Millenarianism

Millenarianism—the expectation that history is approaching a decisive divine transformation—organizes several of the book’s most sharply contrasting religious worldviews. For Dan Lafferty, it becomes a personal calling and a cosmic explanation for suffering; for leaders in the FLDS community, current events confirm that the end is near; the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, by contrast, prepares for calamity while avoiding a precise timetable. Across these examples, the promised future is not remote: it gives meaning to present hardship, sorts people into moral camps, and can intensify the authority of those who claim to interpret it.

Dan Lafferty’s End-Time Cosmology

After deciding that neither the mainstream church nor Mormon fundamentalism supplied reliable answers, Dan Lafferty developed a transformed faith centered on his conviction that he was Elijah. He understood Elijah as a forerunner charged with preparing the way for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The role made the expected end personal: Dan did not merely anticipate the return of Jesus Christ; he believed he had a part in announcing it.

His account of history divides humanity into children of God and children of the devil, whose opposing natures are fixed. In Dan’s cosmology, the children of God agreed to endure life on earth while the devil’s children populated it. The world would remain hell for roughly six thousand years, during which each hour of suffering would accumulate credit toward a thousand-year party with Jesus Christ. At the end, Jesus Christ would return, remove the devil’s children, and establish the promised thousand-year reign. The sequence gives adversity a defined place in a vast plan: endurance is not incidental but part of the preparation for the future kingdom.

That expectation also shapes how Dan interprets his brother’s fate. In November 2002, he said he saw no realistic possibility that Ron Lafferty would escape the death penalty, and regarded Ron’s execution as part of God’s plan. He further treated it as a possible sign that Armageddon was near, or that the approaching “Big Party” was close. The anticipated apocalypse thus reaches into an immediate family tragedy, which Dan reads not simply as a legal outcome but as evidence about the state of the world and the nearness of its transformation.

Prophecy and the Reading of Current Events

The FLDS community’s expectations likewise turn public events into signs, though its forecasts have not always been fulfilled. Rulon Jeffs had prophesied that a hurricane of fire would sweep the world clean by the year 2000. When that prediction failed, it did not end the community’s apocalyptic expectation. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Warren Jeffs preached to followers in Bountiful and Colorado City that the attacks were a portent of the End Times and a cause for hope: he anticipated that God’s chosen people would soon be lifted into eternal glory.

The contrast between Warren’s public condemnation of the terrorists’ violence and his private religious interpretation of the attacks is significant. The same event could be denounced as bloody violence and treated within sermons as evidence of an approaching divine culmination. In Bountiful, photographs of the planes striking the World Trade Center were mounted in the school halls, making the news images a continuing visual reminder of the Last Days. Prophecy here is not only a claim about the future; it is a way of instructing a community how to read the present.

Mainstream Preparation and Uncertain Timing

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints also teaches that the Second Coming will be preceded by plagues and desolations. Its leaders have urged members to store a year’s worth of food and survival supplies in preparation for a period of privation. Scripture predicting an end after seven thousand years from the creation of the world provides a broad chronological frame, but church authorities remain circumspect about exactly when the Apocalypse will occur.

This restraint marks a difference from the more immediate certainty expressed by Dan and Warren. Preparation for a difficult future can be part of religious life without a leader specifying when it will arrive. The book therefore presents millenarian expectation not as one uniform doctrine but as a range of practices: a personal conviction of prophetic vocation, an urgent reading of recent events, and institutional preparedness paired with uncertainty about dates.

Authority, Boundaries, and the Kingdom on Earth

End-time belief appears within communities where religious authority already reaches into ordinary conduct. In Colorado City, Rulon Jeffs’s followers were forbidden to watch television or read newspapers and magazines; contact with people outside the United Effort Plan, including relatives who had left the religion, was also prohibited. Restrictions on information and association helped delimit the community’s relationship to the outside world. The book does not reduce these rules to millenarian belief, but places them in a religious setting where leaders claimed special authority to guide the faithful through a world understood as morally dangerous.

That authority could extend beyond the home. In Nauvoo, Joseph Smith’s vision of a kingdom of God took institutional form in a city with unusual sovereign powers, a disciplined Nauvoo Legion, and Joseph at its head. Later, in Deseret, Brigham Young’s followers treated the laws of God as superior to civil law; local probate courts, dominated by Mormon bishops and juries, were expanded in ways that displaced federal jurisdiction. These episodes are not simply predictions about the end of time. They show how the idea of a divinely ordered kingdom could inform attempts to govern life on earth.

The book also connects religious certainty to sharp divisions between insiders and outsiders. In Colorado City, apostates were described as more wicked than Gentiles or members of the mainstream church, while those who left were warned that they would be damned and degraded. Such teachings do not themselves establish a timetable for the end, but they place departure from the religious community inside a larger moral drama of loyalty and evil. Millenarianism’s force in these passages lies in how it makes the future consequential now: it can turn suffering into preparation, political events into signs, and obedience or separation into tests of belonging.