School of the Prophets

The School of the Prophets was a small religious organization founded by Onias in Provo in the early 1980s. It helped turn competing claims of revelation into a shared group practice: members prayed, read scripture, and discussed whether reported messages came from God. The group also became a setting in which Ron Lafferty gained authority, a fact later central to arguments about the religious and psychological context of his actions.

Formation and Early Work

By early 1984, the school was meeting weekly, usually in the Provo home of the Laffertys’ mother, Claudine Lafferty, above the family chiropractic clinic. The five Lafferty brothers helped establish it through labor as well as attendance. They printed, folded, and collated more than fifteen thousand of Onias’s pamphlets, then addressed and mailed them to Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints leaders around the country. A task Onias expected to take several months was completed by the brothers in two weeks of work day and night.

The school’s growth depended in part on a prior connection between Onias and the Laffertys: he believed their energy could advance his ambitions for the organization, while they embraced the work. Their involvement gave the new school an active core. The evidence describes weekly meetings and a successful launch, but does not specify a formal constitution, fixed membership rules, or a permanent institutional structure.

Revelation and Authority

The school operated within a religious tradition in which claims of personal revelation could challenge centralized authority. Joseph Smith initially encouraged individuals to seek direct impressions from God, but in 1830 announced that no one else in the church was to receive commandments and revelations concerning church affairs. The account presents the continuing appeal of personal revelation—and the difficulty of containing it—as one reason Mormon groups repeatedly divided into new sects.

Onias’s school embodied that tension in a small community. In a revelation dated January 8, God was said to have identified the Lafferty brothers as an elect people; about six weeks later, another revelation directed Onias to appoint Ron Lafferty bishop of the school’s Provo chapter. Ron’s younger brothers looked up to him, and the school’s members approved his promotion. The appointment thus gave Ron standing within the group at a time when, according to his journal, he had recently lost his material wealth, his family had divorced him and moved to Florida, and he had been excommunicated from the church he loved.

Shared Evaluation of Revelations

At Ron Lafferty’s trial, psychiatrist Dr. Gardner argued that Ron’s reported revelations had to be understood in the context of the School of the Prophets. Gardner described a group of about six people praying, reading, talking, and weighing together whether a revelation was genuine. He contrasted this shared religious practice with the isolated experiences he associated with schizophrenia, and said Ron could engage with other people and discuss books in detail. Gardner’s testimony did not treat the existence of a group as proof that a revelation was true; rather, it framed revelation as something the members evaluated collectively within their religious world.

Gardner also distinguished his view of Ron’s mental condition from the question of responsibility: he testified that Ron was not psychotic, while saying that he showed symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. The school’s importance in the trial therefore lay partly in the distinction between a belief that a group could recognize as religious and a clinical judgment about an individual. That distinction was part of the defense’s account, not a finding that the school’s discernment had established the truth of Ron’s claimed revelations.

Boundaries and Narrative Significance

The school’s reach included people on its margins as well as its central participants. Watson Lafferty once brought a hitchhiker, Todd, to Claudine’s home, where he met members of the family and was invited to attend meetings. Todd stayed at the house for two weeks, then went with Watson to Arizona for construction work. After the two quarreled, Todd disappeared with Watson’s belongings, ending his association with the Laffertys and the school before he could be called upon to carry out a later instruction to remove named individuals. The account does not establish that Todd became a member or attended the meetings.

In the book’s broader account, the School of the Prophets illustrates how religious authority could be both organized and contested: a group evaluated revelations together, while Onias’s revelations also conferred a recognized office on Ron. That structure made the school more than a backdrop to the Lafferty brothers’ lives. It was a community through which their religious commitments acquired organization, recognition, and, later, significance in court.