Blood Atonement Belief

Blood Atonement Belief is the doctrine, described in the book, that some serious sins could not be redeemed through Jesus Christ’s atonement and instead required the sinner’s blood to be shed. Associated with teachings attributed to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, it became a rationale invoked to justify lethal punishment. The book traces its force through different settings: nineteenth-century sermons and violence in Nauvoo and Utah, Dan Lafferty’s later reading of Mormon history, and the killings carried out by Ervil LeBaron’s followers. Across these episodes, the doctrine joins a claim about salvation to a contest over who has authority to judge and punish.

Meaning and Religious Authority

In the account of the doctrine, ordinary repentance and Christ’s atoning blood were understood to be insufficient for certain grave offenses. Will Bagley’s history, as cited in the book, describes the belief as placing some sinners beyond the reach of Christ’s atonement, with the shedding of their own blood presented as their only hope. That claim makes punishment more than a civic penalty: it represents death as a possible means of expiation. It also creates a dangerous opening for people who believe they can identify the offense, determine the sinner’s status, and carry out what they regard as a divine requirement.

The book places this belief within a broader religious worldview sharply divided between good and evil. The Book of Mormon’s account of two opposing churches supplies one example of such a binary moral frame, while Joseph Smith’s teachings about God’s laws taking precedence over human laws supply another. Neither idea, on its own, is the same as Blood Atonement Belief. Together, however, they help explain how a claim of sacred obligation could be made to outweigh ordinary legal restraint. The doctrine’s history in the book is therefore also a history of competing authorities: religious judgment, community discipline, and civil law.

Nineteenth-Century Teachings and Consequences

The book attributes teachings about blood atonement to both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Joseph taught that certain grievous sins could be atoned for only by the sinner’s blood being shed. Brigham likewise described some offenses as requiring that sinners’ blood be spilled. These teachings gave later advocates a religious vocabulary for treating lethal punishment not merely as revenge, but as a purported act of justice or redemption.

That vocabulary became especially prominent during the Mormon Reformation, which peaked in 1856 and 1857. The reform movement’s leader, Jedediah M. Grant, was both a forceful advocate of plural marriage and a preacher of blood atonement. He taught that a sinner could be killed for the sinner’s own salvation when the offense was one that could be atoned for only through bloodshed. His sermons presented water, and by implication ordinary religious rites, as inadequate for sins he considered exceptionally grave. The book emphasizes the convergence of intense religious fervor, pressure to conform, and advocacy of lethal punishment; Blood Atonement Belief was part of that wider climate, not an isolated theological abstraction.

The doctrine’s logic appeared in violence after Joseph Smith’s death as conflict between the Saints and their adversaries escalated in Hancock County, Illinois. In 1845, after the killing of Lieutenant Frank Worrell, a young non-Mormon suspected of burning Mormon homes was himself killed by Mormons. The book connects the episode to Joseph’s earlier teaching that some sins required bloodshed for atonement. The killing sharpened an already escalating conflict: attacks and reprisals spread, more than two hundred homes were burned, and the crisis helped lead to an agreement for the Saints to leave Illinois and the United States the following spring. In this episode, the doctrine’s significance lies in how a sacred justification for punishment entered an environment of collective retaliation and made reconciliation harder.

Law, Power, and the Lafferty Interpretation

The book also connects blood atonement to a wider dispute over whether religious law could supersede civil law. In Deseret, Brigham Young maintained that God’s laws took precedence over the laws of men. The Mormon-dominated Utah Territorial Legislature expanded the authority of local probate courts controlled by Brigham, while federal courts were supposed to hold jurisdiction in the territory. Mormon bishops commonly served as probate judges, and church members predominated on juries. This arrangement did not itself constitute Blood Atonement Belief, but it shows the political setting in which religious authority could compete with federal authority and shape the administration of justice.

Much later, Dan Lafferty encountered the doctrine while studying early Mormon teachings after embracing plural marriage. He learned that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young had preached blood atonement and that Joseph had taught the priority of divine law over human law. Dan’s interest in legal authority had also grown from his own conflict with government requirements, including licensing and taxes. In conversations with his brothers, he argued that government had exceeded its legitimate reach and used scripture to challenge its power to require licenses, taxes, or Social Security numbers. His reading of Mormon history led him to regard the modern Church as having abandoned its original principles. The book does not equate his political arguments with the doctrine itself; it shows how historical teachings about bloodshed and divine law entered the body of material through which he formed an increasingly radical religious outlook.

The danger became explicit when Dan told Allen that God had commanded the ritual killing of Brenda and her infant daughter Erica, and that he and Ron intended to carry it out. Allen questioned why Erica, an innocent child, would be included. That exchange exposes the conflict between a claim of divine command and the ordinary moral recognition that an innocent person should not be harmed. The account presents the Laffertys’ planned violence as religiously framed, while leaving no basis to treat their claimed revelation as an accepted rule of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Later Use and Significance

The book follows the doctrine into the actions of Ervil LeBaron’s followers. Before his death in prison, Ervil wrote The Book of the New Covenants, a long text naming people he considered disloyal and deserving of death. After he died, followers known as the Lambs of God used the list as a basis for revenge. They later described their victims’ deaths as acts of blood atonement and claimed that the killings were justified in the eyes of the Lord. The sequence shows how an idea associated with nineteenth-century teachings could be revived and applied within a later group, becoming a rationale for planned killings rather than a matter of historical theology alone.

Blood Atonement Belief is significant in the book because it makes the boundary between spiritual judgment and physical punishment unstable. When adherents claim that death can atone for sin, and that divine law outranks civil law, a person or group may claim authority to impose a punishment that the state treats as murder. The book’s examples differ in setting and scale—from sermons during the Mormon Reformation, to violence amid the Nauvoo conflict, to later fundamentalist interpretations—but each reveals the same perilous transformation: an account of salvation can be made to authorize human beings to decide who must die.