Eunice Bateman

Eunice Bateman’s life was shaped by the authority of the United Effort Plan and by her marriage to DeLoy Bateman, whom she accompanied beyond Colorado City, Arizona for college and later supported as he turned away from the religion. Her story also records a consequential choice: when the priesthood claimed the power to reassign DeLoy’s family, Eunice and his other wife stayed with him, and Eunice helped raise their children outside the faith’s assumptions.

Marriage and Family

Eunice was DeLoy Bateman’s first wife. Shortly before he left for college, LeRoy Johnson, the prophet and DeLoy’s adoptive grandfather, had commanded her to marry him. The marriage placed Eunice within a religious order in which leaders exercised authority over family arrangements, while the couple’s responsibilities quickly included raising children. Their second child was born a year after DeLoy began college.

Eunice’s family life later became part of the cost of DeLoy’s departure from the United Effort Plan. By the time he lost his faith and left, their three oldest children were married and remained in the religion; the other fourteen were still being raised by Eunice and DeLoy. The family’s size made even an outing logistically demanding: when they traveled together, they needed at least two large vehicles.

College and Life Beyond Colorado City

When DeLoy was sent to Southern Utah State College in Cedar City to train as a teacher, Eunice went with him. Neither had lived outside Colorado City, Arizona before. She recalled feeling like an outsider and remaining homesick for the community while DeLoy studied. Her days were occupied with raising their children, typing for him, and helping with his homework.

College widened the couple’s distance from the beliefs that had structured their lives. DeLoy later described his education as the beginning of his eventual departure from the religion, particularly after a geology course challenged the church’s account of the earth’s age. Eunice’s account makes clear that this period was not simply an intellectual transition for him: she was there with their young family, managing its daily needs in an unfamiliar setting.

Refusal to Leave DeLoy

After DeLoy stopped attending a weekly priesthood meeting, LeRoy Johnson sent someone to the family’s home within twenty-four hours to take away his wives and children. Under United Effort Plan doctrine, wives and children were treated as belonging to the priesthood, which could claim them and assign them to another man. Johnson decreed that DeLoy’s family should be given immediately to someone considered more worthy.

Eunice and DeLoy’s other wife refused to leave him. Their decision defied the expectation that priesthood authority outranked family bonds, and both wives were treated as apostates along with all the children except the three oldest. Eunice’s refusal therefore marked not only her support for her husband but a break with the religious community’s claim over her marriage and household.

Raising Children After Leaving

After their departure from the United Effort Plan, DeLoy worked to teach the fourteen younger children to think for themselves and question what the religion had taught them. Eunice joined him in preparing them for a possible return to the faith if their parents were no longer there to guide them. DeLoy worried that the older siblings, who remained religious, would bring the younger ones back into the community; in his view, the children might be content there but would have little opportunity to develop their imaginations.

On December 31, 1999, Eunice and DeLoy loaded the whole family into two vans and drove three hours to Las Vegas for the arrival of the year 2000. They took the children to the Strip, where thousands gathered outside the New York–New York Casino to watch the countdown. The trip placed the family in a city their religious teaching cast as wicked and destined for destruction, at the very moment the millennium was expected to bring the end of the world. The year arrived without the predicted catastrophe. For DeLoy, the experience made an impression on the children; for Eunice, it was part of a shared effort to let them test inherited certainty against what they could see for themselves.