Obedience to Prophetic Authority

Obedience to Prophetic Authority is the expectation that believers submit their judgment and conduct to a prophet who speaks for God. Across the book, it is both a source of order and a means of control: revelation can authorize decisions about doctrine, family, and daily life, while disagreement may be recast as disloyalty to the priesthood. Its appeal is not only the promise of certainty but the relief of letting a leader bear responsibility for choices that otherwise remain the believer’s own.

Revelation and the struggle for authority

The principle rests on a tension built into the faith’s history. The official title of the supreme leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints identifies him as President, Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, expressing an expectation that religious authority is grounded in continuing revelation. Joseph Smith initially encouraged believers to seek personal impressions from God. But if everyone could receive divine direction, competing revelations could challenge the prophet’s authority. In 1830, the year the church was incorporated, a revelation attributed to God limited the right to receive commandments for the church to Joseph Smith.

That restriction did not eliminate personal revelation. Some believers continued to trust what they understood as God’s voice, even when it contradicted an institutional directive. The resulting contest between individual conviction and authorized revelation helps explain why Mormon groups repeatedly divided: each claim to divine direction could establish a new center of religious authority. The principle therefore does not settle who may speak for God; it makes that question consequential.

Authority in everyday life

In fundamentalist communities, prophetic authority reaches beyond formal doctrine. The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints teaches that only prophets may receive revelations governing the faithful, while men alone hold priesthood and ecclesiastical offices. These teachings make obedience a prescribed social order, with women expected to serve husbands and raise children within the faith. The structure resembles that of the mainstream church in its emphasis on male priesthood and prophetic direction, but the book describes fundamentalist communities as taking obedience and control further.

In Colorado City, Arizona, the authority of Rulon Jeffs extended into public institutions and private habits. Members were forbidden to watch television or read newspapers and magazines, and residents were also forbidden contact with people outside the United Effort Plan, including relatives who had left the religion. Enforcement did not prevent prohibited media from reappearing: members secretly acquired satellite dishes, then discarded them after sermons warned that the prophet knew who had them and that their souls were at risk. The cycle of concealment, warning, and renewed concealment shows how a ban could suppress access without erasing attraction to the outside world.

The principle also governed family claims. When DeLoy Bateman stopped attending the weekly priesthood meeting, Rulon Jeffs sent someone to take his wives and children, invoking the doctrine that they belonged to the priesthood rather than to him. The order was that they be given to another man. Both wives refused to leave, and all but the three oldest children became apostates along with DeLoy. The episode makes the stakes of prophetic authority concrete: a leader’s decree could claim to rearrange a household, while the family’s refusal exposed a limit to that power.

Obedience, certainty, and responsibility

DeLoy Bateman’s later reflections describe why such authority can remain compelling. He observed that the religion supplies answers and simplifies difficult choices. If a prophet tells a believer what to do, DeLoy argued, the believer can feel that responsibility for the action has passed to the prophet. He applied this logic even to serious wrongdoing: obedience could allow a person to feel justified rather than confront the moral consequences of a choice. In his account, the comfort of certainty is part of what holds the religion together.

This delegation has an ethical cost. It can make compliance feel virtuous while leaving little room for independent judgment, and it can place the consequences of a decision on people who did not make it. The book connects this dynamic to the teaching that questioning religious authorities undermines faith. It also shows how an apostate may be described as spiritually dangerous, reinforcing the social price of dissent. Yet DeLoy’s own departure followed his recognition that a leader who claimed continual communication with God had accused him falsely. The claim to prophetic certainty became, for him, evidence against the authority it was meant to establish.

Succession, dissent, and division

Prophetic authority must also survive the death of a leader, and succession reveals how contested that authority can be. After LeRoy Johnson died in 1986, Rulon Jeffs assumed leadership, but supporters of Bishop Marion Hammon rejected the succession. Nearly a third of the community left and established a separate congregation, the Second Ward. Each side treated the other as apostate and warned of damnation. The split shows that obedience does not necessarily produce unity: when believers disagree about who holds legitimate authority, the same demand for loyalty can harden competing claims.

An earlier rupture followed the death of John Y. Barlow. Joseph Musser became leader, then, while seriously ill, appointed Rulon Allred as his second elder and heir apparent. Those who believed LeRoy Johnson should succeed Musser opposed the appointment. After Musser’s death in 1954, the movement divided: Johnson led the larger group that remained in Short Creek, while Allred led the Apostolic United Brethren in the Salt Lake Valley. In both successions, authority depended not only on a claim to revelation or office but on whether followers accepted the person designated to inherit it.

The book presents obedience, then, as a powerful but unstable bond. It can organize a community around a prophet and give believers confidence that their conduct accords with divine direction. But when authority absorbs personal judgment, reaches into family life, or is claimed by rival leaders, obedience can also deepen coercion and fracture. The recurring question is not simply whether followers will submit, but whose revelation they will recognize—and what they surrender when they do.