Government of God and Theocratic Rule

Government of God and Theocratic Rule is the claim that divine authority should direct not only religious belief but also civil government and daily life. In the book, that claim moves from Joseph Smith’s vision of a divinely governed society to the institutions of Nauvoo and later fundamentalist communities. Its promise of a single, sacred source of order repeatedly collides with the problem of who may speak for God—and with the competing claims of dissenters, rival prophets, and the state.

Revelation and the Problem of Authority

From its beginnings, Mormonism placed revelation at the center of religious authority. The official title of the head of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—President, Prophet, Seer, and Revelator—embodies the expectation that leadership rests on continuing communication with God. Joseph Smith initially encouraged individual members to seek impressions from the Lord to guide their lives. That invitation made direct access to divine guidance one of the new church’s compelling features, but it also raised a problem for institutional control: if members could receive revelations of their own, they might receive instructions at odds with the prophet’s.

In 1830, the same year the church was incorporated, Joseph Smith announced a revelation reserving the right to receive commandments and revelations for church governance to himself. The restriction did not extinguish personal revelation. Many members continued to heed what they understood as God’s words, including on theological questions. The tension between a prophet’s exclusive claim to institutional revelation and believers’ conviction that God could speak to them directly became a recurring source of schism. The book connects that unresolved conflict to the proliferation of Mormon splinter groups, including the communities led by Onias and the United Effort Plan.

Nauvoo: Sacred Rule and Civil Power

Nauvoo gave Joseph Smith’s political vision a concrete setting. After escaping jail in Missouri, he chose a sparsely inhabited, malarial site beside the Mississippi River in Hancock County, Illinois, as the future capital of the Kingdom of God. The Saints built the town rapidly; within five years, more than fifteen thousand people lived in and around it, making it Illinois’s second-largest municipality. A charter passed by the Illinois General Assembly in December 1840 granted Nauvoo unusual sovereign rights and powers, creating the legal framework for an unusually autonomous, church-led city.

Joseph Smith’s authority there extended beyond religious leadership. He was formally installed as ruler over Israel on Earth, commanded the Nauvoo Legion, and sought authorization from Congress for a force of one hundred thousand men. Congress did not grant the request, but in January 1844 he announced his candidacy for president of the United States and sent 586 missionaries, including ten members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, to campaign across the states and Wisconsin Territory. These actions joined local theocratic rule to a national political ambition: Joseph did not treat religious leadership and civil power as separate domains.

His position involved a consequential contradiction. Joseph professed belief in democracy and the protections of the United States Constitution, yet he also believed that his divine appointment would ultimately make democratic restraints unnecessary. He expected the American people to recognize the truth of his message, while envisioning a government of God in which God would govern through him. That conviction sharpened his neighbors’ fear that the Saints’ unified voting, political influence, and prophet-directed administration threatened elected government and local self-rule.

The destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor intensified that conflict. To non-Mormon residents of Hancock County, the suppression of the press confirmed fears that Joseph’s authority could override constitutional protections and ordinary political limits. After hostility escalated, Joseph declared martial law and mobilized the five-thousand-man Nauvoo Legion. Illinois governor Thomas Ford demanded that Joseph and others surrender to face charges, warning of the danger of a wider confrontation. The episode shows how a government justified as divine could become a direct contest with civil authority over law, political power, and the freedom to oppose a prophet publicly.

Law, Obedience, and the Reach of Rule

Theocratic government in the book is not confined to formal political structures. It also operates through claims that religious authority may determine conduct, family relations, and access to information. In Colorado City under Rulon Jeffs, members were forbidden to watch television or read newspapers and magazines; contact with people outside the United Effort Plan, including relatives who had left, was also prohibited. Sermons warning that Jeffs knew who owned concealed television dishes prompted residents to discard them, though secret viewing gradually resumed until the next crackdown. The cycle illustrates how a prohibition could be enforced through religious authority and surveillance, while members’ recurrent evasion showed the limits of that control.

The same authority could reach into family life. According to United Effort Plan doctrine described in the book, wives and children belonged to the priesthood rather than to husbands or parents and could be reassigned. When DeLoy Bateman stopped attending the weekly priesthood meeting, Jeffs sent someone to take his wives and children and decreed that they should be given to another man. Both wives refused to leave, and all but the three oldest children joined DeLoy in becoming apostates. The episode makes the stakes of obedience tangible: a challenge to the prophet’s authority could bring a threat to the family, while the family’s refusal could itself break with the religious order.

The book also contrasts that internal authority with the community’s dealings with the government. Colorado City received substantial public services and federal funding, while its leaders presented the assistance as a means by which the Lord cared for his chosen people. Fundamentalists called defrauding the government “bleeding the beast” and treated it as virtuous. The contrast reveals a selective relationship to state power: government could be condemned as wicked while its resources were accepted under a religious interpretation that placed them in service to the community.

A related conflict appears in the treatment of civil law in Utah under Brigham Young. The position that God’s laws took precedence over human laws shaped a legal system designed to favor religious authority when the two conflicted. The Utah Territorial Legislature expanded the power of local probate courts, which Brigham controlled; many judges were Mormon bishops, and juries were largely composed of church members instructed by religious leaders. Federal officials regarded the resulting system as theocratic rule, while harassment and fear drove most of them to leave the territory. Across these settings, divine law functioned not merely as a belief but as a competing claim to jurisdiction over institutions and people.

Succession, Schism, and Competing Prophets

A system that concentrates authority in a prophet must also answer what happens when that prophet dies or becomes unable to lead. The death of LeRoy Johnson in 1986, at age ninety-eight, unsettled Colorado City, where he too had been expected to live forever. Rulon Jeffs succeeded him, but his claim to Johnson’s mantle was contested by supporters of bishop Marion Hammon. Nearly a third of the community left with Hammon, settled across the highway, and formed the Second Ward. The rival congregations denounced each other as apostates and warned of the other’s damnation. The split demonstrates that a shared belief in prophetic government did not ensure agreement about the legitimate prophet.

The earlier division that followed John Y. Barlow’s death in 1949 shows the same vulnerability within the wider fundamentalist movement. Barlow’s successor, Joseph Musser, suffered debilitating strokes. In 1951, while gravely ill, he appointed Rulon Allred as his second elder and heir apparent, despite opposition from those who believed LeRoy Johnson should succeed him, as Barlow had specified. After Musser’s death, the movement divided: Johnson led the larger group that remained at Short Creek, while Allred led the Apostolic United Brethren in the Salt Lake Valley. A dispute over prophetic succession thus reshaped the movement into rival organizations, each with its own claim to religious authority.

Onias’s challenge illustrates a different route to prophetic legitimacy. In 1975, Robert Crossfield received a commandment in which God called him Onias, declared him the true prophet and rightful leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and said he had been placed on earth to set the church in order. The claim was rejected by leaders of the United Effort Plan, who excluded him from their prayer meetings. Onias moved away and later established the School of the Prophets. His revelations subsequently declared the Lafferty brothers an elect people and appointed Ron Lafferty bishop of the school’s Provo chapter. The episode shows how a rival revelation could both contest established authority and create a new hierarchy, with its own leaders and followers.

The Meaning and Cost of a Government of God

In these accounts, the government of God is at once an ideal of sacred order and a practical claim to authority. Nauvoo’s charter, militia, and political ambitions gave that claim civic and military form. Local legal systems translated it into jurisdiction. In the United Effort Plan communities, commands about information, association, and family life carried the prophet’s authority into private conduct. These were not identical arrangements, but each treated religious leadership as entitled to shape more than worship alone.

The book’s repeated succession disputes expose the instability inside that promise of unified rule. If authority depends on revelation, disputes about who receives revelation can divide believers; if leadership passes through an institutional chain, disagreement about the rightful successor can split a community. The result is a continuing contest among prophetic claims, established hierarchies, individual conscience, and civil law. The ideal of a single divine government therefore appears not as a settled order, but as a source of both cohesion and recurring fracture.