The Big Party

The Big Party is Dan Lafferty’s name for a promised thousand-year celebration on earth, preceded by a long era of suffering and ending in a divine harvest. In his account, the phrase turns an apocalyptic scheme into a personal explanation of history: hardship accumulates meaning, the righteous are separated from the wicked, and the final violence becomes a prelude to celebration. It also reveals how Dan could interpret the murders of Brenda Lafferty and Erica Lafferty as part of a sacred plan rather than as crimes demanding repentance.

A promised celebration after suffering

Dan describes the party as a promise made by Jesus Christ to those he identifies as God’s children. The celebration is to last a thousand years and take place on earth. But it is not imminent in Dan’s account of the promise: six thousand years of earthly suffering must come first. During that span, the devil and his children are allowed to populate the world, while God’s children are placed in it gradually. Their time amid suffering earns credits for the celebration to come.

The sequence gives pain a designated purpose. The present world is, in Dan’s telling, a period of work and endurance; its disorder is not evidence that the promised future has failed, but a condition through which the faithful must pass. At the end of the six-thousand-year period, Christ returns, the earth is harvested, and those Dan calls the devil’s children are removed. The thousand-year party follows this separation. The name makes the ultimate reward sound joyful, but the framework surrounding it depends on judgment and exclusion.

Dan’s account also places Elijah within the expected arrival of Christ. The promise, as he presents it, is that Christ will come through Elijah after the faithful have endured their allotted time. The party is therefore not an isolated image of paradise: it is the destination in a sequence of endurance, return, harvest, and the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth.

From prophecy to an explanation of violence

Dan connects the coming harvest to the murders of Brenda Lafferty and Erica Lafferty. He says that taking their lives foreshadowed the future work of the angels who would gather and kill those judged not to belong to Christ. In his interpretation, those angels need not be supernatural beings descending from heaven. They may instead be earthly men who believe they have been instructed to carry out their Father’s business. This is how Dan places his own actions inside the prophecy: he casts them as a preview of the harvest and himself as an agent of a divine purpose.

That interpretation exposes a decisive collapse between future prophecy and present action. The Big Party is presented as a reward at the far end of history, but its promised arrival also furnishes Dan with a way to describe lethal acts in sacred terms. The language of harvest makes the removal of people seem like preparation for a celebration; it does not make the acts less consequential. Dan’s account therefore reveals not simply an expectation of the end times, but a moral system in which violence can be treated as foretaste of the final judgment.

Ron’s sentence as an approaching sign

The phrase also links Dan’s apocalyptic expectations to the fate of Ron Lafferty. In November 2002, Dan said he saw no realistic possibility that Ron would escape the death penalty. He nevertheless treated his brother’s anticipated execution as a key part of God’s plan for humanity and as a possible sign that Armageddon was near. For Dan, the state’s sentence did not stand outside his religious interpretation: he could absorb it into the same end-times scheme that gave the Big Party its meaning.

Dan’s response makes the expression more than a name for a distant reward. The prospect of Ron’s death becomes evidence, in Dan’s view, that the promised sequence is advancing. The phrase’s cheerfulness sits beside a stark account of punishment and destruction: celebration is for the chosen, while those excluded from it are to be removed. Dan thus reads an impending execution both as an earthly consequence and as a signal of the approaching end.

The promise and Dan’s certainty

Dan’s conviction extends beyond the fate of his brother. He maintains that he has led a righteous life and believes that his own confinement will not last much longer. He expects the trumpet announcing the Last Days to sound, after which he will leave the restrictions of maximum-security prison and take his rightful place in the Kingdom of God on earth. The Big Party supplies the future toward which that expectation points: not merely release from prison, but vindication and participation in the promised reign.

The expression gathers Dan’s central convictions into a single image. A thousand-year celebration gives suffering an endpoint; the harvest divides humanity into those who will share in the future and those who will not; and Dan’s interpretation of violence and punishment makes present events part of that final timetable. His confidence that the party is coming is inseparable from his confidence that he acted under divine guidance. In the book’s account, the phrase therefore marks both the hope Dan anticipates and the apocalyptic logic through which he continues to understand the harm he caused.