DeLoy Bateman and the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints

DeLoy Bateman’s relationship with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is defined by a rupture that never becomes a clean escape. He left its faith and rejected its authority, yet stayed in Colorado City, retained habits formed by religious life, and continued to value the community. His story follows the distance between leaving a belief system and ceasing to belong to the place and people that shaped a life.

Inheritance and Formation

Bateman was born and raised in the faith, within a family whose history was closely bound to the movement’s leadership. His great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather were among the religion’s thirteen founding members, and his adoptive grandfather, LeRoy Johnson, led Colorado City before Rulon Jeffs. Bateman’s place in the community was therefore both familial and institutional: its religious order was part of his inheritance, not an affiliation he encountered from the outside.

As an adult, Bateman taught science at Colorado City High School. He had two wives and seventeen children, and built a large family home with his own hands. The community’s rules governed more than formal worship. Members were forbidden to watch television or read newspapers and magazines, and were prohibited from contact with outsiders, including relatives who had left the religion. The wider Mormon principle that only men hold priesthood authority and that prophets direct the faithful’s conduct was, in fundamentalist communities, enforced with particular severity. This was the world in which Bateman’s devotion and his questions developed together.

His curiosity had begun early. As a boy, he noticed contradictions between religious teaching and scientific knowledge, but LeRoy Johnson instructed the young people to avoid certain questions. Bateman learned to suppress the contradictions rather than resolve them. At eighteen, Johnson sent him to Southern Utah State College in Cedar City to train as a teacher, accompanied by Bateman’s first wife, Eunice, whom the prophet had directed him to marry. College exposed him to geology and to the scientific account of the earth’s age, sharply at odds with the religion’s teaching. Bateman later described that education as the beginning of the end, though he remained in the faith for roughly twenty more years. After earning his degree, he returned to Colorado City to teach its young people.

The Break with Prophetic Authority

Bateman’s departure was not simply a response to restrictions or to plural marriage. He said that he could no longer accept the religion as true. The turning point came in a confrontation with Rulon Jeffs. Bateman calmly told the prophet that what he had said about him was a lie. When he later considered the exchange, the contradiction seemed conclusive: a man who claimed continual communication with God had failed to know that his accusation was false. Bateman decided to leave the Work, understanding that doing so would end the life he had known.

His break carried particular force in a community where the prophet’s authority reached into ordinary choices and family life. Members were taught that a prophet’s direction settled debate, while dissent was treated as a challenge to religious authority. The boundaries were also informational and social: television and print media were banned, and contact with former members was forbidden. Bateman’s eventual skepticism thus challenged not one isolated teaching but the authority that claimed to determine what could be known, whom one could speak with, and how a family should be arranged.

Bateman’s account of his departure remains more complicated than a simple denunciation. He believed that the leaders themselves might sincerely accept the religious claims they made, rather than knowingly deceive their followers. He also came to reject religion generally and identified as an atheist, while allowing that a supreme power or larger plan might be possible. For him, however, that possibility could not restore confidence in the prophets or in the faith he had left.

Family Consequences and Continuing Ties

The consequences arrived quickly. When Bateman failed to attend the next weekly priesthood meeting, Rulon Jeffs sent someone to his home within twenty-four hours to remove his wives and children and place them with another man. In the United Effort Plan’s doctrine, family members could be reassigned by priesthood authority; they were not treated as belonging exclusively to a husband or parent. Bateman’s two wives refused to leave him. Their decision was extraordinary within the community’s hierarchy, and they, along with all but the three oldest children, became apostates too.

That outcome did not erase the strains of living between family members who now occupied opposing religious positions. Bateman’s brother David lived just yards away, across a six-foot fence. The brothers had helped raise one another after their father became disabled when they were young, but David was not permitted to speak with Bateman because Bateman had left. Bateman feared that a conversation could place David’s marriage and access to his children at risk. The fence was a small physical divide set against a much larger religious boundary: kinship endured, but the rules made ordinary contact perilous.

By the time Bateman’s faith finally failed, his three oldest children were married and no longer living at home; they remained in the religion. He worked to teach his other fourteen children to think independently and question what they had been taught. He worried that, if he and Eunice died, the older children might bring the younger ones back into the faith. They might be content there, he thought, but would have fewer chances to exercise their imaginations. Leaving the church therefore became not only a declaration about his own beliefs but also a deliberate effort to preserve his children’s capacity to choose.

Apostasy Without Departure

Bateman’s later life shows the persistence of attachment after belief has gone. He continued to live in Colorado City, despite having no respect for its new prophet, Warren Jeffs, and doubting that he would ever move far away. He no longer practiced plural marriage. His second wife moved to St. George, while her children remained with him and she visited them each week. Because he no longer believed the religion’s teachings, he said he could not justify polygamy.

The religious past remained present in his body and daily habits. On a hot day on Canaan Mountain, Bateman was still wearing the faith’s sacred garment, the long underwear he tried to stop wearing but found difficult to leave off. He described feeling exposed without it. The garment became an intimate measure of how deeply the religion’s practices had shaped him: disbelief had altered his convictions, but it had not made every inherited custom disappear. His attachment was also explicit. He called Colorado City a good community in which to raise a family and praised its residents’ strength and hard work, even while acknowledging reports of serious abuse and harmful conduct within the community.

Bateman also questioned the comfort provided by religious certainty. Prophetic commands, he observed, could relieve individuals of feeling responsible for difficult decisions by placing that responsibility in the prophet’s hands. Yet he believed that freedom to think for oneself mattered more than happiness. His judgment was not that life outside the community was automatically better: he even thought residents might, on the whole, be happier than outsiders. The decisive value was personal freedom, not comfort alone.

On December 31, 1999, Bateman and Eunice took their children to Las Vegas to welcome the new millennium. Religious teaching had cast the city as wicked and expected the world’s destruction at the turn of the year. The family stood among the crowds outside the New York–New York Casino as midnight passed and the world continued. Bateman believed the experience made an impression on the children. It was a practical lesson in testing a frightening prediction against what happened, and an expression of the skepticism he wanted them to carry forward.

Significance of the Relationship

Bateman’s departure distinguishes rejection of religious authority from rejection of every bond formed under it. He repudiated the faith’s account of truth, its control over family relationships, and its demand that questions be suppressed; nevertheless, he remained rooted in Colorado City and acknowledged the community’s appeal. The relationship is therefore neither continued obedience nor uncomplicated liberation. It is an ongoing negotiation between an inherited identity and a chosen skepticism.

That tension also explains why his story centers on education, family, and ordinary objects as much as on formal apostasy. A geology course opened a conflict he had learned to set aside; a prophet’s failed claim made that conflict impossible to ignore; the threatened reassignment of his family made leaving materially consequential. The garment he still wore and the children he taught to question show the uneven aftermath. Bateman could abandon the religion’s truth claims without instantly shedding its habits, place, or emotional hold, and could remain attached to a community while insisting that no authority should decide what he was permitted to think.