LDS Church and Mormon fundamentalism

The relationship between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Mormon fundamentalism is not simply a separation between a mainstream church and its rejected margins. It is an argument over who may define the faith’s original principles, how divine authority relates to civil law, and whether religious change represents growth or apostasy. Fundamentalist movements draw on the history and teachings of the larger church even as they condemn its departures from practices such as plural marriage. The result is an enduring tension: the church’s movement toward social and institutional normality can distance it from its founding vision while strengthening the appeal of those who claim to preserve that vision.

A shared inheritance and competing claims

Joseph Smith’s church offered converts a sharply bounded account of religious truth. The Book of Mormon presented existence as a conflict between the church of God and the church of the devil, while Joseph taught that personal revelation could connect believers directly with God. This combination of exclusive truth claims and intimate access to divine guidance remained important to later fundamentalists. It made religious authority both communal and intensely personal: a church could claim to restore the true faith, while an individual might also believe that God had revealed what the church should do.

The early church’s conflicts with its surroundings helped give that claim a political dimension. In Missouri, Mormon settlers described the region as their divinely appointed inheritance and sought to establish a gathering place there. Their distinctive political and economic practices, together with their claim to be God’s chosen people, intensified local hostility. Joseph’s teaching about freedom to choose between righteousness and wickedness also framed disagreement in stark moral terms. The divide was not only over land or local influence; it concerned who belonged to the righteous community and what followed from refusing its claims.

In Nauvoo, the relationship between religious and civil authority took institutional form. A charter granted the city unusual sovereign powers, and Joseph became its de facto ruler. He led the Nauvoo Legion and sought further military authority, while presenting his movement as the one true church guided by God. Later, under Brigham Young in Utah, church leaders treated divine law as superior to laws made by non-Mormons. The Utah Territorial Legislature expanded local probate courts, which were controlled by Mormon leaders, and federal officials complained that the territory functioned as a theocratic dictatorship. These episodes formed a precedent that fundamentalist arguments could draw upon: religious community and political order need not, in their view, be governed by the same authority as the surrounding society.

The dispute over authority and adaptation

The modern separation grew especially sharp around plural marriage. Dan Lafferty’s independent study led him to believe that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had gone astray when Wilford Woodruff ended the church’s support for the practice in 1890 under pressure from the federal government. Dan treated licensing, taxes, and Social Security numbers as signs of government extending its reach into individual life. His scriptural arguments opposed state authority, while his rejection of the mainstream church rested on the conviction that it had surrendered a defining religious principle.

Fundamentalist communities likewise presented their practices as protected religious belief, while authorities and critics pointed to their conflict with civil law. A Colorado City police chief defended the privacy of polygamous households as a matter of religious freedom, even though plural marriage was illegal throughout the United States and Canada and police officers were sworn to uphold the law. This conflict exposes the competing jurisdictions at the heart of the relationship: church rules claim authority over domestic and religious life, while civil law asserts authority over conduct within the state. Neither side’s claim disappears merely because adherents regard the other as illegitimate.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, meanwhile, moved toward a different institutional identity. Its annual revenues were estimated at more than six billion dollars, it had become Utah’s largest employer, and its public life was increasingly shaped by business and public relations as well as theology. The book describes a long movement toward the familiar norms of middle America. That trajectory contrasts with fundamentalist communities’ insistence on retaining older practices and a more all-encompassing religious order. The contrast is not merely between belief and disbelief: it is between different judgments about what fidelity to the past requires.

Fundamentalism as both departure and return

Dan’s account of his own religious development shows how unstable the boundary can be. After the murders of Brenda and Erica Lafferty, he later said that his beliefs underwent a major change in prison. He no longer identified with Mormon fundamentalism, and described his later theology as drawing from the Old Testament, the New Testament, The Book of Mormon, fundamentalist scripture, and his own thinking. He came to regard established religions as fraudulent, including the movement he had once embraced. In his view, searching for truth required identifying contradictions in what he had been taught; he had moved from the mainstream church to fundamentalism, and then beyond both.

Yet his later convictions retained a structure familiar from his earlier fundamentalism. He divided humanity into those inherently aligned with God and those aligned with the devil, and understood himself as Elijah, a forerunner preparing the way for Christ’s return. His beliefs therefore changed in content and affiliation without abandoning the stark division between righteous and wicked that had characterized his earlier religious outlook. His trajectory demonstrates that leaving one religious organization does not necessarily mean leaving its central habits of thought.

Apocalyptic expectation also links the larger church and fundamentalist groups, though they express it differently. Warren Jeffs interpreted the September 11 attacks as a sign that the End Times were near, despite his father Rulon’s failed prediction that the world would be swept clean by fire by 2000. The mainstream church also taught that the hour of Christ’s return was near and urged members to store food and survival supplies, but its leaders were more circumspect about predicting when the Apocalypse would occur. Shared expectation thus coexists with a significant difference in how confidently leaders attach current events to a timetable.

Converts, family ties, and the continuing split

The pull of fundamentalism can arise from dissatisfaction within the mainstream church rather than from a prior connection to a fundamentalist family. Pamela Coronado grew up in a traditional Mormon household and served a mission in France. She found it difficult to testify that the church president was the Lord’s only true and living prophet, and questioned the direction of the church. After marrying David Coronado, whose family history included flight from violence associated with the LeBaron clan, she came to share his fundamentalist beliefs. They joined Onias’s group in 1984 after encountering his revelations, which they regarded as resembling Joseph Smith’s.

The Coronados’ experience also shows how association with fundamentalism could bring consequences from the mainstream community. Six months after they joined the group, Dan Lafferty murdered Brenda and Erica. The murders frightened those around the Coronados; their connection to the Lafferty family led others to regard them as evil, and they were excommunicated. Their relatives feared for their safety. Nevertheless, the couple retained their faith in Onias and the Work. They opposed the mainstream church’s decision to admit Black men to the priesthood and believed in plural marriage, although they had not entered into such a marriage themselves. For Pamela, those positions were not the whole basis of faith: she described its foundation as spiritual.

The book therefore presents the split as reciprocal rather than final. The mainstream church’s success and moderation have made a return to plural marriage by official design seem unlikely, yet its very movement away from the most controversial elements of Joseph Smith’s theology can encourage fervent members to seek a more uncompromising version of the tradition. Fundamentalists contest the church’s authority by claiming to preserve what it abandoned; the church’s institutional growth, in turn, makes that claim both less representative of the majority and persistently compelling to some converts. Their relationship remains bound by a common history even where their accounts of that history lead to opposing conclusions.