Kingdom of God on earth

Kingdom of God on earth is the ideal of a sacred community governed according to divine authority, not merely a promised future state. Across the book, it becomes a project to gather the chosen, establish a holy homeland, and organize civic life under religious rule. The ideal offers believers belonging and refuge; its claim to supersede ordinary political authority also creates conflict and, in the book’s account, can help make coercion and violence seem righteous.

A Chosen People and a Sacred Homeland

The promise takes shape within a religious worldview that divides humanity into opposing moral communities. The Book of Mormon presents two churches as the only alternatives, one belonging to God and the other to the devil. In the book’s account, this stark division helped make Mormonism’s message appealingly clear: belonging to the true church meant joining a people with a special place in sacred history. Joseph Smith’s teaching that followers could receive personal revelations from God further grounded religious authority in direct communication with the divine.

That sense of election acquired a geographical destination. In 1831, Joseph Smith directed the Saints toward Jackson County, Missouri, which he identified as the site of the Garden of Eden and the place where Christ would return. His followers were instructed to gather there and build a New Jerusalem. The settlement was thus more than a migration or a search for safety: the landscape itself was understood as part of God’s plan, and possession of it as a divine inheritance.

The claim of inheritance sharpened the divide between Saints and their neighbors. Mormon immigrants brought abolitionist sympathies into a region where many residents had southern roots and owned enslaved people. Local hostility also grew from the newcomers’ communal separation, their purchases of large tracts of land, their preference for doing business with fellow Saints, and their coordinated voting. Their belief that they were God’s chosen people, entitled to claim the region as Zion, made local disputes over land and power part of a larger contest over who had a rightful place there.

The book also describes a moral logic that made reconciliation difficult. Joseph Smith’s teaching of free agency framed the choice between the Lord and wickedness as personal, but treated choosing against the Saints’ religious plan as grounds for withholding sympathy. A revelation called Missouri the Saints’ inheritance and the land of their enemies; Mormon rhetoric about the destruction of the wicked reinforced residents’ fear that the gathering was not simply a religious settlement. The sacred homeland promised refuge to believers while casting those who resisted its establishment as adversaries.

Nauvoo: A Religious Ideal with Civic Power

After leaving Missouri, Joseph Smith chose a low-lying, malarial site beside the Mississippi River in Hancock County, Illinois, for the new center of the movement. The Saints bought land on credit and built rapidly. Within five years, more than fifteen thousand people lived in and around Nauvoo, making it the second-largest municipality in Illinois. Its growth turned the idea of a gathered religious community into a visible city with substantial political and military capacity.

Nauvoo’s unusual charter, passed by the Illinois General Assembly in December 1840, gave the city exceptional sovereign rights. The book characterizes it as a theocratic principality, with Joseph Smith at its head. He assumed the title of King, Priest, and Ruler over Israel on Earth, commanded the Nauvoo Legion, and sought authorization from Congress for a much larger force under his control. Congress rejected that request, but Joseph Smith then announced his candidacy for president in January 1844, extending the project beyond a local religious refuge toward national influence.

This episode reveals a central tension in the ideal: a divinely ordered community could be imagined as spiritual, but its realization required decisions about law, government, and force. Nauvoo’s religious authority was also civic authority. The Kingdom’s promised order did not stand apart from politics; it claimed powers that affected residents and neighboring governments alike.

Divine Law and Competing Legal Orders

Under Brigham Young, the priority of divine law over human law became an organizing principle of government in Deseret. The book describes a legal system designed to make the Saints’ religious law prevail when it conflicted with federal authority. Because Utah remained a territory, federal courts were supposed to retain legal power. The Utah Territorial Legislature, dominated by Mormons, responded by expanding the authority of local probate courts controlled by Brigham Young. Mormon bishops commonly served as probate judges, while juries were composed largely of church members who followed instructions from religious leaders.

The arrangement placed overlapping claims to jurisdiction in direct competition: the federal government asserted territorial authority, while church leaders and local institutions treated religious law as superior. Federal officials complained that Brigham Young had established a theocratic dictatorship. Many left after persistent harassment, and the book recounts fears that officials who stayed might be killed. Brigham Young answered criticism with defiance, threatening an untimely death for a president who acted against the Saints and declaring that Utah might become either a sovereign state or an independent nation.

The ideal had a practical destination as well as a legal program. In July 1847, the Saints reached the Great Salt Lake Valley, whose streams and mountain barrier seemed to the scouting party to offer both the resources and isolation needed for a capital of the Kingdom. On their first evening in the valley, settlers planted potatoes and diverted City Creek to irrigate them; they also began laying a temple foundation nearby. The hardships of the journey, in which more than six hundred Saints died during the first winter, strengthened the survivors’ commitment to the church and to Brigham Young. In the book’s account, migration, settlement, and loyalty fused into a durable community whose members had endured together and were prepared to follow their leader.

Later Communities and the Limits of Secular Law

The same ideal appears in later fundamentalist communities as an argument for the authority of religious leaders over everyday life. In Colorado City, Arizona, Rulon Jeffs’s authority extended to public employees, the police force, and the superintendent of schools. His sermons made obedience central to religious life. The book reports that he had an estimated seventy-five wives and at least sixty-five children, and that some wives were married to him as teenagers while he was in his eighties. These details place family structure within a wider system in which a prophet’s religious authority shaped intimate and civic arrangements.

Civil law remained present, but community members could also navigate around it. Polygamy was illegal in Utah and Arizona, so men typically legally married only their first wife while subsequent wives were considered spiritually married. The arrangement left those women legally single mothers and could make large families eligible for public assistance. The book notes the contrast between the community’s description of state and federal governments as hostile forces and its receipt of more than six million dollars a year in public funds. The contrast illustrates how claims of separation from secular authority could coexist with reliance on public institutions and resources.

The gap between a community’s religious order and state law also affected people who sought to leave. Sam Roundy, Colorado City’s polygamous police chief, defended what happened inside local homes as a matter of religious privacy. That claim became especially difficult to reconcile with his public duty to uphold the law when Ruth Stubbs, the third wife of one of his officers, left the community with her children and reported abuse. Her account, including the circumstances of a marriage arranged when she was sixteen, exposed the human stakes of a system in which religious leaders and family members could exert power over a woman’s marriage and choices.

Inheritance, Violence, and the Ideal’s Legacy

The book connects the Kingdom ideal to doctrines that can make violence appear permissible in defense of sacred order. It presents Joseph Smith’s legacy as a conviction that the Kingdom must be protected at any cost, and interprets the Mountain Meadows Massacre not as an isolated departure but as an expression of a political culture shaped by blood and vengeance. Brigham Young’s commitment to the Kingdom, in this reading, carried forward a violent potential in Joseph Smith’s theology, with consequences extending even to Young’s family: in 1902, his grandson William Hooper Young killed a woman and wrote Blood Atonement in his father’s apartment.

Dan Lafferty’s path offers a later, personal version of the same conflict between divine authority and the state. He came to believe that government had exceeded its proper reach and used scripture to argue against licenses, taxes, and Social Security numbers. His studies led him to regard the modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as having departed from the original faith by abandoning plural marriage. The book describes this self-directed fundamentalism as a desire to restore an imagined original religious order, and later records a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder offered by a court expert while distinguishing it from psychosis. These details do not make the Kingdom ideal identical with Dan Lafferty’s actions; they show how claims of divine order could be reinterpreted by individuals outside established church authority.

Across these histories, Kingdom of God on earth shifts between a promised homeland, a gathered community, an alternative legal order, and a justification for obedience to religious leadership. Its power lies in joining spiritual belonging to political claims: the land becomes sacred, law becomes a test of loyalty, and resistance can be recast as opposition to God. The book’s account emphasizes both the solidarity this ideal could sustain and the danger of treating one leader’s or group’s claim to divine authority as beyond ordinary legal and moral challenge.