Obedience to Religious Hierarchical Authority

Obedience to Religious Hierarchical Authority is presented as both a source of cohesion and a recurring fault line in Mormonism. It places religious truth and communal direction under leaders understood to speak with divine authority, yet the tradition’s encouragement of personal revelation gives believers a way to contest that authority. The result is a persistent tension: obedience can sustain a community, but competing claims to God’s instruction can divide it.

Revelation and the Claim to Authority

From the beginning, Mormonism connected ecclesiastical leadership with revelation. The supreme leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints bears the title President, Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, expressing an ideal in which authority is not merely administrative but divinely guided. Joseph Smith initially encouraged followers to seek personal impressions from God for guidance in their lives, distinguishing the new faith from churches that filtered religious truth through established institutions.

That invitation created a problem for centralized authority. If believers could receive revelations of their own, they might receive instructions that contradicted Joseph’s. In 1830, the year the Church was incorporated, Joseph announced a revelation reserving the authority to receive commandments for the Church to himself. The restriction did not erase the attraction of direct communication with God: some believers continued to heed personal revelations, including on theological matters. The book links this unresolved conflict to the repeated splintering of Mormon communities, with some two hundred sects emerging from the original Church over time.

The Book of Mormon’s division of humanity into two opposed churches reinforces the moral weight of belonging to the authorized community. Its stark distinction between the church of God and the church of the devil supports a worldview in which religious affiliation is not simply a difference of opinion. In early Missouri, believers’ conviction that they were God’s chosen people and had a divine claim to the land sharpened their separation from their neighbors. Joseph’s teaching of free agency allowed people to choose, but treated rejection of the Saints’ religious claims as a choice with grave moral consequences.

Order, Community, and Survival

The book situates hierarchical obedience within the practical and cultural conditions of the American frontier. In a setting where survival could depend on cooperation, collective discipline had material force. The account argues that the early Church’s emphasis on obedience and revelation from above was tied to a concern with communal survival, a concern that continued to shape the institution beyond its pioneer beginnings.

At the same time, Mormonism’s disciplined order answered a broader unease with individualism and uncertainty. Joseph Smith could champion ordinary people while remaining suspicious of democratic volatility and the competing ideas of modern life. The Church offered rules and a stable authority structure as a refuge from that complexity. Obedience therefore appears not only as submission to a leader, but as a social arrangement promising order, belonging, and shared purpose.

Rival Revelations and Institutional Division

The School of the Prophets in Provo makes the conflict between personal revelation and hierarchical authority concrete. Its members helped launch the school by printing, folding, and mailing more than fifteen thousand pamphlets. In 1984, Robert Crossfield, known as Onias, received revelations identifying the Lafferty brothers as chosen and appointing Ron Lafferty bishop of the school’s Provo chapter. The appointment gave Ron a recognized position in a group whose members already looked up to him.

That recognition did not settle who held the highest authority. Ron later presented a removal revelation to the school and asked its members to validate it. Ron, Dan Lafferty, and Watson Lafferty supported accepting it; the other men rejected it. The three brothers left the meeting, ending their association with the school. The episode illustrates the difficulty facing a prophet whose followers are taught to seek communication with God: a believer may claim divine instruction that directly contradicts the prophet’s direction. For believers who regard the word of God as supreme, loyalty to the prophet can yield to the competing revelation.

The conflict also shows how a community can try to test revelation collectively without resolving the deeper question of whose authority should prevail. Bernard Brady became concerned that Ron might act on the revelation and formally documented that concern in an affidavit. The episode thus moves from a dispute over religious legitimacy to concern about possible consequences beyond the group’s internal deliberations.

Succession and the Costs of Schism

Contests over succession show that hierarchy depends on recognition as well as claims to divine authority. After John Y. Barlow’s death, Joseph Musser became a leader but suffered a series of strokes. In 1951, while gravely ill, Musser appointed Rulon Allred as his second elder and heir apparent, despite objections from supporters of LeRoy Johnson, whom Barlow had specified as his successor. The dispute became a major schism. After Musser’s death in 1954, Johnson led the larger group that remained in Short Creek, while Allred led the Apostolic United Brethren in the Salt Lake Valley.

A later succession conflict followed the death of LeRoy Johnson in 1986. Rulon Jeffs took leadership, but supporters of bishop Marion Hammon disputed his right to inherit Johnson’s position. Nearly a third of the community left and established the Second Ward across the highway. The rival congregations condemned one another as apostates, turning disagreement over leadership into a dispute over spiritual standing and eternal fate.

Obedience in Daily Life

Under Rulon Jeffs, hierarchy reached beyond religious meetings into ordinary life in Colorado City. Residents were forbidden to watch television or read newspapers and magazines, and were barred from contact with outsiders, including relatives who had left the faith. Enforcement was visible in cycles: members secretly acquired satellite dishes, a sermon warning that the leader knew who possessed them was followed by dishes being discarded in the desert, and concealed televisions gradually returned before the next crackdown. The pattern shows both the reach of the prohibition and its limits; members tried to comply, but the restriction did not eliminate the desire for outside media.

The separation of apostates from their families further demonstrates the personal stakes of obedience. DeLoy Bateman, who had left the religion, lived near his brother David, yet David was not permitted to speak with him. DeLoy feared that if David’s wife were found talking to him, she could lose her children and be married to another man, while David could remain in the community without his family. In this account, religious authority governs not only public affiliation but contact, family bonds, and the consequences of departure.

The book’s treatment of Ron Lafferty also resists reducing religiously framed action to a simple question of individual madness. Dr. Gardner testified that Ron was not psychotic, while describing symptoms associated with narcissistic personality disorder. He distinguished Ron’s revelations, considered within the School of the Prophets’ shared practice of prayer, study, discussion, and evaluation, from an isolated experience of hearing God. The distinction does not resolve the moral or social consequences of Ron’s beliefs; it underscores how religious communities can provide a framework in which claims of revelation are discussed and granted meaning. Across the book, hierarchical obedience remains powerful, but never fully secure against believers who claim that a higher authority has spoken directly to them.