Conflict Between Religious Freedom and Plural Marriage

Conflict Between Religious Freedom and Plural Marriage is a recurring struggle over who has the authority to govern marriage and family life: the state, a religious hierarchy, or the individuals bound by both. The book presents religious-liberty claims as both a defense against government suppression and a shield invoked by communities whose practices can deprive women and children of meaningful choice. Its history is therefore not a simple contest between belief and law. It is also a contest over which law will prevail, who gets to define abuse, and whether people inside a religious community can appeal beyond its leaders.

Religious Authority and the Law

The conflict has an early political form in Nauvoo. After arriving in Illinois, Joseph Smith built a city whose charter gave it unusual sovereign powers. The result, as the book describes it, was a theocratic principality: Joseph stood at its head, held religious and civic authority, and commanded the Nauvoo Legion. The episode establishes a pattern that recurs in later plural-marriage communities: religious authority did not merely ask the state to tolerate private belief but also sought space to organize public life under its own rules.

That conflict became explicit in the Utah territory under Brigham Young. He argued that plural marriage was a religious liberty the federal government had no right to curtail, and that divine law outranked laws enacted by non-Mormons. The Utah Territorial Legislature, dominated by Mormons, expanded the authority of local probate courts controlled by Brigham. Because bishops often served as judges and church members made up most juries, the local system could make church priorities decisive when they collided with federal law. Federal officials described the arrangement as theocratic rule; their departure amid harassment and fear further illustrates how a community could contest state authority not only in principle but through institutions and local power.

A related suspicion of government appears in Dan Lafferty’s arguments to his brothers. He maintained that licensing, taxation, and Social Security numbers gave the state improper control over citizens, supporting his claims with scripture. His position was broader than a defense of plural marriage: it treated ordinary government requirements as violations of basic rights. The book presents this as one route by which a return-to-original-religion ideal could become a general rejection of state authority.

Plural Marriage, Family, and Control

In Colorado City, the claim to religious freedom existed alongside extensive priesthood authority over households. Rulon Jeffs had an estimated seventy-five wives and at least sixty-five children; some wives were married to him at fourteen or fifteen, when he was in his eighties. His sermons stressed submission, and his teachings drew on nineteenth-century writings by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. The book sets these teachings beside the community’s claim to religious independence, showing how freedom for the institution could coexist with sharply limited autonomy for its members.

The legal and religious forms of marriage also diverged. Because plural marriage was illegal in Utah and Arizona, men typically entered a legal marriage with one wife while additional wives were considered spiritually married and remained unmarried in the state’s eyes. That arrangement exposed women and children to the consequences of a household’s unofficial status, while helping large families qualify for public assistance. The community denounced the governments of Arizona, Utah, and the United States as hostile to the United Effort Plan, yet received substantial public funds. The book uses that contrast to complicate any account in which state support and religious opposition are wholly separate.

The allocation of family members could be controlled from above as well. When DeLoy Bateman left the Work, Rulon sent someone to claim his wives and children for the priesthood and ordered that they be given to a supposedly worthier man. Both wives refused to leave DeLoy; most of the children followed their parents out of the community as apostates. The episode makes the dispute over religious freedom intimate and concrete: the institution’s claim to govern marriage and children met the family’s decision to remain together, and departure carried the cost of religious exclusion.

The family histories of Bountiful show how plural marriage could entangle kinship and authority across generations. At fourteen, Debbie Palmer was married to Ray Blackmore, a community leader, and became his sixth wife and stepmother to thirty-one children, most older than she was. Because Blackmore was also the father of her stepmother, Debbie became a stepmother to that woman and, in the book’s account, her own stepgrandmother. Later, Alaire Blackmore’s marriages made her at different times a wife to her adoptive father, a cowife to Debbie, and a wife to Winston Blackmore, her adoptive brother. Such relationships are presented not as abstract theological questions but as family arrangements shaped by leaders who controlled marriage decisions.

Raids, Prosecutions, and Public Opinion

The 1953 Short Creek raid demonstrated how government enforcement could produce the opposite of its intended public effect. The raid became national news, and photographs of children separated from their mothers drew widespread sympathy for the polygamists, who presented themselves as law-abiding Mormons exercising constitutional rights. Coverage reached the front page of the New York Times with prominence comparable to news of the armistice ending the Korean War. The raid was widely criticized as religious persecution and a misuse of public money. Governor Howard Pyle lost office in 1954; the arrests and trials cost taxpayers $600,000, and by 1956 those arrested had been released and reunited with their families.

The community resumed plural marriage, and the population continued to grow rapidly. The book describes the backlash as a boon to the FLDS Church: for much of the following half-century, fundamentalists were able to practice polygamy across the Intermountain West with little state interference. The raid thus became part of the community’s political memory, available as evidence that official intervention could be excessive and that public sympathy might turn against the authorities.

Tom Green’s prosecution shows how that balance could shift. David Leavitt had previously defended a polygamist on the ground that constitutional religious freedom overrode state laws against plural marriage. He had not intended to prosecute Green, whose family and community he already knew about. But after seeing Green on national television discuss his young wives, Leavitt focused on evidence that one wife had been thirteen when Green, then thirty-seven, impregnated her. He filed charges five months after the program aired. The case drew national coverage and made plural marriage a public spectacle. Here the conflict was no longer framed only as the state intruding on private religious practice: the prosecution presented the treatment of a child as a matter of criminal law. Leavitt won the case but, like Pyle before him, later lost political support; Juab County voters removed him in 2002.

Media, Coalition, and Competing Claims

Media visibility could make the religious-liberty case more persuasive or expose the harms that claim was said to conceal. The Short Creek images of distressed children made the fundamentalists appear persecuted. Green’s own television appearances helped prompt prosecution. The book also contrasts national attention to Elizabeth Smart’s kidnapping with the treatment of Ruby Jessop, who had been born into a polygamous community. Antipolygamy activist Lorna Craig argued that the two fourteen-year-old girls had both been kidnapped and sexually abused, but that Ruby was returned to the community and no comparable investigation followed. In her analysis, Ruby’s upbringing and the local authorities’ ties to the religious order made her case harder to recognize as a violation requiring outside intervention.

The coalitions that formed around the issue were politically unexpected. The American Civil Liberties Union and gay-rights activists supported fundamentalists’ claims of religious persecution and limits on government intrusion into private life, although FLDS doctrine condemned homosexuality. Conversely, radical feminists joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in supporting stronger prosecution of plural marriage. These alliances reveal how the dispute could bring groups together around a shared legal concern while leaving their broader beliefs in direct opposition.

In Colorado City, police chief Sam Roundy defended the principle that government should not intrude into residents’ homes. Yet the conflict became harder to contain as women left and reported abuse. Ruth Stubbs, a third wife of police officer Rodney Holm, fled with her children and appeared on television; she had been assigned to marry Holm at sixteen, after leaving school following the sixth grade. The town’s mayor, Dan Barlow, characterized the prosecution as harassment of an honorable religious minority and compared it to the Short Creek raid. His interpretation drew on a real history of state intervention, but it competed with accounts of women and girls whose marriages, education, and ability to seek help had been shaped by religious and local authorities.

Ruth later disappeared after submitting a note saying she did not want Holm jailed and refusing to testify. Her aunt, Pennie Peterson, had also left Colorado City as a teenager after being ordered to marry an older man; she challenged the use of constitutional liberty to defend the sexual exploitation of girls. Meanwhile, the mayor’s own son, Dan Barlow Jr., was charged with molesting five daughters over many years. Four daughters did not testify, and he received a suspended sentence after signing a statement expressing regret. Together, these cases show why the question cannot be resolved by treating religious freedom as either an unquestionable defense or a mere pretext: the book’s central concern is whether claims of collective religious liberty can obscure the power relations and barriers to redress within a community.