates occupied the lowest moral position and were aligned with the devil. DeLoy’s relatives who remained in the faith were forbidden to speak with him, his wives, or the children who had also left. The ban made estrangement a rule of community membership, not merely a private family choice.

The dispute also reached DeLoy’s home. Although he had built and paid for the large house, the United Effort Plan owned the land within the city limits, including his lot. Rulon and the plan pursued legal action to take possession of the house and sought to evict DeLoy from Colorado City. The case reveals how religious authority could be reinforced by control of property: leaving the faith did not automatically free a person from the institution’s practical reach.

Debbie Palmer and the Work of Reconsideration

Debbie Palmer’s story emphasizes the gradual work of doubt. Raised in a patriarchal religious system that prized obedience, she was also a child who asked questions and thought for herself. Her experience of family life, including mistreatment by her father’s second wife, complicated the ideal of plural marriage she had been taught. Later, as leaders pressed her to leave a house they wanted to control, she found it harder to reconcile their conduct with the righteousness they claimed to represent.

Debbie began to question whether self-proclaimed prophets truly communicated God’s will. Her struggle was not presented as an easy rejection of belief: abandoning the account of the world and her place in it that had shaped her life felt intellectually frightening. But she came to believe she had to take responsibility for herself and her children rather than attribute her suffering to divine purpose. The book thus portrays apostasy not as a single moment of certainty, but as a movement from inherited obedience toward the difficult recognition that human leaders and religious claims could not be treated as identical.

Apostasy, Stigma, and the Persistence of Boundaries

Other accounts clarify how departure can be shaped by circumstance without making every victim or dissenter an apostate. Flora Jessop left Colorado City and an arranged marriage, later becoming an antipolygamy activist. Her sister Ruby, by contrast, was forced into a marriage as a teenager and was returned to members of the community after an intervention by child-welfare officials; she then disappeared from outside view. The contrast shows the vulnerability of young people within the system, but the evidence does not establish Ruby’s own religious position, so her experience is not the same as a documented decision to leave.

Nor does a break with one religious setting necessarily erase the moral divisions learned within it. In a later account of Dan Lafferty’s transformed faith, he continued to divide humanity into those inherently aligned with God and those aligned with the devil. That example does not define apostasy, but it underscores the persistence of absolute categories even when a person’s religious circumstances change. Across these narratives, leaving a group alters one’s standing within it; it does not guarantee freedom from the ideas, relationships, or institutions that formed the boundary in the first place.