Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is presented as a religious community whose authority reaches beyond worship into information, family relationships, and everyday conduct. Under leaders including Rulon Jeffs and his successor Warren Jeffs, prophetic instructions are treated as binding, while contact with outsiders and dissent within the community are sharply constrained. DeLoy Bateman’s story reveals the cost of leaving: he rejects the church’s claims and becomes an atheist, yet remains attached to the place and people who formed him.

Leadership and Religious Authority

The church’s governing model centers on male priesthood authority and the prophet’s power to receive revelations that direct the faithful. The book places this model within a broader Mormon tradition in which questioning religious authority is treated as a threat to faith. It distinguishes the fundamentalist community by the greater extremity with which it enforces obedience, control, and prescribed roles for men and women. Women are expected to serve their husbands, bear children, and raise them within the religion; the leadership structure itself is reserved for men.

In Colorado City, Rulon Jeffs’s influence is described as extending into civic administration. The mayor, city employees, police force, and public-school superintendent are all said to answer to him. His authority is therefore not confined to religious teaching: the narrative depicts a town in which spiritual leadership and local government substantially overlap. The same concentration of power informs the church’s treatment of families. Under the United Effort Plan’s doctrine, wives and children are regarded as belonging to the priesthood rather than exclusively to husbands or parents, and leaders can order them reassigned to another man.

Information, Belief, and Community Boundaries

Members are forbidden to watch television or read newspapers and magazines. DeLoy describes a recurring pattern of prohibition and evasion: some residents secretly obtain satellite dishes, hide them, and watch television; after a sermon warning that the prophet knows who has a dish, people discard them. For two or three years televisions may disappear from town, only for concealed dishes to return gradually before another crackdown. The cycle shows both the practical reach of the ban and the difficulty of enforcing it completely.

The boundaries extend beyond media. Residents are forbidden to have contact with people outside the United Effort Plan, including relatives who have left the religion. The community is also described as teaching that the earth is seven thousand years old and that human beings have never walked on the moon, with film of the Apollo landings dismissed as a government deception. DeLoy’s account makes these restrictions personal: his brother lives only a few yards away, across a six-foot fence, but is not permitted to speak with him. DeLoy says that if his brother’s wife caught them talking, she could take the children, while the church could arrange another marriage for her.

The book also describes the community’s relationship with government as both oppositional and materially dependent. Colorado City received federal funds for streets, fire services, and water infrastructure, and a federally built airport served the fundamentalist community. Residents received substantially more in government services than they paid in taxes. DeLoy explains that assistance is justified to believers as the Lord’s means of providing for a chosen people; defrauding the government is framed within the community as virtuous resistance. The contrast between rejecting outside authority and accepting its resources is part of the book’s account of the church’s contested place in public life.

Family, Departure, and Consequences

DeLoy was raised in the faith and had deep family roots in the fundamentalist movement. He built a large home in Colorado City and, at the time of his departure, had two wives and seventeen children. His break with the church followed a confrontation with Rulon Jeffs: after deciding that the prophet had falsely accused him, DeLoy concluded that a man claiming continual communication with God could not have made that mistake. He then stopped attending the weekly priesthood meeting. Within a day, someone was sent to take his wives and children away under the church’s doctrine of priesthood ownership.

Both wives refused to leave DeLoy. Their decision defied the church’s authority, and the narrative reports that they and all but the three oldest children consequently became apostates as well. This outcome makes departure more than a change in personal belief: it becomes a rupture that leaders seek to impose on family relationships, while the family’s choice can also challenge the leadership. Later, one of DeLoy’s wives moved to St. George, while her children remained with him in Colorado City and she visited them weekly. DeLoy no longer practiced plural marriage, explaining that he could not justify it once he no longer believed the religion’s teachings.

Leaving did not erase the community’s influence on him. DeLoy remained in Colorado City and spoke warmly of its hardworking residents and its value as a place to raise a family, even while acknowledging reports of serious abuse within the community. He described the religion as having shaped everything he had learned and said that its practices remained physically and emotionally familiar. His continued use of the sacred undergarment, despite trying to stop, illustrates how a religious identity can persist as habit and attachment after belief has been rejected.

Prophecy, Politics, and Public Conflict

The church’s leadership also gives the community an apocalyptic horizon. Rulon Jeffs had predicted that a hurricane of fire would sweep the world clean by 2000; when that prediction failed, Warren Jeffs, his son and heir apparent, interpreted the September 11, 2001 attacks as a portent that the End Times were near. Although Warren publicly condemned the terrorists, the book reports that he presented the attacks to followers in Bountiful and Colorado City as evidence of approaching divine deliverance. Images of the planes striking the World Trade Center were displayed in a Bountiful school as reminders of the Last Days.

In public disputes, members describe their plural-marriage practice as a constitutionally protected religious belief and resist government scrutiny of their homes. That claim collides with the fact that plural marriage is illegal throughout the United States and Canada, and that police officers are sworn to uphold the law. The account of a young woman who left Colorado City after being assigned to marry a police officer brings the conflict between religious authority, personal choice, and civil law into view. The church’s practices are thus shown not only as internal rules, but as matters contested by former members, law enforcement, and the wider public.

DeLoy’s Apostasy and the Church’s Significance

DeLoy’s rejection of the church does not lead him to another religious community. He becomes an atheist, though he allows that a supreme power might be possible; he says that common sense leads him away from belief. He traces his doubts to childhood questions about conflicts between religious teaching and scientific knowledge, questions he learned to suppress. His departure follows a direct encounter with the gap between prophetic claims and observable events, and his later reflections describe apostasy as a difficult reassessment rather than an uncomplicated escape.

His account also demonstrates how beliefs can survive as inherited attitudes. DeLoy recalls being taught racist ideas from childhood in a town where he had little opportunity to encounter Black people. As an adult, he recognized that those lessons were wrong, yet noticed their lingering effect in his own reflexes. The book reports that the church continued to teach that interracial marriage was a grave sin. DeLoy’s experience links the organization’s isolation from outside information to the persistence of prejudice, while emphasizing how difficult such conditioning can be to undo.

Taken together, these accounts portray the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints as a community sustained by prophetic authority, controlled boundaries, and the promise that obedience offers certainty and spiritual security. The same structures shape marriage, parenting, political identity, and access to knowledge. DeLoy’s continuing affection for Colorado City complicates any simple division between insiders and outsiders: he rejects the church’s authority but remains tied to the community, illustrating the enduring human connections that its rules both organize and strain.