Divine Law Over Human Law

Divine Law Over Human Law names a recurring claim in the book: when civil authority conflicts with a command understood to come from God, religious duty takes precedence. The principle can sustain a community’s resistance to outside control, but it also raises a harder question: who has the authority to identify God’s law, and what happens when competing believers answer differently?

Revelation and the problem of authority

From the beginning, Joseph Smith encouraged Latter-day Saints to seek personal revelation and follow impressions from the Lord in their lives. That invitation made direct communication with God one of the new church’s compelling features, but it also threatened the prophet’s authority: followers might receive revelations that contradicted his. In 1830, the year the Church was incorporated, Joseph announced a revelation reserving the receipt of commandments and revelations concerning the Church to himself.

The restriction could not eliminate the appeal of personal revelation. Believers continued to heed what they understood as divine direction, including on religious questions, and the book connects that unresolved tension to the splintering of Mormon groups. The School of the Prophets illustrates how rival claims could become organized authority: Robert Crossfield, called Onias in his revelations, claimed a prophetic commission to set the Church in order, while the leaders of the United Effort Plan rejected his standing and expelled him. Later, Onias appointed Ron Lafferty bishop of the school’s Provo chapter. Such competing claims show that appealing to divine law does not settle who may speak for God; it can instead create new conflicts over whose revelation binds a community.

Nauvoo’s religious government

In Nauvoo, the principle acquired a municipal and political form. An Illinois charter passed in December 1840 gave the city unusual sovereign rights and powers. Joseph Smith stood at the head of this theocratic principality and was officially anointed King, Priest, and Ruler over Israel on Earth. He commanded the Nauvoo Legion, a disciplined militia nearly half the size of the entire American Army at the time, and sought authorization from Congress to create a force of one hundred thousand men. Congress declined that request, but the charter had already concentrated exceptional local authority in Joseph’s hands.

This political order joined religious conviction to the practical machinery of government: a city, a militia, and a leader who believed he was guided by God. The episode demonstrates why the principle was more than a private belief. When a religious community understood its leader’s authority as divinely grounded, disputes with the surrounding state could become contests over which jurisdiction—and which source of law—would prevail.

Utah: law, courts, and collective loyalty

After the Mormon migration west, Brigham Young treated plural marriage as a religious obligation that the United States had no right to prohibit. In his view, God’s laws outranked the laws of men. Utah’s status as a territory placed legal authority with federal courts, but the Mormon-dominated Utah Territorial Legislature expanded local probate courts, which Brigham controlled, and thereby displaced federal jurisdiction. Many probate judges were Mormon bishops, and juries were largely composed of church members who followed church leaders’ instructions. The result was a local legal system designed to ensure that, when civil and religious law clashed, the latter could prevail in practice.

The same conviction shaped public defiance. In 1880, John Taylor declared that the Church would stand under heaven’s banner rather than submit to the United States over plural marriage; the assembled Saints raised their hands in support. His stance met escalating federal opposition, including legislation that made prosecution for unlawful cohabitation possible even when plural marriage itself was difficult to prove. Here the conflict was explicit: each side claimed legitimate authority, while religious solidarity strengthened resistance to federal enforcement.

The book also traces the principle’s collective and ethical consequences beyond the courtroom. After the acquittal of the men charged with Joseph Smith’s murder, Brigham Young directed church authorities to introduce an Oath of Vengeance into the temple endowment. Participants pledged to pray for vengeance and to teach that obligation to their descendants; the oath remained part of the ritual until 1927. During the migration west, meanwhile, church leaders denied practicing polygamy to outsiders even as the doctrine was shared with the Saints. The book describes this as a form of religiously justified deception, showing how loyalty to a perceived divine cause could be invoked not only against laws but also to defend conduct that contradicted public claims.

Personal defiance and its legal limits

In the modern conflicts described in the book, polygamists appealed to constitutional protection for religious belief while confronting laws against plural marriage. Colorado City’s police chief Sam Roundy argued that what occurred inside believers’ homes was a matter of religious freedom. Yet police officers were also sworn to uphold the law, making the conflict between religious practice and civil duty immediate rather than abstract.

Ron Lafferty gave the principle a more individual and consequential form. He argued that government had no right to require licenses, taxes, or Social Security numbers, and treated such requirements as an illegitimate claim of control over his life. After studying Mormon history, he came to regard the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as having abandoned its course when it ended official support for plural marriage under federal pressure. In his case, the belief that he answered to God rather than human law became a central issue in the legal assessment of his mental competence. The Tenth Circuit agreed that he understood the charges and their possible consequences, but concluded that his paranoid delusional system kept him from interpreting them realistically; Utah would have to reassess his competence before retrying him.

The principle therefore connects distinct struggles over jurisdiction: a prophet’s authority over a church, a religious community’s claims against federal power, and an individual defendant’s refusal to recognize civil law as binding. The book does not treat those claims as equivalent in consequence. It shows how the assertion of divine priority can unite believers and organize resistance, while leaving unresolved the crucial question of how a community distinguishes revelation from a competing or destructive claim to speak in God’s name.