Bible

The Bible appears as a source of religious authority whose meaning is repeatedly mediated by leaders and believers. In the book’s accounts of plural marriage and fundamentalist dissent, it supplies precedents and language through which competing claims about divine law, obedience, and religious practice are made. Its influence is therefore not simply textual: the question of who may interpret scripture, and how its passages apply, becomes part of the struggle over authority.

Old Testament precedents and plural marriage

Joseph Smith’s early consideration of plural marriage drew on the Old Testament as a source of precedent. The patriarchs Abraham and Jacob, described as ancestors of the Mormons, practiced plural marriage without condemnation in the scriptural accounts. Joseph took this as support for the belief that God intended men to have more than one wife. The narrative presents this reasoning alongside his emotional conviction that the prospect of loving more than one woman could not be contrary to God’s will. Scriptural precedent thus reinforced a desire that Joseph already found compelling; it did not operate as an abstract argument detached from his conduct.

In Nauvoo, the pamphlet The Peace Maker became an indirect means of introducing this scriptural case. According to John D. Lee, Joseph arranged for a man identified in Lee’s account as Sidney Hay Jacobs to select passages from the Old Bible that concerned polygamy, or celestial marriage, and advocate the doctrine in pamphlet form. The book identifies Udney Hay Jacob as the pamphlet’s likely author, while noting that scholars generally regard Jacob, rather than Joseph, as its writer. It also argues that publication by the church press would scarcely have happened without Joseph’s endorsement. The selection and arrangement of biblical passages therefore mattered as much as the passages themselves: the pamphlet was intended to prepare the Saints to accept a principle Joseph had not yet chosen to announce openly.

The response defeated that gradual approach. The Peace Maker provoked an uproar, and Joseph publicly claimed that it had appeared without his knowledge, even as the narrative describes him as already practicing plural marriage in secret. He issued strong public denunciations of polygamy, creating a contrast between the Old Testament precedent used to legitimate the practice in private and his public retreat when that argument met resistance. The episode shows scripture serving as a resource in a staged effort to shape belief, rather than as an uncontested rule whose meaning was self-evident.

Scripture in disputes over authority

The book places this use of biblical precedent within a wider patriarchal religious culture. It describes Mormonism as rooted in Old Testament traditions and explains that men alone hold priesthood and ecclesiastical authority, including the office of prophet. In both the mainstream church and the fundamentalist church, prophets alone are authorized to receive revelations governing the faithful’s lives. Fundamentalist communities, the account says, carry rigid expectations of obedience and distinct roles for men and women to an especially extreme degree. In this setting, scripture’s authority intersects with a hierarchy that assigns interpretive power to male religious leaders.

That hierarchy does not prevent ordinary believers from arguing from scripture; instead, scriptural argument can become a means of contesting the established church. Dan Lafferty’s study of Mormon history led him to conclude that the modern LDS Church had departed from its original course when it abandoned plural marriage. In discussions with his brothers, he argued against government authority by appealing to Mormon scripture and later defended the restoration of polygamy through texts that included the Bible and The Book of Mormon. When Ron arrived at one of these gatherings as a committed opponent of fundamentalism, he tried to refute Dan by citing the Bible and The Book of Mormon. Dan answered with arguments from those same books as well as from the Constitution. The brothers’ disagreement turned not on whether scripture mattered, but on which interpretation should govern religious life.

From scriptural argument to claimed revelation

The account distinguishes biblical authority from the particular scriptural episode that became central to Ron and Dan’s reasoning about violence. As they considered Ron’s removal revelation, they turned to the story of Nephi and Laban near the beginning of The Book of Mormon. Nephi initially resists killing Laban, but the narrative then presents God as commanding him to act for a righteous purpose. That example is from The Book of Mormon, not the Bible; its relevance lies in how the brothers placed it within a larger scriptural framework that also drew on the Bible. They interpreted another of Ron’s revelations to mean that Ron was the mouth of God and Dan the arm, assigning Ron the role of speaker and Dan the role of killer.

On the Monday evening before the planned killings, the brothers discussed the removal revelation at their mother Claudine Lafferty’s dining-room table. Claudine sat nearby knitting and listened without speaking. According to Chip Carnes’s court testimony, Ron discussed the Bible and a revelation that he claimed instructed him to eliminate people; Carnes heard him mention Brenda and a baby. Dan questioned whether the people designated for removal had to have their throats cut. Ron replied that the Lord had commanded it. Here the Bible is part of the language in which a claimed divine instruction is discussed, but the book does not identify a specific biblical passage as the source of the order. That distinction matters: the presence of scriptural language does not itself establish what a text commands or whether an alleged revelation follows from it.

Interpretive power and consequences

Across these episodes, the Bible supports sharply different projects: Joseph’s concealed development of plural marriage, fundamentalist arguments against the modern church, and the broader patriarchal structure that places revelation in prophetic hands. The text’s authority is repeatedly asserted, but its practical force depends on interpretation, selective citation, and the institutions or individuals claiming to speak for God. Joseph’s trial balloon failed when the Saints resisted it; Dan’s arguments persuaded Ron to embrace fundamentalism; and Ron’s later discussions invoked the Bible without establishing a specific biblical command for the proposed killings. The book thus portrays scripture as consequential not because its application is automatic, but because claims made in its name can alter belief, authority, and action.