FLDS Ban on Contact with Outsiders and Former Members

The FLDS Ban on Contact with Outsiders and Former Members helps define the boundary between the religious community and the world beyond it, and between the faithful and those who leave. In Colorado City, where Rulon Jeffs’s authority extended into civic life and family arrangements, the prohibition was more than a rule about conversation: it operated alongside restrictions on information, religious denunciations of apostates, and the priesthood’s power over spouses, children, and property. DeLoy Bateman’s departure makes its consequences concrete: relatives were forbidden to speak with him and his family, while the United Effort Plan sought to take the home he had built.

The Boundary Around the Community

Residents of Colorado City were forbidden to have contact with anyone outside the United Effort Plan, including family members who had left the religion. That restriction accompanied a ban on watching television and reading magazines or newspapers. The two prohibitions narrowed access both to outside communication and to information that might offer perspectives beyond those sanctioned by religious leaders.

The media ban was enforced through warning and self-policing as well as formal authority. DeLoy Bateman described how people sometimes bought satellite dishes in St. George or Cedar City and watched television in secret. After Rulon Jeffs preached against television and warned that its viewers endangered their souls, dishes would be dumped in the desert. The practice might stop for two or three years, DeLoy said, before secretly installed dishes began to appear again. His account shows a cycle of prohibition, concealment, public warning, and renewed prohibition; it also distinguishes the community’s official rules from the private conduct of members who did not always follow them.

The contact ban gave this separation a personal dimension. Leaving did not simply mark a change in belief: it could make continued relationships with parents, siblings, or other relatives a violation of the community’s rules. In a setting where religious authority reached into local government and family life, social isolation and institutional power reinforced each other.

Apostasy and the Loss of Family Ties

DeLoy had been raised in the faith and was a respected member. In 1996, after relatives of his second wife spread accusations about him, Rulon Jeffs summoned him and made accusations of his own. DeLoy calmly told the prophet that the claims were false. When he later concluded that the prophet’s supposed access to divine knowledge had failed in this instance, he decided to leave the Work, although he knew his life would change profoundly.

The consequences followed swiftly. When DeLoy did not attend the next weekly priesthood meeting, Rulon Jeffs sent someone to take his wives and children. Under the community’s doctrine, wives and children were considered the priesthood’s property rather than a husband’s or parents’ to keep; the prophet directed that DeLoy’s family be given to another man. Both wives refused to leave him. All their children except the three eldest also became apostates, turning a rule aimed at a former member into a rupture across much of his immediate family.

The prohibition on contact made that rupture enforceable beyond the household. Relatives who remained in the religion were forbidden to speak to DeLoy, his wives, or their apostate children. His brother David lived only yards away, across a six-foot fence, yet was not allowed to talk to him. DeLoy described the brothers as exceptionally close because they had helped raise each other after their father became disabled. The fence was therefore not just a physical boundary: the rule made an intimate family relationship subject to religious discipline.

Religious Condemnation and Material Pressure

The separation was reinforced by teachings that assigned apostates a particularly shameful place. In a sermon on July 16, 2000, Warren Jeffs, Rulon Jeffs’s son and heir apparent, described an apostate as among the darkest people on earth and as a tool of the devil. The book’s account contrasts this denunciation with the ordinary human relationships the rules disrupted: DeLoy’s wives chose to remain with him, and his children’s change of religious status followed their parents’ decision.

Material security could also depend on the same authorities. DeLoy had built and paid for his large home, but the United Effort Plan owned all the land within Colorado City’s limits, including the lot beneath it. After he left, Rulon Jeffs and the plan pursued legal action to take possession of the house and tried to evict him from town. The case shows how the prohibition on contact belonged to a broader system in which leaving could bring not only estrangement from faithful relatives but also conflict over one’s home.

Other Cases and the Wider System

The account of Ruby Jessop illustrates the vulnerability of people whose family circumstances placed them within the community’s authority. At fourteen, after being observed kissing a boy, she was made to marry an older relative in a ceremony presided over by Warren Jeffs. She later tried to escape to a sympathetic brother. In May 2001, she was allegedly taken from his home through false promises and brought to the home of her stepfather, Fred Jessop, a senior church official.

Ruby’s sister Flora Jessop, who had left Colorado City, reported the matter to a county sheriff. A deputy went to the town but accepted church leaders’ explanation that Ruby was on vacation and left. After Flora continued pressing for intervention, the Utah Department of Child and Family Services arranged a meeting with a social worker in St. George. Ruby was interviewed in the presence of one of the people alleged to have taken her, said that everything was fine, and was returned to members of the faith. She later gave birth to a child; the account says no one outside Colorado City had heard from her since the summer of 2001. The circumstances demonstrate how a former member’s efforts to help a relative could meet the authority of the community and an inadequate outside response.

The book sets such cases against a hierarchy in which men alone held priesthood and ecclesiastical authority, prophets alone received revelations governing the faithful, and obedience was presented as the route to faith. In the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, these arrangements were taken to a particularly strict extreme. The contact ban was one part of that structure, not an isolated rule: it restricted outside ties, marked departure as betrayal, and helped leaders retain influence over family belonging and everyday life.