Divinely Sanctioned Violence

Divinely sanctioned violence is the belief that force may become righteous—or even obligatory—when presented as a command of God, a defense of the faith, or a means of carrying out divine justice. The book follows this claim across different settings: public threats and armed retaliation in early Mormon history, a suspected attempt to fulfill prophecy, teachings about blood atonement, and Dan and Ron Lafferty’s decision to treat a private revelation as authorization to kill. Its recurring tension is between divine authority as believers understand it and the limits imposed by civil law and the lives of those placed in danger.

Religious authority and force

In Far West, Joseph Smith addressed several hundred followers after Mormon residents of Daviess County had faced harassment and violence and many had been forced from their homes. He framed the Saints as an injured people who had sought redress from officials without success, then warned that continued molestation would be met with force. His rhetoric transformed defense of the community into a religious cause: the faith, he suggested, might ultimately be established by the sword. The words did not remain only a threat. The Saints began raiding non-Mormon towns for food, livestock, and valuables, and burned about fifty homes. Missourians retaliated by destroying Mormon cabins; a subsequent skirmish killed three Saints and one non-Mormon.

The episode shows how sacred justification could intensify an existing conflict rather than resolve it. An inflammatory letter falsely reported that the Saints had killed fifty Missourians. Governor Lilburn Boggs, elected on an anti-Mormon platform, responded with an order directing the Missouri Militia to treat the Mormons as enemies and drive them from the state or exterminate them if necessary for public peace. The sequence places religiously framed violence within a cycle of reciprocal threat, attack, and state retaliation; it does not make the participants’ different uses of force equivalent, but shows how claims of defense and public order could each become grounds for coercion.

Prophecy, blood atonement, and individual action

The attempted assassination of Lilburn Boggs offered another form of the same logic. In 1842, a gunman shot Boggs through a window in his Independence home. Newspapers speculated that the attack had been carried out by a Mormon in fulfillment of Joseph Smith’s prophecy that Boggs would die. The suspected shooter, Porter Rockwell, had recently arrived in Independence and left soon after the shooting; he was almost certainly the would-be assassin, but he was never brought to justice. The book reports that some believers regarded helping to fulfill a prophecy as a sacred duty, even without a known order from Joseph Smith. The episode thus links prophetic expectation to action while distinguishing suspicion and communal interpretation from proof of who directed the attack.

Dan Lafferty’s path to religious extremism involved the doctrines he found in historical Mormon writings. After reading The Peace Maker and deciding to practice plural marriage, he studied further and concluded that the modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had abandoned other early teachings as well. Among them was Blood Atonement Belief: Dan learned that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young had taught that certain grave wrongs against Mormons could be answered only by spilling the wrongdoer’s blood. He also adopted the principle that God’s law takes precedence over human law. These ideas joined his growing rejection of state authority, which he argued had no right to demand licenses, taxes, or Social Security numbers. His experience of having his home sandwich business shut down for regulatory violations had been a pivotal event in his passage toward fundamentalism.

The Lafferty brothers’ interpretation of revelation

The book presents the Laffertys’ decision to kill as a process of religious interpretation, not as an act compelled by a text alone. After Ron received the removal revelation, he showed it to Dan, who warned him to make sure it came from God while also cautioning against refusing divine work. A further revelation cast Ron as God’s mouth and Dan as God’s arm; the brothers understood this to assign Dan the actual killing. Seeking guidance, they considered the account in The Book of Mormon in which Nephi resists the command to kill Laban but is told that one person may perish to serve a righteous purpose.

Dan then received a revelation comparing him to Nephi and promising blessings for obedience. Mark Lafferty later described its effect as making Dan willing to do whatever the Lord commanded. After praying, Ron and Dan classified the four people named for removal as wicked in advance, calling them children of perdition, and concluded that it would be wise to act on the revelation. Their reasoning collapses moral judgment into a categorical division between good and evil: once the targets are assigned to the condemned side, violence can be recast as obedience. The passage makes clear that the brothers’ certainty came from their interpretation and reinforcement of the revelation, rather than from a process that tested its demands against the people it put at risk.

That interpretation also met resistance within their religious circle. The School of the Prophets ordinarily evaluated revelations presented by members. Ron gave the document to Bernard Brady before a meeting; Brady found it frightening, told Ron he believed it was wrong, and declined to be involved. Neither man raised it with the group once the meeting began. At a later meeting, Watson Lafferty brought a pearl-handled straight razor and asked that it be dedicated as a religious instrument modeled on the sword of Laban. These details show that the claim of divine authorization was not universally accepted, even among people close to the brothers, and that the group’s usual procedure for discernment did not result in a collective endorsement of the revelation.

Sacred law and civil authority

The book also examines violence within wider struggles over jurisdiction. In Nauvoo, a charter granted by Illinois gave the city unusual sovereign powers. Joseph Smith stood at the head of a theocratic principality, held the title of ruler over Israel on Earth, and commanded the Nauvoo Legion, a large and disciplined militia. The account presents these powers as an institutional setting in which religious leadership and political authority converged; it does not describe them as proof that violence was always authorized. Their significance lies in the scale of the authority claimed and the military capacity available to it.

Under Brigham Young, the conflict between divine and civil law became an explicit feature of Utah’s legal arrangements. Brigham argued that God’s laws took precedence over those of men, while Mormon leaders maintained that plural marriage was a protected religious practice. Because Utah was a territory, federal courts were supposed to hold legal authority. The Mormon-dominated Utah Territorial Legislature expanded local probate courts, which Brigham controlled, and probate judges were often Mormon bishops. Their juries were largely composed of Mormons who followed instructions from church leaders. Federal officials complained that this system had turned Utah into a theocratic dictatorship; harassment drove most of them away, and some feared violence from Porter Rockwell. Here divine sanction operates not only as an explanation for individual force but as a challenge to which legal authority should govern.

A later dispute over religious privacy exposes a related limit. Sam Roundy, Colorado City’s polygamous police chief, maintained that private religious life was no business of the state. Yet police officers were sworn to uphold the law, and polygamy was illegal throughout the United States and Canada. That conflict became immediate when Ruth Stubbs fled Colorado City with her children and appeared on Phoenix television alleging that her husband had beaten her and arguing that polygamy was inherently abusive. Her account counters the claim that religious practice is necessarily beyond public concern: appeals to protected belief and household privacy coexist with questions of coercion, personal safety, and the responsibilities of those charged with enforcing the law.

Significance

Across these episodes, religiously justified violence appears in more than one form: as a public warning that faith will be defended by force, as action understood to fulfill prophecy, as a doctrine of blood atonement, and as obedience to a revelation that its recipients treat as a command. The settings and actors differ, and the book does not reduce them to a single organization or continuous policy. What connects them is a recurring contest over who may define justice and whose authority can overrule ordinary law. The Laffertys’ case makes the danger especially plain: when a private interpretation converts people into predetermined enemies and presents killing as obedience, the language of sacred duty can remove the restraints that might otherwise interrupt violence.