Kingdom or nothing

“Kingdom or nothing” is an absolutist conviction about religious allegiance: the Kingdom of God takes precedence, and actions said to advance or protect God’s work can be treated as justified. In the book, the phrase is more than a slogan. It condenses a legacy in which claims of divine authority can override ordinary limits, with consequences that extend from Mormon theology into violence and later disputes over who has the right to speak for God.

Meaning and Early Mormon Context

The phrase appears as a defining inheritance from Joseph Smith: his followers, the book says, received both the conviction that it was “the Kingdom or nothing” and the belief that any act promoting or protecting God’s work was justified. That pairing matters. It joins total commitment to the Kingdom with a permissive moral rule, so that the end of defending the faith can appear to authorize otherwise forbidden means.

This inheritance sits alongside Mormonism’s emphasis on continuing revelation. The Church’s supreme leader bears the title “President, Prophet, Seer, and Revelator,” reflecting the belief that religious truth and ecclesiastical authority come through an ongoing sequence of divine revelations. Joseph Smith initially encouraged individual believers to seek direct impressions from God, but then restricted the authority to receive commandments for the Church to himself. The tension between personal revelation and centralized control endured: believers continued to heed what they understood as God’s voice, while rival groups formed around competing claims to prophetic authority.

From Doctrine to Consequence

The book connects the Kingdom-first outlook to Brigham Young’s commitment to building God’s Kingdom and to a culture of violence rooted in Joseph Smith’s theology. It argues that early Mormon preoccupations with blood and vengeance helped create the conditions in which the Mountain Meadows Massacre became possible, rather than making the massacre an isolated aberration. In this account, “Kingdom or nothing” describes a structure of justification: protecting the sacred project can take precedence over the lives and rights of those caught in its defense.

The legacy also reaches beyond that historical episode. The book invokes William Hooper Young, Brigham Young’s grandson, who in New York in 1902 killed a woman he described as a prostitute and wrote “Blood Atonement” in his father’s apartment. This later crime is not presented as proof that every Mormon inherited or enacted the same doctrine. Rather, its placement sharpens the book’s argument about how the language of blood, vengeance, and religiously authorized action could persist as a dangerous inheritance.

Prophetic Authority and Splintering

The phrase also illuminates the recurrent struggle between institutional authority and people who claim their own revelation. In 1975, Robert Crossfield received a commandment identifying him as Onias, the true prophet and rightful leader of the Church, and assigning him the task of setting it in order. The leaders of the United Effort Plan rejected his authority and expelled him. Yet the appeal of independent revelation remained: the book describes roughly two hundred Mormon splinter sects since 1830, with new ones continuing to emerge.

Onias’s School of the Prophets became a point of contact between competing prophetic claims and the Lafferty family. The brothers helped print and mail more than fifteen thousand pamphlets for him; the school met weekly in their mother’s Provo home. Onias later received a revelation declaring the brothers an elect people and appointed Ron Lafferty bishop of the Provo chapter. These details show how an uncompromising religious mission could be organized through practical labor, communal recognition, and offices that gave prophetic claims a local structure.

Schism, Violence, and the Limits of the Expression

Succession disputes within the fundamentalist movement offer another view of the consequences of contested authority. After Joseph Musser appointed Rulon Allred as his heir, supporters of LeRoy Johnson rejected the choice. The movement split: Johnson led the larger group that remained in Short Creek, while Allred headed the Apostolic United Brethren. Later, after LeRoy Johnson’s death, Rulon Jeffs took leadership, but followers of Marion Hammon disputed his claim; nearly a third of the community left and formed what became known as the Second Ward. Each side denounced the other as apostate and warned of damnation. The Kingdom’s authority was asserted on both sides, but no shared judgment settled who possessed it.

The expression therefore describes an ethical danger, not a complete explanation of every act or group discussed in the book. Ron Lafferty’s case brought the conflict between divine and civil law into a courtroom: the Tenth Circuit concluded that, because of his delusional system, he could not interpret the charges against him realistically, including his belief that he answered to God’s laws rather than man’s. The phrase helps name the absolutism at stake, while the court’s ruling marks a separate question about legal responsibility and mental competence. Across the book’s examples, the central problem is what happens when a claim to defend the Kingdom is treated as sufficient authority in itself.